April 24, 2025  |  Written by Tyler Parrott

Almost since the game’s launch, I’ve seen people on social media clamoring for leaders that deploy into space. And I can certainly understand the excitement! As you’ll see, leaders deploying into space has been an exciting concept from the beginning of the game’s lifespan. And now that Jump to Lightspeed is fully released, and people are playing in the new space combat metagame, I thought I’d take a moment to recount where we’ve been with the concept of leaders deploying into space.

The Second Arena

We knew during the design of the game’s core mechanics that most of what we were working with was not going to be new to entrenched TCG players. With the pillars of the game’s design being “accessibility” and “fun,” we intentionally chose to use mechanics already well-established within the industry unless there was a compelling reason to experiment with something new. To some, this was a point of discomfort; how would we set ourselves apart from our competitors if we were using many of the same mechanics as them? It’s a fair question, and one we spent a lot of time thinking about. This thinking lead to us designing towards the things that make Star Wars™: Unlimited unique and special. One of those unique features is the leader card, both the build-around front ability and the unit that deploys during the game. Another is the existence of two arenas.

If this game were not a Star Wars game, it probably wouldn’t have the two arenas. That’s because the game began life as a series of pitches from a variety of game designers, all of whom prioritized different elements of the franchise. The pitch that was individually the strongest was from Lead Designer Danny Schaefer, but I submitted a pitch as well! Having been both a card gamer and a Star Wars fan for most of my life, I had a lot of familiarity with the Star Wars card games that came before, even ones I hadn’t played. And having grown up with The Phantom Menace specifically, I have a soft spot for the “multi-front finale battle” which occurs in that film (as well as Return of the Jedi and Rogue One). Therefore, I built my pitch around bringing back a mechanic from a previous Star Wars card game that I felt had never achieved its full potential: competing for control of multiple arenas of combat simultaneously. Ultimately my pitch wasn’t as strong as Danny’s, but incorporating the concept of multiple mutually exclusive arenas of combat both improved the strategic decision making within the game while also reinforcing the thematic excitement of playing a Star Wars game.

When you take these together, it was immediately obvious that there was compelling design space in specifically allowing leaders to deploy to either arena. It very specifically was the crossover between two features of Star Wars: Unlimited that make it unique. So why haven’t any leaders deployed to space until Jump to Lightspeed?

Unique Challenges

The answer, of course, is that for a meaningful chunk of Spark of Rebellion’s design, there were leaders who deployed to space. In fact, if you look at the art of the leaders, you’ll notice some telltale signs that indicate which leaders those were. There’s even a unit in the set who, for a very brief moment in time, was a leader who would deploy to space (it’s Wedge Antilles—the first draft of the set had more than 18 leaders). We always try to make the art, subtitle, and mechanics of a leader all point towards the same “moment in time” that the card is depicting for that character, so that it feels holistically complete while also leaving lots of room for other interpretations of the same character in the future. But with all the moving parts in design (especially during Spark of Rebellion), sometimes things have to be smudged a bit to make all the pieces come together.

Consider the Hera Syndulla leader. The art depicts her in the cockpit of the Ghost, but nowhere in her mechanics does it matter that she’s an expert pilot. Her mechanical design is leaning much more in the direction of “team mom,” bringing all the Spectres together. With the advantage of full hindsight, I would have commissioned an art piece of her leading the crew in a heroic rescue, or being a mentor in the ship’s crew quarters, both of which highlight her leadership qualities rather than her piloting acumen (thus allowing an art piece of her as a pilot to stand out on a card where the mechanics were about her being an expert pilot). But when the art was commissioned (and for many months afterwards), Hera Syndulla deployed into space…as did Han Solo (Audacious Smuggler), and Grand Moff Tarkin (Oversector Governor)! (Note that Tarkin’s art depicts him on the bridge of a star destroyer, not on the Death Star. That was intentional.)

We were committed to making them work as space leaders, even though we hadn’t fully worked out the kinks of the execution yet. The lowest-hanging fruit, of course, would be that the leaders deployed as their ship. Consider a leader where the front side was Han Solo, but the deployed unit was the Millennium Falcon. Then, when the Falcon gets defeated, it returns to being Han Solo as a leader. In a vacuum, this execution felt perfect—the space unit matched all the other space units in theme, and it made perfect sense that a character like Han would jump into the cockpit of the Falcon and join the fight in space. In practice, however, it ran into an enormous roadblock: the uniqueness rule.

