Closed Lanes: Legion is Beginning to Feel Like a One-Way Street
November 18, 2024
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In this article we will look at the revised Separatists cards that came with the 2.6 update for Star Wars: Legion. We’ll also talk about some significant rules changes that impact how Separatists work.
I’m going to assign each unit a grade based on the sum of the changes they got and how they interacted with the new rules because grades are fun. Let me know if you disagree in the comments.
Let’s talk about the big rule change that impacts nearly all droid units first: AI.
Previously, to avoid AI triggering, a unit with the AI keyword needed a face-up order token. This created an interesting puzzle in both the list-building stage as well as throughout the game, where droid players had to build a list with face-ups in mind and a plan to manage or mitigate their AI, as well as position their units during the game to take advantage of the myriad tools available to droids to manage the drawback (Coordinate, Override, and Direct, in particular). On a given turn you could also just decide to allow AI to trigger (and sometimes you were forced to through opponent action), which was a bigger deal on some units than others. AI was widely seen as a way to offset the powerful droid trooper keyword, which prevents droid units from suffering from the suppression condition for having suppression tokens equal to or greater than their courage, which is a massive benefit.
Now under 2.6 to avoid AI you just have to… be at Range 3 of a commander, or have a faceup. That’s it. It’s really trivial to manage now. The only times it really becomes an issue now are 1) if your last/only commander gets killed at a key moment during the turn or 2) you have a unit off completely by itself on one of the objectives that requires splitting your army in two and basically playing on two separate 3x3s, like Breakthrough. Even in the case of the second scenario above, however, you can always still just issue an order to said unit the old-fashioned way, which is even easier now since you can do that at unlimited range. Oh, and Override is just Range 5 now, so if you happen to have that keyword, you can just use that.
Anyway, TLDR, AI is a lame non-keyword now. Moving on.
Let’s dig in to the unit updates, starting with everyone’s favorite droid support commander, who got both much cheaper and even more awesome.
Each of the unit cards got minor updates, which we’ll go through in a minute, but there is one massive change here to each of these cards: Exemplar. For a unit that could already generate a bunch of tokens each turn (via Strategize and Aggressive Tactics face-ups), this is huge. Each of your Super Tactical Droids is now Super Padme, except they also do other stuff, like Direct. Since the T-Series also has Exemplar now you can do silly things like give both of them an order with Aggressive Tactics and then have two floating surge tokens each turn plus whatever tokens they give themselves via Strategize/Bolster/Aim/Dodge.
Here are the other changes to their cards:
Generic: Gained Surge/Crit (previously surge/hit), Blaster Rifle dice upgraded to Red/Red/Black. With the cover changes and the Super Tac’s Sharpshooter 1, this Rifle shot is extremely legit now. It’s pretty normal to just push three hits through with Pierce via Lethal. The generic has become my favorite Super Tac due to his cost and the fact that he gets a smattering of each of the three primary Super Tac abilities (Direct, Override, Strategize) instead of just two of them like Kalani and Kraken.
Kalani: Downgrade from Sharpshooter 2 to Sharpshooter 1, Blaster Rifle dice upgraded to 3 Black. The Sharpshooter downgrade is whatever, since the difference between Sharpshooter 1 and Sharpshooter 2 is extremely marginal with the cover changes. The big thing with Kalani is how much value you get out of his extra tokens from Strategize 2 with Exemplar units available to drop those tokens on.
Kraken: Blaster Rifle dice upgraded to 3 red. The lack of Direct is still an issue even though it’s much less relevant for AI reasons because it’s still very relevant for Aggressive Tactics reasons, but if you want a Super Tac that kicks ass and takes names, Kraken is your droid.
Arguably already the best support commander in the game, the Super Tactical Droid gained Exemplar and better dice. What more could a droid lover ask for?
Yeah, this guy got Exemplar as well. He’s 60 points. You can get Exemplar for 60 points. Also, he got surge to defend, which isn’t a huge deal because he still melts immediately if your opponent can actually see him.
So yeah, no change really, besides Exemplar.
He still dies to a stiff breeze, but it’s a 60-point unit with Exemplar. Did I mention you can get Exemplar here for 60 points?
Oh my, what a glow-up for our favorite Sith Lord. Now he can really feel like he deserves that Signature Look of Superiority.
Here are all the changes to Dooku:
So yeah, woof, that’s a lot. Let’s break it down.
