Hello everyone! Lead Game Designer Danny Schaefer here with an announcement to share regarding card legality in the Premier format:

Effective November 8, 2024, Boba Fett (Collecting the Bounty) is suspended from Premier.

A suspended card is not legal to play in any events in that format for as long as it remains on the suspended list. This includes both Competitive- and Casual-tier Organized Play events. Our team will have regular check-ins—at least once per set—in which we’ll update the community about our thoughts on the competitive metagame and an evaluation of whether cards should be added to or removed from the suspended list. 

This means that, starting on November 8, the Boba Fett leader from Spark of Rebellion will not be legal to play in any Premier format events; he will remain legal in Twin Suns, Draft, and Sealed.

This is a major decision, and we know that you all will have lots of questions. In this article, I’ll do my best to answer as many of those questions as possible and give real insight into the process that went into this decision and what players can expect going forward, speaking as a representative of our design and development team.

Why take action now?

We don’t make the decision to suspend a card lightly. Our default stance up to this point has been to let the metagame evolve early in the game’s life, knowing that things will continue to shift as more sets come out and the card pool expands. But the dominance of Boba Fett decks is too much to ignore. We strive for all players to be able to compete in a fair, fun environment on a level play field, and the Boba Fett leader goes against those core values.

In the first set of Planetary Qualifiers, Boba Fett decks represented around 40% of Top 8 finishers and more than 55% of winners. That’s far above the line of an acceptable metagame share for a single leader. It’s making the experience of playing in Premier events difficult to an extent that we need to take direct action. We did talk about whether it was worth waiting to see if the metagame could shift to counter the Boba Fett leader after Twilight of the Republic’s release, but ultimately we felt it best to proactively step in now. While the new set will shake up the metagame to some degree, we can’t say with confidence that it will fully unseat Boba Fett, and the risk is too great to potentially allow another few months of Premier with that level of dominance. Acting now allows players to build Twilight of the Republic decks and prepare for the next PQ season knowing what to expect without the specter of Boba Fett hanging over their heads.

The team had extensive discussions on what form that action would take, but ultimately settled on suspension as the clear best choice. Suspending the Boba Fett leader is clean and easy to understand; it’s timely, in that we can take immediate action when problems arise; and it’s precise, allowing us to target only the most problematic cards without collateral damage elsewhere. We’re confident that suspending allows us to directly address metagame issues in a way that’s effective and minimally disruptive compared to other options. While we also strongly considered an outright permanent ban, we feel that suspension better reflects our philosophy—that while the Boba Fett leader may be clearly too strong now, we will take honest looks in the future as to whether he can safely return.

I do want to briefly touch on alternatives we discussed, knowing that players may have questions. We strongly dismissed the idea of power-level errata—for instance, changing a card’s cost or stats. In a physical card game, it’s too problematic for a card to fundamentally not do what it says, especially as a burden for newer or more casual players. We discussed some variants of a restricted list, limiting the ability to play certain cards without making any card entirely illegal. But any such list would have to be meaningfully larger and more complex than a suspended list, would have difficulties working with leaders and bases, and would create potential for significant problem cards to continue to dominate. We also discussed the concept of leader retirement, effectively banning a leader only after it had reached a certain threshold of wins or high finishes in competitive events, but we ultimately disliked this concept for a few reasons. It lacks timeliness, potentially allowing a bad metagame to persist much longer than we want; it only affects leaders, meaning we very well could also eventually need a banned or suspended list to deal with problematic non-leader cards; and it has significant overlap with the goals and function of our rotation system for Premier (which we’ll be sharing more details of next month).

Speaking of rotation, another factor that makes us comfortable with a suspension is the knowledge that a card suspended from Premier is still playable in other formats. You can still use Boba Fett as a leader in Twin Suns. We have always planned to support a non-rotating competitive format when the first Premier rotation does hit, in which Boba Fett will also be playable. And of course, you can always play him in casual games outside of official events. 

Why suspend Boba Fett specifically?

Our conversations covered numerous possibilities of exactly which card or cards to suspend. The Boba Fett leader himself is very powerful, but he also exists in the context of a powerful shell and support pieces. The Cunning-Command-Villain archetype plays many of the game’s most powerful midrange cards, and Boba Fett also gets access to specific synergy cards in Fett’s Firespray and Boba Fett’s Armor. There was meaningful discussion of suspending some combination of these other pieces while allowing the Boba Fett leader to remain legal.

Ultimately, we settled on the Boba Fett leader himself as the clear choice. He is the most severe power level outlier and his power level issues are exacerbated because he’s a leader. Leaders carry special weight in this game because they define archetypes, because you have guaranteed access to them in every game, and because a deck can only ever have one leader. Boba Fett’s combination of stats and ability have proven to be too far ahead of the curve for a 5-deploy leader. With him being so far ahead of other midrange leaders, he does more to exclude other options and suppress metagame diversity than any other single card. There are plenty of powerful events and units in the game, but they can go in a variety of leader archetypes and exist alongside other powerful cards in the same deck. Boba Fett being so far above-rate precludes other midrange leaders (especially in the Cunning/Command/Villain aspects) from being viable in the metagame. Regardless of what specific card choices in these decks shift from set to set, it would likely remain optimal to have the Boba Fett leader at the helm.

