Closed Lanes: Legion is Beginning to Feel Like a One-Way Street
November 18, 2024
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There’s just something special for me about playing a “two-box” strike team. Sure, intricately piecing together a team with units from many different boxes is a lot of fun, but there’s a certain simplistic joy that comes from plopping two squads on the table that are straight out of the box. Perhaps it is because, for one tiny moment, I feel less like a min-max power gamer.
Today, I want to embark on a fun thought exercise: looking at every box in the game and figuring out the optimal second box to pair with it. It also has a nice side effect: it creates a pseudo buyer’s guide for newer players looking to get into the game. My criteria for the “best” box essentially boils down to this: what would I say if a new player asks “Hey, I just bought X box, what should I buy next?” Of course, if they had just bought an Xbox I’d tell them to return it and get a PS5 so they can play The Last of Us and Horizon Zero Dawn.
Making a cohesive and effective strike team is very important, but that’s not the only consideration here. Ideally, we’d like to match the squads thematically and give a variety of interesting mechanics. We also want to give our hypothetical new player a strong foundation for expanding their collection. We’ll assume we already have the core set since that has several critical game components. Boxes like the You Cannot Run duel pack and the We Don’t Need Their Scum unit pack won’t be considered since they don’t include full squads.
It turns out that Shatterpoint has a lot of boxes released so far, so I’ll split this into two articles. To start, let’s focus on the Clone Wars era!
If your first Shatterpoint expansion is Dooku, you probably want to play droids. If your first expansion is General Grievous, you probably want to play droids. Luckily (or unluckily) getting these two boxes plus the core set will give you (almost) all released Separatist units. You’ll have a lot of mix-and-match options with three of each unit rank, plus a variety of 3pc, 4pc, and 5pc units.
If you’d rather not go the pure Separatist route, keep reading and you’ll see that Dooku is a decent complement to a few other Clone Wars boxes. At the very least Jango is a fantastic piece that will fit anywhere. Grievous is a little harder to make work if you’re moving away from pure droids, but I’ve enjoyed him paired with the Mother Talzin box.
If you want to see the Dooku/Grievous strike team in action then you can check out my very first Bombad battle report.
So you love Obi-Wan and started with the Hello There! box, where next? Let’s get this party started and … wait … well, I recommend the This Party’s Over expansion. Obi’s identity helps make Republic units very sticky as they can keep hunkers in melee but also spend them after defending to heal and move. Mace’s identity brings a Steadfast and Protection bubble for even more defensive tech. ARF are also a really strong building block for any Republic list, and they love it when Obi lets them keep their hunkers.
Speaking of ARFs, they also provide a big upgrade over the 501st if you want to rock an Obi/Anakin combo using your core set minis. Rex is also a core set model that will come in quite handy here. Unfortunately, Cody is a bit of a weak point, but Rex and Obi are best buds in Shatterpoint so that’s an easy swap.
The Bad Batch is also a great box to pair with Obi-Wan. Thanks to Wrecker they bring some of the same defensive tech as Mace but with some fun, different abilities. Much like ARFs, Tech and Echo enjoy keeping their hunkers in melee. If you are looking for something more competitive but a bit less thematic then the Bad Batch is the way to go,
If you want to see Obi and Mace on the table (the Rex version) then that is also covered by my first battle report. How convenient!
Luminara is an amazing character because she goes with anything. You can have a pretty decent list with just Lumi and the core set since Lumi/Maul plus All Mandos is a perfectly good setup. However, if we want to use more of the Lumi box then things get a bit tricky. I often don’t find myself including both Lumi and Barriss in the same strike team, except for Vader lists but he is excluded from this exercise. Luckily, the Bad Batch brings an extra secondary that gels well with Lumi!
The Bad Batch are a pillar of Republic list building currently. They are probably the Republic’s best bet when it comes to the mission Never Tell Me the Odds thanks to their speed and melee/ranged flexibility. If you want to run all four Bad Batch units together then Luminara is the perfect pairing. Crosshair loves wounding people but can’t usually move friends on his activation. Lumi fixes that with her identity. A good third box to pick up here would also be Plo Koon’s Lead By Example. Wolffe likes leaning into clone synergy with the Bad Batch while Plo can do some work with Barriss and/or clone commandos. He doesn’t make a great two-box pairing with either box though, unfortunately.
My favourite list here would be Lumi/Crosshair/Commandos with Huner/Wrecker/Techo. You can see something similar in action in one of my most recent reports.
Luckily for us, the two Dathomirians not found in this pack come in the core set (Maul and Asajj). As such, we have some flexibility with our second box. Both Asajj and Savage have the Separatist tag and some synergy to go along with that. Leaning into that tag, we have a choice to make between the Dooku or Grievous boxes. I am picking the Dooku box here. Dooku’s identity combos well with Mother Talzin, allowing them to double up on revenge triggers. Back in my day, before all these newfangled rebel releases, Dooku/Talzin was the way you played double-revenge lists!
If you want to try some Separatist-focused lists then Savage can go under Dooku and still have the same double-dash potential he has with Talzin. If you want to focus more on Dathomirians then Jango is a great secondary to splash under Asajj or Maul.
