Nobody goes into a tournament wanting to lose.

That doesn’t mean that everyone cares about winning more than they care about other things. Every player is different. But even if you’re bringing an off-kilter Chewie deck because you think it’s fun, or you just love the character, you probably don’t do it intending to scrub out. You want to do the best you can with what you chose to bring. So for all of you out there sleeving up with the aim of winning a few games, I have good news and bad news about Star Wars: Unlimited.

The good news is that SWU is a game that is so tightly focused on the battlefield and the back-and-forth action that nothing will matter more to your success than how you pilot. If you play well, you can and will win games.

The bad news is that, on the flip side, nothing will save you if your sequencing and play is bad- no meta deck, no 3x Legendary card, no nothing. We have every indication that SWU will never be a game you can play on autopilot. If you want to do well, you must learn how to make good decisions once the first round starts.

So, in the spirit of sucking less, we begin our first New Player Lessons that focuses on actually playing instead of preparing to play. The most elemental part of piloting is sequencing- basically, the order in which you choose to take your actions. That’s what we’ll tackle today.

THE PLAY’S THE THING

When it’s your turn in SWU, you usually have a lot of potential choices for what to do in the moment. There’s gonna be good cards in your hand, and juicy units on the board, and potential combos to fire off, but the correct approach is usually the answer to the following question- “Which action represents the best balance between what needs to happen right now and what I need to preserve for the remainder of the round?“

There’s a lot to unpack there. First of all- it’s absolutely subjective. Different players might look at the same board and come up with different plays are the answer. In this way, Sequencing is at least as much art as it is science. But it’s also true that you can usually look back at certain moments of the game and find where you’ve missed the mark on this. Recording your games is a great tool for that.

Just like with my previous New Player Lesson on Resourcing, sequencing is too complex to cover in a single article and nothing can replace reps against other players. My main game prior to SWU was Ashes: Reborn, a fabulous ECG that shares a ton of DNA with SWU. That community laughs a lot about the question “What makes a good attack in Ashes?”, because as fundamental as that seems, it is hilariously complex and almost impossible to answer. Great Ashes players may be literally considering dozens of factors when they make a decision about how and when to attack.

SWU is fundamentally a resource management game. The player who gets the most value out of their resources will usually win.

This resource tug of war should inform your sequencing decisions. While I can’t cover everything, below are five principles that make up a good play in SWU. They’re in rough order of priority, but as you can imagine, those priorities shift in a given moment in unpredictable ways. And pay close attention- often, your best play available is actually sneakily doing all of these things at once.

PRINCIPLE 1: PRESERVE YOUR VALUE

You should choose the play that gets the most out of what you’ve already invested in.

A good example of failing to do this can be found at 5:37 in our Tarkin vs. Leia video. Justin plays Ackbar, which leaves Tarkin with only 2 life remaining. This should be a clear sign to Tyler that he needs to get value out of Tarkin ASAP, but instead, he chooses to play Yularen. Justin is then able to Shoot First with R2-D2 to kill Tarkin before Tarkin can swing.

Tarkin could have swung, but because of a sequencing mistake, he died before he could. That instance of unclaimed value is a misplay, and is a good example of why this is our first principle.

Truly bizarre boardstates aside, you want your things to be already exhausted before your opponent has a chance to kill them. Every time your unit swings, it compounds its value. This is part of why it can be valuable to swing your unit at the Base if it’s not good a good trade available- Bases don’t hit back (yet), so base hits are excellent at preserving your own value. In the above example, there’s actually yet another option available- Tyler could have sent Tarkin at the 1 attack C-3P0, which would have killed the droid but left Tarkin alive with a single life left. That play demands Justin invest yet more into killing Tarkin if he wants him off the board.

That trade would have potentially gotten Tyler two more instances of Tarkin’s damage- the damage to kill 3P0, and the damage on the eventual counterswing Tarkin may have done since Tyler would have denied the clean Shoot First play. It’s a much bigger swing in resources and tempo than it first appears, and that’s before even accounting for the additional experience token Tarkin’s attack would have bestowed on that TIE!

