June 26, 2025 | Written by Tyler Parrott

One of the things about being a game designer for a trading card game is that you're constantly iterating. Whether it's making changes to the cards in a set based on weekly playtests, or whether it's making changes to a set based on the reactions of the public, we're constantly analyzing feedback and looking to improve our product. But at the end of the day, deadlines exist and eventually, the iteration on a specific product has to stop.

In 2024 we had some extremely impressive successes, but also some pretty significant missteps, and we've learned a lot since working on our first three sets. Today, I'd like to share with you what our thoughts are on the first year of the Star Wars™: Unlimited trading card game. What are we proud of, and what lessons did we learn?

Spark of Rebellion

Personally, I consider Spark of Rebellion to be very close to a masterpiece. There were some misses, and of course I'll get to them, but overall we were able to deliver on an exciting Star Wars-themed experience that also functioned as a self-contained, well-balanced game where every piece had a role and got to shine. The art direction was bold and stylized, the characters included were just the right mixture of fan favorites and deep cuts, and the mechanics were simple, straightforward, and accessible. Personally, I think this set is going to go down as a lifetime professional achievement for me.

So, what did we do so well? The core mechanics of Star Wars: Unlimited are extremely compelling, and Spark of Rebellion highlights them perfectly. There are simple, powerful units at every point in the cost curve—at launch, Green Squadron A-Wing (Spark of Rebellion, 141) was one of the most powerful 2-cost units in the game! The set explores a lot of what could be possible with the game's core mechanics, whether it's picking up resources with Lando Calrissian (Spark of Rebellion, 197) or attacking into another arena with Strafing Gunship (Spark of Rebellion, 212). It features some standout individual flavor wins, from I Am Your Father (Spark of Rebellion, 233) to Shoot First (Spark of Rebellion, 217), and the synergy between individual characters subtly aligns with player expectations: R2-D2 (Spark of Rebellion, 236) and C-3PO (Spark of Rebellion, 238) set up and enable each other, K-2SO (Spark of Rebellion, 145) enables Cassian Andor's (Spark of Rebellion, 13) card draw condition, Darth Vader (Spark of Rebellion, 10) can attack twice by defeating Admiral Motti (Spark of Rebellion, 226), and Death Trooper (Spark of Rebellion, 33) is at its strongest when played in a Director Krennic (Spark of Rebellion, 1) deck (among many other examples!).

Additionally, the Rebel and Imperial archetypes landed perfectly. They're mirrored to ease comprehension complexity, but enough of their individual numbers are changed to make each faction play out very differently. The Rebels are more midrange-focused, with slightly heftier payoffs that want to stay in play, but also an extremely aggressive Leia Organa (Spark of Rebellion, 9) / Wing Leader (Spark of Rebellion, 241) / Rebel Assault (Spark of Rebellion, 103) package that highlights their proactive nature. Meanwhile, the Imperials are more big-unit focused with cards like Grand Moff Tarkin (Spark of Rebellion, 7) and Maximum Firepower (Spark of Rebellion, 234) while also having a swarm option with cheap units like Snowtrooper Lieutenant (Spark of Rebellion, 227) and General Veers (Spark of Rebellion, 230). This really characterizes the two factions as “an inevitable force full of individually-replaceable soldiers” against “small but survivable characters who want to work together to win,” which is just how they're presented in the source material.

Perhaps most important of all, Spark of Rebellion really landed its starter experience. Many people have told me—and I happen to agree—that the Spark of Rebellion Two-Player Starter is the best intro product they've seen, in any game. The way that the two decks are balanced against each other, with Luke being the stronger deck but also being harder to pilot, makes the experience extremely replayable. The decks are full of iconic cards, from Leia Organa (Spark of Rebellion, 189) and Han Solo (Spark of Rebellion, 198) to Force Choke (Spark of Rebellion, 139) and Emperor Palpatine (Spark of Rebellion, 135), and the math of unit stats and abilities at each point up the cost curve make decisions incredibly compelling at each stage of the game. I keep a sealed starter product by my work desk as a reminder of what goal we're trying to accomplish whenever we begin design and development on a new expansion.

