Legion Worlds 2024 – Top 8 Lists

I know I don’t usually write Legion articles, but I recently received a mysterious hologram from a beautiful passable, mysterious, and tall man from Seattle in a doctor’s lab coat saying “help me Matt Bronson, you’re my only hope.” Never one to back away from a challenge, here I am! Let’s breakdown some worlds lists!

Before we begin, a quick disclaimer. This tournament had a cuts for top 32 then top 4. As such, showing the top 8 lists is a bit of an arbitrary cut-off and may not be perfectly representative of the most well-positioned lists, but we have to draw the line somewhere! Regardless, all these lists and players obviously did extremely well.

Also, all three days of the worlds event were stream on the YavinBase YouTube channel! Click the link here to check out the VODs.

Final Table

First – Oliver Dier

The so-called “Fury Road” list first made a splash way back at NOVA 2022 when our own Evan Bulriss took second place with his version. Olly’s list is reshaped and refined for a new era of legion. He goes down to 9 activations in exchange for extra black sun bodies. If worlds taught us anything in 2023, it’s that Black Sun Enforcers and buses are good.

Leading up to worlds, it seemed like there wasn’t that much anti-armour tech making it far at high-level events. As such, the buses were a great meta call. We’ll see shortly that Olly had to fight through two experimental droids (ExD) in the top 4 games to come away with the championship. ExD can do a lot of things well, but killing armour is not one of them. By protecting his black suns behind full armour with regenerating shields, ExD (and many clone lists) can’t do much until it’s too late; the blacks suns jump out, blow things up, and rejoice. In a meta with so much defensive tech that can be refreshed between attacks (shields, force barrier, etc.) or medic heals, big haymakers can be especially useful. That’s what the black suns can bring. Comms jammers on both buses are good in many matchups, but again there are especially useful into clones and droids, shutting down fire supports in the former and order chains in the latter.

While this list lacks a traditional “playmaker” piece like a jedi or bounty hunter, it makes up for that in other ways. The buses bring a lot of tricks and can help control the middle of the board, whereas the bikes add flexibility to the objective deck. Anecdotally, I would say a five point bid was plenty to outbid gunlines and annoy them with objectives like breakthrough and bombing run. ExD is an exception in that it sometimes runs these objectives, but they probably don’t like to against Fury Road.

Second – Luke Cook

If there’s one thing Luke Cook loves to run, it’s efficiency lists, and golly gee is ExD efficient! Let’s go top down. Kalani gives out four tokens for one action, which seems like a good deal, plus he’s usually maxing out Aggressive Tactics with four faceup orders. He won’t see combat very often, but his Sharpshooter 2 makes the Orbital Strike command card capable of one-shotting some four health white save units if needed.

The B1s in Luke’s version appear to be pure support boys, there to heal and do objectives. Twelve points for a PK droid is insanely efficient when the repair charges can be spent to heal yoked out BX droids. Most factions are paying more to heal cheaper units. The B2 units provide a big wallop at range and serve as excellent hostage carriers. Though you may expect to see the T-Series personnel upgrade on B2-HAs, ExD forgoes this because the unit needs to keep AI to benefit from the battleforce effect (more on that later). The much maligned MagnaGuard corps make an appearance here, no doubt as a bit of an armour hedge. Impact 2 and Critical 1 at range 4 helps a lot there. Finally, we get the BX droids. Luke’s running five man squads with shields and offensive push. He also throws in a couple impact grenades for a bit more anti-armour.

Personally, I often look at ExD lists and think “seems fine, but nothing crazy” which is both true and not true. One of the greatest strengths of ExD isn’t something you’ll see on the LegionHQ printout, but rather the battleforce rules themselves. The three special surge tokens ExD generates each turn, which can stockpiled and be spent for speed increases, aims/dodges, extra dice, or suppression removal (never seen anyone choose the last one), turn everything into overdrive. ExD generates enough tokens to match or even exceed GAR lists. The BX snipers can rain down four-dice shots from range 5. Despite the lack of a playmaker unit, anyone can do their best impression at any time by boosting up to speed 3 (or speed 2 for a hostage running away). The Super Tac command cards are still very, very good as well. The one and two pips have always been excellent but traditionally the three pip has been hit and miss outside of spider droids. Turns out, free recovers are really good on BX droids with shields and o-push! ExD lists excel in many areas and matchup very well into GAR, which was the most popular faction in the tournament.

Top 4

Jessy Gilbert-Bélec

I spent a long time talking about Luke’s ExD because we have a lot more where that came from. Let’s go a bit quicker here and just highlight the differences.

