The release date of The Exiled is growing ever nearer, and our supply of teasers is rapidly dwindling. There are still plenty of new features to show off, but we would like to take a break from game mechanics to show off some art—and pass along praise to some of the game’s best players.

Pictured in the center of The Scope’s illustration are Pierre Malherbaud and Emilie Goldberg. Pierre took first place at both last year’s Gen Con and Fan Fest, earning the chance to be immortalized as a part of the EVE universe. Emilie took third place at Fan Fest, so when Pierre asked that she be in the illustration with him, we agreed.

EVE: The Exiled to release August 1st

The Exiled, the first expansion for CCP | White Wolf's sci-fi CCG, EVE: The Second Genesis, has been delayed due to a printer error. A mechanical error resulted in a mis-collation of the booster packs, which upon inspection were deemed unsuitable for release. Measures have been taken to rapidly address this problem, and the company has announced today that the set will be available in stores August 1.

During the ramp-up for The Exiled, there has been a great deal of speculation surrounding the continued usefulness of mining. Of special concern has been the topic of mining in the newly-important outer regions, which are expected to change hands several times in the course of a game. Astral Mining Inc. is here to lay all those fears to rest.

Astral Mining Inc. is simple, but effective, allowing a player to establish and profit from a mining operation in the same turn, drastically reducing the time investment that previously made mining a risky endeavor. However simple this card may appear, however, it was used in a surprising way during playtesting. Once a stable mining operation is in place, Astral Mining Inc. can be used to double the income gained. A crafty player could extract ISK from an operation during the income step, play this card and then profit again at the end of his turn. With judicious use of a Mind Clash, this process can be repeated for several turns, ramping up the profit from a single location enough to fund a whole fleet.

CCP | White Wolf announced several weeks ago that the EVE Gen Con Championship prize pool would be increased from $10,000 USD to $25,000 USD. While this new figure is impressive, nearly double what any other CCG tournament is offering, it is not the final change being made to the tournament. The company announced today that the tournament will now be open, allowing any Gen Con attendant enter and compete for a portion of the cash. Registration for the event will follow all the usual guidelines of Gen Con event registration. For more information about registering, please visit the Gen Con Indy site.

The Gen Con Championship was previously only open to those players who qualified at previous regional events, and their accomplishments will not be diminished by this change. The Championship has only a limited number of seats, and all players who previously qualify will be guaranteed a place. In addition, they will receive cards from the upcoming expansion, The Exiled, and an invitation to hit the town with the infamous CCP | White Wolf crew.

On Monday, CCP | White Wolf discovered a major printer error in the sorting of the booster packs for the latest expansion to the EVE: The Second Genesis, The Exiled. We were faced with a tough decision, we decided that we cannot, in good conscience, release the set in such a condition, so we have been forced to delay the release for an uncertain amount of time.

We are currently working with our printing partner to correct this oversight, but do not yet have enough information to announce a new release date. However, the job of resorting the cards is expected to take between three and four weeks, placing the new date sometime in early August. We regret this situation, and hope the fans will bear with us while we seek to bring this set up to the high standards they have come to expect from us.

Further details will be posted as soon as they are available. All questions about (re)scheduling prerelease events should be direct to Zack Walters, the Organized Play Coordinator at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

We have told you in some of these teasers that The Exiled contains plenty of dirty tricks, and its finally time to unveil one of the nastier ones: the Torture news.

Amarr Method of Torture, one of a set of four, is a complicated card that can be used to devastating effect by a smart CEO. The automatic destruction of newly-assembled ships it promises is an extremely powerful ability, but even its lesser penalty - the sacrifice of a card already in play - will make a noticeable dent in any enemy's forces. While the reality of gameplay leaves this card with little opportunity to actually destroy a newly-built ship, the constant sacrificing needed to avoid it will quickly whittle down both sides.

When mathaplo revealed the existence of characters in the forums last week, speculation about their role in the game, as well as the meaning of some of their statistics, began to fly back and forth. Now the time has come to fully unveil one of the last secrets of The Exiled.

Characters are designed to bring a host of new tactical abilities to Second Genesis while remaining nonessential to basic gameplay. Characters can be put to work in a couple different ways: The first is as an agent, docked in a starbase. While docked, the character grants its listed agent bonus. The second is as a pilot, attached to a specific ship. Once a ship has docked at a starbase and attached a character, it gains the benefit of the listed pilot ability. Additionally, if the character grants any command abilities, they can be used as though they were attached to the ship, on the same side as they appear on the character (yes, this allows a ship that already possesses a command on that side to activate both at once). Finally, if a ship piloted by a character is destroyed, its controller can pay the character’s clone cost (found in the blue cross at the top of the card) to prevent it from leaving play, returning it to his/her starbase instead.

