Closed Lanes: Legion is Beginning to Feel Like a One-Way Street
November 18, 2024
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This unit guide will cover Han Solo, one of the many Commanders you have access to for the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars: Legion. Initially premiering with a less than stellar reception, time has vindicated the smuggler and he’s worth another look. What makes him so much better? How can you use him? There’s a lot to cover so let’s get started.
100 Pts: When he debuted he was a whopping 120 points, definitely far overcosted. 100 points is a pretty good place for him, especially with some of the changes that occurred around him. It lets him be a good compliment to 1-2 other Heroes, which is good because he’s not really equipped to be your only leader.
Defense: A Rebel who isn’t Luke or K2 so say it with me: White with surge. While this isn’t ideal, with Low Profile and Uncanny Luck it raises his survivability by quite a lot.
Offense: DL-44 Blaster Pistol – Range 1-2, 2R, Pierce 2. With Gunslinger, Sharpshooter and Steady this is a potent little thing. It’ll cut through most things that aren’t Jedi or Mandalorians, and can split the pain. You have to get close but we have some answers to that as well. He has a token melee attack but at 3 White dice, don’t get yourself in that position, ok?
Courage 2 – Mediocre. Keep him out of sight until he’s ready to shoot, you don’t want him without actions, or worse, to panic.
Slots: 1 Command, 1 Training, 1 Equipment. Excellent versatility, letting you put on a bunch of different stuff for different roles. Han is an aggressive character so this will usually take a more offense bent.
Low Profile – Han always had this, but it got a lot better in the October 2021 update. Previously it would improve light cover to heavy which was nice when you got it but didn’t come up as often as you’d think once suppression came into play. Now Low Profile just flat out negates a shot if he has cover. In effect it allows you to get a cover even better than Heavy (Heavier, if you will).
Gunslinger – Basically, it’s a free attack against a second target (can’t shoot the same target twice, sorry). This can have some limitations with your range 2 pistol if your opponent split their forces up but it’s a free shot with a really nasty Pistol.
Sharpshooter 1 – Ignore the first level of cover, making Heavy cover light and negating light cover. Aside from the obvious benefit, negating light cover will also make Low Profile useless if your target also has it.
Uncanny Luck 3 – You get to reroll three defense dice, while a white defense die is pretty bad, even with surge this improves the odds a little bit. Play it well in tandem with Low Profile and you can get through many firefights with minimal damage. A re-rolled white surging defense dice has a 55% chance to net you paint, which makes it slightly better than a red save if you are rolling three dice or less.
Steady – The new hotness and the biggest reason Han deserves a second look. You get a free attack action after moving, which opens up so many new options. In addition to making your Range 2 pistol much more of a threat from afar it gives you additional actions. Action economy is possibly the single most important thing in the game to determining your victory and this functionally gives you a third action. You have a lot of ways to play with this too, pull in close with a double move and shoot or fall back, shoot and move again to get to safety.
Added to your hand as if it were a 1 pip but is actually a 0 pip card so you’re always going to get priority (Han Shot First. Ha. Ha. Ha.). Like a lot of early cards it’s super straight forward and there’s not a ton of finesse to it. Use it when Han is in the perfect place to gun down a target but he might be at risk of being shot at himself. With Steady, gaining free aim and dodge tokens will free up needing to take an Aim or Dodge action so you have more flexibility to run in and fire away or get out of there.
A fun one, but you need to set it up. Han himself is not the ideal target to be taking bullets (though he can be if you feel lucky and set it up) but you can force fire at another trooper you gave an order token. Some ideal targets include K2 with his Red Die with armor, or Chewbacca or Wookie Warriors with their big old sack of hit points, or even Luke with his Lightsaber (provided he has the dodge tokens to deflect).
This effect lasts as long as the order token is face up, you’re willing to wait out to activate is ideal. This is still a difficult card to use right, because an opponent who knows what they’re doing can try and block line of sight to the unit you want to direct fire toward so they can fire at who they want to.
Rebels ultimately don’t do well under focus fire so if you leave a card out it’s probably this one. It can be worth it if you can set it up but if you don’t have good targets you don’t mind taking a few shots, maybe bring something else.
One of my favorite cards in the game. When you play it you can choose to discard it, in which case you force your opponent to return it to their hand and play a different card. This has the dual purpose of forcing them to play a less optimal card and showing you what is in their hand. If you choose not to discard it, you can pass off an order to Han and 2 troopers but gain no other benefit from the card.
The biggest hurdles with the card are:
These have been reduced thanks to Chewbacca and Lando being added to the game. Chewbacca has a command card that can be paired with Han, Notorious Scoundrels, which lets you return a Han card to your hand from the discard pile. This has the dual effect of letting you use the card twice, which reduces the need to get the timing perfect and keeping you from being stuck with Standing Orders. With Lando you can slip the card into your Contigencies so you can try a different card and swap it in if it’s a card you want to interrupt. Careful with this strategy though as it requires you to discard two cards to pull it off (the original card and Change of Plans). We’ll discuss this a bit more in the strategies section but the card has come a long way.
