I was recently commiserating with a friend over Star Wars Unlimited. More specifically, we were lamenting the fact that there are so many leader cards in the game that would never see the light of day because they’re just not competitive. We resolved to make an effort to try out all of the game’s available leaders, or at least as many as we could manage. We also decided to take the idea a step farther by starting with the bottom of the barrel, the leaders that the tournament community considers to be the absolute worst.
Star Wars Unlimited in a Nutshell
Star Wars Unlimited is a trading card game that plays very similarly to Magic: the Gathering, especially Magic’s very popular Commander format. Players build decks around a leader card that begins and remains in play for the entire game. Your leader provides a theme for your deck in the form of an aspect: Vigilance, Aggression, Command, Cunning, and either Heroism or Villainy. In addition to the leader, each deck has a base card which provides another aspect. These aspects guide the types of cards that go into the deck, and help focus on a basic strategy for the game.
Each round players play one face down card to be used as a resource, used to put other cards into play. The resource row grows round by round, making more powerful cards available as the game progresses. Game play consists of playing units (either on the ground or in space) and using them to attack your opponent. Knocking out your opponent’s base is how you win, but choosing whether to go after their units (so they can’t keep attacking you) or their base is one of the primary decision points in the game.
I’m lucky enough to have a few friends who play the game, so I don’t have to rely on tournaments in order to play regularly. This means I can focus more on building fun, thematic decks that explore some of the game’s more complex mechanisms without having to worry about getting crushed by a fast-moving tournament winner. My two main opponents are my wife Katherine, who has a long history with TCGs (she started with Magic: the Gathering in the early 1990s); and my friend Steve, who is an experienced gamer but new to TCGs.
We usually play the game three-player, using a variant of the official multiplayer rules: we follow the publisher’s recommended game structure, but we play with regular decks rather than using the official Twin Suns deck construction rules that seek to emulate Magic’s “only one copy of each card” Commander format. None of us are particularly competitive players. We play the game because we like games and because we are Star Wars fans, and we’re all far more interested in having a good time playing than in building unbeatable decks.
With that in mind, we set out to play the game with decks built around, let’s be nice and say the less competitive leaders. A brief survey of the tournament meta seemed to indicate that the bottom-tier leaders were Moff Gideon, Doctor Aphra, Lando Calrissian, Hunter (from The Bad Batch), Jabba the Hutt, Finn, and IG-88 (note: this was before the Twilight of the Republic card set was released, so things in the meta may have changed a bit).
Round One: Hunter vs. Jabba the Hutt vs. Moff Gideon
For our first game, I decided on Hunter from The Bad Batch. The group of misfit clones present an interesting but very solvable deck building problem in that they are spread out among five of the game’s six aspects, and normally a deck is only going to feature three. It’s possible to include cards in your deck that don’t share an aspect with your leader or base, but they cost more to play so most of the time it’s not worth it. But thanks to Omega, who removes that penalty, it’s pretty easy to get them all in there. And worth it, as the characters all work really well together.
One of the things I always find fun about playing games based on licensed properties is coming up with unlikely team-ups. In this case, since it’s pretty critical that I get Omega into play as soon as possible, I’ve paired her with…Cobb Vanth, that immaculately coiffed small town marshal played so memorably by Timothy Olyphant in season two of The Mandalorian and a few episodes of The Book of Boba Fett. Vanth’s ability cycles through my cards faster, improving the chances that Omega will turn up quickly.
The deck’s gimmick is a shell game involving revealing copies of characters in play to improve their combat stats, move them in and out of the resource row, and generally just keep them in play and working for you. It’s a little complex and can be slow to get started. I can see why it’s not very popular in a tournament environment, but I actually found it pretty fun to play – there is something very satisfying about pulling off a complicated card combo.
Steve opted for Jabba the Hutt, who rewards his player by making units cheaper to play after he eliminating opposing units. It’s a pretty straightforward ability that allows the player to get costly characters into play quickly. In Steve’s case he went for a classic lineup of bounty hunters, with Zuckuss and 4-LOM distinguishing themselves a great deal more than they ever have on screen.
Alas, Katherine didn’t have time to build a deck from scratch so she played with the Moff Gideon preconstructed deck. Gideon hands out combat bonuses to small or mid-sized units, and the deck comes loaded with a ton of intimidating-looking Death Troopers and Dark Troopers. The army of troops didn’t end up working to Katherine’s advantage – every time one would come into play Steve and I would drop everything to take them out.
We played two games with this line up. Jabba won the first, exactly the way he was supposed to – by getting formidable bounty hunters into play quickly and cheaply. Hunter won the second game, in spite of the complexities of the deck. We had a great time with both games, easily imagining Hunter’s clones and Jabba’s bounty hunters reluctantly ganging up on Gideon’s swarm of troopers, only to turn on each other once the coast was clear.
Round Two: Dr. Aphra vs. Finn vs. Lando Calrissian
Dr. Aphra, the scheming archaeologist, is one of the more popular Star Wars characters who (to date) has never appeared on screen. Her deck strategy is another shell game similar to Hunter’s – I must be attracted to overly complicated ideas.
