Games evolve.

While it’s always tempting (and fun!) to look back on the early days of anything you love, it’s continued development and mechanical evolution is what keeps players around for the long haul. We love new things, and games have to grow and move forward over time to stay their best selves.

(Except, of course, for Vanilla World of Warcraft. That game has gone straight downhill since November 2004. Do not @ me.)

So as SWU evolves, we here at GarbageRollers HQ have decided to make a little historical record as to how the game changes over its history. It’s safe to assume that each new set that’s released will feature new mechanics and keywords. We’re going to grade those things, both in terms of how hyped they were in the run up to release, and how they actually impacted the game as a whole.

Doing this for Set 1 would be a little silly, so we’re starting with Set 2, Shadows of the Galaxy, which had three shiny new mechanical themes for the set. They were, of course-

• Smuggle, the new keyword that lets you play cards from your resource row.
• Bounty, the upgrade keyword that gives a reward to the unit’s opponent when it’s defeated, usually applied natively or through a Bounty upgrade.
• Capture, which conditionally places a unit face down under another unit (which is then “guarding” the face down unit) and out of play. When the Guarding Unit is defeated, the previously face down Captured unit goes back into play for its owner, exhausted.

Most players were very excited by these flashy new effects- but how did they actually end up playing in practice? Let’s find out…

Smuggle

What We Thought: C+
What We Got: A
Key Cards: Tech, DJ, Hotshot Blaster, Timely Intervention

The conversation around Smuggle wasn’t actually very optimistic to begin with, if you can believe it. In a game where you draw 2 cards every turn, the prevailing sentiment was that Smuggle’s cost premium wasn’t likely to be worth the card advantage on offer.

In a lot of instances, that turned out to be true- but Smuggle’s presence on some of the most interesting and powerful cards in the set defied the odds to make it a present and future mainstay. In fact, not only are certain Smuggle cards popular in almost every archetype, they’ve even coalesced together into a top tier deck in Han 1 Yellow. Widespread play and an archetypal competitive deck? It doesn’t get much better for new mechanics than that.

The sauce here came down to the card designs themselves, many of which were suitably splashy and even benefitted from being stashed in the resource row and waiting for their right moment. Extending your hand also ended up proving a valuable thing in general, with lots of hand attack cards floating around across multiple meta decks. It all sort of added up to something greater than the sum of its parts, and for now Smuggle has the vibes of a keyword that will be a staple, core part of the game for a long time to come.

That impression may not end up holding true for our other two mechanics though…

Bounty

What We Thought: A-
What We Got: C+
Key Cards: Bossk, Top Target, Bounty Hunter’s Quarry, Price On Your Head

You know, for a month or so there, Bossk was terrifying.

The idea of doubling up on some of these Bounty effects, which already had kind of juiced numbers by virtue of how many hoops it took to get them to fire, seemed genuinely new and wild. Combine that with very relevant effects and a solid suite of units that keyed off of them, and the biggest concern for many folks was just whether there would be enough good Bounty upgrades to make the archetype sing.

And as it turned out, having enough Bounty in your deck wasn’t even the problem.

The problem was slotting these cards to begin with. Rapidly, players encountered a teeth-gnashing puzzle at the deckbuilding level- what do you even cut to squeeze in a Bounty? Upgrades? We weren’t playing a ton of those anyway. Events? Far more reliable in general. Units? The backbone of our decks? And can I make this decision correctly enough times to even begin to get a deck that centers around these things?

Where the heck do these bounties go!?

It was frequently an infuriating question, and maybe the answer all along was…nowhere. While the best of these cards, like Bounty Hunter’s Quarry and Top Target, have found steady homes, the mechanic isn’t likely to maintain a big presence in the game at large. Bossk can win tournaments, for sure, usually using a similar Green build to the one that had all those players terrified during Preview season. Like the dark of night, it’s still potent. It’s just gotten a lot less scary as you’ve grown up and seen it’s worst.

Capture

What We Thought: B
What We Got: D+
Key Cards: Relentless Pursuit, Legal Authority, Jabba The Hutt

Capture was definitely the black sheep of the new mechanics, but there was still a lot of cautious optimism. Removal is good, after all, and this represented a new type of removal that sat somewhere between an exhaust and an actual kill. That standing meant Capture was quickly identified as the kind of effect that had a natural home in Tempo decks, with maybe the occasional foray into Midrange or Aggro. The sky was the limit.

And a couple months later, it has pretty much disappeared from relevance.

What happened here? Well, it turned out that the sort of “in-between” removal status tended to give it a cost premium over Exhaust effects, and that left Capture effects without much of an audience. It was nice if you landed it against an opponent who either didn’t want to slow down to answer it or didn’t have the tools to do so in the first place, but the effects tended to have hoops attached to them that made their ceilings kind of awkward to reach for. It was just less reliable and less permanent than other removal options it was fighting for slots with, a deadly combination. It also shared an issue with Bounty, namely that there weren’t even that many Capture cards, and the ones we got were not universally playable.

The biggest exception here was, of course, Relentless Pursuit, which should be studied for how successfully it combined a new mechanic with a tribal synergy into one knockout package. But alas, that card likely won’t stay in lists forever, and when it’s gone, Capture itself may well vanish from our collective memory. A flavor win, but a tough sell in the game as it stands today.

A Note On Leaders, A Look To The Future

In closing, I wanted to add a note based on a talk I had with a friend of mine as we were chatting about my prep for this article.

My friend is not a hyper-competitive player, but he loves the game and is plenty good at it despite having less card game experience than most of our group. As we were talking about my need to finish writing this piece, he mentioned “Yeah, tell them how awful Smuggle was!”, a statement which piqued my curiosity.

After a little unpacking, I discovered what he meant- see, he had spent a good chunk of time at his locals this season trying to make Hondo happen, to no avail. That experience had colored how he viewed the whole keyword. For him, the mechanic itself was directly tied to his weeks of trying to make it work as its own archetype, not just as part of the competitive meta.

And that made me realize how deeply the Leaders matter as we gauge the impact of set mechanics. The reality is that none of the Leaders from Shadows that were themed around these new mechanics were potent enough to make a huge wave. Lando, Hondo, Bossk, Jabba– these are the poster children for these shiny new effects, and in the end, they couldn’t totally bear that weight. I hope that future set-mechanic oriented Leaders end up with kinder fates.

So far, we’ve seen two new mechanics for Set 3, Twilight of the Republic- the swarm-enabling Coordinate and the devious unit sacrifices of Exploit. We’ll have a close eye on them as we look forward to our next episode of Chop Shop!

Until then, and as always- may the force be with you!