Shadowfist Limited and Standard Edition

What's in the set? - rarity, distribution by faction, and obligatory statistics
Nitpicker's Guide - errors big, small, and ludicrously small
Storyline summary - the story behind this set, summarized in a couple of paragraphs
Card list - opens in new window
Etc - whatever's left, random thoughts and comments, sometimes my opinions on this set or cards in it, and/or the State of Shadowfist at the time of this expansion

What's in Limited and Standard Edition?

Daedalus Entertainment printed the Limited edition in 1995 in both starter deck and booster pack formats. All cards are black-bordered with a gold foil Ting Ting stamp in the upper right corner. Limited Edition featured 323 cards, with rarities divided into Very Common, Common, Uncommon, and Rare. Some of the cards appear more than once on the card sheet, so you'll find them more often than others of the "same" rarity. I don't have any uncut sheets to check the counts, but my card lists include the information that Daedalus published.

Starter decks contain a rulebook, quick reference card, and 60 randomly assorted cards, with a high proportion of Very Common cards to give the deck a reasonable chance of being playable out of the box. Each starter display box contains 12 decks. Booster packs contain 12 randomly assorted cards; each booster display box contains 36 packs.

Standard edition was also printed in 1995 in both starter deck and booster pack formats. All cards are black-bordered but without the gold foil stamp. It's the same set of cards as Limited Edition, except that eight cards were intended to be removed from Standard. Those eight are the Unique characters killed during Operation Killdeer: Adrienne Hart, Iala Mané, Jack Donovan, Jueding Shelun, Mad Dog McCroun, Nirmal Yadav, Sun Chen, and Thing with a 1000 Tongues.

Some of these cards made it into Standard Edition anyway, so you will occasionally find them without gold foil stamps. I don't know how many of these cards exist; Daedalus thought they were very rare, but I've seen enough of them around to believe they're scarce but not impossible to find. In theory, they were replaced by eight other rares on the sheet (Banish, Floating Fortress, Kan Li, Redeemed Assassin, Seal of the Wheel, Shamanistic Lieutenant, Shih Ho Kuai and The Red Lantern Tavern) making those R2s. I've seen enough data now to believe that there was in fact a second set of sheets with those cards as R2s, which means that the print run was effectively split into two parts (the part with the Killdeer guys, and the part without) but I don't know what proportion of the run falls into each category. [Special thanks to Frank Beumer who sent in his careful records of opening 5 boxes of Standard!] In general, if you are lucky enough to get one of these guys out of a box, you end up getting all eight. That's because the eight of them appeared in the first four slots of the first two rows of the rare sheet (Zev would have to kill me if I told you how I know that :)

The print run was roughly 12 million cards for Limited, and another 7 million for Standard. Yes, there are more "limited" cards around than not :)

The statistics below are for Limited Edition; I'll leave it as an exercise for the Student to tweak them for Standard Edition. Apologies for the formatting of the table, but it's much smaller to plop an image in than write a table in HTML. Eventually I'll try out the CSS thing and redo all my tables...

Looking at this graphically may or may not help you, but I like it. Click either graph to see a larger version in a new window.

What stands out most for me when I look at this breakdown is the large number of States that were printed, and how few of those see regular play (Shadowy Mentor and Fortune of the Turtle by far the most common, with a smattering of others on the second tier, and then a large pile that never see the light of day...)

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The Nitpicker's Guide: Limited/Standard Edition

In both editions:

