Today, we’re going to look at one of my favorite things to draw 100% real, accurate, and never wrong conclusions from: STATS! Specifically, we’re looking at stats from the Star Wars: Legion World Championships at Adepticon.
These stats were pulled from GameUplink by the illustrious Jon “Bushfacts” Bushman. So yeah, what we got…it is better than stats. We got
We’re going to be primarily looking at counts and then ending with some win rates.
Unless otherwise noted, these rates exclude mirrors: for example, if we’re looking at Rebel win rates, those rates exclude games between two Rebel players.
Let’s get into it.
Faction Counts
We might as well lead off with faction counts, to put everything else into context:
Red save best save? I think we’ll see that popularity doesn’t necessarily follow results, but it’s clear that Republic and Empire were the two most popular factions going into the tournament, with the remaining three splitting the last third of the pie.
Unit Counts
Commander
Well that sure is a lot of Anakin, who was easily the most popular unique commander. The Pyke Capo beats him out in raw numbers at 35, but Capos are usually taken in multiples (sometimes as a three of) in Shadow Collective Pyke gunlines, so it’s not surprising that they top the list here. Most of the other generic commanders are still only usually taken as a single commander, and obviously you can only take one of a given unique commander in a list.
Kalani was a close second to Anakin, being the clear choice for most Experimental Droid players. Yoda rounded out the list of top unique commanders, grouped with a clump of generics; the Imperial Officer, T-Series, and Clone Commander. Both of the latter two were often taken alongside an existing unique commander (Kalani in the former case and any number of GAR characters in the latter case). After that, things drop off pretty significantly, with a smattering of the more common unique commanders all clustered in the middle around 10 picks each (Iden, Han Solo, Leia, Vader, and Cassian).
Operative
Both more and less variety here; Padme tops this list by a wide margin, though given that GAR only has two operatives to choose from, I’m not sure that is entirely fair. There is pretty good diversity here after that, with Bossk and Boba Fett clear favorites among the various bounty hunters. Operatives (especially force user operatives) were not actually that popular overall, marking a pretty clear divergence from past list archetypes that often featured a list built around an operative as a playmaker unit.
Corps
Ho hum, clones popular. The corps unit counts are sort of more of a faction count metric, since you have to take corps and there really aren’t many options. I’m not sure how useful this is as a result, except to show that almost no one was taking the special EXD magnas (I included them here since they count as corps in EXD) and Rebel players overwhelmingly favored vets over Rebel Troopers and Fleets.
Special Forces
Not many big surprises here either; ARCs super popular, followed by BX Commandos (EXD showing its popularity there again). The scout troopers are mostly in Tempest Force lists (that is full scouts). Death Troopers are also pretty high on this list, likely due to their utility in Imperial Remnant. Wookiees round out the top group, being taken in many multiples in Wookiee defender lists.
Support
Support is not a terribly popular slot to begin with, though that is very likely to change here in a few weeks when Range Troopers and Clone Commandos show up. Anyway… Empire speeder bikes are clearly the class of this slot, far outpacing any other choices with 65 and dwarfing the next most popular FD Cannon’s 24 picks.
Heavy
Last but not least, we have the heavies. Heavy armor has had a bit of a resurgence as a counter-meta pick, and those savvy enough to do that had themselves a better go of it than many people expected, with Oliver Dier taking the whole thing with his Raiding Party double A-A5 list. Empire heavy armor dominated this list with Dark Troopers easily being the most popular pick, followed by the AT-ST and then the A-A5 Speeder truck. Marquad (another AT-ST!) Rounds out the top 4 followed by T-47s, and then all the other heavies in the distance. Not appearing in this tournament: the AAT or the Saber Tank. Turns out life is pretty sad when you can never, ever get anything out of cover because your base is the size of a dinner plate.
Activations
Next, let’s take a quick look at activation counts.
Note this is the actual number of units in the list; Dark Trooper players will humbly note that their numbers are actually higher, because their murder robots get to go twice. They still only score once.
Anyway, the pass rule has definitely brought this number down; the average used to be 10, and now it is very clearly 9. There is a decent spread here with a cluster in the 8-10 range. You can’t go too low, after all, which is a good thing; you still need dudes that can score objectives and stuff.
Bids
No bid at all was, by far, the most popular option. With the tiebreak going to the lowest bid, this is no surprise. I myself spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out how to get my list from 799 to 800. AMG if you are going to do the tiebreaker this way, can you please just give us a blank 1 point upgrade that does nothing?
Anyway…yeah, bidding is sometimes useful, but mostly not necessary/actively bad. If you’re bidding you need a very specific idea of what you want to do with your battle deck, and you probably don’t need to bid a lot to get there, since most people seem to want to be at 800.
Win Rates
Okay, let’s get to the good stuff.
I’m including the raw numbers here alongside percentages, so you can see the sample sizes, which for most of these were pretty reasonable.
We’ll go in ascending order of overall win rate, and then we’ll look at Experimental Droids specifically… you’ll see why when we get there.
Ideally you want to see all of these rates somewhere in the 45-55% range, for a healthy balance (in my humble opinion). Overall rates have trended in that range for most of Legion’s history.
These rates all exclude mirrors.
