We’re pushing the tier list debut to next week, as we haven’t had a chance to dive in to Palpatine gameplay due to illness.

We have a treat though! For the 2nd weekend in a row, there was a TTS tournament on Saturday giving us some more interesting meta results. 14 players assembled for a 4 round swiss, followed by a Top cut of 8 players. The Bracket can be found here, and the decklists can be found here. Fresh off his win, we asked Thorrk if he wanted to do some of his infamous paragraphs (Discord and Reddit users know of their power) about his win. This man is not one to disappoint!

Without further ado, please welcome Thorrk!

Boba Command Tournament Report

Hi everyone,

Last Saturday I had the pleasure to take part and win the second TTS tournament organized by Rishca.

I am mostly known as a Vader player but this time I decided to bring Boba Green which I believe to be the strongest deck in the game (a lot more on that later). 

I still believe Vader is a very strong deck with a very decent match-up against Boba and therefore a strong contender, the problem is that Vader often struggles against aggro and bringing it in an open tournament feels like playing the russian roulette every round, so I decided to go for a safer option this time.

The Tournament Meta

2 players ended up dropping so we had 14 participants:

4 Boba Green

2 Leia Red

1 Boba Yellow

1 Luke Red

1 Sabine Green

1 Sabine Yellow

1 Luke Green

1 Palpatine Red

1 Krennic Green

1 Iden Red

Overall a pretty balanced field with an expected dominance of Boba and a good amount of aggro decks. This field is overall very favorable for Boba since its natural predators were in few numbers. (no Vader and only one Krennic)

We only had 2 off meta decks which were Palpatine and Iden unfortunately those decks did poorly. Krennic Green and Boba Yellow were underrepresented in my opinion.

My List

It’s overall a pretty classic version of the deck but let me zoom on a few oddities and “innovations”:

Resupply in the main deck – The strongest thing you can do on turn 2 against most decks is a ramp simply because it allows you to skip the 4-drop and go directly in Boba’s big turn, one turn earlier. Playing Resupply on top of SLT doubles your chance to make that happen. Yes, drawing the card later sometimes sucks, that’s why I only play 2 in the main.

Steadfast Battalion – This very clever piece of tech was played by Astrotech and the L8NG crew during last week’s top cut tournament. When your leader is in play you can use ECL to ambush the battalion and one shot most leaders in the game. It’s a very efficient way to deal with Boba, Krennic and Luke. This combo comes with a couple of caveats, it requires ECL use, if your opponent knows it can be played around and the battalion is not a very powerful card outside of this set up. My experience with the card has been rather mixed, but to be fair I mostly played against aggro against which this tech is not good.

Traitorous – I think this card is currently underplayed especially in Boba green, it has been an incredible card throughout the tournament. The traditional 5-drop you will see in Boba such as Rukh, Battalion, Bossk, Kallus are great but don’t impact the space arena, and going all in on space is an excellent way to deal with the Boba big turn. Traitorous is a 5- drop that can affect both arenas, it’s also an excellent card against Boba who plays the best 3-drop in the game. Just be mindful of upgrade removal and consider siding it out for game 2 when you expect your opponent to bring anti-upgrade.

Reinforcement Walker – I was looking for a strong late game option for slower Match ups and ended up landing on that guy. Since I mostly played against aggro decks I only got to play it once on the very last game of the tournament and anybody who saw that beauty in action can attest to its power. 

My Run

So here are my results:

Swiss 

2-0 against Leia Red

2-0 against Sabine Green

0-2 against Leia Red

2-0 against Sabine Yellow

Almost a perfect record. I got overrun by His Dudeness aggressiveness with Leia, going full space against Boba can be very effective if the boba player doesn’t find the answer.

I got pretty lucky on my pairings since I faced only Aggro decks during the swiss which is a very good matchup for Boba. But all of that ended up having little consequence since even a 2-2 record could qualify you for the top8.

Top 8

2-0 against Boba Green

You can watch the match here.

Games were very close as you can expect for a mirror against a player of that caliber. I was lucky enough to find ramp in game 1 while my opponent didn’t. Playing Traitorous while my opponent wasn’t made a big difference.

Top 4

2-0 against Sabine Green

You can watch the end of Game 1, and Game 2 here.

After an extremely close game 1, I ended up repeating my swiss performance against Poem. As I said earlier this Match-up is very favorable for me, but Poem put up a hell of a fight!

Finals

You can watch the whole match here.

Glad to finally play a match that is not against Aggro. In game 1 I managed to overrun my opponent, the game would have gone the other way if it lasted a little longer. This was a perfect example of how flexible this deck is and can take an aggro or control stance depending on the situation.

Game 2 was epic and probably the best game of Star Wars Unlimited I’ve ever played, extremely back and forth! I ended up with like 18 cards left in my deck. Redemption and Luke’s constantly holding me back but the value provided by Reinforcement walkers ended up taking over the game, this game could have gone even longer if I didn’t have the fatal Firespray to finish the game

End up with a perfect record in the top 8 but this was not representative of how the games actually went, nothing felt like an easy win in this top 8.

Closing Comments

I think the results speak for themselves. Out of the 5 boba decks played, 4 of them made it to top 8 (the one that didn’t was played by a new player). Boba Green won the tournament undefeated in top 8 and SIP went undefeated in Swiss and was also playing Boba green.

Kotul did a great job with Luke red and reminded us that this deck is still a force to be reckoned with.

