Apologies, first off, to our regulars in this space for the lack of a midweek article this week! We’ve had some sick family members, conflicting editorial needs, and all the usual new year challenges. We appreciate your faithful readership!

I’ve been having some interesting discussions with some friends of mine (both in and out of the GarbageRollers circles) in the past couple of weeks as spoilers for Jump To Lightspeed start heating up. The early Leader spoilers for that set have had some pretty iconic characters, and the designs have been, uh, interesting.

Actually, “interesting” might be a charitable word, at least as far as the general reactions have been. In fact, the player reactions to these Leader reveals were sort of the beginning of this article’s thought process. I just don’t think you can blame the playerbase at large for looking at Leaders like Ackbar and Wedge and feeling, you know…

Whelmed.

Four sets in, the age of optimism has all but ended. We have collectively developed a pretty strong idea of what is and isn’t going to work in this particular design space. Leaders, after all, are some of the easiest things to evaluate comparatively in the whole game, since every deck gets one of them and a player’s given options are, often, occupying comparable roles within given archetypes.

So how do we quantify what exactly it is that we know? Turns out, that’s the meat of our article today. Here’s a few general inferences we can make about what does and doesn’t succeed competitively in terms of Leader design.

What’s Working

1. Strong Stats (Relative To When You Deploy)
   • If you need a good point of reference for how tight of a rope this is on, you need look only at the Banned Boi himself, Boba Fett. By virtue of having a solid gameplan and then, like, one additional stat point than you would expect, Boba dominated the world so hard that he got himself deaded. Yeah…the quality of your Leader unit matters a lot, and you can see that in the statlines of the Leaders that are working well, such as Sabine being a functional 4/3/5, and Jango and Quinlan at 5/3/7.
2. Resource Advantages
   • Han2 waves hello- so does Han1, for that matter. In a game with such tight math at its core, anything that meaningfully messes with the basic resource economy is worth a second look. This isn’t an instant ticket to success though…more on that in a bit.
3. Free Abilities
   • As an extension of the above note on resource advantages, one of the best things a Leader can offer you is free value, especially if that value is almighty damage. Sabine is the classic example of this, with Anakin and Cad also being good points of reference.
4. Instant Speed Abilities
   • While there are good Leaders who don’t follow this trend, there’s a lot of Leader abilities out there that would improve substantially if they were triggered instead of costing an action. Initiative is worth a lot in this game, and while there’s some value in using a Leader ability to stall, those lines are not as widely applicable as abilities that keep up the tempo with accessible instant triggers, such as Jango and Quinlan. Like, imagine a world where Anakin had to take the base damage and assign the +2 attack buff, and then make the attack on a subsequent turn. You could definitely engineer some scenarios where you could leverage that…but you could also safely bet that Anakin wouldn’t be making top cuts.
5. Splashy Deploys
   • A couple of solid Leaders exist that don’t exactly display the above traits, but successfully make up for it by having deploy effects that are just massive game changers, with Qi’ra and Emperor Palpatine being the foremost examples.

These are the major trends that we see across Leaders with good performance in the meta. Why did Quinlan work out? Because he’s got solid stats and an ability that’s both free and instant. Why do we still see Han1? Because his ability is free, it messes with the resources, and he can potentially do a very splashy double ramp on his deploy turn. If you follow the rabbit, items on this list keep popping up.

But while having one or more of the above is definitely a good indicator of a Leader’s potential, there’s actually a lot of evidence that avoiding being in line with negative trends is just as important.

In fact, each of these negative trends is going to come with examples of Leaders who came in hot with potential, only to have their prospects dismantled by a fatal flaw.

So…what things kill Leaders?

What Doesn’t Work

1. Late Deploys
   • Palpatine is a notable exception, but even deploying on 6 is tough for some Leaders. Most of the 7 deploys are just too easy to lose with before you even get there. Even options that are continually on the bubble of playability, like Vader and Yoda, are so meta dependent that players lean away from them. If that weekend’s meta is gonna try to go fast with any frequency, you just can’t field them. What this boils down to is this- Leader units are actually broken. They’re free and they’re frequently better than normal units. The only thing that balances this is that everybody gets one. Your deploy is such a massive boost to your tempo that letting your opponent do it without being able to respond with your own quickly is very, very tough to pull off.
2. Conditional Triggers
   • Or as they’re more commonly known, hoops. Nute Gunray is offering a free unit, Bo Katan is offering free damage, heck, Wat is offering +2/+2 for free! But those darn hoops- because you have to set these advantages up, you open yourself up for counterplay, and the payoffs rarely compensate for that.
3. Trait/Mechanic Dependency
   • While Cad’s combination of free value and instant speed (plus a particularly deep trait) have pushed him past this, most of these decks that have emerged to this point have been quickly reconfigured into other Leaders that don’t restrict deckbuilding as much. Tribal decks just would need better payoffs than we’ve seen printed so far to be worth reaching for a Leader on their behalf. One of the most tragic examples of this one is Dooku, who had people pretty riled up in the run up to Twilight. I was skeptical the whole time because of his requiring the Separatist trait, and that skepticism ended up panning out. The narrowed cardpool that comes with Trait dependency is consistently a nail in the coffin, and it’s ditto for mechanic-centric leaders like Lando and Padme.
4. Deckbuilding Shenanigans
   • It turns out trimming down to a 60 card list is hard enough for most archetypes as is, and so you absolutely don’t need Leaders like Nala Se, Hera, or Sheev bending the deckbuilding rules for you. Whatever they give up in order to bend the rules is never worth it, especially in the cases of Hera, who doesn’t have an ability, and Sheev, who doesn’t have a freaking Leader unit. The price is simply too high.
5. Fairness
   • There’s quite a few Leaders who don’t exactly match up with any of these negative traits- Leaders like Ahsoka, Maul, Obi-Wan, and Boba Daimyo to name a few. The problem is that those Leaders are too fair. They’re so focused on being reliable that they don’t exhibit the kind of above-curve play patterns that are common to all successful Leaders. Your Plan A has to be great, not just solid, and what we’ve seen play out time and time again is that a high ceiling is far more valuable than a high floor.

Going Forward

What’s this all boil down to? Well, basically, my point is that we have a lot of data that reinforces the above trends. That means the fates of Leaders, for the moment, feel tied to this pretty limited set of lanes.

And that makes new cards feel a little too solvable to be exciting.

Every once in a while, a Leader surprises players by either under or over performing. But those cases are rare. Pragmatically speaking, we already know that Ackbar is bad, because he has a notable hoop to jump through and his ability isn’t free. Asajj has below-curve stats, so she’s probably not gonna happen. Piett’s got a sexy cost reduction option, so he’s exciting right? Sorry. He’s restricted to a certain trait and his stats suck, so we know before we ever crack him in a pack that he’s not viable.

Maybe you take umbrage with this kind of reductive thinking. I admire your optimism, if that’s you. I once was you, and I still try hard to be open minded when it comes to deckbuilding. But the reason I’m writing this now is that I really feel that we have enough data at this point to be able to see through the matrix a bit.

The reality is that we can now be pretty sure that Leaders in SWU only function competitively under a certain set of conditions. Growing pains happen. But unlike a lot of the other early wobbles in card design, this one feels different, because it has an insidious implication…

The available space for Leaders to play in feels like it’s shrinking, not growing. And that could be the kind of problem that proves particularly difficult to root out.

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What do you think about Leaders in SWU? Are you excited for any of the characters coming in Jump To Lightspeed despite Jayson’s doomsaying? Let us know in the comments! And as always, may the force be with you!