But even for a set that I would consider an overwhelming success, there were still areas where we could have done better. The first is, perhaps, the most obvious: our leader development was spotty at best, and game-breaking at worst. The gulf between the weakest and strongest leaders in the set is very wide; IG-88 (Spark of Rebellion, 12) at least had the advantage of being so difficult to use effectively that he became a bit of a meme for players who wanted to prove themselves with a deckbuilding challenge. But Jyn Erso (Spark of Rebellion, 18) and Hera Syndulla (Spark of Rebellion, 8) were just too low-impact at every stage of the game to keep up with the stronger leaders, and Chewbacca (Spark of Rebellion, 3) and Grand Inquisitor (Spark of Rebellion, 11) just don't have enough stats to make a splash by the time they deploy. Then, there's Boba Fett.

When I started the list of lessons we learned from Spark of Rebellion, this guy was at the top of the list. I could talk about how we got here (all the leaders used to be stronger and he was the only one that wasn't nerfed when we lowered everyone's stats) but the real lesson is that being generically useful is its own advantage. We spent a lot of time debating whether his resource readying ability was any good—in order to gain an advantage, you need an opponent's unit to leave play after you've exhausted resources, and you need the one resource you ready to matter given the cards in your hand. Ultimately, our evaluation was wrong, and in large part because we didn't consider how little Boba Fett asks of you. Even if you don't get to maximize his ability every round, his triggering condition is something that naturally happens, and his stats are so high that he will never be weak on the board. Whatever the best cards are in his aspects, he just gets to play them all because he has virtually no deckbuilding conditions.

Ultimately, we missed so much on Boba Fett that he had to be suspended from Premier play. Maybe we'll see him come back before he rotates out of the format in March of 2026, but maybe not. In either case, I expect him to be a permanent fixture of the Eternal metagame, once that develops, because of how inconsequential his deckbuilding requirements are.

There were two other lessons that we learned from Spark of Rebellion, although they aren't lessons for design and development. For production and sales, we learned that demand for this game is higher than we thought. A lot higher. The fact that we sold out the vast majority of our 3-month supply in 3 weeks was extremely exciting for us (we made an amazing game!) and also extremely terrifying (how much ill will is our lack of availability going to cause us?). Obviously planning for this level of success is unrealistic, but it was a pretty big signal for us to pivot the print runs of all future sets.

For art and graphics, we learned what art pieces people liked (Darth Vader, Aggression, Leia Organa, and Death Trooper were regularly identified favorites)…and what art pieces people did not like (Chewbacca, Han Solo, Bamboozle, and Command were all criticized at various times). As much as I, personally, enjoy the more exaggerated comic book style, I am clearly enough in the minority that we've adjusted our art style closer to the pieces that players liked, and we've been increasing the quality of our art since this first set.

Overall, Spark of Rebellion will be remembered as one of the best products we've ever made. Not perfect, but one that started the game and the year off with a bang.

Shadows of the Galaxy

Shadows of the Galaxy was also a very successful set. We wanted to highlight the scoundrels and criminals of the galaxy, and I think we did a great job of finding the characters that people were most excited to see from every era. Of course, even with The Mandalorian (Shadows of the Galaxy, 18) and Moff Gideon (Shadows of the Galaxy, 7) headlining the Two-Player Starter, there was significantly lower excitement for the theme of the set than there was for Spark of Rebellion, since Spark of Rebellion hits on the heart of the StarWars fandom and Shadows of the Galaxy targets a more niche audience. Yet, where overall excitement was lower for the theme of the set, the mechanics stepped up.

Smuggle, especially, was a home run. It was immediately popular with casual players for helping guide their resourcing decisions. It was beloved by competitive players for being a mechanic that gave them more options when playing cards. And it has a ton of design space by virtue of each Smuggle card having a distinct Smuggle cost. There is some real complexity in the mechanic, as it forces players to think about a zone they normally don't (their resources), and as it increases the modality of each card it's on (“do I want to play this card at cost, or resource it and overpay for it later, getting a card advantage?”). But despite the on-paper complexity, we found that players for whom the greater optionality would be most concerning just weren't engaging with the mechanic in that way. Most casual players experience Smuggle as pure experiential upside: it helps them choose what to resource early, and it gives them options when they run out of cards in their hand. (The intermediary step of playing a Smuggle card instead of a card in your hand comes with experience.)

Bounty also stands out as an accomplishment for Shadows of the Galaxy. It's extremely thematic, produces very fun game experiences, and heightens the variance of a game by making players engage with high-risk, high-reward gameplay loops. It plays well into the core combat decisions of Star Wars: Unlimited but it does so subtly, helping ease player decisions rather than overwhelming them with something new. Both the units with built-in bounties and the Bounty upgrades proved to be popular with their different respective audiences, and there's a group of players for whom Shadows of the Galaxy is an especially beloved draft/sealed format because of it.