There is some chance that removing support pieces instead of the Boba Fett leader could have allowed versions of his deck to exist in a balanced state. But that plan would have required suspending multiple cards, and a real possibility that we’d need to suspend more cards as time goes on to keep the Boba Fett archetype balanced. We already see evidence that Boba Fett is adaptable and powerful enough to lead multiple archetypes to competitive success: all 4 base colors were represented among Planetary Qualifier Top 8s. The fact that Boba Fett was already a top archetype in the Spark of Rebellion metagame before the printing of Boba Fett’s Armor also lends credence to the fact that Boba Fett himself is the major issue. Attempting to remove cards around him would carry serious risk of Boba Fett decks continuing to be top tier and push out other options.

We are well aware that many players enjoy the playstyle of Boba Fett decks and that those decks have played an important role in the metagame, particularly as a predator for aggressive leaders like Sabine Wren. We are confident that other leaders can step into Boba Fett’s place in similar midrange shells, providing that stylistic option and metagame check in a way that is still powerful but less egregious. We also believe that the Boba Fett suspension and the influx of new cards in Twilight of the Republic will open opportunities for new leaders and archetypes to flourish.

How did we get here?

I’ll start by stating the obvious: the Boba Fett leader was a development mistake. If we knew back then what we know now, we never would have let him go to print with that combination of abilities, stats, and deploy cost. I’m sure many people are wondering how a mistake like that makes it out the door, and I’ll do my best to give some insight into the process and how we’ll do better in the future.

The development of Spark of Rebellion was a time of maximal uncertainty. While we now have established baselines for abilities and stats relative to cost, for the first set we were building those baselines without any existing precedent. That process involved a lot of iteration as we looked to find the optimal numbers to create fun and compelling gameplay. For much of the playtesting process, this meant several leaders had stats that were more in line with where Boba Fett ended up: imagine a 5/10 Darth Vader, a 4/9 Luke Skywalker, or a 2/7 Sabine Wren. In this environment Boba Fett was far less of a power level outlier, and in fact was rather average for much of playtesting. As the process continued many of the other leaders were nerfed around him, and while Boba Fett was also adjusted, he retained relatively strong numbers.

There was significant debate on the Boba Fett leader late in the development process, given his uniquely high stats relative to his deploy cost. Ultimately the decision won out to take the risk of keeping him strong given that we hadn’t seen evidence of him being overpowered in our testing up to that point. We knew he was pushing the limits in terms of numbers, but felt that he could be strong-but-balanced relative to other leaders—clearly this was incorrect in retrospect. Other leaders were also pushing limits in various ways—Sabine Wren and Emperor Palpatine at the extremes of the cost curve, Hera Syndulla breaking aspect limitations, even IG-88 pushing the amount of damage a 5-deploy leader could put in play—and Boba Fett ended up being the one that we pushed too much.

With more sets under our belt, and now having seen the metagame develop in the real world, we have a much better sense of baselines for cards. Even in our internal testing, by the time we were in development of Twilight of the Republic we recognized that Boba Fett had likely been pushed too far and were balancing new leaders accordingly. We will absolutely continue to create powerful, exciting, and splashy cards going forward, but will do so with a continually improving understanding of where to be cautious. It would be naïve to say we’ll never have a power outlier like Boba Fett again—to never make mistakes would mean never taking risks—but we have learned a lot from him.

What to expect going forward?

We will keep watching the metagame and aim to provide regular updates on what we’re seeing. Our next update will be in March 2025, and we’ll update again every few months after that. These updates will include an evaluation of cards currently on the suspended list and whether they could safely be removed, as well as the possibility of adding cards to the list. We don’t anticipate suspending cards often, but we will be ready to take that step if a situation arises again that warrants it. 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. We will be clear in our communication of timing and plan around competitive seasons and set releases.

In implementing this Boba Fett leader suspension, we’re well aware of other powerful cards and decks putting pressure on the metagame right now—for instance, Sabine Wren and Energy Conversion Lab. Based on our internal discussions and playtesting, we expect these decks to be strong but fair in the new metagame after Twilight of the Republic releases. If these aggressive archetypes rise to the top, we’re confident the player base has the tools to target them effectively. There are already a number of strong decks which can be tuned to have good matchups against aggressive strategies. We also expect to see significant metagame shakeups with the releases of upcoming sets like Jump to Lightspeed and Legends of the Force. But, of course, we will continue to monitor the metagame to see if it matches our expectations.

Thanks for taking the time to read, and I hope I’ve been able to address most of your questions around this suspension. We’re committed to listening to our fans—please keep telling us how you feel and participating in community conversations. I’m very excited to see what new decks players bring in this fresh, wide-open format with the Boba Fett leader gone and a new set coming into the mix. Until next time!