Closed Lanes: Legion is Beginning to Feel Like a One-Way Street
November 18, 2024
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Invader League is nearly concluded; we are presently in the top four, with matches to be played this weekend. I’ll hit the top eight lists; we actually have a top four (round of eight is over) so I’ll rank those first. Beyond that I’m just presenting these in original seed order, because you have to order them somehow.
We’ll also look at some quick cross-faction win rate stats to give these lists some context, because the composition of the top 8 is a little misleading with respect to overall faction performance, particularly with respect to Rebel representation.
For those that don’t follow Invader, it is a two phase tournament with nearly 240 participants. Participants are divided into groups or “pods” of five players each where they play a Round Robin tournament; the top 2 players from each group advance and are seeded into a bracket style elimination tournament. These are the lists that made the top 8 of the elimination tournament. You can find out more about Invader league here: Invader League
You can find the entirety of the Season 6 elims lists here (order by seed, not final placement).
Yeah, Rexstar is still good. This one cuts R2, which I like quite a bit. R2 is great on some deployments and 100% useless on others; cutting him lets you get another corps unit with beef, which is going to be useful no matter what your battle card setup is. Having faced both this list and Rexstars with R2 I much prefer to see R2 across the table from me than more beefy clones.
This list heavily leverages token sharing, Take That Clankers, Air Support, and Vigilance to get ahead on attrition. Most objectives involve counting unit leaders in some fashion, so even though the bid is pretty low and its going to be red player a lot, clones don’t care. Dead units can’t score.
Inossatam has been doing a great job representing the French with this innovative Rex list. One thing that is great about Invader is you get folks from all over the world, so you aren’t getting a “fish bowl” effect of a local meta and you get to see how folks from other areas and other countries see things. Ino is making use of medics here, which add a lot of extra beef to his corps units from both sides of the dice; throwing an extra one on offense and picking up a dead clone on defense. Clone models are pretty difficult to kill in general, the medics are a little extra insurance for that occasional blank you roll.
The one strike team is interesting. GAR lists run triple ARC strikes almost without exception; I’ll be curious to see how Ino does in the last two rounds of this tournament when he has to (potentially) face more GAR mirrors.
The last remaining of the dreaded “13 activation STAPs” lists. I like this one, because it has a jammer unit, which is useful and frustrating against both GAR and CIS alike. Snider cut some B1 heavies to make it fit, but what do B1s really do, anyway?
Saber does go brrrrrrrr. Yeah, I know, 3 GAR in the top 4. It’s annoying. Same ratio as last season. They’re still good.
Anyway, this is pretty interesting, because who doesn’t like tanks? Timbo heavily leans on the saber here, supporting it with token sharing from Padme’s Exemplar.
Timbo has faced a lot of Rebels on his climb, so we’ll see how he does in a GAR mirror in top 4.
The rest of these lists round out the Top 8.
Now this is an interesting list. I love me some operative Luke. Habmo has paired him with triple wookiees for maximum threat saturation. They don’t have bowcasters, but with the various Wookiee errata they don’t necessarily need it; the naked melee version can stand on its own pretty well.
Now this is quite the smorgasbord of a CIS list. If you are wondering about the 34 point bid, apparently it wasn’t intentional; Bobette made some kind of mistake in list submission and ended up not including or cutting some B1 heavy weapons. This is a very objective focused list, leaning into the objectives that favor Maul and using that Blue player control to take the wheel from the start of the game.
This is a pretty typical Rexstar, which was by far the most common GAR archetype in the tournament. Jason was actually a hairsbreadth (or an R2 movement millimeter, depending on how you want to look at it) away from knocking out Snider and making it an all GAR top 4. Personally I would consider dropping Echo here down to a generic sniper to make room for Vigilance on the generic, but I’m extremely partial to that upgrade.
What a schmuck. Can’t even come up with a creative list name. Should have gone with “Better Call Maul” or something.
Anyway, this leans into the defensive nature of B2s and a strong bid with Maul-friendly objectives. It doesn’t actually hit that hard (not at range 3+, anyway) so it really needs to establish that control to make your opponent force something to happen.
