I’ve always had a soft spot for Grievous. As far as character designs go he’s among those that are truly “George Lucas” to their core, right down to the fact that he expected audiences to have any earthly idea who he was going into Episode 3, a chronic cough that would go unexplained for anyone who is even remotely on the casual fan side, and an accent that travels across Eastern Europe as the film goes on despite the character having an American accent in the cartoons from which he originated. One can’t deny his charm though, whether it’s his skittering creepily up a ceiling while giggling or his extraordinary willingness to have others die in his place he’s just about as perfect a cartoon villain as one could ask for.

In Legion he has a legacy as well, he was the original commander for CIS and one who has now had a bit of a glow-up with the “Legion 2.6” update. This guide was updated and mostly re-written for Legion 2.6 from the original by Lucas “Teknofobia” Ustick.

Strengths

• 8 health + red saves
• Two command upgrade slots
• Large melee dice pool and one of the few “AOE” attacks in the game with his 1-Pip
• Has Entourage: Magna Guards which is a very useful keyword

Weaknesses

• Courage 2
• He has no Force upgrade slot, so while he does have lightsabers he is missing a certain something that even “basic” Jedi like Commander Luke and the Inquisitors have
• He doesn’t have a way to increase his mobility

Overview

Upgrade Slots: Command x2, Training, Gear

Points

Grievous has taken a slow but steady trip down all the way to 130 points from his original 175 (if you can believe it). That makes him a bit of an odd duck: he is by far the most expensive commander in the game who does not have a Force slot (Cody, the next one down, is a full 25 points cheaper). This along with some other things put Grievous in a “class” that’s pretty much all on his own where he doesn’t neatly fit into any single category, but can do work in multiple categories as a result.

Offense

General Grievous is primarily a melee unit who has a secondary ranged attack. He has two different weapons, Trophy Lightsabers and the DT-57 “Annihilator”. His prior iteration attempted to make him feel more thematic by giving him Arsenal 2 and splitting these weapons up into three possibilities (when given an upgrade card that people basically always took) but the devs made him more friendly to new players without sacrificing…too much. Expert Grievous players will sometimes miss the old ability to do “one lightsaber hit and one annihilator shot” but that was only an occasional tactic. Whether he is attacking in melee or at range, the Relentless keyword means that you’ll only finish a turn without hitting something when the enemy army is far away.

Now his kit is quite straightforward: If you’re attacking in melee you should be using the lightsabers unless you are engaged but REALLY want to attack someone else within Range 2 in which case you’re using the DT-57 (remember, its Versatile keyword allows you to do this.) You’ll also use the DT-57 on the way in if you are unable to engage an enemy, and can also be used in “peekaboo” attacks where Grievous moves out of LOS blocking terrain, makes a shot, then goes back to hiding again (what a scamp!).

Jedi Hunter is a keyword that helps somewhat even the playing field against Force users but honestly Critical 1 is usually good enough on its own so it’s only a mild help as a keyword.

Defense

General Grievous has a formidable health pool of 8 wounds with red saves and, now, Immune: Pierce. This gives him 16-24 effective wounds depending on whether he has surges or not. That makes him very difficult to kill. It is worth noting he now has Immune: Pierce instead of his old Impervious, and the addition of the new Backup rule as well as the ability to have Magna-Guards take heat for him mean that he’s strangely most vulnerable in a melee fight since neither of those latter items can be used in that situation.

Block is a very useful keyword that increases the motivation to improve his Dodge access via upgrade cards, we’ll get to that later.

Mobility

Speed 2 and Scale so not amazing but not terrible. His inability to access Burst of Speed is probably the single situation where he feels the greatest amount of jealousy for real Jedi Arts. He does not have a natural deployment keyword but can get access to Scout 1 via either a Recon Intel or a Crab Droid’s Scouting Party keyword.

Entourage: MagnaGuard

Until this point, when there was a “buddy combo” between a unique character and a non-commander/operative it was either Entourage or Retinue. WELL GUESS WHAT, NOT ANYMORE! The free aim or (more likely) dodge Magnas get from being near their dear leader is nothing new, and has been one of the biggest reasons they’ve been relevant ever since they released. But now not only can you give one of them a free order (enabling Aggressive Tactics surges and lightening your bag) but they can also provide Backup and you can even run a fourth one if you’re a bit daring.

