Babylon 5 CCG: Getting Started

Looking around the old interwebz, so many think that the B5 CCG sounds fun (or they have fond memories) but that its just too difficult or cost prohibitive to get into the game now.  I've put together this little post to show you that its surprisingly easy and truthfully fairly affordable to get back into this game even 15 years down the road.

This assumes that you get a group of four together and split boosters from boxes (easiest way to make it affordable).  How you divide up boosters is, of course, up to you. All hyperlinks following will take you to presorted and filtered eBay searches.  Besides these, I'd recommend occasionally checking generic Babylon 5 eBay auctions and looking for entire collections or sets being auctioned off.  I usually see one or two still trickle by a month, and usually one of them is a ripoff and the other a steal.  If you think you've found something good, feel free to ask here and I'll give you my honest opinion on the auction.

Launching the Ship:

First thing you need is a starter set for each player (I'd just go Minbari, Narn, Centauri, Human at this point).  Here are some Starter sets on eBay.  As you can see they go for around $10 apiece and are 60 card decks that are more or less ready to go.  I'd then recommend going to Vorlon Space and grabbing the final ruleset.  Play a game or two with your palls for fun.  Get the mechanics down, and have and idea of where you'd like to go from there.

Improving the Game:

After you've had a little experience with the starter decks, next you need some boosters.  If buying by the box (and you should) I'd highly encourage you to get at least a couple Deluxe booster boxes on eBay and if your feeling up to it, I'd then look at Great War booster boxes on eBay.  Each box runs about $25 if you're patient.  If you get two, that's another $13 a person.  With two boxes of boosters, starter decks, and a good group of friends, your final cost (per person) would be $23.  I dunno about you, but in my gamer circles, that's a steal.  If you're a patient and wily eBay buyer, you could even cut that in half!

If you find that you want to explore the Shadow War mechanic, Shadows booster boxes on eBay are extremely cheap.  This expansion was overproduced and really a little shallow in its selection.  However, if going the Shadow War route, its a must.

Expanding and optional factions:

If you get more than 4 players interested, and everyone wants to play unique factions, have additional players either grab a Non-aligned starter deck on eBay (a later, fifth faction) or a Psi Corps starter deck on eBay (alternate Human sub-faction) or another one of the core factions and then a Home Faction (Opposition) starter deck on eBay (this allows two of each faction in the game at the same time).  It is possible to have three Human players, and two of each of the others... but I'd not recommend it, unless you've all played before and are freeing up an entire day to play this mega game out.

After this, hunt for individual cards or look at the more rare and more expensive later expansions (Wheel of Fire and Crusade are a blast... but hardly needed to win the game, and probably not worth it if you game on a budget.  Severed Dreams is really only worth it for all the alternative variants of the ambassadors... and I'd just get them as single auctions, that'll save you frustrations and money).

ENJOY!