Running these two boxes as-is will be a fine list. If you want to get another Dathomirian in there then I would recommend Talzin/Savage/Nightsisters with Maul/Jango/Mandalorian Super Commandos. If you need some proof of concept, you can watch a Dooku/Talzin game here or a Maul/Talzin game here.
Now, some people will say that Hello There! is the best box to pair with Mace. If you want to lean into defensive shenanigans or just like the look of clones then scroll up a bit and check out that blurb. I, however, have enjoyed Mace/Padme more in my games. Padme’s squad brings a lot of mobility that complements Mace’s team well. Padme’s Royal Command combos well with Ponds’ Forward Scout if you want to quickly move bodies from deployment to the midline objectives.
One strength that Mace’s team brings is that he provides a lot of force and they don’t spend very much of it. This means that his counterpart squad can often go all-out with their abilities. The Bad Batch box can be a great pairing if this is why you like Windu. Wrecker particularly has a lot of nice-to-have abilities that he may not use much when force is tight, but with Mace’s plentiful force, Wrecker can cut loose. The Bad Batch also loves having ARF around, but you could say that about any Republic unit.
There are a number of boxes you can pair with Mace, but I’ve had the most fun with Padme & Co. Thematically it works well enough and it gives a solid foundation to build out the Republic faction.
Mace/Padme is how I’ve enjoyed Mace the most, but my best times with Padme have been in Plo/Padme lists. It all gels so well together! Handmaidens are still troopers, which Plo really cares about for his abilities. Ahsoka’s reactive ability only cares about whether the supporting unit is from the Galactic Republic, so handmaidens check that box as well (Rex, who has a similar reactive to Ahsoka, wants clone troopers). Supports can have crazy turns in this strike team. On the first attack use Coordinated Fire from the other support, second attack use Coordinated Assault from Sabe to let her dash, then after the combat action is finished Ahsoka follows up with a jump and attack. As you branch out into other Republic lists, Plo/Ahsoka/Handmaidens is a great squad to pair with whatever you want.
One drawback here is that we aren’t really utilizing Wolffe. In an exercise like this, we’re assuming that we’re playing Plo, and he vastly prefers Ahsoka in his squad. Wolffe could go in the other squad, but he cares about clone synergy so he’d prefer someone like Rex or Wrecker in the opposite secondary slot. Once you get beyond two box teams, however, Wolffe has great potential.
If you’re looking for a third box to go these two, this is where I’ll break my own rules and mention You Cannot Run. Vader/Padme and Vader/Plo are two very fun lists, albeit a bit anti-thematic if you aren’t into “what if?” scenarios. The problem there is you’ll be taking 501st under Vader, but as a Republic player I’m sure you’ll pick up ARF eventually anyway.
If you want to scout out what a Plo/Padme list looks like on the table you can check out my battle report here.
Cad’s box is an interesting one for this exercise because there isn’t a clear path for him. He likes bounty hunters, so Mando’s box jumps out immediately. However, that will give us two boxes from different eras, which is a little bit awkward as we start our collection. Instead, I’ve gone a different direction, choosing the Dooku box. Thematically this works decently well since Cad does a lot of work for the Separatists in the Clone Wars. Furthermore, Jango is a big upgrade over Aura as you expand your collection. Even a point down, Cad/Jango/Bounty Hunters is generally preferred to Jango/Aurra/Bounty Hunters. If you do want to play Aurra, then Dooku and the Magnas are some strong melee characters that she can damage for extra dice.
You can watch a modified version of Cad/Dooku here.
I’ll be very upfront here: I struggled a lot with Hondo’s box. Outside of Hondo/Bad Batch, he just hasn’t clicked for me, and I can’t recommend a four-box list here (Hondo/Jango/ARF with Hunter/Wrecker/Techo). Hondo only brings 7sp to the table, meaning he needs a 3pc secondary or support in his squad. Outside of Gwarm, all 3pc units in Hondo’s era are Republic or Separatist, and if you want to run those factions they often have better candidates for the primary slot. Unfortunately, Gwarm is, well, underwhelming. As fun as it would be thematically to have Hondo team up with Anakin or Obi-Wan, mechanically it just doesn’t click in this game.
At the end of the day, if Hondo is your first pickup then I assume you want to lean into the scoundrel theme, so my two-box pick will be … Lando’s squad? It opens up some future possibilities to turn Hondo into a rebel, which is kind of thematic, and it gives you a team of six scoundrels. Lobot also helps the Gwarm problem by giving out focuses, allowing Gwarm to be more mobile (potentially) while getting his big shot off. Not a lot of these characters are big fans of melee, but all the supports do and that’s half the bodies, so you should get Hondo’s identity going fairly often.
I should note somewhere here that Lando has not actually been released yet, even if we have spoilers. His box is scheduled for a November 1 release date as per the Asmodee store page.
Aaaaaand that’s it for part one! If you’re just starting out in the game, the Clone Wars era is a good place to begin because you’ll get some great units in the core set. As we’ve seen here, Dooku is a pretty useful box if you’re into bad guys. For the Republic, I find both Plo and Bad Batch to be pillars of the faction. Unfortunately, those two boxes don’t synergize especially well together so you may want to pick a lane if you’re only grabbing a few boxes.
Join us next time as we explore the rest of the boxes, focusing mainly on the Age of Rebellion era. In the meantime, let me know what your favourite two-box pairings are!
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