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Behind the scenes, when we’re not waxing poetic about the nature of our Meta Snapshot or cooking up decks, we spend a lot of time talking with each other about the bones of the game we love. In that spirit, we’re taking a more traditional blog approach today, thinking out loud about a few trends that have popped up across SWU’s set design. 

Three times a year, we get to head down to our local stores and get what the design gurus at FFG have come up with into our hands, and it’s been interesting every time so far. Set design and set structure in SWU seems like an interesting puzzle, from the outside looking in, and now that we’ve had a sort of “full cycle” of sets we’re in a better position to analyze how it was approached. While looking at it on a spreadsheet would tend to highlight the similarities, in practice the game’s initial year of releases all felt like they were pretty different from each other. They certainly impacted the meta game very differently.

To broadly recap: 

• The game’s first set, Spark of Rebellion, introduced all of the major mechanics of the game while also establishing color identities in very broad strokes. 
• Set 2, Shadows of the Galaxy, brought in three fairly involved new mechanics and expanded depth for most of the existing deck archetypes. 
• Twilight of the Republic finished out the first year with an almost entirely self-contained set of sub-themes and mechanics, maintaining the overall structure of the first two sets while bringing back relatively little of their mechanical identities. 

These differences have gone a long way towards bringing attention to the things that are mostly the same. A few broad patterns have emerged, most of which have been generally perceived as “necessary sacrifices” for the sake of the sets working well in Limited play: 

Across all these sets:

• Legendaries and Rares have been top-tier cards pretty infrequently. 
• Sets have tons of single-aspect cards that don’t see much competitive Premier play. 
• Cards are reprinted across sets to ensure certain effects are accessible in their most familiar forms. 
• Tribal synergies, set mechanics, and card subthemes tend to stay within the boundaries of their own sets. 

These patterns have had a mixed reception. Most players who aren’t actively rabble-rousers can tell you with level heads why these trends exist, but many of those same level heads also are willing to admit that there’s parts of all this that affects their experience. 

For one thing, box purchases have had pretty diminishing returns for most players who aren’t collector-minded. While SWU is far from the first game where just buying singles is a pretty compelling approach, the number of playable cards in each set has, to this point, gone downhill, with Twilight having a pretty visible lack of fresh staples. Box EV (expected value) has not been a strong suit of this game so far. 

That downward trend seems to have subtly seeped into competitive deckbuilding patterns as well. While the Boba ban has contributed to an astonishing resurgence of diversity within competitive top cuts, there’s also been a bit of vocal dissatisfaction that Set 3’s actual primary mechanics, Coordinate and Exploit, seemed to be pretty much dead on arrival as build-arounds. In fact, none of the major mechanics in any of the SWU sets, from Shields to Bounties, have played much more than an auxiliary role in competitive decks. The pattern so far is that a few fresh decks emerge in each cycle (Han+DJ, Jango Space, Quinlan TT as examples) but by and large the existing archetypes pick up whatever 2 or 3 cards from the set slot best into their existing plans and roll onward. 

All this leads me to the central question that inspired this particular post, one that I’ve been thinking about since the beginning of the Set 3 meta…

Do the concessions that Star Wars Unlimited makes at the design level to ensure a cohesive Limited experience meaningfully restrict Premier play? 

For clarity’s sake, let’s define some terms: 

• When I say “concessions”, I’m mainly referring to the things mentioned above- L and R designs, single aspect card volume, reprints, and inner-set mechanical containment. 
• When I say “meaningfully restrict”, I basically mean any negative impacts on competitive balance, player interest, or both. 

If the answer to this question is yes, what would that mean in the long view? What does a game with a consistent subservience to Limited-forward set design look like 5 or 6 years after launch? The card game space hasn’t really seen that to this degree to my knowledge, so we’re in new territory. Further, if the patterns continue as they have, I’m curious whether the Carbonite packs will do anything to alleviate the sort of diminishing desirability of boxes of SWU by giving players a sort of outlet for meaningful spending.

This is all overly reductive, but in a nutshell, I’m really just curious what it means for the game that relatively few of the cards in the sets seem Premier-relevant.

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So yeah- basically, this is what’s on my mind lately. Are all these tradeoffs we see across sets to make Limited sing going to cause long term problems? My lack of an answer is pretty much why I’m writing this- I want to know what you think! Let us know in the comments what kinds of things you’ve observed about SWU’s set design. And as always, stay tuned to this space for more poetic rumination on the game we love, and may the force be with you.