By all accounts, Star Wars: Unlimited has enjoyed one of the best, if not the best, launches for a TCG ever. Deck diversity remains pretty high, product availability wasn’t nearly as constrained as many other launches despite incredible demand, and FFG’s communication has been mostly excellent.

But it’s not all roses.

Devoted as we are, it perhaps wouldn’t be very journalistic of us to omit giving some attention to the things that haven’t gone well. SWU’s many strengths have been accompanied with a few weaknesses, and it’s important to note that these particular gripes are not things predominantly out of Fantasy Flight’s control, like singles prices. No, these are actual mistakes, things that didn’t have to be rough but are.

None of the below gripes are signs that the sky is falling, but they do represent points where the negative nancies are at least on to something. What’s stunk so bad that even the GarbageRollers can’t vouch for it? Read on.

Gripe #1: The Website And Official Deckbuilder

It made me laugh a little bit when they announced the deck techs earlier this week, where SWU designers would look at your decklists and make suggestions. Naturally, the lists need to be submitted using the official deckbuilder. And yeah, uh, no.

A UI disaster from top to bottom, virtually nobody is actually utilizing what was supposed to be a one-stop-shop for SWU. The deck builder is fiddly and bad for sharing. The store and event finders are headaches, and that’s when they’re working. And communication on a roadmap for fixing these things has been overlooked in all the hubbub. It’s in a bad state.

The one bright spot here is that FFG knows. At the community celebration, which happened a week or so after the website tools were made available, we told one FFG dev who asked us for feedback that the tools weren’t up to snuff. I told him transparently that until things changed, the reality was that virtually all of us were 100% going to just keep using the wonderful SWUDB. “That’s great, we totally understand.” they said. “Make us get better.”

Gripe #2: Gamegenic Accessory Availability

What’s harder to find: a Showcase Leader, or a set of the official acrylic tokens? Hard to say. Based on the Ebay prices and the absolute drought of these on the market, you might well could flip a coin.

What happened here? This is definitely a tough thing to gauge, but unlike booster packs, the Gamegenic product line was largely out of stock and heavily allocated from day one. It boggles the mind.

This particular gripe was much worse until recently as well- for a solid month or so, official OP documents stated that official Gamegenic playmats were required for competitive play. On top of that being a silly ruling, it was a particularly bad look considering nobody could find them to buy. Thankfully, that ruling has been reversed in another great example of FFG’s new schtick of being great listeners, but as for the accessories themselves, it looks like we’ll have to wait until Set 2 to see if Gamegenic will have enough availability to suit demand.

And speaking of that OP document…

Gripe #3: OP Program Communication

This one almost gets a pass, as one of the key factors wasn’t entirely FFG’s fault. The departure (by all accounts amicable) of OP Lead Josh Massey right at the game’s launch could hardly have come at a worse time, and the reverberations of his voice leaving the team seems to have taken an inevitable rough spot and turned it into a true issue.

Getting OP off the ground is tough in any card game. There’s a lot of things that are hard to get right, and SWU’s OP has a lot of bright spots. Despite listing this as weakness, it’s still arguable that this OP program is more fleshed out than many other TCGs have been at launch. But with a poorly specced out judge program, inadequate tiebreaker protocol, disastrous tournament software, and a merely whelming set of promos available for the first wave, Josh’s absence has begun to cut deeper and deeper as time goes on.

A strong voice to cast vision is exactly what’s needed, and exactly what walked out the door.

We have nothing but love for this team- shoutout to Corey Scott and the rest of the crew trying to get this all off the ground. But for the moment, there’s enough gaping holes in the OP program that it could probably be its own article. We’re not going to write that one just yet- instead, we’ll join SWU’s devoted playerbase in hoping this gets into shape sooner rather than later.

Gripe #4: Legendary Card Collation

This one is just weird. A video and a post started making the rounds recently that virtually confirmed something many of us had theorized for a while- that these strikingly similar boxes many of us had been observing were, indeed, more than just coincidences.

Look, this isn’t the end of the world, but in a game where opening packs is so magical, it just stinks to have the curtain be this thin. It also makes opening single loose packs very dubious, as it’s almost impossible to know whether someone has already been able to roughly ascertain how good the pulls a partially bought box might be. And a further curiosity- the word on the street is that this isn’t really a thing many other games have dealt with. Hard to say what’s going on over at the printer, but I hope they figure it out. Chances are good that if there’s a pattern in the Set 2 boxes, players will stumble upon it quickly.

A New Hope

Despite these minor gripes, there’s a lot more to love about SWU than there is to complain about. It’s also worth noting that these are all very, very fixable, as the elements that are locked in, things like the game’s actual balance and design, are uniformly excellent. Here’s to the future- it’s very, very bright.

May the force be with you!