Recent Changes

Weekly Play Packs

Our local store finally received their weekly play packs and we finally hand them in hand this week.

The changes to the weekly play cards might be one of the best changes to come to Star Wars Unlimited since it launched. The card treatments for the new A Lawless Time weekly cards are so significantly better than the prior sets. Gone are the wonky fog borders, now replaced by borderless cards with stellar alternate artwork.

In past weekly events at our local shop the play packs were kind of an afterthought. People would get them and open them, but aside from a legendary card or something specific needed for a master set collector, they mostly went unappreciated, unused, and often just discarded or even left on the table not even worthy of the effort needed to walk them over to the trash bin.

Contrast that with yesterday when people were eager to get and open the packs. Multiple people at the weekly were anxious to put together play sets of specific cards. Others wanted one of each to have as a set. There was a good deal of trading occurring just from the three card weekly packs.

Good job FFG. Well done.

Premier Rotation

For the first time in a long time the meta seems pretty wide open.

We’re diving headfirst into the mostly unknown. The top eight cuts of mostly Hans will be gone now. At least prior to major events there doesn’t seem to be a consensus top deck or even decks. Leader tier lists seem to be all over the place at this point.

Yes, of course there are still strategies that are strong such as Space Aggro, or simply Aggressive Negotiations that players need to be aware of and for which they should prepare to face in an event. However there are various setups for each of these and it’d be debatable which is better. Luke or Vader for the Space Aggro type? Jyn or Beckett for Aggressive Negotiations? Other setups entirely?

While there are still pangs of pain in not having some staples of the game available in Premier like Resupply, Surprise Strike, Power of the Dark Side and Green Squadron A-Wing, at least having the meta this seemingly wide open is a breath of fresh air.

Good job FFG. Well done.

Standard Boxes

Standard display booster boxes now have level one prestige cards and no more base variant foils. The number of hyperspace cards found in packs has been increased. Overall this has made regular packs significantly more fun to open.

Good job FFG. Well Done.

We also know that this is the last set that will have rare bases in the rare pack slot. Having opened two rare bases in a six pack sealed event, I can tell you that will be a welcome update when Ashes of the Empire drops.

Good job FFG. Way to be self aware, admit a flaw, and work to fix it.

Carbonite Boxes

Carbonite boxes also had some adjustments. They too no longer have the base foil cards and are jam packed with hyperspace variants. There are also multiple levels of serialized cards being out of different total numbers.

Unfortunately there have been some distribution issues where some boxes have showcases in each pack.

Now of course Danny, Jack and Tyler are not stuffing the packs into boxes for all of us players and fans to open. This is almost certainly a manufacturing and packaging issue. It was mentioned on a recent stream that FFG was aware of the issue would be investigating.

Well as of this week’s stream announcement FFG has now said that the so called “god boxes” are due to an overprinting of leaders in approximately 100 boxes of carbonite. The normal 1 in 48 carbonite pack drop rate should not be impacted by this.

Again, good that FFG was aware, looked into this, and found a root cause. Not an ideal look to have a production issue like this, but glad it has been addressed swiftly and that the standard drop rates have been deemed to be unaffected.

Wrap Up

The recent changes are pretty darn good. The only real adverse things are almost certainly unintentional extra printing and weird distribution of showcase leaders, and the already slated for a fix issue with the rare bases not being in the rare slots moving forward.

It should be considered a very good thing that the FFG team works to continuously improve the SWU product not only by releasing new sets of cards, but by tweaking things based on player sentiment and feedback.

Overall, very well done FFG team. Keep it up.