Welcome, GarbageRollers faithful, to the 10th entry in our New Player Guide!

This lesson is focused on Limited play- AKA Draft and Sealed. These formats are much beloved in other tabletop games, and the typical praise is that they’re more affordable and approachable formats than full constructed, given the ever-evolving meta and expensive decklists of that ubiquitous format.

In SWU, the format is certainly more accessible, but there’s something else going on too- it’s just plain fun. Limited SWU has been one of the high points in my years of gaming. FFG has designed the game to shine in Limited formats, right on down to the way that cards are distributed in the packs. It’s a blast, and because of that you ought to have an easy time finding folks to play with at your local store…but for the uninitiated, it can feel overwhelming. As easy as SWU can be to teach, the first set, Spark of Rebellion, features over 250 cards, and knowing how to fit them together and play the game is a tall order.

With that in mind, we figured you might want a few pointers! Just in time for Prerelease weekend, we’re here to coach you up on some of our favorite tips for approaching draft and sealed play.

Approaching Limited Through Card Evaluations

Performing well in limited play has a lot of skills you’ll want to work up, but there’s one that’s universal, and is a really good starting point for the new player and experienced player alike. It’s the ability to do this:

Evaluate Cards By Understanding How SWU Is Balanced

It’s important to have a good grasp on how the folks who make the game balance the cards. The reason for this is simple- you’re not always going to know off the top of your head what’s best in your small selection of Limited cards. In Limited, you don’t have access to the full cardpool or to someone else’s idea of what a good deck is. You have to determine for yourself what cards will work best for your deck, and that’s its own skill.

Players always have opinions about how cards stack up against each other, but let’s put those aside for now. Before we ever get there, we have concrete evidence
(both in current cards and designer commentary) that the designers themselves see card design and balance in certain measurable ways, and it’s very prudent to know what those are so that we can evaluate cards better.

In general, there’s two axes that SWU cards are balanced around:
Balance Axis 1 [Accessibility To Rarity, or ATR]: ranges from Common Versatility to Legendary Specificity
Balance Axis 2 [Power To Color, or PTC]: ranges from Neutrals (Low Power Ceiling) to Dual Color Uniques (High Power Ceiling)

That may seem a little confusing at first, but in practice it’s pretty easy to come to grips with. We’ll start with the first axis, the ATR.

The ATR Axis can basically be defined like this: in general, as cards go down in rarity they become more generically useful. There’s a ton of examples of this across the cardpool, but a good place to start is Battlefield Marine vs. Home One. Home One is a great card, like a lot of Legendary cards are. It does a very splashy, very cool thing. But…how versatile is it, practically speaking? It’s versatile in the sense that it can bring something back from your discard! That’s really flexible. But it’s also a biggggg ol’ capital ship that you have to wait a long time for – you may have to include ramp cards just to be able to pay for it. Also, its main effects are centered around healing. That combination of traits, high cost and healing, implies a certain kind of deck, and thusly there’s lots of Hero Command decks in SWU that might not be good fits for Home One. Now let’s peek at Battlefield Marine. It’s just a plain 2/3/3, which isn’t flashy, but it trades nicely with a ton of other early game cards, and it also has really relevant traits in this color. It’s solid all the way around, and there’s seriously just no good reason that a Hero Command wouldn’t run 3x of it as of this writing.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? Home One is a “more powerful” card than our Squid Soulja Boy, but it’s definitely not as easy to slot into our decks and get use out of, and that difference can pretty directly be tied to the card’s rarity. Don’t get me wrong- there are plenty of Legendary cards that break this rule a bit by being, for all intents and purposes, generically awesome, but the principle still applies. Putting aside picks you make for the sake of building your own collection, Commons and Uncommons are often great picks in Limited because they’re designed to be the backbone of your deck.

The other angle here is the PTC Axis, which comes down to this: in general, as cards gain more aspects, their power ceiling increases, with an extra boost if they’re unique. This axis is actually a little more reliable than the ATR, with relatively few exceptions across the cardpool. The relative strength level goes like this:

True Neutral < Single Aspect Hero/Villain < Single Aspect Aggression/Command/Cunning/Vigilance < Dual Aspect

And as noted, within those divisions, unique cards get a slight edge. Check out Sabine Wren vs. Underworld Thug. Both of these cards are 2/2/3, but Sabine gets way better traits and two super useful abilities by virtue of her having more colors and being unique. The general principle holds up most everywhere- the extra colors on Restored Arc and Inferno Four make them much stronger in a vacuum than Distant Patroller.

Understanding these two axes helps you get inside the heads of the designers a little bit, better evaluating cards at a glance. And that skill is critically important as you enter limited formats. Take this knowledge, stuff it in your pocket, and follow me down to some specifics for your format.

Playing Sealed

Sealed is a blast, a slice of self-contained fun that’s a little bit like putting together a puzzle. It’s simple- you take 6 packs, and using the Leaders and cards you pull from those packs (plus any common base you’d like, if you need one), you make a 30 card deck to bash against other sealed decks. This is the format that most stores will play for prerelease, with a notable exception- at Prerelease events, you’re allowed to use your Luke or Vader promos as your Leader. Cool, right? Be on the lookout for strong options in those colors, because the Luke and Vader Leaders aren’t found in normal packs, which means this might be your only chance to play them in Limited!