We’re all about compounding value on our units. That means doing what we can to make sure they get their chance to make an impact before kicking the bucket.

PRINCIPLE 2: DENY YOUR OPPONENT VALUE

You should choose the play that takes the most potential value away from your opponent.

Tyler does this well at 11:05 in our Tarkin vs. Luke video. Luke has just flipped over his damage with It Binds, but Tyler has Overwhelming Barrage. That card would be a very, very efficient way to knock the shields off of Restored Arc and a very problematic Obi-Wan Kenobi, but Tyler instead correctly opts to pour all of that damage into Luke, which is just enough to remove him before he can swing at all that round.

The shields remain, but Tyler has crucially prioritized denying Justin the value of a 7 attack Luke and the shield he would have given on attack. Tyler goes on to win the game.

The inverse side of Principle #1 is theoretically pretty obvious- if you’re trying to preserve the value of your cards, you’re trying to remove as much value as possible from your opponent’s.

This can play out in a variety of different ways- maybe it means choosing a ready unit to kill when you have a choice between multiple targets. Maybe it means forgoing a unit in your hand this round because you have the perfect removal card to ace that huge threat your opponent invested in. Maybe it’s plopping down a Sentinel at the most annoying time possible, making your opponent bow out of the round early so they don’t have to inefficiently ram their units into your wall.

All those things constitute denied value. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself what would be most devastating to be on the other end of. Then do that thing.

Denying value has some elements that can be problematic- decks that trade endlessly often forget that, at some point, they were supposed to win. You have to strike a balance. But on the other hand, it will be rare that a deck can win by just hitting Base and not properly respecting the opposing threats. It’s ideal to order your steps so that you can deny your opponent every possible ounce of value from the cards they’re investing in.

PRINCIPLE 3: DELAY COMMITTING RESOURCES AND UNITS

You should choose the play that commits only as many resources/units as are necessary to stay ahead on value.

At 3:30 in our Boba vs. Han video, Tyler spends all of his resources on Bossk, sending him in with Ambush to kill Justin’s Sabine. This looks good on paper- Bossk has a great ability and Tyler has denied Sabine value by killing her straight away. But it creates a problem- Bossk is exhausted, leaving only the TIE and eventual Boba leader to use to counter Justin as the round plays out.

Boba’s resource refreshing definitely changes the evaluation here a little, but this play is still a good example of this principle- by jumping straight into playing Bossk, Tyler greatly restricted the potential available plays he had available in the round, which lets Justin sequence more freely and set up a winning board state in short order.

A while back over in Ashes, we found an interesting statistical correlation. In that game, you use dice as your resources, and you get 10 of them every round to use. We found that when you graphed out dice usage over time, the player who had more dice available at the end of the majority of turns was, almost without exception, the winner. The lesson was clear- spending your resources slowly is almost always a good idea.

There are always going to be instances where dropping all of your resources on an Ambush unit or a top of round Overwhelming Barrage is correct. But if there’s not a compelling trade from Principle #1 or Principle #2 on the board right now, the correct play is usually to slow down and durdle as much as you can. This doesn’t mean to make bad passes (more on that in a moment), but it does mean that you’re vastly more flexible to respond to your opponent if you have more of your tools still available. Spend slowly!

This principle does have a sort of fundamental conflict with the need to maintain tempo and potentially claim initiative, and it can be hard to know what to prioritize for a given board state. You’ll have to use your gut, as well as knowledge of your deck and your matchup, to find the balance. But I often see players err to the side of going too quickly rather than the other way around.

Patience is the name of the game. By slowing the expenditure of resources and units in clever ways, you can generate all sorts of advantages.

PRINCIPLE 4: RESPECT THE PASS

You should choose the play that considers the value of what a pass means for each player.

This one is a doozy. At 15:47 in our Tarkin vs. Leia video, Tyler, seeing no obviously good trades, passes. He’s theoretically respecting Principle #3, holding off on committing before seeing more of what Justin’s got going on.

