As we say goodbye to 2024 with our last Grand Tournament of the calendar year, perhaps we can say hello to what is hopefully a relatively balanced metagame.
PAX Unplugged is the “all gaming EXCEPT video games” con that takes place in Philadelphia, PA, USA once per year usually in early December (and will be late November next year apparently). This has usually been the final big Legion event of the calendar year when things tend to quiet down for the holidays before they ramp back up again in late January with Las Vegas Open.
Though we’ve had one GT since the points and rule adjustments that landed a month ago (“The Pit” in Cardiff, Wales, UK which was won by fellow physician and Republic enjoyer James Whiting) give us some hope of a better balance with its relatively varied Top 8, any person like me who pretends to understand mathematics will tell you that it’s irresponsible to draw wild conclusions until you have two points of data. Luckily for all of us in my opinion, the way this tournament shook out reinforced my belief that we’ve landed in a significantly better spot with regards to faction balance.
But first, let’s do the numbers.
Faction participation seemed relatively even although the relative lack of Empire could either be a fluke or a sign of hesitancy that they can succeed against the other rising stars of Rebels and CIS, but it should be noted that two of those 5 players made the Top 8.
Transponder is one of the few new generic upgrades we’ve gotten in the AMG era, and it’s one that represents the “ideal” form of an upgrade in my opinion, one that truly does have a use in broad circumstances and across factions. More of those please! The rest of these essentially suggest to me that dodges are still a strong way to mitigate attrition, which continues to demonstrate its increased importance in this form of the game. Of note, there were only 7 copies of Force Push in the tournament and 4 copies of Recon Intel, so mission accomplished on that last one if the goal was to make it less of a universal upgrade.
Not much of a shock here with regard to advantages, two advantages are unequivocally actually advantages after all, three more are a bit of dealer’s choice, and Prepared Positions is often actively bad to utilize. Shifting priorities (lists with fast movers) and Bring Them To Heel (Empire and vehicle-heavy Shadow Collective) are the closest thing to specialty objectives as far as I’m concerned, I think the game could actually use more of them…
Anyway let’s get to what you came here for. This was a 5 round Swiss-style event with no cut, I’ll be including the lists without battle cards to improve readability but those who are curious about battle card choices can check them out on the Longshanks event page.
A rare appearance from the Separatist Invasion Battle Force! E-5C seems to be the most appropriate choice of heavy weapon for B1’s in the current meta given that the crit-poking at range of the E-5s is now of significantly less value. From what I can tell, there is exactly one turn (Dooku’s 1-Pip) where there would be ONE unit (the tank) without a face-up order, which is pretty nuts when you think about it. Direct: Trooper is a truly wild keyword.
We interrupt this list article to briefly touch on the easiest “theme song” match in history, between the name and its particularly chugg-y metal riff:
I want to give a lot of credit to Raul because he found a way to optimize Dark Troopers that I wouldn’t have thought of: eschewing the Range 2 Blast weapon in order to make room for a third with the help of Gideon’s Entourage: Dark Troopers keyword. Cutting two of those minis alone saves 90 points which means that the third copy (at 155) only needs 65 points of extra space to get itself in there. This confers an array of advantages:
Still, before people get overly frightened, it should be noted he lost to the #3 and #6 finishers after a 3-0 start. The advantages above can be significantly mitigated once even a single dark unit (which only has 8 health and no surges) dies, which can happen very quickly against charging melee, ranged Impact, or most of all charging melee impact (aka lightsabers, which both lists had). Further, though dark troopers give you a pass advantage they still only count once for primary objectives which means something like shifting priorities can be a big ouch for these relatively slow units.
I’ve warmed up to the new Commander Luke, as long as he is kitted sparingly he seems to be a good deal for a melee unit with little other responsibilities. The standout item in the list in my opinion is the heavily kitted Mandalorian Resistance unit complete with a beskad duelist. For what it’s worth, it has two upgrades that will give it a permanent dodge for the remainder of the turn via Nimble which, along with the medic droid, does mitigate its primary weakness which is to say “losing even a single mini is very bad.” Still, even though I continue to have doubts about the efficacy of generic Mando Resistance, 106 points is honestly not a terrible tag for a unit with so many upgrades. Craig said he built the list around getting red saves on defense and Pierce on offense, which does make sense, and I can’t really argue with that.
You don’t see this every day! The amount of ranged hate this list can put on is honestly silly, and it features plenty of surge generation to boot via the corps and Aggressive Tactics. Armor can be hard to punch through in Legion 2.6, even when the shots miss you have an un-suppressible unit that can chill on a point until your opponent musters enough dice to deal with it. Somewhat surprisingly his only loss was to the Triple Dark list above. Perhaps part of the reason the Impact wasn’t enough in that matchup was the fact that this list benefits greatly from putting a lot of suppression on opponents via the Sonic Imploders (which Andrew pointed out to me can be split-fired to give 3 suppression per shot), beam weapons, and long-range shooting in general, none of which would matter to either Vader or the Dark Troopers.