Here’s a few general tips as you build your Sealed deck…

1. Know The Set
   This is an intimidating first step, I know…but it really is worth noting that nothing can fully replace knowledge of the cardpool. Even the most basic dive into tournament lists, tier lists, popular decks, and community conversations can be the biggest difference maker in your Sealed decks, giving you a good idea of what cards you’re looking for. The Discord is a fantastic place, and we’re always brewing up something in there. And when we brew, we do it on SWUDB, our beloved and ubiquitous community deckbuilding platform. Wave hello!
2. Read Your Pool
   It’s important to try not to force anything, even if you have a crazy cool Legendary or something to that effect. The reality is that only a couple of color combinations are likely to work even decently in a given Sealed pool. Organize your cards by color, and start with a basic count of how many cards are in each aspect. From there, combined with your Leader options, start ruling colors out, keeping in mind that more depth is usually safe to bet on. Before long, you’ll whittle things down to a couple of directions, and how you build from there is really a gut thing.
3. Follow The Commons
   It can be tempting to see a fancy Rare or Legendary and make that your whole personality. And like almost everything else in card gaming, if you think that’s fun, go for it! But as a counterpoint, I’d encourage you to look strongly at your Commons and Uncommons as you settle on a deck. These cards, as mentioned above, will be your backbone. A few copies of Seasoned Shoretrooper or Scout Bike Pursuer can be an even more stable core to build around than somebody like Wedge. Make sure your fundamentals are covered! Actually, speaking of that…
4. Respect Your Ratios
   There’s a great deckbuilding article by BananaCrapshoot that has a handy starting point for new players who want some guide rails for deckbuilding- his Rule of 12s suggests that at a baseline, decks should have 12 Round 1 plays, 12 Space Units, and 12 Events. That’s for a 50 card deck, but the rule very much still applies here. I’d just lower the number a bit down to 7, meaning in a Sealed deck, you want to try to aim for 7 Round 1 plays, 7 Space Units, and for sure no more than 7 Events/Upgrades. This isn’t always going to be possible (Space Units, especially, are often stretched in Sealed), but having this ratio in mind will help you made decisions about what to build.

Playing Draft

Draft is, bar none, my favorite way to play Star Wars Unlimited. It’s skill-intensive, endlessly replayable, and thanks to strong support from FFG, SWU is uniquely suited to shine in this mode. You and a group of up to 7 other buddies (I like drafts of anywhere between 4 and 8 players) will take 3 packs each, pull out the leaders and bases, and then do four rounds of drafting. The first is a face-up draft of the Leader cards, where you pass to the right, leaving you with 3 Leader options to pick from at the end of the draft. The next three rounds (passed left, right, then left again) see you picking one card at a time from the remaining cards in each pack, and at the end, you’ll make a 30 card deck out of your picks.

What to pick and when is, as you can imagine, tough to know. It’s also more art than science. Here’s a few tips for how to approach it:

1. Know The Set
   Our first principle is the same as for Sealed- it really does help to know a bit about which cards are successful and how certain decks fit together. Check out the top decks over on SWUDB or head over to the Discord to get a head start!
2. Find Your Slice
   One of the biggest factors in a successful draft is successfully finding pieces of the color pie that you won’t have too much competition for. Multiple players drafting the same color makes all of their decks worse, so trying to pick your approach carefully really pays off. This comes with time, but there’s a couple ways to get a head start. First, pay attention to what Leaders are around the table. If there’s lots of Tarkin, maybe think twice before committing to Villain/Command. If there’s hardly any Hero Leaders and you have one, consider leaning that way. Another thing you can do- watch to see what power cards end up in your hand when they should have been taken. If a card like Overwhelming Barrage or For A Cause I Believe In is still in a pack after multiple folks have had a chance to take them, either the pack was stacked or those colors aren’t being drafted by those players. By watching packs carefully, you can start to rapidly get a picture of who’s drafting what, and you should let that inform your picks.
3. Time Your Commitment
   What the other folks are doing should only have so much say on what you do. The real marker for your own draft deck is when you decide to take a card that commits you to a set of aspects. There’s two main approaches here- a forced commit, where you decide very early, and a delayed commit, where you try to stay as flexible as you can as long as you can. Personally, I kind of like a hybrid- I like to commit early to an aspect combo that matches one of my Leaders and that I think I’ll have little competition in. For example, if I have Director Krennic as a Leader option and I’m feeling good about running him based on everyone else’s Leaders, I might take a card like Gideon Hask, Count Dooku, or even Death Trooper very early, even first pick. I might well be wrong about Villain/Blue being a more open color, but by committing early, I’m able to grab power cards that I might miss otherwise. As for the second color, I often wait before I’m positive about that. In the aforementioned Krennic example, I might take a Seasoned Shoretrooper and a Death Star Stormtrooper while I see what’s out there and gather data on what’s being picked. Often, a particularly spicy card will be what pushes you to fully commit to that third color. There’s lots of ways to take things slow and play the wait and see game, but I’ve just had more fun and success with taking high value cards that match a Leader as soon as I can justify it. As long as you’re careful, you should do fine.
4. Respect Your Ratios
   Remember our ratios from before- try to have 7 Round 1 plays, 7 Space Units, and no more than 7 Events/Upgrades. In Draft, events are a little more likely to work for your gameplan, so you can get closer to that 7 number, but I’d still be very cautious about going over that. Units are your bread and butter.

It’s Almost Here!

I hope this has been a helpful resource for you as you prepare for your first steps into a larger world…after all, Prerelease is upon us!

For so many of us, this weekend will be the first time we get to hold real cards, or maybe even play the game! I encourage you to refer our entire New Player Guide to folks looking for a head start, and I also hope you’ll all be excellent to each other as we dive in to a game that promises to be near to our hearts for a long, long time.

May the force be with you!