All leaders in the game have the ability to change into a regular unit once per game. This allows them to attack and be attacked, and often their ability as a unit is a little different than their ability as a leader. In Dr. Aphra’s case, the leader has you discarding cards from your deck every round, with the unit version becoming substantially more powerful if there is a sufficient variety of different cards in your discard pile. I tried to populate the deck with cards that would help this idea along, like the Rickety Quadjumper that lets you peek at the top card of your deck. However, I can see why this leader isn’t overly popular as it takes a lot of time and effort to get this mechanism going, and it’s not nearly as interesting as Hunter’s interactions with the other clones.
Katherine went for Finn this time around. Fantasy Flight Games has seemed a little reluctant to include material from the sequel trilogy in their games, so it’s not possible to build a whole deck around this era. A few sequel elements such as the ubiquitous Rickety Quadjumper (the ship Finn and Rey almost steal in The Force Awakens) and Rose Tico make an appearance, but Katherine decided to make up the difference with a veritable army of Mandalorians from across the entire Star Wars timeline.
It may sound random but it works in the context of the game. Finn’s ability is to convert upgrades (cards that attach to units, usually representing added skills or equipment) into Shield tokens. Shields are disposable but incredibly useful – they prevent all damage to the character they’re attached to for one attack, after which they are discarded. Meanwhile, many of the Mandalorians interact favorably with upgrades, so it’s a combo that makes sense, even if it’s hard to picture.
Steve built a deck around Lando Calrissian (the young version from Solo: A Star Wars Story). Lando is meant to make use of the Smuggle effect that was introduced with the Shadows of the Galaxy expansion. Normally, at the start of each round, each player plays a card from their hand face down to become a resource. These cards are “exhausted” as payment to put cards into play (like tapping lands in Magic), and ordinarily they remain resources for the rest of the game – frequently the most agonizing decision you can make in Star Wars Unlimited is which card from your hand to play as a resource.
Smuggle aims to alleviate that agony by allowing you to play cards from your resource row, although usually with an extra cost. Lando cancels that extra cost, but forces his player to sacrifice a resource in payment, which means his player will start running behind on resources unless they are able to get extra resources into play to make up for the loss. It means that a deck with Lando as its leader will need to spend time and energy just keeping up.
Steve chose to mitigate that with cards such as the Twin Pod Cloud Car and the Cloud City Wing Guard, which provided defensive abilities that gave him room to breathe and also provided an amusing glimpse into Lando Calrissian’s future.
Finn and his unlikely Mandalorians won this round handily. Katherine’s deck was probably the least thematic in terms of keeping with established Star Wars lore, but she did keep Rose and Finn together, and demonstrated that maybe this leader isn’t as bad as he first appears.
There’s only one leader left on our bottom-tier list: IG-88. How are we going to make this work?
Round Three: IG-88 vs. IG-88 vs. IG-88
The IG-88 leader card is distinctly uninspiring, leaving no question as to why he’s at the bottom of the barrel. As a leader, he gives one unit a +1 advantage if his player has more units in play than the player they’re attacking. When he enters play as as unit, he gives all of his player’s other units a +1 advantage when attacking, which is a little better, especially if you’ve been amassing units to take advantage of the leader ability. Still not that exciting though.
Remembering that, according to the excellent Tales of the Bounty Hunters story collection, there are multiple copies of IG-88 out in the galaxy, we decided that we’d each build a deck using him as the leader. If nothing else it would be interesting to see if we all showed up to the game with essentially the same deck or not.
By this time the Clone Wars-themed Twilight of the Republic set had come out, which features a new mechanism that puts battle droid tokens into play. These are low-powered units that aren’t expected to stay in play for long, but they are units, which means IG-88 can exploit them. And it’s easy to get a lot of them into play.
Steve and Katherine both went this route with their decks. Katherine decided to use a base that adds the Command aspect to IG-88’s Aggression and Villainy. This gave her access to a lot of Separatist military-themed cards that would create battle droid tokens but also provide some brute force in the form of Super Tanks and the powerful B2 super battle droids.
Steve, on the other hand, wanted to be able to play cards like Rallying Cry and Twice the Pride, which play at a higher cost if you don’t have the Aggression aspect on your leader and your base. He also managed to make good use of IG-88’s Villainy aspect to include a fair number of cards that add battle droid tokens to the game.
Partly out of obstinance, but mainly because Katherine and I share a collection and she beat me to all the battle droid cards, I decided to counter-program. Reasoning that my two opponents would go the battle droid route, I started looking for cards with Overwhelm, a keyword that allows units to stomp on tiny opponents and deal excess damage directly to the opposing base. My answer came in the form of Rancors and Wampas, so I further reasoned that as a droid, IG-88 would make an excellent zookeeper.
We played two games with these decks, and had a surprising amount of fun considering that not only were we all playing the same leader, but it was the one widely considered to be the worst. Katherine’s militarized IG-88 won both games, but I really enjoyed playing my deck, so much so that I’m going to retool it with a different leader. Bossk is looking good…
What Have We Learned?
We were able to have a lot of fun with Star Wars Unlimited by agreeing to try out underused leaders instead of obvious game winners. It is unfortunate that the available leader cards (and thus deck types) are so seemingly unbalanced that there is a clear hierarchy of winners over losers, but there is a lot to be said for focusing on playing rather than just winning.
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