Rebel Veterans and Mark II Blaster Unit Guide (Legion 2.6)

This unit guide for Star Wars: Legion will cover the Rebel Veterans and their accompanying emplacement, the Mark II Medium Blaster. Original article by Alice Lirette with Legion 2.6 re-write by Evan “Doc Velo” Paul.

Since this article required a nearly complete rewrite we will forgo the usual blue text for updates. Sorry to all you blue text enthusiasts out there.

Strengths

• Same base gun as rebel troopers but surge to hit.
• Low Profile is much better than the Defend 1 they used to have
• Come with a solid emplacement.

Weaknesses

• Speed-1 Moves
• Still Rebels, and that means white defense dice.
• Coordinating with your mounted gun can require a bit of work.

Overview

48 Points: Only 8 more than a naked Troopers unit and they can certainly earn that.

Defense: White with surge defense, standard Rebels. Low Profile helps though (see below)

Offense: A-280 Blaster Rifle 1 Black die, same as their less experienced brethren but these guys have learned to aim down the sights. That surge to hit is going to come in handy and make them more dangerous.

Their melee won’t get used much but is now amusingly significantly better than stormtrooper melee and second only to Fleet Troopers for Rebel Corps options.

Courage 1: Woof. Rebels don’t get any Courage 2 corps as a baseline even if these guys seem like the ones who should. As a result, you have to worry about the same problem every other Galactic Civil War corps does: don’t let yourself get pinned down. These units are especially vulnerable to this because of their slow movement speed.

Speed 1: With the Legion 2.6 update these guys only got upgrades…except for this. Prepared position does mitigate this to a certain extent (IF you’re going to use it). When considered in combination with their Courage 1, this is quite a blemish indeed.

Coordinate: Emplacement Trooper Rebels are traditionally the most order-starved faction in the game aside from Shadow Collective (who actually enjoy being order-starved anyway) so anything that gives you more face-ups is a good thing. Fire support has changed in Legion 2.6 (we’ll get to that in the Mark II Blaster section below) but it’s still enabled by starting the turn with a face-up order so this keyword still enables it.

Low Profile: As long as they have any cover (which is usually the case) they will get to convert one cover dice to a block with every defense roll which is just about as good as having a permanent dodge with Nimble.

Prepared Position: This can be an advantage if the terrain suits using it. If you can deploy them in a way that does not expose them to multiple turn 1 attacks then go ahead and prepare the hell out of those positions and take a free dodge! At the end of the day, it’s perhaps most important to remember that this keyword is optional. But if they’d be sitting ducks for say…a Republic Commando attack, it’s best to just deploy them normally.

Personnel

From an efficiency perspective, you don’t gain too much of an advantage from either the single extra Veteran trooper or the “Rebel Veteran Squad” upgrade aka the “Double Stuff.” 63 points is 6 points more than simply having a second squad of five regular vets, which has the dual advantage of splitting enemy fire and allowing more scoring opportunities. As is the case with most of these “Big Squad” upgrades, while it can be fun, the juice is simply not worth the squeeze. This is double true of Rebel Veterans since more actual units also means you get access to more of the quite efficient Mark II Blaster unit on top of that.

Medical droids can be good if you have some open space and want to support a Commander or Operative you feel is at heavy risk of being focused on, such as Luke or Sabine. However, most of those hero units you’d want to heal move at normal speed and the vets…don’t. A Comms Officer is also a decent option since that not only adds another dice and health but also enables placing an Emergency Transponder, giving the unit access to a token or losing a suppression, either of which may be key.

Heavy Weapon: CM-0/93

This used to be a Range 3 gun, its update to the current stats was really the first thing that put Rebel Vets on the map.

There’s another reason the gun is valuable: Anti-armor. Although white dice are notoriously bad, that Critical 2 is a real spotlight for the unit. The DLT-20a on Rebel Troopers occupies a similar role with its 2 Black and 1 White Range 4 gun, but that only has Critical 1. Both dice only have 1 critical symbol on them so this is the potential to do twice as many criticals to pesky armor units such as snail tanks and AT-ST’s.

The slower movement of the Veterans now means that they gain more from having a range 4 gun than they did before. That being said, Legion 2.6 is generally a format where armies close within range 3 of each other quickly. At the end of the day, players have some interesting decisions to make when it comes to spend their points as far as the heavy weapon is concerned, but a little more on that toward the end…

Other Upgrades

Veterans also have training, gear, and grenade slots. Unfortunately, their Speed 1 movement makes many of the potential options here non-starters. Grenades are exclusively close range and this is a slow long-range unit. Since Prepared Positions often makes Recon Intel a waste (after all, if you can use Prepared Positions safely that’s better than getting a Scout move) the usual “5 point tax” we put on a lot of the Corps is likely a non-starter. Then there’s the training slots, none of which mesh with what the unit does particularly well. Funny enough, I think the only consistently worthwhile “other upgrade” is the one that requires you to put a Comms Officer in your personnel slot:

The Veterans’ Courage 1 and Speed 1 can be a nasty combination, but this card enables you to get either an aim or lose a suppression (usually the best two choices) when you need it most, which is typically going to be during the major engagement on Round 2. 13 points for the Officer-Transponder combo is honestly a decent deal for that reason.

Mark II Medium Blaster Trooper

The Mark II will come with every full Veteran squad that you buy, whether you buy them individually or (more economically) by getting the Echo Base Defender battle force which comes with 4(!) full units of Veterans and Mark II’s.

