I’ve been playing card games for over 30 years now, and there’s been a lot of time to explore different deck archetypes and strategies. Different deck types are the spice of life and keep deckbuilding and gameplay new and fresh. Now that SWU is coming up on its first rotation, it’s a good time to take stock of what oldies-but-goodies are missing from the SWUniverse. My hope is that SWU’s design team will explore all of these in time even as they push a board-centric, midrange style of gameplay.

Bounce House

The Gameplan: Play a bunch of cards with “when played” abilities, use other cards that return those cards to hand for a bonus, and then replay the original cards.

Existing SWU Support: We’ve got Bright Hope, Pirated Starfighter and Ma Klounkee that return units to hand for a bonus. However, all of those are now 4.5 months away from rotating. On the other side of the block, we have the Qui-Gon leader who embodies this archetype, but who had too little stats and too many conditions to his ability to see meta success.

How It Could Happen: The key would be something like the above-referenced Beast from Marvel Snap. He allowed a player to return multiple friendly units to hand and replay them at a discount. More cards like Ma Klounkee that return cards to hand for lucrative bonuses would also be needed. What this archetype really needs, though, is a leader to weave it together. QGJ was close, but not powerful enough, so design would need to give us a rhyming leader with more heft.

Voltron

The Gameplan: Take a single, big, hard-to-interact-with unit and suit it up with multiple upgrades, making a deadly threat.

Existing SWU Support: The Leader cardtype naturally supports this archetype since most removal events simple can’t target leaders. We have leaders like Chirrut and the new Cassian that are hard to kill. The new Plot keyword also gives us upgrades that can play from the resource row. The upgrade-focused Kylo Ren, who can bring out upgrades on deploy, is probably the closest we’ve come. However, successful Kylo builds were highly dependent on Force Throw and focused on attacking for lethal instantly. Since Set 1, when Chirrut was viable, there hasn’t been a deck that deployed a leader and really focused on their survivability.

How It Could Happen: First, we need some of the powerful removal from sets 1/2- namely, Power of the Dark Side and Rival’s Fall, to rotate out of the format. There’s no point in creating a voltron leader if they can simply be defeated out of hand. Second, we’d need a leader that buffed themselves synergistically. We have some contenders now, like Snoke or Lama Su, but their growth is arithmetic- not the sort of multiplicative increases we’d need. Think something like Axe Woves‘ text on a leader. Finally, we’d need more upgrades that drastically improve the survivability of units. Diplomatic Immunity is a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough.

Poison

The Gameplan: Give your opponent tokens or cards that linger and grind down their health.

Existing SWU Support: This doesn’t really exist in SWU at all right now. The closest analogue is the repetitive damage doled out by Boba/Data Vault decks.

How It Could Happen: What if there was a set down the line that dealt with public opinion ala Andor season 2? There could be “Unrest” tokens that were added to a players base and did scaling damage each turn. It’s fun to imagine a Rebel leader that added or multiplied those tokens.

Unrest
Token Upgrade (0)
When the action phase begins, for each Unrest token on your base, it takes 1 damage.

Vel Sartha, Ghorman Collaborator
[Leader]When your Saboteur unit damages an opponent’s base, you may exhaust this leader to attach an Unrest token to it.
[Unit] Saboteur. When you deploy this leader, deal damage equal to double the number of Unrest tokens on an opponent’s base to that base.

Inserts

The Gameplan: Put a bunch of negative effects into your opponent’s deck and then force them to draw the them.

Existing SWU Support: This doesn’t exist yet. The closest we have is probably Rey– just imagine she came out of the opponent’s deck instead. There are some cards, like Bazine Netal, that force your opponent to draw cards, but not in any kind of volume.

How It Could Happen: Similar to the Poison archetype, there would need to be a token that could be inserted into the opposing deck, as well as a leader that actively supported those. Maybe Ewoks laying traps? Additionally, we’d need a draw engine. The best version of this in other games has been a low-cost “both sides” card. Something like:

Ewok Insurgent
1/1 Token Unit (0)
When you draw this card, you must reveal it. Your opponent takes command of it.

Event (1)
All players draw three cards.

Chief Chirpa, Defeating the Empire
[Leader] (Exhaust) Shuffle two Ewok Insurgent tokens into an opponent’s deck.
[Unit] Your Ewok Insurgents gain Ambush and +1/+1 for each other friendly Ewok unit you control.

There are logistical issues to be solved with this kind of mechanic- like how do you deal with differently-sleeved cards in a deck- but I don’t want to say that those issues would forever preclude their introduction into SWU.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this design wishlist! As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments or on Discord @DJStormtrooper.

May the Force be with you,
Tyler