• Alchemist Lair was supposed to provide Magic resources, but was printed with Chi resources instead. The correct version was printed in Flashpoint.
• There are two versions of The General: one with a black title, the other with a white title. These appear to be about equally distributed. It was supposed to have a white title.
• There are two versions of Ultimate Mastery with slightly different rules text (one version uses more words to say the same thing as the other). These also appear to be equally distributed.
• Hill of the Turtle appears as both a Common and Uncommon card. It was supposed to be Uncommon, but ended up in both slots.
• The art for Reinvigoration Process shows the Mark Tedin art from Cellular Reinvigoration. The art was supposed to be by Anson Maddocks, that's why he's credited on the card. And then Anson's art was lost, so we may never know what it was supposed to look like.
• Helix Chewer appears in an Event border rather than a State border.
• Thunder on the Mountain has a stray "m" in the rules text. That was supposed to be an Architects of the Flesh resource symbol
• Margaret Organ-Kean's name is misspelled as "Keen" on her cards.
• The art for Hands Without Shadow is attributed to L.A. Williams, but it's really by Ed Beard, Jr.
• Nicola Leonard's name is misspelled as "Nichola" on Progress of the Mouse.
• You may find cards whose corners were not completely cut (this is possible in any card game). Jacob Skytte sent me a card with two square corners. I've heard folks say they have cards with four square corners, but I haven't seen one like that...
• Jim Sensenbrenner traded me a Limited card that has a distinct blue/green tint on the back. It's obviously not the same as other cards. He found a few like that, but it's the only time I've heard of it.

In Limited Edition only:

• The Ting Ting gold foil stamp sometimes ends up somewhere other than the upper right corner. Mike Nickoloff sent me a Surprise, Surprise with the stamp on top of the title, and Bruce McCreary sent me a Sibling Rivalry that has two gold foil stamps. (ok, those are Netherworld cards, but it's close enough :)
• The gold foil stamp doesn't always make it through the printing press intact. Mike Nickoloff sent me this Limited Ed. Larcenous Mist whose stamp isn't even recognizable.

In Standard Edition only:

• As mentioned previously, the Operation Killdeer characters were supposed to be removed but weren't, so you can still find them in Standard sometimes.
• Standard Edition starter decks sometimes contain only one Rare card, and sometimes contain as many as six Rare cards. I haven't worked out the statistics on this, but usually it's the deck I get in sealed tournaments has one rare, and the deck you get has six. :)

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Storyline Summary: Limited/Standard Edition - Operation Killdeer

The Operation Killdeer story was written by Robin Laws in 1995; it's really part one of a two-parter, with the second half occurring in the Netherworld expansion, except he never wrote that part of the fiction. You can read the Killdeer story here, and it's included in the Back for Seconds book for the Feng Shui roleplaying game.

The Ascended want to form an alliance with the King of the Fire Pagoda and the Queen of the Darkness Pagoda (more about that in Netherworld). To demonstrate their ability to manipulate the other factions, the Ascended arrange for the Dragons and Lotus to fight over The Red Lantern Tavern, a minor feng shui site in the 1850s juncture. The Unspoken Name sends his best Pledged agent (and secret lover), Adrienne Hart, to oversee the operation.

At the tavern, Jueding Shelun summons Thing with a 1000 Tongues to take the site. Mad Dog McCroun, Jack Donovan, and Iala Mane are on hand to counter him. The demon crushes Jack Donovan underfoot, and Shelun kills Mad Dog with a blast of sorcerous fire. It turns out that Adrienne was an orphan in the same orphanage as Mad Dog, and she has very strong memories of him. She takes revenge for his death by attacking Shelun. Sun Chen is observing things for the Guiding Hand, but he feels compelled to help stop the giant demon. The Thing casually breaks his back and tosses him away. Nirmal Yadav, an Architects agent, is at the Tavern as well—he is literally dragged into the fight by Sun Chen, and they are both roasted by Shelun. Iala cracks the demon's skull, but is blinded by its acidic blood. Adrienne pushes Shelun into the demon's path as it falls; he is crushed by the giant body. Mr. X, a Lodge agent, takes advantage of the situation to shoot Adrienne for the good of the Lodge (her love for the Unspoken Name wasn't so secret after all).

As this scene fades out, a badly-wounded Iala overhears Mr. X discussing the "demonstration" with the King and Queen...

In case you're wondering, a killdeer is a bird known for its "broken wing" display used to distract predators from its young/nest. You can read more about it at birdwatching.com [birdwatching.com, 26 Mar 2005], or wherever Google [google.com, 26 Mar 2005] may take you.