Have you heard? Our ads weren’t kidding, The Exiled really is bringing wealth to the Second Genesis community! We have increased the prize pool for the Gen Con Championship from $10,000 to $25,000, more than doubling the amount of cash being given to players. Those of you who haven’t qualified for the Championship yet should either start demonstrating the game (in order to reach the 20 new players that earn you a spot) or check the Event Calendar for one of the four remaining Qualifiers. More of these will be going up soon!

There's finally another way (besides Early Warning System) to pull ships from one region to defend another. And Acceleration Gate does this with style.

This common, inexpensive region is an expansionist player's dream. It allows a CEO to spread fewer ships across more regions while still maintaining the possibility of presenting a solid defense. This ability alone is easily worth the cost, but when the income and mineral value are taken into account, Acceleration Gate becomes a very potent location. As always, there are drawbacks.

Many of you have noticed the Glicko scores under your profiles by now, but amidst the hustle and bustle of preparing The Exiled, we have yet to address what they mean. The time has come to remedy that.

The player database has finally been implemented on the website, and it is fully integrated with your forum login. If you are registered for the forums, you’re in the database; however, we would like to ask you to provide us with some more information. In order for the database to be used as a means of accurately tracking each player’s involvement in demonstrations and tournaments, we need to have up to date contact information so that we can email and potentially ship items to you. If you haven’t already, please take a moment now to update the information in your profile.

We have recovered from the craziness that three-day weekends always bring, and are ready to unveil one of the new, more desirable, outer regions. And yes, we really do mean for it to be that good.

The Exiled is going to give outer regions a kick in the pants, and Aridia is perfect example of how much more enticing they will be. Even if we ignore its ability for the moment, Aridia is still a good investment, nearly paying for itself after one turn of control. And if a location is played into it immediately, the income curve rises dramatically, with the region at least paying for itself in one turn. If we now look at the ability, this region can very rapidly become a huge cash cow: with a high location cap and an ability that toughens ships for each location in the region, Aridia is a miner’s paradise.

Once again, I direct your attention to the Card Spotlight. Emergency Shield Generator may seem very straightforward, but it has a subtle but significant effect on the game as a whole. Sure, it is relatively expensive, and requires you to have an upgraded starbase, but the defense it provides is invaluable. With the added permanency of the targeting restriction taken into account, this suddenly becomes a very strong card for nearly any deck, requiring the use of roughly two more enemy frigates to take down your shields.

Arguably, the most interesting thing about this card is the fact that it was submitted to the developers by a player. Our own darknight submitted the following via the Create A Card feature:

When we saw this, we knew it would fit perfectly with the new pace we were trying to achieve with Exiled. So our thanks and congratulations go out to darknight. And remember: keep submitting ideas, and they may be picked up for the next set. This game belongs to its community, and you get to decide where it goes.

Before you read this, you should check out the Guristas Despoiler featured in the latest Card Spotlight. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Read it? Drooling over the thought of that tiny ship becoming the biggest, baddest ambusher in your fleet? Good, we meant for that to happen. The Despoiler is just one of many such cards in Exiled that calculates the number of friendly cards when determining a trait. When paired with racial affinity, this mechanic helps maintain the strategic integrity of each race. The relaxing of racial restrictions broadens the options available to deck builders, especially in limited-format games, but we didn’t want to punish players who continued to focus and specialize. By sticking to only one faction, CEOs can now super-specialize, sacrificing access to the larger pool of options to become the undisputed masters of a particular tactic.

With Sentry and Exile, we introduced ships that will make assaulting outer regions easier than ever, but now we’d like to share with you two new command abilities that will vastly improve defense of both home and outer regions: tanking and sniping. Because they are command abilities, they are only useful for defense, but a ship with one of these commands active can easily mean the difference between victory and defeat.

So I (AgentZero) spent all of last week at the Gamma Trade Show in Las Vegas, leaving a number of tasks unfinished here in Atlanta. Unfortunately, the weekly Exiled update was one of these tasks. I apologize for the delay, but I return from Sin City bearing a gift: a new card from the upcoming set. Behold!