“There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics.” – Mark Twain
Stats are fun. Let’s look at some. These are cross faction win rates, updated as of the top 8 games. This specifically excludes faction mirrors. Some of these sample sizes are pretty small, but what fun would a top list article be without some baseless speculation and punditry?
Data courtesy of jasonisconfused
We’ll do some hot takes here faction by faction, in roughly declining order of performance.
Republic didn’t even face any Empire opponents (thank goodness for that) but they managed a 67% win rate against Rebels and a 68% win rate against CIS. The latter was as silly as 80/20 at one point, but a couple of droid players made some late gains in the top 16/top 8 to close the gap a little.
I’m not sure how much you can tell here about the Rebel/GAR matchup, given that the sample size is only 9 games. Timbo himself faced 3 Rebels during his climb and is therefore responsible for fully half of the GAR vs. Rebel wins here.
This tournament has been sort of a coming out party for some Rebel units that have been long neglected but got some nice errata in the last update, specifically Wookiees and T-47s. Rebels pulled a positive win rate against both CIS and Empire and had the least bad loss rate (I think that’s a compliment) against GAR. The reason you only see 1 Rebel in the top 8 has a fairly easy explanation; Rebels had a ton of mirror matches, so they had a very high proportion of “team kills.”
A lot of people were hyping droids as the next dominant faction to hit the meta after the GAR nerfs would (supposedly) force clones from the lime light, and CIS was by far the most popular faction choice going into elims, representing nearly 50% of the field. However, that optimism hasn’t borne out in the data, with CIS pulling a negative win rate against both GAR and Rebels, and a negative win rate overall as a result. They were also the only faction to lose a match to Empire, if you want to call that a hallmark of poor performance (sorry Empire, I promise not to make any more jokes). The fact that 3 droid players made top 8 is purely a result of numeric inevitability given how many droid players there were in the first place.
There weren’t a lot of Empire players to begin with, so this sample size is vanishingly small. They didn’t even play against GAR. It’s sort of hard to parse out the causation here, but at a minimum I think we can say Empire isn’t exactly a favorite of the competitive community at the moment. I think there might be some unexplored archetypes here but right now it isn’t looking great for them.
Well there you have it. Some lists and data to chew on. Go forth and debate on the interwebs and social mediums.
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5 Responses
I still read this data as GAR still likely needs adjustment. I only see potential for the Kashyyyk wave to provide more tools to a faction that’s already pretty dominant. Poor Empire is going to be waiting until 2022 for help. I don’t know if the LAAT/LE is the answer for what woes them. (speculatively)
I still read this data as GAR still likely needs adjustment. I only see potential for the Kashyyyk wave to provide more tools to a faction that’s already pretty dominant. Poor Empire is going to be waiting until 2022 for help. I don’t know if the LAAT/LE is the answer for what woes them. (speculatively)
As an Imperial player who regularly plays against a Clone army this article is incredibly depressing….
It is somewhat sad how powerfull GAR is in the game , they have great defense, good heavy weapons and an amazing synergy between the clones, Rex only comes to add on the problem. Not even the jedis on GAR are being able to top that. ( yhea , obi wan is an amazing unit and would be favourite if any rebel player could use it)
I think the problem GAR has (if you can call it that), is how well they were designed.
They knew what they wanted when they made them, which was good synergy between the troopers, which is fluffy for the faction. The standby nerf was needed, but I think if anything the points increases exacerbated the supposed Rexstar issue.
Clone troops cost even more now, so it further limits their options. When a core unit costs 75 or 89 with just a heavy, support choices become rather limited to strike teams and cheap commanders/operatives like Rex and the generic or R2 (if that’s your thing).
They also suffer from not having many toys at the moment, and the others they do are too expensive to take when they don’t synergise as well as troopers.
To “fix” it they need to find ways to make the other toys more appealing. Make BARCs and the Sabre cheaper, maybe.
Better yet would be taking a look at the other factions and giving them an identity that works as well for them as GAR’s does.