This article will cover the final cut (top 8) results from the Star Wars: Legion tournament at Las Vegas Open 2024.
The format was six rounds of swiss, a top 8 cut, and then two rounds of single elimination, with a 136 players, making it the largest Legion tournament in the US since the World Championships last year.
As you can see from the lists below, this is another tournament where GAR dominated the top spots…though in a slightly new way. We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again: a number of the new rules changes have indirectly benefitted GAR in a way that has accumulated to their advantage in aggregate and contributed to their consistent run of recent success…and we’re still finding new ways in which that has happened, as Nathan did below.
Geonosians were technically legal for this event, though unsurprisingly no one was able to get them on the table in time, since they literally released the first day of the event.
Final Table
1st – Nathan Gribble
Well Hello There! Obi-wan Kenobi, despite his biting wit and fantastic beard, has been viewed as less competitive than Anakin and Yoda for quite some time. Nathan has clearly proved that GAR groupthink wrong here.
The key is one little change to the Soresu rules in the CRB that you might have missed… the bullet under Soresu Mastery that prevents Obi-Wan from spending dodges while using Guardian if the attacker has High Velocity was removed (High Velocity still prevents the defender from spending dodges, but Obi-Wan is not the defender when he’s using Guardian, hence the reason for that bullet existing). The old RRG format had a lot of these specific call-out style bullets under various keyword entries, and these bullet style call-outs were removed in the CRB (not just from Soresu) in favor of more narrative style paragraphs. The removal of this particular bullet that didn’t make the transfer to the block paragraphs on Soresu has a pretty significant gameplay implication.
This doesn’t seem like an intentional buff to Obi-Wan. He still can’t spend dodges against High Velocity while defending himself, so it’s not just “Obi-Wan is special vs. High Velocity”. Whether it’s intentional or not, however, it basically shores up one of the only remaining ways to consistently damage clones through their various defensive tech. Nathan leaned even further into Obi-Wan’s Guardian here with three medics, allowing him to roll the dice a bit on his saves (especially against those pesky pools with Pierce) with some mitigation for those inevitable blanks. This also allows him to aid him in raw attrition: Obi and the medics absorb hits on corps that would normally decrease their offensive potential, but they stay high for the first few shots no matter what thanks to this tech.
The Cody/AT-RT combo here is interesting; similar to what my colleague Mike Barry was experimenting with at PAX with Yoda/Cody. Cody can be used sort of a like a GAR Bossk where you just feed him aims and have him fish for crits with his long range Surge/Crit pool, while using him to kick off fire supports and also set them up via the direct/relay chain through the AT-RT. I’m not sure it’s better than just having a Clone Commander and a Full ARC unit for roughly the same cost, but it’s hard to argue with the results. This is also an especially long-range squad for Republic: Padme has her looted blaster and between the three corps heavies, Echo, and Cody there are five units that can shoot some weapons (with either impact, crit, or both) at range 4 which makes it even more able to poke at a distance. Given that all the corps have “cumbersome” he didn’t do a lot of moving with his shooting, but when you’re at 800 points…you usually don’t have to these days.
2nd – Josh Cook
Not to be left totally out of the spotlight, Yoda/Padme made an appearance at the final table. Josh has dropped the Echo strike (putting Echo in a full ARC instead) in favor of a Clone Commander, which is a nice way to both guarantee getting some face ups for Fire Support and some more surges via Bolster without having to use a force slot on Guidance. Battle Meditation on Yoda allows for his two pip to be all the more deadly as well.
Top 4
JJ Wood
Yeah, it’s more Yoda, but this one has Chewie instead of Padme! This is the more “traditional” way to run Yoda, and JJ has clearly demonstrated that he’s still plenty good with Chewie. JJ has Boil in here for a bit of extra defensive tech to make up for those lost Padme tokens, but otherwise this is still an ARC focused list (instead of BARCs like would be more common for a “standard” old school Yoda/Chewie).
JR Deeter
Ewoks! Like any good melee threat saturation list, JR asks “do you have enough guns to kill all of these murder bears?” No, mostly, is the answer. This is a very objective focused list, with an extremely high bid that practically guarantees JR will be using his battle deck and forcing his opponent to try and swim upstream against a tide of furry bodies on those objectives that count unit leaders.
Top 8
Philip McCabe
Philip has gone in the same direction as JR above, though he’s taken an extra trapper for a slightly smaller bid. The return to bidding for some of these objective skew lists is interesting and bears some watching to see if it continues into Worlds or not.
William Warf
Blizzard Force is still good! As with the Ewok lists above, this is an objective focused list with a commensurately large bid. William has taken a flamer snow here as well which should help a bit with all those Ewoks, though I wonder if one is enough in those situations. We won’t quite get the answer this time, William got matched up with Nathan (the winner) and defensive GAR lists typically have an advantage against Blizzard that negates many of its strengths.
Michael Larsen
Michael brings yet another Yoda/Padme to the table, this one carving out some points for Boil instead of using them on another corps heavy weapon. Notably, Boil is on a Phase II unit, which gives them a surge to spend for Guardian (you can’t use Clone token sharing when you aren’t the defender, though you CAN use tokens from Exemplar or the Yoda 3-Pip).
David LeBlanc
Here are the Wookiees! David rounds out the top 8 with our fifth GAR list and third melee saturation list. David’s Wookiees cut some of the beef in favor of three of the excellent Wookiee battleforce Fluttercraft, which gives him some solid objective play while being a nuisance to those other melee skews. The Flutters all have hacked comms, which is not an upgrade you see a lot of but goes well on a timing sensitive unit that is also likely to be in the middle of the enemy army.
Summary
There you have it. GAR still good. Melee skews good. Blizzard still gonna Blizzard. Congrats to Nathan on the win and on finding yet another competitive way to play GAR.
AMG has publicly said not to expect any sort of balance update before Worlds, so this is likely to be our last big preview of what things will look like, though Geonosians and Inquisitors will come out before then and may be a factor. What do you think things will look like in two months when everyone throws down in Chicago for the World Championships? Let us know in the comments!
