Welcome to Morning Musings, where I drink some coffee and ramble on! As the mind wanders on some random Star Wars Unlimited thoughts, we’ll find out if I’m living in Fantasy Land or Crazy Land…

For today’s article, I’ve got 5 hot takes, which I hope are spicier than my overly-successful set 1 opinions.

Set 1 leaders will win at least 2/3 of the large events at Gencon

Gencon will be our first look at a competitive event ran by FFG (though not a part of the competitive circuit). While it won’t have a top cut, there’s enough notoriety around the event that we can expect it to be a good showcase before Planetary Qualifiers start in October. It will also be one of the first big events using the Open Decklist rule (assuming FFG runs tournaments by their own rules doc) and it will be interesting to see if we see some 1-of threats show up in winning lists just for the mind games.

Early testing thus far has shown a lot of Set 1 meta decks getting help with Set 2 cards and still running on top. Some early Set 2 leaders that will look to break this prediction are Rey, Han Solo, Qi’ra, Jabba, and Lando. While I fully expect the set 2 leaders to break more into the meta over the course of the next 4 months, I still think Set 1 leaders will make up the larger % of the meta.

Smuggle will be the strongest new mechanic in Set 2

Smuggle, Bounty, and Capture are the three new mechanics added to the game for set 3. They all seem to have enough cards built around them, with pieces of each mixed throughout the color pie. Capture will play as a tempo game at worst, with capturing a unit always equating to exhausting an enemy unit at the bare minimum. Bounties have a variety of options, from resource regen, to card draw, to healing base/units. Bounties feel like they might have one of the bigger ceilings, but also a floor in the basement with how much counterplay the opponent potentially has to keep you from defeating the unit to trigger the bounty. Bounties may end up being best played in tandem with the Capture mechanic.

This leaves us with the Smuggle mechanic, which has a lot of strong options to work with. The Combo-lords will be looking to do wild things with Tech, DJ, or Lando to break the game, but there’s also just a lot of strong cards that you would love to be playing from hand and feel even better playing from your resource pile at any point in the game. Hotshot DL-44 and Timely Intervention have been the early talk of the town and I suspect people will slowly start to pack more and more smuggle into their decks especially if the hand hate decks rise up (we’re looking at you Pillage).

Doctor Aphra will win a Store Showdown

It’d be a shame not to have another fun Store Showdown prediction and Aphra seems like the most entertaining choice. Many people were bamboozled with her reveal and only left more confused when the entire set was spoiled and the Murder Droids were nowhere to be found. While I don’t think she is as fundamentally as bad as most make her out to be (a free engine has to be good at some point), she definitely didn’t get the support needed to be a Tier 1 deck for Set 2. She will definitely be a fun side-deck I try to make work throughout the set with the few recursion options we already have in the game.

No cards will warrant Bans/Balance changes in Set 2

We survived this prediction last set, and I feel fairly comfortable we can land it again. The meta has been able to adapt thus far to whatever deck of the week rose up. Any given week during set 1 had 3-4+ different decks winning tournaments and there were probably 4-8 good choices to bring to a tournament at any point during the set 1 meta. I suspect we will see more of the same, and we haven’t run into any game-breaking combos yet. The only thing that has me worried on this one is my last hot take…

True Midrange will struggle in the Set 2 meta

Aggro and Control both got a lot of awesome tools in Set 2 that make me really worried about the viability of midrange decks. They just play too fair. There may be some paths to make them work such as hand hate, but I’m really not optimistic beyond that. Boba Green will always have some play due to the goodcard.dec nature of the build. Is there hope outside of that? I sure hope so!

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Thanks for reading! What do you think about these predictions? What are your hot takes?