Assuming you’re not a Spike, as Tyler outlined last week, you’ll spend more time on deck building than anything else (apart from playing) in Star Wars: Unlimited. Leaders have interesting dynamics, but so do the other cards… So, how should we start deckbuilding? I see three main options in Star Wars Unlimited:

1. Picking a leader and building around that leader.
2. Picking 3 colors that complement each other well.
3. Finding the best value cards in the game and building around them.

Picking and building around a leader

Pretty self-explanatory- you think there is a Leader that has a game-winning move when they deploy or a Leader with a nasty ongoing effect that will win games.

My first idea using this philosophy revolves around Luke Skywalker. Shields seem strong and can create sequencing and tempo issues for your opponent. In my games of Star Wars Unlimited, one of the strongest plays I’ve seen is to drop a strong Sentinel on Round 6 before popping Luke out. If your opponent was holding onto a play they thought would get rid of Luke off the rip, this bypasses that. It also allows you to setup a strong shield engine with Luke attacking and keeping the Sentinel alive.

Another option could be using Grand Moff Tarkin to play experience tokens on cheap cards like Death Star Stormtrooper and Tie/ln to burst your opponent down before they can execute their game plan. You can check out our detailed write up of this deck in yesterday’s article

Picking 3 colors that complement each other well

Since the card pool is so small, it’s hard to say what this will look like. So far Blue seems strong in the midrange, Yellow has tricky events, Red has cheap, aggressive units, and Green has many big, late-game units.

Theoretically, if I was looking at building a strong early and mid-game deck, I would look at building around Blue and Red. If I was looking to build a control deck that focused on using events and cheap units to survive the early and mid-game to the drop big units to win the game, I’d focus building around Green and Yellow.

This archetype will get fleshed out once we get a better idea of what each color is capable of.

Finding the best value cards in the game and building around them

Looking through the current card pool, cards like the Boba Fett Unit, Shoot First, DJ Deathstar, and Overwhelming Barrage look like great cards to build around! Boba is a few health above what I’d expect the standard 3 cost unit to have, and then adds in a pretty sweet first strike ability. Shoot First is a super-efficient surprise effect from hand that helps with board control while keeping my unit alive for only 1 resource. Superlaser Technician provides some great ramp help. He’s a chump blocker I can get some value out of by hitting an opponent’s unit for 2 and then cheating ahead on the resource curve. Overwhelming Barrage currently looks to be THE primo board control card while also giving us a temporary stat boost.

Building around these cards leaves us wanting a Villain Yellow/Green setup. From there we can choose between GMT or Boba as our leader before we start to fill out the remaining 38 cards to fit that dynamic. If we choose to run Boba, then we’re probably adding in another strong synergy card with him like Fett’s Firespray and complementing our deck from there.

At last, September has been dubbed Command month, and FFG has slowly released Green Hero cards! Leia Leader loves the Rebel tribal within the plain Hero aspect cards and Yellow, so naturally you would want to start building there. The Home One and Admiral Ackbar reveals leave us another high value synergistic combo to throw in. You can take a deeper look at our deckbuilding thoughts on what we call “Home One Derby” in last week’s article.

Are there any other strategies you plan to use in deckbuilding? Are you excited to start build decks in Star Wars Unlimited? What have been your favorite deck archetypes thus far with the spoiled card set?

If you didn’t know these existed, here are the Deckbuilder websites available for Star Wars Unlimited that you can start deckbuilding with:

• SWUDB
• Star Wars Unlimited DB
• Force-DB
• sw-unlimited-db

Don’t forget to check out FFG’s stream later today (2pm EDT) where they discuss booster packs and rarity here. If you can’t catch it, we’ll be recapping in tomorrow’s article.