April 9, 2025 | Written by the Star Wars: Unlimited design team

Last month, we made the announcement that we would not be suspending any cards from Premier. In the announcement, we noted concern about the win rate of Han Solo (Audacious Smuggler), given his high presence in Top 8 and dominant overall win rate in the Twilight of the Republic Planetary Qualifiers. A 35% overall tournament win rate for Han Solo represents a clear power outlier, but announcing a suspension with the release to Jump to Lightspeed seemed like it would arrive too late and solve the wrong problem. We knew that the powerful Han Solo decks, especially double-Cunning Han Solo, were getting relatively few new tools from the set, while Jango Fett (Concealing the Conspiracy) would be receiving massive upgrades with IG-2000 (Assassin's Aggressor) and War Juggernaut. Boba Fett (Any Methods Necessary) and Kazuda Xiono (Best Pilot in the Galaxy) represented possible new aggressive angles for Han Solo to contend with in the Space arena, and Admiral Piett (Commanding the Armada) had potential as a control deck that could still play powerful units even if slowed down by the resource interaction from DJ (Blatant Thief). To quote Design Lead Danny Schaefer in our Meta Updates article from March:

“Ultimately, our analysis of the current metagame along with our internal testing suggest a strong possibility of a major Premier format shakeup with the release of Jump to Lightspeed—a shakeup that could very well reduce the prominence of Han Solo/DJ decks. With that in mind, we want to err on the side of not interfering in the metagame until we've seen what happens when Jump to Lightspeed comes out...and of course, we'll keep an eye on how the format is shaping up and be ready to step in if anything unexpected arises in the early days of Jump to Lightspeed.”

Well, the shakeup has clearly arrived, and Han Solo has certainly been dethroned. However, given the results from our inaugural Sector Qualifiers, the overall health of the metagame is in a worse state than where we left off in Twilight of the Republic. For this reason, we will be suspending multiple cards in the Premier format.

Effective April 11^th, 2025, Triple Dark Raid (Shadows of the Galaxy, 194), Jango Fett (Twilight of the Republic, 16), and DJ (Shadows of the Galaxy, 213) are suspended from Premier.

Triple Dark Raid

For Shadows of the Galaxy and Twilight of the Republic, Triple Dark Raid existed happily within the confines of Cunning's identity; it provided temporary power, and it had a real element of risk attached to it. At its most powerful in pulling a Ruthless Raider, you could clear out multiple units, take a bite out of your opponent's base, and ultimately not feel too bad about the downside of having spent so many resources without putting permanent units into your own arenas. It performed at its best on the crucial 4 resource turn, where you could demolish smaller units, and also pick out the perfect unit for your upcoming 6 resource turn as well. Importantly, the earlier you found Triple Dark Raid, the better; it had a finite window of power in the early game, and largely diminishing returns later on. Playing a high enough density of powerful Vehicle units to get value out of Triple Dark Raid was a real deckbuilding constraint and had meaningful risk to maximize the power it provided.

With the advent of Jump to Lightspeed, Triple Dark Raid has instead become the best over-the-top direct damage event in all of Star Wars™: Unlimited, dealing up to 13 damage to a base for only 6 resources, thanks to Devastator (Hunting the Rebellion). Jump to Lightspeed's increase in the quality of the Vehicle unit pool gave redundancy to Ruthless Raider in War Juggernaut, making powerful 4 resource turns even more consistent. Triple Dark Raid and Devastator give overwhelming inevitability to more aggressive decks, an archetype that should feel beatable once you've wrestled away control of the board. Instead of maximizing its power on the 4-resource turn, Triple Dark Raid gets stronger and stronger as the game goes on; even on 7 resources, being able to find a Devastator to play in back-to-back turns is an extremely difficult amount of damage to deal with.

Outside of the Aggression pairing, Triple Dark Raid has seen success in Admiral Piett decks, finding The Invisible Hand (Crawling with Vultures) to put multiple Droid units into play, while also pushing damage or taking out other space units in the process. Triple Dark Raid had a staggering 100% representation in the Top 8 decks of our first Sector Qualifier between Admiral Piett and Jango Fett leaders. Due to its unhealthy play pattern in terms of raw damage output, the lack of risk the card now has compared to its initial design, and due to its overwhelming tournament success, Triple Dark Raid is suspended.

Jango Fett (Concealing the Conspiracy)

While Triple Dark Raid has exceeded what we feel is acceptable for the amount of damage that a single card can do in 1 turn, it alone does not represent the whole of the Jango Fett leader's success. The addition of War Juggernaut and Devastator opened up Jango Fett to exist as an extremely aggressive burn deck, where in Twilight of the Republic he largely saw success as an aggressively-slanted tempo deck. With the new additions of IG-2000, War Juggernaut, and Devastator, it is strongly evident that even without Triple Dark Raid, Jango Fett can return to a slightly slower playstyle and still find massive success with his ability to exhaust any number of units while deployed. Jango Fett's ability to exhaust every unit an opponent controls is doubly frustrating with his 7 HP, making him very difficult to defeat in combat.

