What does it take?

In Danny Schaefer’s own words from the first suspension article posted on the Star Wars Unlimited website back in November of 2024:

We will largely be looking at metagame dominance—especially the share of Top 8 and winning decklists—in Competitive-tier events as a primary metric in determining when to take action. We’ll also weigh the amount of time a deck has been at the top of the metagame, being more willing to act if a deck has been dominant for an extended period of time. We may also factor in play pattern considerations, such as if a top deck wins via an infinite combo that’s difficult to interact with or otherwise creates games that play out in an undesirable way.

Paraphrasing and summarizing this a bit we can intuitively say that suspensions would be likely to fall into two categories, things that are just generally not fun play patterns and then the other being sheer dominance.

Prior Suspensions

The original Boba Fett leader was the first suspended card and the reasoning was the clear overbearing dominance of the leader at the time.  Boba accounted for about 40% of the Top 8 finishers and more than 55% of the winners in the set of Planetary Qualifiers prior to the release of the Twilight of the Republic set.

The second batch of suspensions was announced in early April 2025, shortly after the release of Jump to Lightspeed.

Triple Dark Raid was included in 100% of the Top 8 decks of the first Sector Qualifier.  The cited reasons for its suspension were the “unhealthy play pattern in terms of raw damage output” and also “the lack of risk the card now has compared to its initial design”.

Jango Fett had morphed from an aggro-tempo style deck into “an extremely aggressive burn deck”.   It was determined that even with Triple Dark Raid getting suspended that Jango could still be seen as not having a fun play pattern as he could continue to exhaust any number of units while deployed.

DJ was included at that time as well because his ability to permanently steal resources “was simply not an intended use of his mechanic”.  Han Solo, Audacious Smuggler, was viewed as being a midrange pillar of the meta at the time and removing DJ would bring Han’s power level back in line with other decks.  “The overall metagame will be healthier with Han Solo rather than without.”

What About Now?

There have been many calls from the SWU community seeking the suspension of Force Throw.
Is it actually worthy of a suspension?

Dominance

Both players in the final matchup of the Galactic Championship had Force throw in their deck, 6 of the top 8 had it, and over half of the top 64 decks included the card.  While it doesn’t hit the Triple Dark Raid 100% of a top 8 from that first Sector Qualifier event, the initial numbers do put it in line with the Boba Leader prior to his suspension.

In recent Planetary Qualifiers the percentages in the top 8 groupings has gone down a bit, but still probably hovers around the 40% mark.

Unfun

Being forced to discard has been around since the earliest days of CCGs and in some cases could be considered a basic mechanic of the gaming genre.  If Force Throw only targeted the opponent it would not be fun, however it could be played around at times by selecting a card with a low enough cost as to not defeat any of your units in play.  When an opponent uses the discard on themselves and pitches their own high cost card to do a ton of damage to your unit they get extremely efficient removal.

For example, spending 7 resources to play a Luke Skywalker (SOR) and then having your opponent pay 1 and discard their own Luke card to defeat yours feels pretty bad.  It feels even worse when they use their remaining 6 resources to play some other threat onto the board.  It cost your opponent the extra card from their hand, but now they have a pretty nice game state advantage.

Speculation

So will Force Throw be suspended? 

While only FFG can answer that question, we can say definitively that the card had a dominance level recently that has rivaled prior suspended cards.  It can also be argued that it leads to less than fun play scenarios. Plus, with every future printing of a Force attributed unit the card becomes more and more of a potential problem as demonstrated by not being even considered as an issue prior to Legends of the Force being released.

It’s probably going to be watched extremely closely over the next month or so as this set’s Planetary Qualifiers have results coming in.  It would not be shocking at all to see continued dominance and then a suspension of Force Throw towards the middle or end of this set’s meta.

Counterpoint

Force Throw has been around for 5 sets now, and while it’s always been a good card, it has never felt oppressive before.  Triple Dark Raid was clearly too powerful, especially when Jump to Lightspeed was released.  It drew you a card, discounted your vehicle by 2 resources and cheated an action to play the unit.  Force throw does none of that.  At best it is a 2 for 1, often a 1 for 1 and sometimes a 1 for 2 where it costs you an extra card.  

It can be played more consistently now, with the addition of seemingly endless Force units, but it is functionally no different than it was.  Being one of the best cards in the best decks isn’t reason enough.  For a card to be suspended it needs to be oppressive or restrictive, not just prevalent.  It is quite possible that Force Throw will stick around until the entirety of the first year’s sets rotate out of Premier.