The problem? Justin has already attacked with a unit and spent 4 resources. That pass gives him the option to ready all of those cards, while Tyler has spent no resources and gets nothing of value out of the round refresh. This huge gap in player gains from the round turnover is definitely a misplay. Justin wisely claimed initiative when given the choice, but it was less his victory than it was Tyler’s blunder.

Don’t look now, but passing is the most powerful action in all of SWU. It always will be.

For the low cost of 0 resources and no cards from hand, passing can refresh your leader, refresh all of your units and resources, draw 2 cards, and put you up a resource. They’re never gonna print anything better than that. Wild when you think about it that way, huh? But this isn’t an exaggeration. There will come a point in every single round of SWU where you’re getting a ton more raw value out of a pass than any other single action.

The catch is that your opponent usually stands to gain similar value out of passing, too. Because of that symmetry, passing is often a rote affair, done after all available plays have been made. And often, this is how it should be.

But there will be moments in many games where those graphs do diverge- where you get more out of a pass than your opponent would. These moments are easy to miss, so it’s prudent to, however briefly, consider the implications of a pass on most turns of SWU. When you start looking for these opportunities, you’ll be surprised by how often it would be a misplay for your opponent to claim initiative after you pass. In those moments, you can pass to force their hand- they must do something to reverse the graph and make the round refresh more in their favor. That something almost always involves giving you more information and more chances to respond, so passing can often be a great play even if they don’t take the bait.

And if your opponent passes? Stop everything you’re doing and look at the board. Don’t let them get cute with a pass- if you’re gonna get more out of the deal than they did, claim that initiative with the quickness.

PRINCIPLE 5: THINK AHEAD

You should choose the play that considers how the rest of the round and game will play out.

Check out the last sequences of this game, starting at around 33:50 in our Boba vs. Han video. Both Tyler and Justin do a very good job of playing to their outs, considering both resources and sequencing decisions as the game gets ready to wrap up.

Multiple passes fairly early in the round are done because a player is on lethal damage, and both players are anticipating each other’s sequences before making their own. It’s a great example of balancing in-the-moment thinking with the implications of what’s coming down the line.

This is definitely the hardest principle to master, but it will make the difference in your games. The above principles primarily deal with the urgent, tactical, here-and-now decisions. But in SWU, you’ll need to sequence things with both the present and future in mind.

The most obvious example of this is initiative. Just like we mentioned for Principle #4, there’s immense power on tap in the round turnover. Part of thinking ahead is knowing when there’s more value in claiming initiative than there is in squeezing every last drop of value out of your current board. Often you can guarantee another swing with a valuable unit simply by virtue of claiming initiative first. That swing may be worth more than any other options, but you won’t see that unless you’re thinking ahead.

Thinking ahead also impacts how and when you trade with certain units. Yes, you could swing that Death Star Stormtrooper into your opponent’s Base and take your 3 damage. But is it better to go ahead and take out that Cantina Braggart smirking across from you? If you’ll want to do that eventually, isn’t it better to go ahead and do it now? Maybe the answer is no…because you’re anticipating an Academy Defense Walker to drop next turn, and you’d like to use Death Star Stormtrooper and Tarkintown to take it out. Wheels within wheels.

Usually, the urgent stuff is just that- urgent. But where you can, balance the future with the now and try to sequence with an eye on the long game.

ONE WITH THE FORCE

It is tough to get really good at this. If you stick with SWU, especially if you plan to participate in events, you’re going to have plenty of moments that you kick yourself over. Little sequencing things will keep you off of Top Cut, leave you short of that promo card prize you wanted. They’ll even lose you some sleep.

But the more we play, and the more we study the game, the better we get. A game where you felt happy with all of your sequencing choices, win or lose, is its own reward. We can always take steps towards getting better at the game we love.

I hope this article has helped you take the next step into a larger world- a world where you and your deck are having an absolute blast hitting your maximum potential.

May the force be with you!