Pour one out for me, I would enjoy playing a similar list but I only have one tank, and its dang near impossible to find them!
Michael was the top CIS player, and he brought a rare-ish form of Experimental Droids: one that features Kraken and zero Snail Tanks. This did allow him a relatively high unit count despite spending more than usual on his B2 units (with the HA and the doubled squad upgrade). He pointed out to me that despite the loss of an additional source of “Direct” by using Kraken instead of either of the other two he didn’t end up missing it and in fact found Kraken’s much improved fighting stance compared to the other Super Tacs quite useful when defending his side of the board. The Comms Relay helps with this as well since normally two of his commands (They Too Shall Suffer and Orbital Bombardment) would normally only go to himself.
What a pleasantly compact list we have here! Jonathan would have had the option of putting e-gear on one of the ARCs but he clearly valued symmetry over its modicum of actual value.
It’s not yet clear what form of Anakin will be the most effective going into Worlds, but it’s clear to me that he’s still damn good. Delta Squad seems to be the ideal choice for lists that only run one Commando since it can recover its own HQ Uplink twice in the game, though ideally when there is space for points it has Offensive Push as well. This list doesn’t have anything close to the insane alpha strike that Anakin Quad Strikes had but it makes up for that with 8 sources of Reliable which in turn will fuel all those Z6’s into an impressive amount of offensive output Round 2 and beyond.
Patrick has been running Tempest for a long time, he was also runner-up at the recent Rochester GT and thus he demonstrates very well how practice can make perfect. While three AT-ST’s have been and will be the cornerstone of Tempest it’s worth mentioning that full scouts are significantly better in 2.6 than in Legacy because the fights are closer, native Scout is more valuable, and Low Profile makes cover feel good all over again. I think we’ve seen enough to say that Tempest is the best army Empire can run that doesn’t have Vader in it, and given that Vader lists took a hit with the changes to Relentless and medic costs it’s possible that it’s the best overall. Patrick pointed out to me that some players are still unfamiliar with both the Tempest and Marquand commands, which can be tricky, so if you’re one of those players I’d say it’s time to learn!
Patrick only lost to the #8 list (the Sep Invasion one) on Recover the Research, presumably because Franek’s list had so much health that the ATST shots weren’t enough raw dice to account for the fact that one can win on that objective without securing a single point, as long as you have enough dudes to spread out among four POI’s you’ll get the full score.
Nick is a well-known staple of the community, whose contributions to the community in the form of tournament organization, terrain, and podcasting have been extraordinary. Let’s not forget though that the dude knows how to play.
Rebel Hero Hammer in a few different varieties has been the non-Ewok path to success since 2.6 dawned given the faction’s impressive array of unique characters whose strengths outweigh some of the faction’s built-in weaknesses (white saves and poor order control). Perhaps intentionally, the “core three” characters of the Rebellion (Han, Leia, or Luke) show up at the top of winning lists again and again, the former of whom benefitted from the fact that cover usually sucks now and the latter two who got new unit cards as well as points cuts. In the last month though, Rebels got two additional boons. First, Republic lists that featured obscene offensive potential (importantly including 2-3 dirt cheap High Velocity kill shots at the start of each game) were dulled down a bit which gave Rebels more breathing room. Second, a little expansion called Sleeper Cell came out.
Some day I’d hope that AMG would be willing to chat with us so I can find out the truth of whether this and its release counterpart, the much less useful Imperial Riot Control squad, were designed with the 2.6 rule changes in mind. It certainly has the card style of the legacy game but not the gameplay trends of it, at least as far as I could tell. I think that most Rebel players would have run screaming from this thing under the old rules, hell the Astromech would have zero way to get dodges if you were playing on the old version of Breakthrough. In any case, given that this version of the game is all about Range 2 fights after the first turn (and sometimes even on it) this unit clearly has a lot going for it, not the least of which is its natural Scout 2 which allows it to get into position early.
Nick did consider Clan Wren but given that its BASE unit is 15 more points than a Sleeper Cell WITH the astromech AND Up Close and Personal (which together give it consistent and recurrent dodge access, especially since he tended to activate the sleeper cells early when possible) he felt that the efficacy mismatch was too big to ignore, and I tend to agree with him. As he pointed out, Bad Batch is more likely to attract ranged fire, which means that once the sleepers get in there they are very hard to displace.
It’s definitely heartening to see a Top 4 that features all 4 major factions and a top 8 that is also even split. It would have been cool if Shadow Collective could have made it as well but when the tournament only has one player with such a list (Jason Vassilicos who also had to drop despite being 2-2, so its not like he was doing poorly) that makes it pretty tough. I think we’ll see them, especially lists that heavily feature Mandalorians, threatening the top tables before too long.
In any case, congratulations to Nick and all the Top 8, we won’t have another list article until after LVO but be sure to keep an eye out for the podcast and whatever other nonsense we cook up between now and then!
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