Ultimately, we understand that a suspension of both Jango Fett and Triple Dark Raid can feel heavy-handed to some. With a suspension to solely Jango Fett, we would expect Boba Fett (Any Methods Necessary) to find success with the same Triple Dark Raid shell as current Jango Fett decks, and the metagame would remain extremely similar with a different leader. With only Triple Dark Raid suspended, we would expect Jango Fett to still take advantage of the same vehicles at a slower pace, and the same leader would continue to grossly overperform at the top levels of competition. Jango Fett was the most-played deck at each of our Sector Qualifiers, and even with a target on his back as the deck to beat, his percentage of the field increased dramatically between Day 1 and Day 2 at each event. Given the absolute dominance that Jango Fett and Triple Dark Raid have demonstrated in such a short amount of time after Jump to Lightspeed's release, claiming 15 out of 24 of the Top 8 spots in our Sector Qualifiers and representing 5 of the 6 finalists, we feel that quick and aggressive action is required to preserve the health of the competitive landscape for future Qualifiers.

DJ (Blatant Thief)

As we make changes with the intention of bringing the top performing decks in line, we also want to make sure that we're not simply putting the old king back on the throne. We chose not to act on the prevalence of Han Solo sooner because we had expectations that other decks would become better, and the metagame would shake up on its own. However, as we cull the power outliers, it's necessary to also take action on the Twilight of the Republic data, to prevent the format from regressing to what we've already seen in previous months.

DJ's ability to permanently steal resources with such ease was simply not an intended use of his mechanic. We do not intend to errata cards for balance purposes in any capacity; the card you pull from a booster pack should, if at all possible, do what the card says. We also don't want to take pre-emptive action on possible mistakes that do happen in the development process; we want to let them breathe in the wild before we step in. DJ actually came out of the gate relatively low on the Shadows of the Galaxy Planetary Qualifier rankings, overshadowed massively by the now-suspended Boba Fett (Collecting the Bounty). That tame showing led us to leave the interaction for Twilight of the Republic, where the absence of Boba Fett really let the power of Han Solo and DJ shine in full force. Han Solo, in multiple aspect pairings, is able to play as an aggressive midrange deck capable of throwing away card advantage to get ahead of the curve and play more powerful units than other decks. However, the leader also existed as the best control deck, with multiple powerful Smuggle effects at his disposal once his hand was empty. Any other true control deck should be able to compete with Han Solo in the late game, but DJ made it impossible to get there. While there are ways to build around Han Solo and make sure you can defeat a DJ unit on sight, oftentimes the threat of DJ was even more powerful than DJ himself. Because Han Solo is able to play above curve immediately, holding up your resources to deny a potential DJ meant you were not using your resources to defeat the units that had already been played.

Ultimately, the suspension of DJ is intended to act as a correction to Han Solo towards his intended power level, but we do still expect Han Solo to be a strong deck in the metagame. While Jango Fett represents significant play pattern concerns with his new Jump to Lightspeed tools, especially while deployed, Han Solo represents a midrange pillar of the format that we don't want to remove completely. We still expect Han Solo to perform well in upcoming tournaments and recognize the real possibility of Han Solo being a contender for taking down the Richmond Sector Qualifier. However, we believe that without DJ, his power level will be significantly more in line with other decks, and that the overall metagame will be healthier with Han Solo rather than without.

Looking Forward

We had a lot of time to get Spark of Rebellion right, but for the rest of the first year, development was exceptionally tight for our small team. It is clear we made some mistakes under the increased design cadence of the new mechanics in Shadows of the Galaxy and Twilight of the Republic. While now suspended in Premier, Boba Fett (Collecting the Bounty) existed for the purposes of internal playtesting for each of these sets, something that skewed our metagame predictions and caused additional outliers. Jump to Lightspeed, and especially sets beyond, marked a dramatic increase in our team size, and therefore our development capacities.

Triple Dark Raid was a relatively acceptable card at the time it was created, with its high power level offset by a sense of risk. However, the dramatic influx of powerful Vehicle units in Jump to Lightspeed gave Cunning/Villainy decks enough tools to mitigate that risk and make the card consistently powerful. It is important that we continue to make sets based around popular themes, and we didn't want to diminish the excitement of a whole set due to the existence of a single card. As Legends of the Force debuts as a Force-focused set, we are acutely aware of the possibility of Force trait payoffs from the first year of the game exceeding their intended power level. When the set releases in July, expect us to take quick action again if any outliers prove to be too much—but we do not expect to make any suspensions preemptively.

The direction we are taking today has been guided by three important factors: the tournament data we've observed, acknowledging mistakes in our development process, and most importantly, listening to community feedback. Adding suspensions to a trading card game is a challenging step, and not one we take lightly. Star Wars: Unlimited is at its best when there are multiple viable decks to choose from, and when gameplay involves meaningful choices. Losing a resource permanently or having your entire board exhausted in a single action took away from what makes the game fun, and it was especially frustrating when these strategies were also the most powerful and most popular. We understand that these changes are sweeping further than the suspension of Boba Fett (Collecting the Bounty), but we fully expect that it makes the game resoundingly better for everyone, giving room for even more cards to find success in competitive environments.

Thanks for reading!