The Jar Jar Cup, Part 2

Good morning gamers,

Round two of our four-round escalation event was this past weekend and it was a blast! We were going to pair off winners and losers from last time, but the organizer decided to do a full random allocation again, so I wasn't all but guaranteed to face my son (which is good, because after facing him four times in practice, I still hadn't won a game). 

This time around, we were playing with 650-point lists, Standard list building constraints (though we used the "Team" option in Tabletop Admiral, since that's a 600pt limit), but instead of playing with POIs and the standard scenarios, the tournament organizer decided to have us play what he and his brothers usually play: "total annihilation" (or as I will be calling it, "King of the Hill", since it's actually pretty hard to totally annihilate someone's army in five rounds). Let's look at the lists and then see how we did!

List #1: 9-activation Rebel Alliance

This is my list - and I'll be honest, while I dabbled with an Empire list and a Republic list that I thought could be fun, I knew there was a good chance I'd be facing my son Gorgoroth's list and that meant that Impact was gonna be necessary. Also, people in my group have been talking trash about Commander Luke, so golly I needed to take him this round! 

• Luke Skywalker (Commander) with Burst of Speed, Offensive Push, and Recon Intel
• 3x Rebel Troopers
• 3x AT-RT with Laser Cannon
• 2x X-34 Landspeeder with RPS-6 Rocket Gunner, Unstable R5 Astromech, and Mark II Medium Blaster

While I played a lot with an alpha-strike version of the list that had M-45 Ion Blasters on the X34 Landspeeders along with Rebel Vets with CM-0/93s and a squad of Rebel Troopers with MPL-57 to lean hard into anti-armor, I really wanted to get Luke into the list and I got a clear signal from Centaur that he wasn't using Luke. 

The Landspeeders are really great on the first turn, since I can shoot twice with 1 red/5 black/3 black at range 2 with BOTH Landspeeders . . . hopefully this gives me a quick lead with only minimal damage suffered from the Astromech upgrade. All this piles in with the damage from three AT-RTs. Turn 2 opens up Luke as an attack option, along with any of the remaining armored units.

All told, I have 3 activations that can shoot at range 4, 2 activations (technically three with Luke/Long Shot) that can move up to range 3 and crack through armor, and all of these units are equally happy if armor isn't in the mix and we just have to clear "guys upon guys."  I also have three Corps units . . . yeah, I didn't have the points for SX-21s or MPL-57s to make them dangerous against armor (or unarmored) matchups. I'm really happy with the list and glad that I got to use Luke since Centaur didn't need him. Speaking of Centaur . . .

Math Hammering: Ranking Rebel Corps Units

Good morning gamers,

I played a lot with the Republic at the beginning of 2024 and then moved to Rebels as the summer hit. With Legion 2.6 changing a lot of things, I went back to the Republic for a while, got into a good swing with them, then moved back to Rebels. Their play style . . . is very, very different from the Republic.

One of the advantages of starting my plunge into the world of Star Wars Legion is that every unit in the Republic is not only elite (especially since the Phase I Clone Trooper profile got merged with the Phase II Clone Trooper profile to get the Courage/Reliable boost from the latter profile at roughly the same price as the former profile), but their costs are also heavily optimized for value. Whether it's Clone Trooper Infantry, ARC Troopers (both full squads and Strike Teams), Clone Commandos, and Anakin (my son's preferred cup of tea)/Obi-Wan (my preferred cup of tea), it's not hard to find a "good" unit in the Republic - and you can build your list around any number of the aforementioned choices and you'll do just fine.

Rebels . . . don't have that simple of a calculus. In fact, part of the reason why Republic list building is so easy is because you can pretty much pick one unit in each unit type (Corps, Special Forces, Support - and to a lesser extend, Commander) and if you just run those, you're going to get a very optimized list. Until ARF Troopers and Clone Marksmen are released later this year (ARFs are on pre-order right now), the Republic really only has one Corps option and one Special Forces option (with a Strike Team variant) that can "do the Clone thing", so list building is easy. Rebels have TONS of choices and to activate some of them, you might have to tailor your list in other unit types to really get the benefit of the juice.

Today's post kicks off a six-part series on Rebel list building where we'll be wielding the "math hammer" to understand what units - and upgrade suites - are the "best" option for Rebel players. Because you have to take at least 3 Rebel Corps options in your list, we'll begin with Corps and then move on to the other unit types (Commander, Support, Special Forces, Heavy, and Operative - probably in this order).

Taxonomy Overview: What Is "Optimal" for Legion 2.6?

Because the objective conditions (both primary and secondary) are so heavily skewed towards having more activations than your opponent in pre-defined (and often stationary) parts of the board, Legion 2.6 is about both taking enemy units off the board (whole units - not just rendering a unit inert by killing off most of its models) and keeping your own units on the board. This means there are two measures of effectiveness (MOEs) that we can use to determine if a unit is "good": average expected damage (AED) and average expected health (AEH).