Command Cards

Trained in Your Jedi Arts

Trained in Your Jedi Arts is General Grievous one pip and is his most flashy command card, giving him Disengage, a dodge, and a true “area” attack in a similar vein to Explosions or the Spider Droid’s Self-Destruct. This card is also powerful when in a duel with another melee unit. The dodge makes it so you can activate Block when attacked and the extra attack can help get you ahead in a one-on-one attrition in a fight.

Naturally, you’re hoping that you can hit as many targets as possible with his end-of-activation attack, a feat that is sometimes made easier in Legion 2.6 due to the nature of POI’s but sometimes harder since enemy armies tend to be more dispersed. Speaking very broadly, there are two “methods” to using this card.

1. Diving in from Range 2 (aka, equivalent to 2 speed 2 moves) into an engagement, making a Relentless attack, then performing the AOE early in a turn. This approach has the advantage of reducing your opponent being able to prepare by taking dodges and getting multiple actions done before they get suppressed, but has the disadvantage of often allowing your opponent to withdraw (if the engaged unit survived) and returning fire at Grievous. This can be significantly mitigated by Up Close and Personal or Into the Fray as upgrade choices, which we’ll get to below.
2. Using the command when Grievous is already engaged and waiting for a nearby unit to activate so he has a safe place to be engaged with after his attack is done. This is one of those cases where you may intentionally choose to ignore your own Pierce keywords in order to make sure the engaged unit doesn’t get wiped out. This is a safer option but it’s not always available to set up, but it can be a more conservative choice if Grievous doesn’t have much in the way of upgrades.

Either way, you do generally want to get his activation done as early as possible in a way that leaves him safe, since he will be handing out so many suppression tokens that you may well reduce your opponents total available actions by half a dozen or more. When it comes to actually doing damage, it’s a bit of a slot machine. The end-of-activation attack has no Pierce so it’s a little up to the dice gods when it’s all said and done, but if you can get the attack done on Rebels or Clones before they get their dodges up then you can get a ton of value from it.

Supreme Commander

This is a completely new command for Legion 2.6, likely given because the previous version (which gave Guardian to corps units) already felt redundant when MagnaGuards exist and even more so with the Backup rule in the game.

Ruthless can be extremely useful to make units that you either didn’t care about anyway (naked B1’s) or who can tank one damage before losing a mini (B2’s) get an additional full action, which is very often a move to allow them to both threaten a POI and make an attack on the same turn. The extra surges are quite nice as well for B2’s who can use all the surges they can get on most turns, though naturally, you’ll want to at least consider allowing Grievous to benefit from his own command here. Just take note that the “inspirational” surges from the command only go to troopers. With regards to why a BX Commando Droid would benefit from this while a Droideka would not, your guess is as good as mine.

Crush Them!

Crush Them! allows you to dump a whole bunch of surges on the main man and two others in the late game when you’ve hopefully taken down a few units. This is his least powerful command card since it requires you to defeat an enemy unit before it is effective, and even when effective it does not change the game state in any way aside from adding some dice modifiers. This command card is typically only played when there is no other 3 pip option in list building. I’ll admit that I was surprised when this card, which is widely considered one of the weakest character commands in the game, was not enhanced with the Legion 2.6 update but it’s better than Assault. Roger, Roger is also better in many situations but the only downside there is that Grievous (who is not a Droid Trooper despite his hardware) cannot be ordered by it.

Upgrades

General Grievous is dependent on upgrades to remedy some of his shortcomings such as his low courage value. He needs to use upgrades to help him deal with suppression and panicking.

Command:

Aggressive Tactics

Grievous does not surge on offense or defense justifying the expensive cost of Aggressive Tactics. B1 Battle Droids also do not surge and can create large coordinate chains making them a great unit to run alongside Aggressive Tactics.

Strict Orders

General Grievous struggles with suppression because of his low courage and lack of ability to remove suppression. Strict Orders is a reliable way to remove one suppression for each activation whenever he has a face-up, which is most of the time. Though this isn’t an upgrade Droid players take super-often, it can also be helpful to reduce the risk of B1’s getting into panic range since they’ll almost always have a face-up order.

Improvised Orders

Droid players have less order control in Legion 2.6 than they used to on average, so a copy or two in many varieties of list can be quite useful.

Training:

There are multiple strong Training options for Grievous…

Up Close and Personal

Given that the General only has a Range 2 or less weapon, this upgrade will functionally mean that he will get a dodge token whenever he performs a ranged attack. When he had Arsenal 2 this had more incentive to it because he could hit with his saber for one attack and shoot out of melee to get a dodge token. The functional danger for using this card now is that dodges will go to waste given that Grievous will often act late when he’s not already engaged and CIS tends to run high act counts. Still, ultimately, you would run this upgrade for one reason: to become nigh-invincible on your Jedi Arts turn if you go early. If you get 6 dodge tokens or something on that attack then your opponent will be very disincentivized to try to hit you back that turn, which is very likely to make Grievous continue to live.

