Meta Monday – Release Week! (Mar 11th, 2024)

Welcome to our weekly update of the Gauntlet (Meta Tier List)!

This week we’re not moving any of the decks on the list. Now that SWU has released and everyone has cards in their hands, we hope we’ll see more churn as people try to break the meta! There’re a few ongoing tournaments we’ll cover at the end of this article, but first, TTI League 0.5 Season Champ (2-time champ now), Astrotech, reflects on the evolving meta over the last few months!

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A Tale of Three Deck Lists

The release of Star Wars: Unlimited is finally here. It feels like we’ve been playing with the cards for so long already by any means necessary, but now is our chance to open actual packs full of unknown spoils from across the galaxy. Inception has written a wonderful piece covering the highs and lows of the extra-long preview season that we were graced with by Fantasy Flight Games which you can read here.

Today, I want to approach this subject from a different perspective. There was a lot of fun to be had during this season playing with all the cards under the twin suns to figure out what makes this game tick. I built so many deck lists trying to make R2-D2 and C3-P0 be the card advantage engine I always hoped they could be. With each fun experiment came some lessons. I want to walk through a few decks that I built throughout preview season and share some of my lessons learned from these attempts. Please keep in mind when seeing these decks that the card pool was very limited so be gentle with me in the comments.

There are certainly a lot of questionable choices in this deck list, but my approach was simple:

Playing more cards than your opponent will let you get ahead of them on board.
Having a card draw engine is necessary to ensure that you have things to do with your resources each turn. Especially with a low curve.

Not bad assumptions to begin with and these things are accurate, but this list did not take the right approach to these ideas. Playing a few games with this deck printed out on copier paper and slotted into sleeves over the scraps of other card games made a few things abundantly clear.

It doesn’t matter if you played two one drops on turn one if your opponent is able to deal with them before they presented any real damage.
Card draw effects matter less when you draw two cards each turn.

The low powered units I’d designed my deck around could not efficiently fight the units my other deck was playing. I relied too heavily on having a combination of a resilient unit, an upgrade to boost its attack and having ways to keep it alive. I was putting all my eggs in one basket and then trying to draw more eggs. History has taught us this lesson already and it’s one I should have seen coming from a light year away.

I also found that I rarely ran out of ways to use my resources thanks to drawing two cards per turn, instead of the traditional one like in many other games. This list was basic but taught me good lessons. Now for something a bit spicier…

This deck was the product of a long thought experiment I had on how you could do the most damage in a single turn and this was a bit convoluted but bear with me. Here is the combo:

On your 6-resource turn when Grand Inquisitor can deploy, you play Fifth Brother.
Use Inquisitors ability to deal two damage to the Fifth Brother and ready him. Attack for 5 on your next action (using his ability to deal one damage to himself). 5 damage total.
Play resilient, or repair on the fifth brother.
Deploy Grand Inquisitor and attack with him dealing three damage and dealing 1 damage to the Fifth Brother to ready him. 8 damage total.
Attack with Fifth Brother again for up to seven damage since he will have five damage on him thanks to the self-inflicted damage and resilient keeping him alive. 15 damage total.
Play Keep Fighting on Grand Inquisitor and attack again for three, readying Fifth Brother again. 18 damage total.
Attack one more time with Fifth Brother for eight damage. 26 damage total.

TL; DR: use inquisitor to ready and attack with Fifth Brother a lot for a maximum of 26 damage.

That’s a lot of damage, but do you see the problem with it? The math checks out and it’s not that unreasonable to assemble the right types of cards to accomplish the combo. Especially when you draw two cards in a turn. The issue is that this combo takes 10 actions to complete. This means that your opponent has an opportunity between each of these steps to disrupt your plan.

My assumption with this deck was that I could develop enough of a board state to run my opponent out of actions, then proceed with the combo after they claimed. The issue with that plan was that my opponent did not like it when I had units in play and would do their best to ensure that I had as few options as possible going into the combo turn. This left my combo vulnerable to their actions and me vulnerable to another good lesson.

Combos are less effective the more actions they take.

In some games, it can feel like two ships passing in the night, but at its core, Star Wars: Unlimited is a deeply interactive game. Each time you take a step forward, your opponent is there to push back. This tension helps keep degeneracy in check and creates a plethora of decision trees in each game to explore.

Finally let’s talk about the Fett in the room:

Regardless of how you feel about Boba Fett, he has established himself as the deck to beat going into the launch of the game. While there are still decks to explore, most people are going to be gunning for this guy. I had the opportunity to play this deck in a few tournaments that were put on by the community and I knew there were a lot of decks hoping to push Boba Fett into a late game where he’d be outgunned. As a result, I stacked my sideboard with expensive options to help combat those late game strategies. In doing so, I overlooked one of the most fundamental lessons I’ve learned in my 25 years of playing TCGs.

When playing and preparing for a match-up, it is important to know your role.

All the control decks that I played against wanted to play a long game, so by putting cards in my deck that were expensive, I played right into their hands. I should have realized that my role was to be aggressive and find a path to victory before they could stabilize. The Emperor’s Legion does this to some extent, but my other sideboard options were not much help in the event.

This extended preview season was a great opportunity to reassess my biases from other card games and to reaffirm the age-old lessons that have held true. It was a blast building with a smaller card pool that grew every week, and I will miss that experience, but I also look forward to what future spoiler seasons bring and the lessons to be learned along the way.

Thank you for reading and good luck in your showcase hunt!

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TTI League Season 0.5 Top Cut Concludes

Our esteemed contributor Astrotech, succeeded in defeating Vika for the 0.5 season title! He piloted his aforementioned Boba/Green build to victory over Vader/Green in the finals. If Vader had won, it would have prompted us to reexamine his tier 2 status, but since his run was fueled solely by winning the Iden/Green matchup, we believe this affirms his tier 2-ness.

TTI League Season 0.6 Top Cut Begins

Hot on the heels of the 0.5 tournament concluding, we have the next iteration! You can find the decklists for the new season here and the bracket here. This season features some unexpected competitors like Chirrut, Han and the Grand Inquisitor which we can only hope will break the meta mold.

Unplayable Content Creator Showcase Tournament

Our friends over at Unplayable recruited a cast of content creators, including our very own Jayson (@ImpossibleGerman) to play an 8-team bracket. Deck choices were: 5 Sabine/Green, 1 Hera/Blue, 1 Palp/Blue, and 1 Cassian/Green. As of writing, the initial matches have yielded a top-4 of ALL Sabine/Green, and a matching final between Davis and FA1TH. Good luck to both in the finals. Look out Set 1 meta, Sabine is gunning for ya!