Deflect being always on is less relevant for Dooku since he natively surges to block now, but it’s a neat little deterrent. A much bigger deal is that permanent surge/block, which of course applies in melee, separates Dooku from nearly every other force user in that department; force users generally struggle to get melee defensive surges without using Into the Fray. Yoda and Palpatine both have permanent surge/block, but they also only have five health; Dooku has six health. In practice, this makes Dooku the most durable force user in the game besides Vader.
Direct: Trooper unit is awesome, giving Dooku a tool previously just reserved for the droid commanders in the faction. This is also the most liberal iteration of this keyword; every other version of Direct is more restrictive (usually Direct: Corps, or Direct: AI in the case of Super Tactical Droids). This means you can even use it on, say, Ventress or Maul, to just give them a free order every turn. There is no other character in the game that just hands out orders to any other character for free every single turn.
The Force Lightning upgrade is neat; it hurt before, but now it hurts slightly more.
There’s an elephant in the room here, though: Force Push went up by 40 points. This means a Dooku equipped like you need him to be equipped is still insanely expensive (my Dooku runs at 240 points). I’ve come to appreciate that Force Push is still a mandatory part of a force user’s kit while being hilariously bad for its cost on non-MOTF force users. I wish Force Push was just built into each Force user’s kit natively; I feel like it would be easier to cost them all properly, but that is a topic for another day.
Anyway, Dooku is a lot better. Is it enough better to offset the massive Force Push increase? I’m not sure. I hope the answer is yes but I think the jury is still out on that one.
This would unquestionably be an A without the Force Push cost increase.
Everyone’s favorite cyborg general who favors bravely running away got a big upgrade as well. Is it enough? Let’s take a look.
Like Dooku, Grievous also got access to a free faceup, which is great for Aggressive Tactics builds. If you want to be able to bounce it you can always throw a comms relay on your Magnas, which I would recommend. Entourage also allows you to run four Magnas, if that’s a thing you want to do.
The change from Impervious to Immune: Pierce is welcome and makes him deceptively durable (relative to previous) against other saber-wielders. He still just kind of dies to Anakin and Vader though, since unlike those two he doesn’t have access to extra attack mechanics or Force Push.
The Trophy Lightsaber change is also nice, particularly the addition of Critical 1, which gives you roughly an extra hit on the pool. You lose the ability to split fire with Arsenal which certainly can be an issue if you’re in melee with two things or you want to shoot something with your gun and whack something with a trophy lightsaber, which you can’t do anymore. I don’t think it would have been a huge deal if they just gave the trophy lightsabers Critical 1 and kept them separate with Grievous still having Arsenal; it would give him Critical 2 when combining both of them, but he’s still really surge-hungry anyway and I’ve found his killing power to be pretty lackluster still.
Before we look at the whole package we have to mention the Supreme Commander rewrite.
I always felt the old Supreme Commander was a bit underrated (being able to spread out wounds via Guardian is always nice), but this is substantially splashier and there is no question it’s good. The surge token mechanic has echoes of Obi-Wan’s General Kenobi which just dumps gobs of surge tokens on your units, which is less useful than it sounds since they can’t really share them, but it’s still solid. The real money keyword here is Ruthless, which is absolutely murderous on B2s in particular.
Or rather, it would be, if Range 2 was still a hard thing to achieve. Having played Grievous with B2s extensively at this point, however, I haven’t found myself using it much, simply because starting on turn 2 my opponent is generally forced to walk into engagement range of my B2s anyway due to how the new objectives work. I could see using it as a way to zone your opponent on turn one, but then you probably aren’t getting any use out of the surge tokens.
That’s a long way of saying this card is certainly good now, but I think it’s a bit overhyped, simply because of how close everything is anyway. Take it for the surges and get excited about when Ruthless is useful, which won’t be every game.
Let’s be real, this is still a big upgrade, since Grievous was previously like, a D. However, I’ve found that he still gets suppressed easily (backup doesn’t help with that), and he still wants like four training upgrades in his one slot, he is still very surge hungry, he has trouble getting to the fight relative to other saber wielders (no Burst of Speed), and he still sort of just gets stuck in melee with units he doesn’t want to be stuck in melee with. Trained in Your Jedi Arts also still does terrible damage, since it doesn’t convert surges, ignore cover, or have Pierce. Supreme Commander makes a difference if you are running him with B2s but he still suffers from “saber user without force slots” syndrome, and I’d probably rather just go double Exemplar if I’m running B2s or pay the premium for Dooku.
