Previews courtesy of FFG, Janklord on Instagram and the Bothan Network’s Cardboard Chefs.

Han Solo – I Got a Really Good Feeling

The new Han Solo will essentially allow you to turn your credits into unit damage.  Yes, you can sacrifice any type of token, but anything other than a credit weakens your board state and is not likely to be worth only 1 damage to a unit.  It’s not something you want to build around at least.  

Han has a couple of issues though.  His leader ability has you sacrifice tokens, but he unit ability wants you to have a bunch in play.  This is similar to Vader in that the two sides are directly competing with each other.  That’s not a great design.  

So, to use Han you want to be generating a lot of tokens.  If credits are so easy to generate that Han can be Scrooge McPorging through a pool of credits to ping things and then use his On Attack, then the 1 point of damage isn’t going to be significant enough to matter.  Your opponent can generate credits just as easily and instead of pinging for 1, they will play some big bomb of a unit.

He also has the issue that the card in the game that enabled all the ping leaders to succeed at various times, Tarkintown, is rotating out.  How good is a leader that pings for 1 damage without Tarkintown.  Likely not very good. 

In all, the new Han Solo doesn’t seem to work well with anything, including himself, and doesn’t really serve much of a purpose.  Kind of like his movie actually, so maybe they nailed it!

Combat Exercise

Let’s assume that the exhaust part of the card has to be paid in addition to the resource cost.  Without that part you could play a unit, have it come in exhausted and then for 1 more resource (or credit) have that unit just also have two experience tokens on it.  That seems unintended of course.

Even with the limitation this could still be a very good card in limited environments.  Yes, it delays a unit attacking for a round but for sentinels or just making some small unit into a pseudo-bomb it could even be worth going off aspect in draft and sealed.

Patient Hunter

This hunter may be waiting a little too patiently to be worth playing.  At 4 cost a 3/3 is below the resource curve.  The hunter could target itself in which case you are paying 4 for effectively a 4/4 unit, however that unit won’t be ready until two turns later.

A somewhat interesting, albeit extremely risky move, would be to use Patient Hunter to beef up an opponent’s unit but keep is locked down for some number of turns.  The obvious downside here is that eventually that unit is going to be really quite large and become something requiring a different solution.

Another take on this could be that there is a card yet to be revealed that could combo quite nicely.  Tyler Parrot’s teaser article for A Lawless Time mentioned a card that would have the text “…additional regroup phase…”.  If there are ways to chain up regroup phases to make something larger but still allow it to be ready for the following round, that could prove interesting as a combo.

Millennium Falcon – Dodging Patrols

Seems playable at first glance and that is our take overall.  The synergy with basically any ground unit is nice as are the 5 hit points for only 3 resource cost.  The Rebel trait may not hurt either.

Kudos also on the art of this one.  It immediately calls back to the asteroid chase scene from Empire Strikes Back.

The biggest downside is that it doesn’t combo much with the new Han leader outside of Han being a ground unit when deployed.

Lady Proxima

This is the first card we’ve seen so far that has the ability to just pump the credits out indefinitely on its own. Doing something to create a credit in round followed up by this hitting the board the next round will add up quickly into something rather large coming into play on your side of the board.

This card has some Doctor Pershing vibes to it. On its own not a giant threat, but absolutely will be a target that your opponent will want to clear off the board due to the effect of just pumping out those credits. She’s also got a bit of chest burster vibes.

The Master Codebreaker

Gambits matter now.

Two nice effects on this well dressed unit. Immediately digging for a Gambit Event and then being able to play them for a reduced cost is a nice single card combo. This would allow you to dig and potentially play something for free as your first action of round one.

The only downside is the limitation on available Gambit tagged cards. The payoffs simply may not fully be available yet, however we haven’t seen the entirety of A Lawless Time yet so there are almost certainly at least a couple more on their way. Gambit is also a trait that has shown up in prior sets so this card will only continue to get better as additional sets leverage the same trait.

Improvise

This is likely not the Gambit that The Master Codebreaker was looking for.