Jessy’s version of ExD drops a lot of the the anti-armour tech that Luke had, going instead for crit guns on the B1s and more surges via a T-Series commander. He also slots Bombing Run into his objective deck. I saw a lot of ExD players doing this. One of the big issues with Bombing Run for a trooper list is usually melee. Getting bogged down by engagement can often prevent bombs getting dropped. However, the Super Tac two-pip gives disengage for a turn, which mitigates that problem well-enough. Against something like clones Bombing Run will feel pretty good for ExD, but against a true speeder list it may not. It is possible that they can use their impressive range to pop an speeder before it drops the bomb, however. The shields on the droids also help mitigate the effects of the exploding bombs after drop-off, if the shields are still intact.

Olly played Jessy in the Top 4 match and ended up picking red player, then Hostage Exchange, and used the bus comms jammer to force Jessy’s hostage carrier to AI attack. Normally this objective is in the deck because you can usually just give orders to the carrier to avoid this and then turtle up into a defensive stance afterwards, but that doesn’t take gettin’ jammed into account. Very clever!

Oskar

Oh look, more ExD! Oskar also went with crit guns on the B1s and loaded up his B2s a bit more. He opted for Payload instead of Bombing Run, similar to Luke Cook. I don’t have much more to say here, it’s a slightly different flavour of ExD but it still does all the ExD stuff.

Top 8

Mikołaj Matuszyński

Once again, we have ExD. Mikołaj goes all-in on the efficiency of the repair droids, rocking them in each of his four corps units. One notable change-up is hunter on two of the BX droids instead of offensive push. It doesn’t strike me as a particularly great meta for hunter, but obviously Mikołaj made it work. I am curious as to what factors made him switch it up and whether he would do it again in hindsight.

Trent Hale

I got to experience this list first hand as Trent is the one who knocked me out of the tournament. It’s more droids, but not experimental droids. Maul and Bossk is a great pairing that I’ve enjoyed myself in the past, albeit in Shadow collective. Bossk, the B1s, and the magnas provide a strong long-range threat that softens up the enemy for a late-striking Maul. The threat of bounty is always good, and while Bossk may not be as dynamic as someone like Boba or even IG-88, his range advantage can be huge on the right table.

Maul obviously provides a lot of playmaking in the objective game with three actions, and the splash geonosian unit can provide some similar tricks. However, it can be a fine line between being an annoying flanker and giving away kill points to your opponent, since the geos can get wiped quickly if caught out. In a world of 9 activations, having 10 with Maul is not a bad place to be at all.

Antoine Granet

OK, this may look like a teddy bear list, but I see a droid hiding in there! With the inclusion of C-3PO, I’ll go ahead and mark this down as another droid list.

I would go so far as to say this is the standard Bright Tree Village list at the moment. It leans into the main Ewok strength of bodies, bodies, bodies. Chewie helps those bodies last longer and Han provides extra tricks with his awesome command cards. Ewoks won’t win a gunfight against anyone, in fact they mainly say “guns, what are those?” However, they play the objective game very well, especially in the right hands. We’ve seen mostly 9 act lists in thus far in the list, so out activating opponents by five activations on average opens up a lot of possibilities. As expected, Antoine brought a very large bid to ensure he’s playing the objectives that Ewoks excel at.

Philipp Hoch

Ah good, back to droids. Like Trent, Phillip went with Maul and extra activations, but the similarities end there. Droidekas are the big thing that pops off the screen for me, but after thinking about it a bit it makes some sense. Dekas open up Bombing Run in the objective deck similar to speeders, but they can also provide and LOS-blocking wall for Geonosians to hide behind, jumping out whenever necessary. I’d say this list is much more similar to Ewoks than ExD or even Trent’s list in that it seems to be leaning into objective play above all else. It has lots of activations, many of them performing three actions per turn, and a makeshift LOS wall that helps out wherever needed. It probably won’t kill much, but it doesn’t need to.

Summary

Well, that’s it for worlds top 8. You may have noticed no empire or clones, which is surprising considering they made up over half the field. For clones, I think their issue is that ExD mostly does what they do but better. I think ExD players were well practiced and prepared for clones, whereas I’m not sure if the same was true in the reverse. A lot of the top empire lists included dark troopers, which do matchup pretty well into ExD. They operate on a concept similar to Ollie’s winning list: hide a heck-of-a-lotta firepirepower behind full armour and go to work. As a double six-man dark player myself, I’m salivating at this top 8, saddened that I had to run into maybe the one guy with enough firepower and tricks to take me down. I’m not sure what the excuse is for the rest of the dark players, but I’d bet we see more of them going forwards. As I look ahead at the meta-adjustments to come, I see a lot of armour skews arising to take on ExD and, maybe a spicy take here, maybe the return of ion spiders to take down both? They do well into droids, shields, and armour. Time will tell!

What will you be doing going forward, trying out something you see here? Trying to get ahead of the meta and come up with counters for these lists? It’s an exciting time as we close out one competitive season and start to look towards the next. Store champs are right around the corner, time to get practicing!