Okay, so the B1 card didn’t actually change at all, which is interesting that they got a new card. This tells me two things: 1) they plan to do new cards for everything, and 2) this is all the love B1s are getting because they got a new card with nothing. As someone with a shelf full of lovely-looking B1s, this makes me sad.
The AI change makes them even more sad. But why? They have AI: Attack, which is like the worst version of AI?!? The primary benefit previously of B1s was they were an extremely useful tool for pumping out face-ups to manage AI (both to themselves and to other droids). Now that’s just… not really necessary. Without Coordinate they’re just numerous, cheap, and bad, which might have a value by itself. I’ve found however with the new game’s lethality they just die even faster than they did previously, which is to say, they basically just die immediately.
That begs the question, why take them, especially when B2s got a massive beef upgrade?
There might be something to taking the double-size unit, but I think I’d rather still just pay for B2s, especially as 13-14 model units are tough to fit places.
Not only did they not get any changes to their card, but their primary benefit was almost entirely obviated by the AI change, and the increased lethality of the game does not look kindly on their already notorious fragility.
On the other hand, there are these guys. They got several changes:
The cost increase aside, that save upgrade is massive and well worth the offset of losing Armor 1. These guys are absolute slabs of beef now and make extremely worthy targets for cheap droid medics (by which of course I mean droid Repair). The dice upgrade on their main weapon, in addition to making it a melee weapon, is also huge. B2s already hit like trucks, now they hit like… well, even bigger trucks, especially if you can shell out the points for the expensive but intimidating double-sized unit.
The changes to how objectives work are also a massive benefit to B2s. Previously, Range 2 was generally both very lethal but also hard to obtain; now it’s still very lethal but like, the normal engagement range for most fights starting on turn 2.
The cover changes help too; coupled with giving them native Impact on their card it makes the ACM a much more attractive option now relative to the HA.
Lastly, the AI change was also huge for them, because AI: Attack was pretty rough on them. Previously if you wanted to run B2s en masse Override was basically required. Now you can just, sort of spam them without a plan except just having a commander.
My favorite way to run these guys is spamming the base unit with the ACM and a repair bot, but I’ve seen people having success with a handful of the double-sized units as well.
This is your new default corps unit choice now. Hopefully, you can find some to buy…
BXs got a lot of changes (some of them less obvious) and it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Here’s the list:
The Jump 1 is certainly a welcome edition and seems on theme for a unit that does lots of acrobatics in canon. The other stuff is basically all nerfs. The cost increases in particular hurt a ton; sniper/shields was previously the most popular way to run these guys (almost exclusively in ExD) and that combo went up by a whopping 18 points to a ridiculous 122 points for a five model unit, which is just insulting when GAR can run new ARCs with a clone commander for 80 points.
The Dioxis change is kind of a wash; arm-able bombs would have been silly with the way new objectives work, so I get the need for the change, but it feels kind of boring. Poison vibros (the base unit with a Dioxis and Vibroswords) come out to 98 points which is basically the same cost as a Magnaguard with a whip.
The one thing BXs still have going for them is Scout 3; Scout is a hugely important keyword in the new edition and one that droids generally lack, so there is some utility there.
BXs are still a reasonably effective unit but they just look a bit expensive for what they bring to the table now, especially compared to alternatives that fill comparable slots/roles in Magnas and B2s, but do it with much more durability.
These all got the same changes which is why I’m grouping them together; full Armor changed to Armor 5. This is, in objective terms, a nerf, though in practice Armor 5 is still basically full Armor since it’s still rare for dice pools to reliably get above 5 hits. The game is also substantially shorter and bloodier and units have less time to dedicate to plinking away at armored units, which all adds up to these units being more durable than before in practice.
The Snails are especially good with droids now having access to Exemplar, which really makes Defensive Protocols shine. Run two snails with double Exemplar in Experimental Droids and thank me later.
The generic Snails also got Critical 1 on the Ion Cannons and the ExD Snail got Critical 1 on the Heavy Blasters, which is a decent little offensive upgrade. All of these units also got cheaper.
These units did a bit of a maneuverability hit with the removal of the displacement mechanic from the game, which can mean sometimes they just get locked out of going where they want to go.
Overall, Separatists are looking like the most improved faction in the update besides Republic, with overhauls to Dooku, Grievous, and B2s as well as massive upgrades to the already good Super Tactical and T-Series Tactical droids.
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