Star Wars: Unlimited’s uniqueness rule functions differently from the uniqueness rules of previous Star Wars card games. In this game, you can have multiple copies of the same character in play at the same time, so long as they are different versions of that character with different mechanics (indicated by having a different subtitle). However, that wasn’t the case for much of the design process. We started the same place as all the previous Star Wars card games: if you control a card named Han Solo, then you can’t play any other cards named Han Solo. Under this more restrictive uniqueness rule, the hypothetical Han Solo leader described above wouldn’t be allowed to play any card in their deck named Han Solo…or any card named Millennium Falcon.

As you can imagine, this felt extremely problematic for many of the designers and playtesters working on the game. We wanted to incentivize thematic deckbuilding and make cards that represent close allies have synergy with each other. We wanted the Millennium Falcon to have obvious synergy with Han, so that the Falcon became one of the first cards players considered for their Han decks. If Han decks couldn’t ever play the Falcon while the leader was deployed—even if that was only 1-2 rounds—that was an extremely loud signal to players that they shouldn’t even put the Falcon in their Han decks to begin with. And if players were disincentivized from playing the Falcon in a Han deck, then would this even feel like a Star Wars game?

This dilemma proved to be unresolvable for the design team. It was one thing to say that Luke Skywalker (Faithful Friend) decks couldn’t play Luke Skywalker (Jedi Knight), since those were recognizably the same person, but to say that Han Solo (Audacious Smuggler) couldn’t play Millennium Falcon (Piece of Junk) was breaking away too much from the experience that players wanted. This was even more egregious because of how arbitrary it was—it’s not like Han Solo (Worth the Risk) had the same restriction. Therefore, we decided that the character’s name couldn’t change when they deployed into space.

So what if it just…didn’t?

We actually took this possibility very seriously and playtested it for a few months. The logic was that we (intentionally) weren’t saying who the pilot of the Millennium Falcon was, so it wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility that Han was flying a different ship. That way we could still have Han deploy to space, but without preventing him from including the Falcon in his deck. We even explored possible art or graphic design treatments to help justify having a pilot appear, on their own, in the space arena as a unit. But we knew we were going to make pilots that would attach to ships, and this felt like it was so similar in execution that it would muddy the experience. It was also asking our players to accept a lot of abstraction to make three cards work the way we wanted.

This is what spelled the end for the space leaders in Spark of Rebellion: we were working so hard to make three leader designs work, and when we looked at the rest of the leaders in Year 1 there was only one other leader who we intended to deploy to space (Admiral Trench was in Twilight of the Republic for a brief window of time before getting pushed back to Jump to Lightspeed). With zero space leaders in Shadows of the Galaxy, and only four out of 54 leaders in the first year deploying to space, it wasn’t worth jumping through this many hoops—especially not when we could instead save that design space and make it a selling point of a future set. So Han, Hera, and Tarkin got redesigned to be ground units and we held back on the idea of space leaders for the time being. The uniqueness rule would eventually change, thus invalidating our original concerns, but it was already too late to be commissioning more leader art even if we did want to go back and put space leaders back in Spark of Rebellion, which we were now committed to not doing as we started looking forward to the themes of Jump to Lightspeed. After all, if ever there was a set to introduce space leaders, the ”space battles” set seemed like a natural place to do it.

Stay On Target

If the problem with Han Solo deploying to space outside of a ship was that nobody was buying the implied narrative that he was in an unspecified ship’s cockpit, then the solution, clearly, was to put him in a specific cockpit. And what a better place to do that than the set where piloting was a prominent mechanical theme?

We knew almost immediately once we started working on the Piloting keyword that we would want leaders to be able to pilot ships. It would be our first opportunity to get leaders into the space arena in a way that felt natural, and it would let us put our headliner mechanic onto a bunch of leaders (which is always desirable). However, since the keyword changed how a card is played, and you don’t play a leader, it didn’t…technically work. (We would sort out the minutiae of how the Piloting keyword was going to work later.)

But making the Piloting keyword work on leaders wasn’t our first priority! First, we had to figure out what would make Pilots have a unique identity. Our first thought was to make their attachment low-cost, but low-impact, such that their “non-unit” side revolved around their identity as a Pilot card. Thus, the first draft of all the Pilot leaders had “Pay 1 resource and exhaust: Flip this leader and attach it to a friendly unpiloted Vehicle,” as well as a variety of abilities that were active while they were piloting. It meant we didn’t have to worry about the existing upgrade removal, and it made sure that the mechanic (being a pilot) was the most prominent feature of the leaders’ play patterns.

