Where All the Pilots At?
It’s time we brought up the elephant in the room, that no one else is talking about. Jango Fett in Milan. What’s that? Everyone is talking about Jango? And nothing else? Well, that’s awkward. Backup plan, Carbonite boxes… No, that’s old news. Finn? No, no-one cares about Finn.
I know, let’s talk pilots and the impact of Jump to Lightspeed on the largest weekend of SWU tournaments to date.
The first Sector has come and gone in Milan, Italy with a whopping 546 players! That is a fantastic turnout and it’s awesome to see so many people excited to play in the large events leading to the Galactic Championship.
We previously published an article about the potential pros and cons of the piloting mechanic in general, which you can go back and read about in our “Will Pilots Fly?” post. Now we have some real data we can look at to see how big of an impact this mechanic had on the game. As it turns out, it looks like the invite got lost in the mail because the impact was minimal at best.
We put our porg statisticians to work for 2 days since the end of Milan. First thing they said was “Do the Wookies have to be in the same room as us?” But, once they got to work we got some hard numbers. Out of the 546 players in Milan, 54 of them decided to take a new pilot leader for a test drive. That’s actually a pretty good number, especially considering how prevalent Jango was. I know, I used the “J” word and I said we would talk about something else. If that 10% of the field were evenly distributed throughout the event I’d say mission accomplished. Here is where the cracks start to show. Only 2 of those pilot leaders made it into the top 100.
So why did a 10% play rate only convert to only a 2% top 100 rate? There are a lot of reasons, which have been addressed by us and others. Other leaders being too good, upgrades answer being too efficient and plentiful. They had an uphill battle from the start. This may not work itself out unless Confiscate, Fang Fighter and Bamboozle get banned or in a year when they rotate.
Ok, if pilot leaders didn’t fare so well, how about pilot units? Surely there are some great units in Jump to Lightspeed, right?
Most definitely, Jump to Lightspeed brought us some amazing cards. Again, with our porg statisticians hard at work they came back with “Can we have some more blue milk?” We gave them some more and after many hours and deliberation they, once again, gave us some solid numbers.
Out of the top 50 players there were a total of 1,054 ground units used and approximately 2500 cards total. The top ground unit was Crafty Smuggler at 74 copies, followed by War Juggernaut at 69 copies. The 18th most widely played ground unit was Boba Fett, Feared Bounty Hunter with 17 total copies run. Boba Fett is pretty good since he pings for 1 or 2 when played, which Jang…I mean some decks, utilize quite well.
Here are the total number of pilots played in the top 50
That converts to 5.4% of all ground units played (5% if you discount Sidon since he’s not an offense driven pilot) and 2.3% of all cards played. Again, not horrible, but when a set of cards is completely built around a mechanic, this did not seem to have the competitive impact that was hoped for. Other than Boba Fett, none of these cards seem integral to their respectives decks. They are good and maybe a slight upgrade over previous cards, but none of them are the main drivers for their decks. Even Boba could be pulled and those decks wouldn’t suffer much. For example, the winning deck didn’t even use him.
Another thing we can see is that only a total of eight 3-cost pilots were used in the top 50. When the answers to a card are so inexpensive and efficient, you can’t risk spending 3 resources to play it. Chewbacca pilot was an incredibly hyped card, but it made no impact. He gets better if control takes over the meta, but even many of those decks can just defeat it with little effort.
We have only had one large official competitive level event so far, with two more this coming weekend, so things could change. The meta will adjust to Villain Cunning Aggression with ways to combat it. Will pilots be a part of that answer? Hopefully. The idea of pilots is fun and thematic, and I would love to be able to play with more of them. As is, this doesn’t seem terribly likely.
How do you think pilots have worked out so far? We’d love to hear what you think.