Preview season in a card game is always full of speculation. The shifting tides of how a set shakes out are great fun to follow. Dialoguing about a game is, after all, part of being a player!

But every once in a while, cards come along that seem pretty locked in. Like all cards, these have their naysayers, but nevertheless, the GarbageRollers editorial team feels comfortable making a stand- these are bangers, destined to find meaningful play at the competitive level, and familiarizing yourself with them is a good idea.

Here’s some stuff we’re sure you’ll be seeing a lot of in the weeks to come…

Bossk – Hunting His Prey

Bossk, already a perfectly respectable 5/4/6, is dangerous because in most matchups you must kill him immediately upon his being deployed.

Landing a bounty isn’t always easy, and thusly doubling the effect of even one can be such a huge gain in tempo that many decks won’t be able to outpace it.

• Doubling the damage of a Guild Target is a lot of cheap base damage for Control to try to overcome.
• Double healing from Top Target (up to 12!) is a tall order for aggro decks to race.
• Any midrange deck fighting Bossk on the battlefield is going to be set back significantly on board value when four xp tokens from a single Rich Reward get doled out.

Don’t get us wrong- these combos won’t always land. People will have ways to kill Bossk just as they do any other leader. But having answers isn’t always something that limits a card’s greatness. There’s a lot to be said of something being unable to be ignored, and we feel that Bossk will fall comfortably into that zone.

A New Adventure

The card with nearly limitless applications, is there anything scarier in the set right now than New Adventure? In Boba Yellow alone, there’s meaningful targets all over the dang place, like Bodhi Rook, Cantina Bouncer, and oh yeah, Firespray.

Played on your own units, it’s an aggressively costed refresh effect that’s sensible on just about anything. It clears out any Voltron unit’s upgrades no problem, and upgrades are likely to be popular in the near future. And if for some reason none of that pans out, units come into play exhausted, so its floor is probably just as a kinda pricy tap effect that can hit anything that isn’t a leader.

Nuts at the top end, and decent even at its worst, you can feel confident that A New Adventure is going to be A Big Deal.

Palpatine’s Return

Don’t look now, but perhaps the most relevant card to compare this to for the moment is actually U-Wing Reinforcement. They may not have many similarities on the surface, but their function in a deck is actually startlingly similar. These cards are here to be three extra copies of your biggest haymaker. And that extra consistency is, historically, something great decks kill for.

Add in the extra discount towards units that are already sick, like Saruman, Daddy Issues, and most obviously The Senate, and it seems hard to imagine that you wouldn’t want a few of these sleeved up. More copies of the best cards in your deck is handy. Who knew?

Unlimited Power!

Someone out there probably thinks we’re crazy, but we feel pretty good about these cards making a splash. There’s some others we’re high on too- here’s a short list of cards that were considered for this article:

• Wrecker
• Legal Authority
• The Marauder
• Kylo’s TIE Silencer
• Poe Dameron
• The Client

Have we been wrong before? You betcha. The only way to find out is to do the thing we’re all here to do anyway…play some SWU.

May the force be with you!