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Etc: Limited/Standard Edition

Limited is the birthplace of Shadowfist, and it was a bit of a messy birth, where the rules needed some patching (like the lack of timing rules, or the missing designator rules) and the cards varied sharply from hugely powerful to "um, why is this here?" On the bright side, it was markedly better than most of the CCGs that followed in Magic's footsteps in 1995, it's got cards like the "Kicker of Butts" (Big Bruiser, in case you haven't memorized all the card subtitles) and most importantly it was designed for multiplayer games so it immediately sucked me in.

I think the best description I've heard about Limited Edition was the supposed interchange between an observer and a player:

Q: "Are there any broken cards in Shadowfist?"
A: "They're all equally broken."

That pretty much sums up the reaction that many players of Magic and Legend of the Five Rings had to Shadowfist. The powerful effects and characters in Shadowfist were generally more common both in printing rarity and in game cost, so you saw them much more often in games. This usually meant the life expectancy of characters was very short, thanks in large part to the abundance of cheap cards that countered them. A key concept that many people didn't grasp was that card flow is supremely important in Shadowfist, rather than playing a few cards and keeping them in play as in other CCGs.

The set wasn't particularly well-balanced between the various factions. That doesn't surprise me too much, because it's very diffcult to thoroughly playtest the first set of any large card game (when both the rules and the cards are in flux during test). It's not impossible, but it is highly impractical if you are trying to meet a deadline and hence make some money. Now throw in the perceived need to rush to market in order to catch the CCG craze, and what's surprising is that it turned out as well as it did.

Each faction ended up with a couple of power cards that still serve to define them even through the Z-Man and Shadowfist Games expansions. (each faction ended up with a pile of stinky cards that still serve as coasters today, too, but that's not as fun to talk about :)

The Ascended were definitely winners in this set, with stellar cards like Shadowy Mentor, Operation Killdeer, Adrienne Hart, and Family Estate. Even the Ascended's second-string cards were huge. "Speed Ascended" was the deck to beat in dueling, and Ascended-based control decks did very well in multiplayer too.

The Architects weren't far behind the Ascended, with Nerve Gas, Imprisoned, Vivisector and Neutron Bomb. They didn't have a top-notch hitter like Adrienne, but they recycled more efficiently, and Dangerous Experiment just wasn't that dangerous for a 5 Power boost.

The other three factions all got something quite good, but not so many cards that they really stood out like the Architects and Ascended. Dragons had Final Brawl and Golden Comeback, but their hitters were marginal and slow to come out due to high resource requirements. The Hand got Confucian Stability and Sun Chen, but didn't get any cheap punch-through events. The Lotus were largely one-trick ponies based around Inauspicious Reburial, or dropped in as a splash just to get Evil Twin and Tortured Memories.

The Jammers and Monarchs were barely introduced in this set, getting only a couple of cards each. The Monarchs did very well though, with the awesome Queen (everybody's best hitter, at least everyone who wasn't playing Ascended). The Jammers got shafted; the cards in this set pretty much stank for them except for the $10,000 Man, and even he wasn't great.

The primary difference between the Ascended/Architects and all the other factions was alternate power generation: the A/A's had it, the others didn't (well, the Dragons had it a bit in Now You've Made Us Mad, but people dismissed that for some reason). That was important but not utterly devastating in the multiplayer game, but it made a huge difference in dueling, where the Ascended and Architects were pretty much kings. The negative spiral that starts when someone seizes or burns a Site (giving them a significant power advantage, since they gain *and* you lose) was too much to overcome for most decks, so an early lead almost always meant a win in dueling.

The Feng Shui Sites varied from totally unworthy of deck space to the my-goodness-they're-everywhere Big 3 (Kinoshita House, Fox Pass, Proving Ground). City Square, Sacred Heart Hospital and Turtle Beach were high up on the power list as well.

Daedalus issued errata against a number of cards in this set, such as Dangerous Experiment and Kinoshita House, in their FAQs and in the Players' Guide. Those errata were confirmed or superseded by the Z-Man errata, and some cards (Bull Market, Shadowy Mentor) were later errata-ed by Shadowfist Games. The whole set of errata was then updated (some removed, some added) by Inner Kingdom Games. Their latest list is at Shadowfist.com [5 Sep 2011]

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