However, we quickly discovered that the uniqueness of making all of the pilot leaders’ abilities be on their deployed side came at a pretty steep cost. It meant that the deckbuilding requirements for all of the pilots were the same: fill the deck with as many Vehicles as possible. It also meant that the most significant tactical decision you could make during a game (when to deploy your leader) never engaged with the Piloting mechanic, and putting your leader into a ship felt more like a chore than something to be excited about. It also meant that Pilot leaders really didn’t want to have Pilot units in their deck, since the leader often got attached to nearly every friendly Vehicle during the game.

After discussing the play pattern of this leader design in depth, we pivoted towards something that felt closer to the leader play pattern that players already liked: have a strategy-defining ability on the front, then deploy as either a ground unit or as a pilot (just like how a unit would) in a dramatic moment. This also meant that we could make our Pilot leaders really strong—if they were only coming out once per game, then their abilities as pilots could be as impactful and memorable as their unit sides and their identities as pilots could be an exciting feature rather than a deckbuilding requirement.

Risk Versus Reward

While making Pilot leaders deploy like regular leaders—even when piloting a ship—achieved the play experience we were looking for, it introduced a unique and difficult problem: it meant that a deployed leader, which in many cases is a deck’s most important tactical tool, could be defeated by a 1 cost neutral event (Confiscate). This proved to be a huge hurdle in development, as there were many players who categorically refused to play Pilot leaders specifically due to that potentiality. We considered a number of possible ways to mitigate that, from making pilots their own card type (and thus not susceptible to upgrade removal) to putting “this upgrade can’t be defeated by enemy card abilities” on every leader. Ultimately, we found that the audience was not a monolith. Some people found the added rules or text complexity to be far more of an issue than leaders’ vulnerability to upgrade removal. So, we began to consider engaging with the dilemma in a way that embraced the identity of a trading card game: with variety.

The premise of a trading card game is that not everyone will own—or even want—every card. If everyone had every card, there would be no need to trade, after all! Much of the joy of a TCG comes from the fact that players get to customize and personalize their game experience. If a player finds a card or mechanic to not be fun, they don’t have to play it. If we designed a variety of different Pilot leaders, that would allow players who wanted to play a pilot deck to choose the version of the mechanic that they personally enjoyed the most, even if it was different than someone else’s preferred version of the mechanic. We looked at all of the Pilot leaders and sorted them into a few distinct “buckets”:

• For the players who were most concerned about effects like Confiscate, we designed leaders that were either fully immune to the effect (Luke Skywalker) or could easily redeploy as a pilot (Poe Dameron).
• For players who were concerned about Confiscate but wanted a different style of deck, we designed leaders that had medium stats but who guaranteed immediate value in the form of a When Deployed ability that couldn’t be removed along with the pilot upgrade. This is where we positioned the Spotlight Deck leaders (Han Solo and Boba Fett) along with Lando Calrissian and Darth Vader.
• For players who were willing to accept a higher level of risk, or were extremely confident in their ability to predict a metagame where players wouldn’t be playing Confiscate, we designed leaders with powerful stats and abilities for their cost—but which did need to stay in play in order to affect the board. This includes leaders like Asajj Ventress, Wedge Antilles, and Rio Durant.
• For the players who wanted to take the highest risk for the highest reward, we designed our most aggressive leaders to be pilots that deployed on 4 resources but who were all-in on their need to stay in play. Kazuda Xiono and Major Vonreg were developed around the existence of the upgrade removal weakness, but with the promise of the most aggressive leader available as a reward if left unaddressed.

This is somewhat representative of how TCG cards are made writ large: since it’s impossible for any individual card to make everyone happy, it’s important that each card have someone who loves it. By targeting individual cards to individual segments of the audience, it means that a card is more likely to find a home, even if another segment of the audience hates it. And if two segments of the audience love and hate alternate parts of the card pool, then their ability to trade with each other allows everyone to be happy in the larger metagame experience. The hope is that, as long as most players have a Pilot leader that speaks to them, then most players will get to enjoy the new mechanic, even if most Pilot leaders don’t speak to everyone.

Future Leader Space

Looking back at where space leaders started, I never would have predicted that the first space leaders would be upgrades that attach to space units already in play. However, what’s exciting about this unexpected implementation is that it doesn’t preclude any of our original ideas. Just because our first space leaders are Pilots doesn’t mean that our original ideas—of leaders deploying into the space arena as Vehicles with different names—couldn’t also occur at some point as well. And who knows, given that we didn’t foresee this path to space leaders entering the game, perhaps there are other implementations that we haven’t thought of yet!

I can’t say when we will see our next space leaders, but it’s not design space we intend to use in every set. Any set could have a space leader, if we have a strong reason to do it, and when we do, I hope it’s exciting and perhaps a little unexpected. And for now, I love seeing players engaging with leaders in a new way.

May you feel inspired to try something new!