November 9, 2026 | Written by Aaron Miles

Hello, Star Wars™: Unlimited players! Game Developer Aaron Miles here with a metagame update:

Effective immediately, Chimaera (Ashes of the Empire, 52), Koska Reeves (Ashes of the Empire, 79), Neel (Ashes of the Empire, 248), and Aggressive Negotiations (Secrets of Power, 179) are suspended from Premier.

Chimaera (A Frightening Reality)

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Chimaera. When our first rotation hit earlier this year with the release of A Lawless Time, a lot of wind was taken out of the sails of Vigilance Villainy. Most of the events that defeat units had rotated, and the aspect pair was largely absent from meta conversations when discussing top decks. Ashes of the Empire then seems to have overcorrected. Metagames should contain natural ebbs and flows, and unfortunately Chimaera is a very stalwart ebb that isn’t allowing much flow.

The most played cards from the A Lawless Time meta are different than the most played cards from the Ashes of the Empire meta. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said between Ashes of the Empire and Homeworlds, where the 4 most played cards in the format remained unchanged so far other than their ordering. Chimaera is simply doing too much. The removal of an enemy unit paired with a self-contained engine to stabilize your base health is a space no other card really occupies. No other 7 resource card in the Premier format is keeping up with Chimaera’s impact, making it so decks not in the Vigilance Villainy aspects are struggling to compete once the game gets to that point.

On top of being the best 7 resource card in Premier, Chimaera is arguably also the best 9 resource card in premier, as leaders like Lando Calrissian (A Lawless Time, 18) and Tarfful (Homeworlds, 10) will happily pay an aspect penalty for this juggernaut or enjoy the versatility of putting it in their discard pile to enable their Anakin Skywalker (Legends of the Force, 70). While players including cards in their deck with the intention of playing it with an aspect penalty is not inherently a problem, it can point to a card being over the line when it’s done with regularity.

Koska Reeves (Warrior of Mandalore)

While Chimaera is too efficient at stabilizing players in the late game, Koska Reeves has been occupying a similar space in the early game. If you can meet the (relatively easy) hoop of having a friendly unit being defeated, you’ll be rewarded with an output of power and HP well above what is normally available for 4 resources, and some of those stats come with a shield. When paired with the Director Krennic (A Lawless Time, 8) this hoop becomes borderline trivial, even if your opponent hadn’t been playing in the same arena as you.

While a major strength of Chimaera was that nothing else at its cost point could compete with it, Koska Reeves highlights the power of redundancy. Other difficult to remove 4 cost Sentinel units like Imperial Armored Commando (Ashes of the Empire, 48) and Captain Typho (Secrets of Power, 98) all but ensure that players will have a way to put a halt to their opponents attacks from the Ground arena on the 4 resource turn. Of the Sentinels, Koska Reeves appears to be both the most efficient in terms of stats as well as the most flexible in number of decks the card can be put in thanks to only having a single aspect, and as such is the target for our suspension.

Neel (The Cutest Boy)

The next card we are talking about is Neel. Neel reads as an incredibly strong card in a vacuum, and we were confident there was eventually going to be a deck to support him. What was a surprise to us was how early that deck popped up, with many Ahsoka Tano (Ashes of the Empire, 9) players at our Galactic Championship opting to play Neel with as little as one other unit who could take advantage of his ability. With the release of Homeworlds, breakout decks like Wicket (Homeworlds, 14) are playing…more than one other unit who can take advantage of the ability.

While Neel is certainly a high-power card, his suspension is a little more contextual to the other cards on this list. While Chimaera is giving too much stabilization to the late game, Neel can let aggressive strategies take off too quickly. With Koska Reeves being suspended, a meaningful level of counterplay to the aggressive openers of decks like Wicket and Ahsoka Tano is being removed from the format. With Wicket already winning the inaugural Regional Championship for Homeworlds, we want to make sure that aggressive decks don’t snowball out of control in a format absent of Koska Reeves and Chimaera.

Aggressive Negotiations

It’s time to talk about an incredibly efficient combat trick and answer what is likely your main question – why now? I’ve spoken to the play rate of cards like Koska Reeves and Chimaera, and how they’ve held onto their top spot for a couple of sets now. When the Secrets of Power meta became a thing of archived history, Aggressive Negotiations went down as the 138^th most played card in the format, which is very, very far down the list. It wasn’t until our first rotation and the release of A Lawless Time that it really found its stride (and jumped to the #1 most played card in the format). At the peak of Aggressive Negotiations, we knew that Ashes of the Empire was on the horizon and would slow the format down to a point where Aggressive Negotiations wouldn’t be as much of a pain point.  While the powerful control tools from Ashes succeeded at that goal, we're now suspending two of the strongest cards that protect against Aggressive Negotiation's wins and don't want the final months of this Premier format to be dominated by a card we already know to be format-defining.

Looking Forward

As many of you know, our team expanded during development of A Lawless Time, making Ashes of the Empire the first set with a dedicated development team the whole way through. One of our main goals was to push the power level of our cards to new heights, and it seems we overshot in some areas. However, we don’t want to be afraid of taking risks and making our game better when those risks pay off. Our goal continues to be to push for a deep metagame with a diversity of viable strategies and archetypes, and we'll continue to learn from the risks we took.