Atlantic City Open – Top 8 Lists

This article will cover the top 8 lists from the Atlantic City Open (ACO) Star Wars: Legion tournament this weekend.

I’m working on a more comprehensive article covering my experience and ACO generally, but I know you are all salivating for the lists, so here you go. I’ll also briefly hit some general trends I noticed just by observation at the end.

ACO was organized into two heats on separate days, with the top 4 from each heat moving on to a single elimination bracket on the final day. These are the eight lists from the final day. They are roughly in order of final placement, though top 4 and top 8 will just be bracketed together and listed in the order they are on Tabletop TO, as it was single eliminations (no “bronze” match or anything).

Final Table

Was it destiny, almost exactly two years after the Worlds final? Luke and I walked into elims day determined to avoid each other as long as possible and bounce all the Rex lists, so that is mission accomplished, I guess.

1- Kyle Dornbos

This is just my Invader list with Offensive/Defensive Stance added to Maul. I dodge a lot with Maul, and I figured a 20 point bid would be overkill for something that wasn’t the “TTS meta” (I was mostly right, excluding Luke who I knew I would never outbid anyway). I was blue player in every match except the final.

This list definitely needs it, leaning heavily into objectives that favor a defensive style Maul list. The conditions and deployments are important here too. Deployments are really important for droids generally (I take the ones above in every single CIS list I run). The conditions all favor Maul and B2s.

2 – Luke Cook

Luke brought his signature double AAT list. This one is definitely all in on the AATs; the B1s are just there to body objectives and pass so the tanks can activate when they need to. It’s a terrifying list to face, one that is difficult to get any headway against if you don’t have any native Impact or ARCs.

This leans really hard into blue player, though it’s more about avoiding bad objectives (like Bombing Run) than forcing good ones. It is really good on Key Positions and Sabotage, though.

Top 4

Ryan Sliwoski

Ryan’s list has Operative Luke, which instantly makes it my favorite among the top 8. This is a nice twist on the Cassian/Operative Luke list, cutting some corps heavies and adding Bistan Pathfinders. Bistan is actually pretty nasty now, particularly against droids. This is definitely a “Luke needs to put the game on his back” list, but, you know, that’s what he does.

Mike Syrylo

This is the first of many Rex lists (Rexstar) you are about to see. Rex is popular, with good reason; Clones are really good at killing things at long range, and also really good at not dying. Most objectives involve counting unit leaders in some fashion, so those two strengths are pretty relevant in most matchups.

This is the “five corps heavies” version of Rexstar, which adds an extra clone unit instead of R2. The DC-15 is a minor twist that gives you some more options against armor.

Top 8

Kyle Chan

This might be the most eclectic Rebel list I’ve ever seen. Pathfinders, Mandos, or Wookiees? Yes.

Once you can sort of squint through the smorgasbord there are actually a lot of disparate threats in this list, and you really can’t go wrong with a special forces focused list led by Cassian.

Richard Blankenship

Definitely not your “typical” Rex list. Richard swapped out a corps unit for Padme, giving him some extra shared defense with one more copy of Vigilance and some token sharing flex with Exemplar. The RPS-6 units are an interesting add. I think a lot of players were (understandably) worried about running into armor.

John Lopez

Hey look, it’s Rex! He’s pretty good.

This is a much more “standard” Rex build that takes five corps heavies. Echo in a Phase II is a bit of a twist that notionally gave John four sniper units.

Al Paz

Another five corps Rex list. Like some of the others, Al took an RPS to deal with armor. An RPS fire supporting an ARC strike shot into a vehicle is particularly nasty and can be done at deceptively long range.

Honorable Mention – Steven MacLauchlan

Steven gets listed here because he was the only 3-0 player from one of the heat days to decline to play on Sunday. Yeah, it’s Rex. Again. This one is interesting; it sort of answers the “five corps heavies, or R2?” question with “why not both?” That pumps it up to 11 activations at the expense of some upgrades and no bid whatsoever.

Trends

Rex

Okay, maybe you already noticed this one. Clone lists with Rex are really good. That shouldn’t be a hot take. There were “only” nine Rex lists, but five of them did well enough to make Sunday elims. There were six 3-0 lists after the heat days; four of them were Rex, and the other two were myself and Luke’s droids. The most popular commander was the Clone Commander (there were 14 of those) but every single GAR list took one (in addition to another commander), so I’m not sure how interesting that is. The most popular commander otherwise was the T-Series, though only one of those lists made Sunday elims.

Armor

There was a lot of armor and vehicles. There were eight LAATs (including one double LAAT), seven AATs, and six T-47s. There were also eight AT-RTs and a ton of STAP Riders (16). I’m a little surprised at how few A-A5s there were (only three) but a pure support vehicle is sort of a new concept so maybe folks are still trying to figure out how to get the most out of it.

Where is Empire?

I guess we have to talk about the AT-AT in the room. Empire was the least popular faction (only nine players brought it), no Empire players went 3-0 on the qualifier days, and only two of them even went 2-1 (both of them were Vader/LAAT lists, in case you were wondering). Folks were speculating that a lot of the Empire players that have gravitated to GAR recently would be coming back to the fold due to model limitations or to try some new hotness, but it doesn’t look like that played out.

Terrain

I’ll have some pics up in my next article, but suffice to say, the terrain was amazing. Nick Bodnar did an awesome job putting all the tables together (and running the event, generally) and they were everything you would want or expect at a tournament.

Summary

ACO was a great time. I’ll have a more extensive article detailing my experience (and I’m sure we’ll discuss it on Scoundrels), so keep a look out for those over the next week or so.