Han has the 3 big slots: Command, Training and Gear giving him a lot of Versatility. How you want to lean will probably depend on who his fellow heroes are. Han is generally intended to be very aggressive, with his Range 2 pistol he’s not going to be hanging back with the gunline so I’ll focus mostly on upgrades that assist him as an up close and personal fighter.
Vigilance – Possibly my favorite pick, you’re mostly bringing this along for Han’s own benefit. Like most Rebel heroes, he’s delicate and an easy target your opponent will want to light him up ASAP. You’ll want to keep dodge tokens on him for the turns you can’t go first to avoid taking a good hit.
Improvised Orders – Second favorite choice, it’s ideal in many Rebel lists, as Rebels often struggle with diversity of units. Also very thematic!
Strict Orders – Another decent pick with Han’s Courage 2 and penchant for getting shot at. Can help him and any one else coming along for the ride.
Offensive Push – Especially with Steady you can get even more out of your movement. Move up, get an aim token and fire, and you’ll still have one more action to play with! If you bring Chewbacca along he gets one too, so why not?
Situational Awareness – At only 2 points this is almost a defacto pick for rebels now when you don’t really want to add anything else. Criticals are flying a lot more than they used to so being able to use dodge tokens is crucial to Han’s survival.
Duck and Cover – An OK final option with the new price cut of only 2 points. With the improvements to Low Profile this can save your ass if you accidentally get caught out without any cover.
Ascension Cables – A good purchase, very cheap and helps him keep up with Chewie and his Scale. Competing with Environmental Gear as the most popular choice.
Environmental Gear – Same reason as Ascension cables, it’s a way to keep him mobile, move into a good position (or a safe place away from danger).
Recon Intel – You know by now why you want this. It gets you into a good position early on and cheap enough that you won’t be too upset if you don’t get much play out of it.
Aside from the usual Rebel strategies (use line of sight blocking cover judicially, use Standby when possible) Han is going to be supremely reliant on the other Heroes in your list. Han may be a General but he’s not great at supporting his troops. He’s an aggressive character, meant to get into your opponent’s face and shoot them. As a result you will probably not want to run him solo, and bring along a good support hero who can hang back and buff your troopers. Maybe do a little damage at the same time. Characters like the Rebel Officer, Leia, and a Sniper built Cassian can fit the build but one of my favorites to run with him is Lando. As stated above during the command card section, Lando gels extremely well with Han. He can operate at the Range 3 most troopers operate at, and with Contingencies you can time Change of Plans better. Just don’t forget about his Flaw card, if you put any of Han’s cards in contingency you risk not being able to access them when you need to.
Han’s best friend, Chewbacca is also a serious consideration, I would damn near say an auto-include. Much like Cassian and K2, the two support each other so well and both Han and Chewie have gotten so much better than their launch era incarnations. Teamwork is an extraordinarily powerful ability and there are far more ways to generate free aim tokens than there used to be, and Teamwork doubles those. Chewbacca is a big sack of hit points and Guardian 3 will keep a lot of the heavy fire off of Han (I suggest bringing the new upgrade Protector so those pesky crits don’t get to Han). Finally, Chewie is both good at range and melee, so he can provide a lot of covering fire or jump in to combat, forcing the enemy to contend with the Wookiee instead.
Wookiee Warriors are big in the Rebel meta now, due to being an absolute sack of hit points that are difficult to shoot through and they work well with Han, as it gives the enemy too many close up threats to potentially deal with. We’ll talk about that more in the list building part, next.
This list is very Wookie heavy and with the upcoming Empire meta could actually do some damage. You have a lot of Pierce here, almost everything has it, in fact. You’re going to need it to punch through all that armor. The Wookiees are the bulk of where your points went so support them, if you keep them clustered together your opponent is going to have so many targets it’s going to be hard to take them all down.
Han can hang out near them and support before joining the charging, taking a few pot shots before the Wookies charge in (or nail anyone “lucky” enough to not get pulled into combat. Chewbacca can tank as many hits as you need to make sure he survives and if he gets hurt enough it’ll do some serious damage.
Between Sabotaged Comms and Change of Plans (Which you can use twice with Notorious scoundrels) you can mess with your opponent’s strategy for half the turns in the game, which can really throw them off.
Han is a great power hitter for your list. At launch he was a bit of a disaster, being stuck with a range 2 gun and a bit too vulnerable for his own good. The game has changed around him in such a way that he’s not a veritable power house in the right list. With the right friends he can absolutely shred through enemy troops. So grab your co-pilot and your trusty DL-44 and start taking down the Empire.
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