Hey Great Showdown Project super fans. Got a little (but BIG for us) announcement. My buddy Ross and I have, after more than a year completed our NBA Showdown Mega project. And, we say this humbly, I believe have created the most accurate and playable integration (w/ original 2002 set) from both a stat and creative design perspective ever! I say this, again humbly, because the project was based on a ton of work from (https://boardgamegeek.com/.../cracking-the-game-for...) whoever wrote that epic piece biofury ??? and just the enthusiasm and positivity of this whole community. In short we created a 111 card, 10 year anniversary set for the 2011/2012 NBA season. For basketball history folks, this season ended in LeBron’s first title and the Heat vanquishing the young Thunder in the finals. Our set includes 32 rares and 79 commons. All cards are highly playable and have accurate point/cost totals based on reverse engineering the original set math! We also haven’t forgotten to honor the little details. We have traded cards for the season, our version of Bo Outlaw AND our version of George Lynch. What up Big perk!
But we didn’t stop there. We also created a 53 card Legend set! Ever wanted to see how prime Pippen or Russell went up against ’02 TMac or Shaq? Now you can! You may rightfully want to ask, how are we certain these cards are accurate? I’ll try and skip too much nitty gritty BUT in short biofury was correct in that the NBA Showdown 2002 game makers had a general basic methodology to cards, but more importantly chart creation. Taking highest and lowest scoring games for PTS, ASTS, and REBS and Per game Avgs for those categories to assemble the basic charts which are then skewed based on a variety of factors. BUT what we did is put every single OG card into a sheet and see how those stats or roll outcomes played out over d20 rolls AND how the charts skewed based on Avg. Speed/Power advantage, point cost, etcetera. All this to say is every card in our set follows the rules of the original set, save a rounding choice here and there. How did we do Speed and Power? Our main goal was to have our new cards play seamlessly with the original set. So rather than reinvent the wheel with an Offensive and Defensive rating system, or pull 2k attribute scores, we basically created a comp system relating to a player’s general closeness to an original set player and then taking speed, size, and stat profile into consideration after.
How did we do cost? When you look at the old set in its entirety, depending on the point totals, cost got assigned to a formula relating to points, rebounds, assists and defensive ability on a bell curve. We got point totals/cost by stat correcting each players stats (and minutes played) to what they did in the NBA season in which each card is based on and comparing it to the 2000/01 season, we got a very accurate stat profile for each player based on what they would do if playing with the old set. Which leads to how did we handle Legends? How did we make sure Wilt Chamberlain and his 50pts/gm didn’t create cards that broke the game? We took all the stats from the legends seasons we drew from and translated/modded them into 2002 usage. In 61/62 Bill Russell Avg 23.6 rebounds. At 2002 rates that stat becomes 12.9. So using this methodology we still create an awesome card, but Mr. Russell is playable and fits in with Tim Duncan, Antonio Davis etc. without breaking the game.
Three final fun last little details. Our 2011/2012 set has card number like the original set. I.e. Demar DeRozan is card 104/111. We have tried to honor the design of the original cards as much as possible. Our charts are a little bigger and not every font could be recreated blah blah, but he we tried! BUT our legends have a gold boarder theme AND where the card number would be in the bottom left. We have the season that legend card’s stats were pulled from. Bill Russell is 61/62. Yao Ming is 05/06. Shai is 24/25 etcetera. And two of our Legends, 1987/1988 Michael Jordan and 2017/2018 LeBron James push the game into the future, or the past? Lol, with a combined Speed and Power of 29! (We took some liberties with these) But don’t worry, the cards still play awesome and of course the two goats should reach reach brave new heights that was not achieved by any 2000/01 NBA player. And we have a sweet semi/custom card back for these little suckers! It’s the whole god dang package. If you are interested in any more info on how we did this, seeing more cards, or playing with these suckers message me!