Empire
Empire did pretty poorly overall, with just above a 41% win rate. They did best against their thematic pairing Rebels, while doing quite badly against Republic and Separatists and slightly better (but still bad) against Shadow Collective.
I would have expected this to be a bit higher against Separatist given the supposed weakness Experimental Droids have against armor (and Empire’s propensity to bring that), but maybe the utter mismatch in Empire non-armor gunlines against EXD brought that number down.
Don’t worry, Empire fans, you’re about to get a big boost to your gunlines with Range Troopers. Pair them with medics and/or Protector IRG and you might even be able to do a decent BX Commando impression.
Rebels
Those fiesty Rebels, doing slightly better than their Empire counterparts coming in at 45% overall. In particular, Rebels did a lot better than Empire against Republic, due in large part to Ewoks and Cassian gunlines (not necessarily at the same time). There was also a certain mad scientist running double bus, Luke, and fleets that did a nice job cushioning this win rate a bit.
Rebels have Bad Batch to look forward to, though it’s unclear how good the Rebel version is going to be compared to the Republic one. If they can wait a little longer, there is the total wild card Rebel Sleeper Cell coming later this year.
Republic
Republic proved to be a real Rock/Paper/Scissors faction at worlds, with an absolutely atrocious win rate against Separatists (more on that in a bit) being offset by quite positive win rates against Mercs and Empire. No one out gunlines GAR, except, apparently, droids.
Mercenary (Shadow Collective)
These are definitely the smallest sample sizes, because there simply just weren’t that many Merc players. It is still 100 games though, which is nothing to shake a stick at.
I’m willing to bet nearly all (if not every one) of those four wins against Separatists is on the back of Ollie Dier and his double bus Black Sun list, who of course ended up taking the whole thing while knocking out a few EXD players in the process (including Luke Cook himself in the final). Excluding aggro double armored transport though, many of these were straight Pyke gunlines or similar, and those did well against Empire and Rebels while struggling a bit against Republic.
Separatist
Well these are all… quite high. A 65% win rate as an entire faction is incredible, and a far cry from where CIS was a year ago. Nice job, clankers. Anyway, 22 of the 37 CIS players were Experimental Droids, which brought this rate up in a huge way.
Speaking of Experimental Droids, how about we just look at them, shall we?
Experimental Droids
Oh my.
This is more than Blizzard Force levels at its height, with a nearly 72% overall win rate. This isn’t a small sample either; 163 games is nothing to shake a stick at. The individual faction rates are pretty remarkable here: EXD did well against Rebel, Separatists, and Mercs (though again not well against Ollie’s double bus, which is why that Merc rate is 57% instead of 100%). However, EXD did really well against Empire, winning nearly 2/3 of those matchups, and did ridiculously well against GAR. I can’t really overstate how silly a 90% win rate is; GAR won three games against EXD in the entire course of this 270 person three day long tournament. Three games. Total.
I’ve been doing Legion stats a long time, and I’ve never seen a matchup disparity this bad. I know, GAR has been the big bad for a long time, and some of you are probably still a little bit scarred from standby sharing and you’re happy to see GAR get it’s due. It’s okay for some factions/list archetypes to have bad matchups. However, those matchups should mean you’re at a slight disadvantage, not a high likelihood to get curb stomped. Like, maybe you have a 45/55 shot or (hopefully at worst) a 40/60 shot in a bad matchup. 10/90 is ridiculous and not a recipe for a good play experience.
It’s possible Clone Commandos and Bad Batch change this calculus, but that doesn’t really help the other factions that EXD did very well against (not 90% well, but still very well), and if GAR can supplant an archetype that is currently winning 70% of its games with their own big bad, is that really a good thing?
Anyway, we’ll see if this continues, because EXD has really only been recently “unlocked” by the competitive community somewhat recently (with the general shunning of the Battleforce specific units in favor of a 3 BX, 2 B1, 2 B2 model) and they do have some obvious weaknesses, like aggressive armor. They’re really, really good in nearly every other matchup though, and unlike previous meta monsters like Dark Troopers it’s difficult to prescribe a “plan” to counteract it.
Heavy Armour
Yeah, I spelled it British style, just for you Ollie.
Anyway, if Armour is such a hard counter to EXD, then… well, that should bear out in the stats, right? Let’s look at overall win rates first for double heavy lists:
Well that’s… decent! Very average overall, really, with an apparently very strong matchup into Rebels (Rebels include Ewoks in this data) and an apparently weak matchup into Mercs, which makes sense if most of those Mercs are Pyke gunlines with Bossk.
Okay, now for what you’re really here for, double heavy armour vs. battle forces:
Okay well that’s… not very good actually. 45% is certainly not what you would expect to see from a “hard counter,” and it’s certainly not 90% (that would be crazy, right!). Maybe it’s just Ollie?
Summary
Adepticon is in the books, we have a new champion, and Republic is really, really bad. You definitely don’t need to worry about how good Clone Commandos and Bad Batch are going to be and you should really focus on how terrible EXD is for the game instead. This is a 100% real statement that is not at all intended for misdirection away from GAR by the definitely not GAR player writing this article.
Hope you enjoyed the stats!