The Sabine Green of Poem was very interesting, it’s a very similar deck than Leia but sacrifices Leia’s ability for a more aggressive leader and a stronger base. The recent addition of Rebel Assault definitely helped it, it’s a good deck piloted by a good player so no surprise it did well, unfortunately aggro decks in general still struggle against boba and this deck is no exception.

Obviously those results have to be taken with a grain of salt, it was only a 14-players tournament and the field was very favorable for Boba. With that being said, we are clearly seeing a trend among the different tournaments and leagues that have been organized so far, and this trend has not changed in the past few months.

Why is Boba So strong?

Well for a start, Boba himself is the strongest Leader in the game, there is no other leader that has such high stats for its cost. Not only that his ability is extremely powerful when used well, allowing you to gain tempo at almost no cost is incredibly powerful in a game where tempo is everything. Sure it is sometimes a bit awkward to use and doesn’t always line up perfectly but it’s free and when it does work it allows you to take over the game extremely quickly.

If that was not enough, Boba is also in what I consider to be the most powerful color combo in the game: Yellow/Villainy. This aspect combination gives you the best 1-drop in the game (Greedo), the best 3-drop in the game (Boba disintegrator), the best 5-drop in the game (Bossk) and the best 6-drop in the game (Firespray).

The other cards are also very powerful, the deck has a variety of extremely efficient answers like No good to me Dead and Waylay, as well as the best yellow card in the game: Surprise Strike.

All you have to do now is add green which gives you: ramp to skip the 4-drop, the best base in the game (ECL), the best 7-drop in the game (vader) and the overall best card in the game: Overwhelming Barrage.

And of course all those cards line up very well together: on turn 4 (or turn 3 if you got ramp) you can play Bossk to defeat something, untap a resource with Boba, deploy Boba, attack to ready 2 more resources, which gives you 3 to play one of your great 3-drops. That means that you can play the best 5-drop, 3-drop and leader in the game in one turn as early as turn 3 and it’s not even that hard to do!

The Boba Problem

Now to the spicy stuff! The other reason that made me want to play Boba is that I wanted to experience for myself how powerful and dominant the deck was: and hell I was not disappointed.

Is Boba Green unbeatable?

No.

Otherwise you would not have seen 3 non-boba decks in the top 4. Boba is by essence a midrange deck, so just like in any other card game, playing a slower/control deck will generally have a good match-up against Boba. The reason is simple: Midrange is not fast enough to win before the control deck comes online and when the control deck is in full swing, it should beat the inferior late game of a midrange deck. There are several decks that belong to that category, the most competitive ones are in my opinion Vader ramp and Krennic ramp but there might be others.

But here is the problem…

Boba raw power is so incredibly pushed that those decks typically only manage to achieve a roughly 50% win rate… and that’s a major problem. Playing a slower ramp deck usually means having a weaker aggro match-up and if that sacrifice doesn’t even allow you to do better than 50% against Boba, you know something is messed up.

Is Boba even a problem?

Yes.

If the best you can achieve against Boba is a 50% win rate and Boba steamrolls everything else, then the correct play is to always play Boba going to a tournament and that’s obviously a problem. 

Since aggro decks are going to be the most accessible decks in both budget and gameplay, I expect a lot of players will play aggro when the game releases, and if those aggro decks get absolutely destroyed by Boba, it could leave a very bad taste in people’s mouth and hurt the game.

Of course we still have 20 cards to see and they will have an impact on the meta. With that being said, I don’t see what could possibly change this situation drastically, but let’s wait and see.

Do I want a ban?

I still want to see the full card pool but yes probably.

I don’t think we “need” a ban, after all there is a diversity of decks that have reasonable chances against it, and Boba is both fairly fun to play with and against. So even if the deck is left untouched until the next expansion, I don’t think it would be the end of the world.

However, as I said above, the raw power level of Boba does have a significant negative impact on the meta diversity, so I personally think that it would be beneficial for the game if the deck was nerfed.

Which card should be banned?

Fett’s Firespray

It’s the only card you can ban that would nerf Boba sufficiently without killing the deck and without any collateral damage.

Fett’s Firespray is just incredibly overpowered, it is the perfect finisher that allows you to win games you should not be able to win, and is brutally punishing if you don’t have an immediate answer for it.

Boba would be very strong even without it, but I think that it should be enough to bring it more in line with other decks.

Of course there are other ways they could nerf it, for example they could errata the card so it comes into play ready only if you have a Boba unit in play. I am not sure if this would be enough and it would certainly not help when the Boba player is getting the perfect opening.

I know that talking ban can be perceived as extremely premature since we don’t have the full card pool and the game isn’t even out yet, especially to those who haven’t played the game at a competitive level yet. 

I sincerely hope to be wrong on this and I am not advocating for a ban at release, it’s probably wiser to let Boba do it’s thing for a couple of months after release before acting.

I also would like to mention that everything I say is coming from a place of love for the game. I want the best for Star Wars Unlimited, and the earlier we warn the designers the earlier they can react which I think will be for the best. We all know what happens when a meta is left unchecked for too long.

And that’s it for me, thanks Rishca for organizing this tournament and Garbage Rollers for giving me a platform to express myself.

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Thanks to Thorrk for putting his write up together! It’s always a blast reading through the player experience of a tournament and some of the interesting post-tournament thoughts Thorrk had for us! Hopefully we’ll find some more counterplay to Boba in these last 20 card reveals.