But for all the strengths of the two headliner mechanics, the set had some major complexity issues. The Commons in this set especially are extremely wordy and complex, often with multiple modes, a variety of conditions, or utilizing mechanics that ask a lot of new players. There are lots of cards that we would never print at Common now, from Timely Intervention (Shadows of the Galaxy, 129) to Frontier Trader (Shadows of the Galaxy, 214) to Relentless Pursuit (Shadows of the Galaxy, 232) (for example). This isn't really a fault of the individual card designs, because it ultimately came from a larger issue with the set: it just had too much in it. We were trying to support four different traits (at Common rarity!), to introduce three new mechanics, and to make a set that felt meaningfully different from Spark of Rebellion. In retrospect, we definitely tried to do too much.

And while the set has several headlining cards for the competitive metagame, the set's complex development (because we were trying to balance so much at the design level) led to a set with some pretty inconsistent power disparities. There are some extremely powerful cards, such as Poe Dameron (Shadows of the Galaxy , 153) and Wrecker (Shadows of the Galaxy 154) both of whom singlehandedly carried Aggression/Heroism forward through the rest of the year), but there are also some real misses, such as Omega (Shadows of the Galaxy, 198) and Ephant Mon (Shadows of the Galaxy, 88), which played it way too safe. Nowhere is this more evident than in the leader lineup. A minority of leaders really made a name for themselves in the competitive metagame—Bossk (Shadows of the Galaxy, 10), Han Solo (Shadows of the Galaxy, 13), Qi'ra (Shadows of the Galaxy, 2), Rey (Shadows of the Galaxy, 4), and even Cad Bane (Shadows of the Galaxy, 14) have all seen consistent, if not always tournament-winning, results. But a different minority of leaders were misses in a way that made their intended audience frustrated at the execution rather than excited that the character was present. Finn (Shadows of the Galaxy, 3), Hunter (Shadows of the Galaxy, 9), and Doctor Aphra (Shadows of the Galaxy, 15) especially were huge misses in both design and power level, to the point that we have taken meaningful lessons forward from each of them about how narrow/gimmicky a leader's design should be.

Ultimately, our lessons from Shadows of the Galaxy can be boiled down to this: have a clear vision for what your set is. I think this set was so busy trying to explore new space, and cater to as many individual desires as possible, that its “design-by-committee” nature held it back from becoming what it could have been. Fortunately, even an unfocused set can be extremely fun and exciting when its headliner mechanics are as compelling as Smuggle and Bounty ended up being, so we're ultimately happy with where the set landed. It was an off-balance second step for the game line, but it was ultimately going in the right direction.

Twilight of the Republic

By the time we got to Twilight of the Republic, we had learned our lesson about focus of design. There would be only three new mechanics, and one of them would be extremely simple. The new token units, and the fan-favorite set theme, would be enough to get people in the door, and Coordinate and Exploit would produce fun and dynamic gameplay that would keep them coming back.

Unfortunately, we miscalculated in a big way. Of the three sets of 2024, Twilight of the Republic was our weakest. There are a handful of contributing factors to why this set was such an unsatisfying final product, but by and large the biggest one is that Twilight of the Republic represents a systematic failure of development. We had twice as much time to develop Spark of Rebellion, and a third as much content to consider, so we were able to really hone in on the metagame balance within that set (Boba Fett notwithstanding). And while Shadows of the Galaxy had some big misses, it also had a lot of big hits because it was still effectively serving as an expansion of what we had done in Spark of Rebellion. By the time we got to Twilight of the Republic, we were trying to manage a card pool three times the size of Spark of Rebellion, while trying to balance brand-new styles of play, and all this while we were also grappling with early design challenges in Jump to Lightspeed and designing a new format (Twin Suns). The overwhelming perspective on Twilight of the Republic's development was anxiety, specifically of the unknown. We were so afraid of accidentally creating something overpowered that we handicapped ourselves across the board.

This is, perhaps, why so many of the Rare and Legendary unique units feel weak compared to those of the previous two sets. Many of them were stronger at various stages of development, but the uncertainty that we had missed something led us to play it safe and give them “one last nerf.” The Uncommons didn't get as much scrutiny, since they were simpler (and therefore more predictable), which led to a weird value distribution within the set. And this unwillingness to take risks also extended beyond the unique units, because what could have been an all-star archetype (Separatist Exploit) stumbled at the finish line.