Detachment: Rebel Veterans: Here’s a keyword that changed quite a bit with Legion 2.6. What didn’t change is that you can only have one Mark II for every Veteran unit you have. One new feature, though, is how they deploy. It’s no longer strictly based on where the Veterans end up; the Mark II is truly its own unit now and can deploy wherever it wants. Additionally, Detachment units gain the “Prepared Positions” keywords of their parent units. What’s most important though is the change to how these units work when it comes to the allowed number of “ranks” in your army.

Detachments DO count for rank minimums, so if you wanted to only run a Veterans unit, a Mark II, and one more Troopers/Fleets/Veterans you totally can do that. They DON’T however count toward rank MAXIMUMS. This means that if you run 6 Veterans then you can run 6 Mark II’s for a total of 12 Corps units. That’s quite a lot, and is not as much of a “meme” choice as you may think given the fact that large numbers of activations will always be helpful winning primary objectives in today’s game.

Defense: Same as the vets, white die but with surge. They also used to be 3 health at which time they were pretty much universally maligned as the worst unit in the game, thankfully times have changed.

Offense: You got an A-280 Blaster Rifle if you need to move but that’s not what we’re here for, we want that sweet Medium Blaster. You can’t move and fire but look at that! Critical 2 and 4 black! Though the dice themselves are the same as the standard veteran squad the Crit 2 modifies those dice more effectively against both armor and cover. It is cumbersome though, so you can shoot then move but you cannot move then shoot.

Courage 2: Alright then, I guess a Rebel Corps unit can get 2 Courage! Given how pokey these guys are it really is more crucial than ever that they not lose an action during activation and with 2 courage they hold pretty decent odds of keeping their shit together to do that.

Fire Support: Gone are the days of adding dice to other dice, the new Fire Support simply means that you get Standby tokens with all face-up orders. This is a nice effect, the only problem is that the face-up it requires is often hard to come by in the scrappy, seat-of-your-pants, “mostly giving orders to the heroes” command pools that Rebels have access to. Still, you will likely get to use this feature a couple times per fight.

Sentinel: This is the keyword that pretty much all emplacements require being that they cannot move then shoot, which mitigates cumbersome a little. Naturally, this meshes with the free Standby token from Fire Support as well.

List-Building Strategies

Given the expanded scope of “Detachment” and what it can mean for army composition, as well as the changed nature of Fire Support, Rebel find themselves in a new quandary when it comes to these units. It boils down the the question of how to spend points. We will cover how to choose between different Corps options in another article, but let’s say that for whatever reason you’ve decided you want to field a few Veterans units and Mark II’s but you’ve only got so many points to spend. After all, much of the strength of Rebels comes from its hero units and Special Forces, meaning that pouring boatloads of points into Corps hasn’t usually been a winning strategy in the past. Let’s compare a few options, including their cost and the total number of hits/crits they’d be likely to make per round:

What’s not included above is the rate of criticals, but this is much less important than it used to be in the world of Legion 2.6. Here’s what’s most important to me: I think heavy weapons on Veterans are likely best left at home as long as you have enough points for another Veteran/Mark II combo instead. If we compare those last two groupings, going “naked” gets you TWO additional units (which, again, will give you an edge in scoring and spreads out suppression) and slightly more hits per round for only a total of 12 points. That ain’t nothing!

I would recommend the “Double Vet, Double Mark II” as a starting point for any Rebel list that has Vets at all (naturally this includes the Echo Base Defenders battle force which doesn’t give you an option). Then, since you’re playing Rebels after all, you should move on to adding in the Commanders, Operatives, and Special Forces that you want to center your list around. Then, after you toss in any Support or Heavies you want (which may be zero of course) you can see how many points are left to pad things out, ideally (in my opinion) with either Fleets or SX-21 Rebel Troopers so you can have a bit more Range 2 firepower.

Conclusion

Hopefully the above GIF made the Hoth music play in your head, if not here is the link to when the good part starts just for you.

Veterans can be the backbone of any successful Rebel army so long as you respect their weaknesses while exploiting their strengths as much as you can. If you deploy them carefully (avoiding Prepared Positions mishaps when they don’t have good cover) then their Low Profile can actually make them fairly sticky, and the loss of each one will be less bitter the more you focus on numbers more than attachments. Will they fold in front of a Clone Trooper unit? Absolutely, but it’s worth remembering that putting out massive damage is not the forte of any Rebel corps (aside from a hot-rolling Fleet I suppose). Their job is to exist on top of points and continue to exist long enough for the rest of your army to take care of business. So get to their desired destination (probably a back-objective) quickly and then just hold the line!

For the Mark II’s, you will likely to a lot of double moves on turn 1 since you won’t have shootable targets, which isn’t so bad because their larger base size makes them faster than their Veteran cousins. Then, so long as they’re Range 1 for the Coordination from the Veterans, they will start Round 2 with a Standby token that will limit your opponent from using their best shots against your more valuable units. You won’t get a lot of Standby attacks off per se. but you will have achieved something nonetheless. Just like with the Veterans, you’re gonna lose some Mark II’s, but as long as you can force your opponent to shoot them when they would rather have shot something else (such as a Sleeper Cell) then they’ll have done their job.

Thanks for reading, and may all your Mark II rolls be double hit/double surge!