Into the Fray

Grievous does not surge on defense or offense and is primarily a melee unit making Into the Fray a solid option. The extra surge can help increase his effectiveness once he is engaged. If you are not playing Aggressive Tactics, Into the Fray is a good option for surge generation. The one downside to this upgrade is the fact two of his command cards generate surges already so you may already have enough surges without Into the Fray.

Tenacity

Tenacity gives an extra red dice to attacks once General Grievous is wounded. Because he has 8 health and is difficult to kill this upgrade is able to consistently add damage to melee attacks. The one major downside of this card is the fact it is competing with the other two for this slot, remember that a dead Grievous does no damage at all.

Gear

Recon Intel

If you’re gonna run a Crab droid then you can leave this at home, otherwise it’s at least worth considering it to get him into the fight sooner.

Prepared Supplies

Compared to Up Close and Personal this will feel anemic, but it’s one dodge exactly when you need it, and sometimes that’s enough

Emergency Stims

Grievous’ 8 health is a lot already, and if you’re on the last round of the game the presence of Emergency Stims may motivate your opponent to not even try to kill him. This upgrade has become a little better generally due to the fact that games are naturally at least one turn shorter than they were before.

Strategies and List Building

When it comes to Commanders in Legion Grievous is a sort of unique mix of support-ish Commanders like Kallus and selfish high-health chargers like Vader. As one would expect, however, his dual nature means that there are characters at his price point or lower who can do a better job supporting your army (Kalani) and who can usually do a better job killin’ dudes (Asajj and Maul). That doesn’t mean Grievous is bad in my opinion anyway, he has been present in more than one Grand Tournament-winning list already at the time of this writing in the 24-25 season, but it does mean that you need to list build with him carefully. There’s a few different ways to utilize him and I’m going to try to highlight them using lists that have either won or finished in in the top cut of Grand Tournaments this season.

Grievous as Top Dog

This finished 4th at Im Norden, played by the aptly named Sidious66 who has gotten shoutouts two articles in a row! This goes to show that even when Grievous is your most expensive unit, one should usually have another commander in the army. Part of this is because Grievous only has one decent command at helping your army (Crush Them is just too ick to count in my book) and another part is that he has to charge so hard to be useful that he can sometimes just bite it with a couple bad rolls against charging ARCs or something. Kalani or other Super Tacs are an excellent way to bolster his weaknesses, giving him the freedom to go in and go nuts.

Grievous As Second Banana

This finished 6th at the largest Legion 2.6 tournament to date, which is no small feat, played Houdini33 of US Army E-Sports. Here Dooku, despite being a “cheap” version without Force Push, is still the most expensive unit by a significant margin. Battle Meditation on the Count means that he can use his Direct to give orders to Grievous no matter where he is on the battlefield. Houdini clearly values surge tokens, he spent 42 points on upgrades just to make sure that the maximum number of units got one!

Grievous as Fourth Banana

We can just skip right past him being third banana into where he’s the fourth one, a list where he shockingly represents less than half of the total lightsabers in the army. Before you scoff though, know that this did win the London Grand Tournament, played by Lyla Claire (Runner Up in Worlds 2023). I can save you the squinting: Grievous got assigned a grand total of zero command cards here but he is still quite an effective beat stick, and importantly since he is not a droid is just as able to get heals from the medics as those Siths can.

Be warned, if you are a relative novice don’t touch this list with a Grievous-sized pole.

All these references to bananas is just reminding me that I’m overdue to write a new Theme Song article, but I still remember that I think I did a pretty good job encapsulating the Grievous lists at the time, which kinda sucked to be honest. He’s come a long way!

Conclusions

Aside from his dreadful and boring 3-Pip, which we still have some hope could be improved when we get updated command card art (?), Grievous is one of the relatively few non-Force users who are truly worth a price tag over 130 points in this game. He’s also just fun. You get to dive in with your Magna buddies and swing a bunch of lightsabers at people, daring them to try to dump enough firepower in him to bring him down. Just be warned, because it can’t be stressed enough: the fact that he’s so easily suppressed remains one of his greatest weaknesses, so try to keep him safe from significant fire until he’s range 2 or so away from his intended Jedi Arts target. Once the General really goes to war, he’s pretty hard to stop.

OP