…which is unfortunate, because Exploit was one of the set's biggest design strengths! The way it engaged with resource management in a new way was extremely fun and exciting for players, and it opened up a ton of new deck possibilities. If we had made the token generators more efficient and the Exploit cards more powerful, then it probably would have been the star mechanic of the set. As it is, poor Nute Gunray and Count Dooku have struggled to find their homes.

Which leads me to one of the bright spots of Twilight of the Republic: its leaders. Nute may have proven to be too weak, and Anakin Skywalker too dominant in draft, but overall the leaders in this set were extremely well designed and developed. Anakin Skywalker (Twilight of the Republic, 12), Jango Fett (Twilight of the Republic, 16), and Quinlan Vos (Twilight of the Republic, 18) have consistently appeared in top tournament decks, and the roster of “powerful but not dominant” leaders is very long. If anything, a lot of these leaders (especially the likes of Padmé Amidala (Twilight of the Republic, 8) and Count Dooku (Twilight of the Republic, 5)) were held back by the fact that the rest of the set—designed to support them—was so weak. Nala Se (Twilight of the Republic, 1), Yoda (Twilight of the Republic, 4), Count Dooku, Wat Tambor (Twilight of the Republic, 6), Captain Rex (Twilight of the Republic, 7), Asajj Ventress (Twilight of the Republic, 14), and Chancellor Palpatine/Darth Sidious (Twilight of the Republic, 17) have all been extremely popular in casual gameplay and have occasionally popped up in tournament results. As the person who inherited the lead design of the set and sculpted these leaders into what they are, I'm extremely proud of them, and I'm thrilled to see how much variety and joy they've brought to players.

The set's other big accomplishment is in its unique limited environment. Some of this is because the development issues that plague the rest of the set aren't present (the fact that Twilight of the Republic is a lower power level than Spark of Rebellion or Shadows of the Galaxy doesn't matter in draft) and some of this is because the set was able to remain extremely simple even as it fundamentally changed the play pattern with the introduction of Battle Droids and Clone Troopers. Yes, Anakin warped the draft environment a bit, and I don't love that for him, but otherwise I think Twilight of the Republic is going to be fondly remembered for how dynamic and varied its draft and sealed games could be.

My personal regret from Twilight of the Republic is related to character selection. At the time, we were operating under the assumption that having a character in the set at all, as a leader or unit, was enough to satisfy the expectation of having that character to play with. Not so—the absence of a new Obi-Wan Kenobi unit was extremely apparent to a lot of people. Likewise, I wildly underrated the amount players would want Commander Cody and relegated him to just being a unit—in retrospect, Rex's leader version should have been Commander Cody, and Quinlan's leader version should have been Rex (sorry Quinlan!). Fortunately, this was another lesson we learned pretty quickly: Luke and Vader having Pilot units (in addition to leaders) in Jump to Lightspeed is a direct result of Twilight of the Republic's mistake.

With all of that said, the takeaway of Twilight of the Republic is that the set was a design success and a development failure. Internally, it's still the gold standard for what we want our sets to look like at a design level, because by those metrics (card/mechanic complexity, design creativity, leader variety, thematic representation, etc.) it was a huge success. But it's also a cautionary tale of development: no matter how cool your set is, if it's too weak, then players aren't going to want to play with it. Sometimes, you need to take risks to succeed. And after missing on the development of token units in Twilight of the Republic, and seeing how they've been playing in Jump to Lightspeed, we're beginning to get a better idea of how to develop them going forward into Years 2 and 3.

Looking Forward into 2025

Which brings me to my conclusion: we've learned a lot since these sets were made (the years of 2021-2022, roughly). Both our successes and our failures have taught us a lot about the design and development process of Star Wars: Unlimited, some of which we've been actively putting into practice. I'll be back next year to talk about how we did in 2025, but in the meantime here are some of the lessons that we've been talking about in the intervening years:

• We should design cards and mechanics that highlight the core game mechanics that make Star Wars: Unlimited fun.
• Star Wars is an awesome IP, and the more we can lean into the characters and moments that players love, the more exciting it will be.
• We need to be diligent to ensure our sets don't experience scope creep. We can't let them lose their simplicity or identity by trying to accomplish too much at once.
• We can't be afraid to take risks with a new play pattern, and we need to have a clear vision for what a balanced card looks like so that we're more confident and willing to push an iconic card's power level.
• Having lots of units isn't an inherent advantage. We can be more generous with our creation of unit tokens.

And, of course, the final lesson: no set will be perfect. As long as we're learning and improving our craft, there will be more opportunities to make awesome cards and mechanics for this game that we all love so much.

May you feel inspired to try something new,