The “Battle Deck” is a catch-all term for the unique objective, deployment and condition cards you bring to a game, four from each category, combined into a deck of twelve cards. With the release of Priority Supplies, the game now has five of each card type. We select four of each for our Battle Deck, our opponent eliminates one of each type randomly during setup, and we create a matrix with the remaining three in each category. Afterward, we move on to the Define Battlefield step, where players take turns eliminating the left-most card back and forth. Any time we are the Blue player, our Battle Deck is in use. We can therefore construct the Battle Deck to gain a degree of control over the way the game will be played, and what will be necessary to pull off a win.

Two approaches to building the Battle Deck are apparent. The first is more conservative – you take a collection of known good units that work together and weave a strategy around them. You are not beholden to your Battle Deck in this case: if you are Red, either by losing a roll-off, being outbid, or by choice, you can still perform decently on most of the possible battlefields by virtue of efficiency. The second approach is riskier but can have a higher payoff – you select a very particular set of objectives, deployments and conditions and then bring the units that accomplish those ideas the best, along with a bid as deep as the metagame dictates, to ensure your Battle Deck is used. Importantly, this can get rid of battle cards your army never wants to see, and it can also put a hole in your enemy’s battle plan or exploit a weakness in their list. Star Wars: Legion is still early in its life, and there is a lot of overlap between Battle Decks, so you won’t be bereft of reasonable choices for eliminating cards in the Define Battlefield step if things do not go your way. Either way you choose to do it, some essential questions are these:

What can my army do well? What is my path to victory? What are the imbalances between my army and the enemy army?

These questions and others like them should be strongly considered when building your army list, constructing the Battle Deck, and eliminating or passing cards during the Define Battlefield step.

Next, let’s dive into some specifics about the three types of cards in the Battle Deck and how various unit types interact with them.

Deployments:

In general, short ranged units enjoy wide and close deployments. The shortest of these are Battle Lines, Major Offensive, and Disarray. Things can get where they want to go very quickly: An AT-RT, thanks to the additional forward movement of its base, can fairly reliably make Range 2 and under of a unit on the edge of the enemy deployment zone with two move actions on all of these deployments. Snowtroopers can move and begin to strike out at Range 3 with Steady on Turn 1. These three deployments are similarly beneficial to repulsor vehicles – these units rely on their mobility to flank and deny cover, so the wider the deployment the better. You can generally establish an “outer lane” through which these craft can move with a reasonable degree of safety. And, of course, slow units enjoy close deployments because they can get into battle quickly (looking at you, Vader.)

Conversely, narrow and distant deployments support units that can project force at long range, like the AT-ST, Sniper units and the Laser Cannon AT-RT. Long March is the poster child for this idea. The narrow deployment makes it easy to concentrate fire down lanes formed by terrain. Long March also denies a flanking position to opposing repulsor vehicles.

Advanced Positions is the newest deployment option and is one of the more dynamic positions. All trooper units gain Scout 1 as they deploy, giving them the opportunity to adjust their position. This is incredibly useful for advancing towards cover or a line of sight blocking building. Moves done with the Scout keyword also ignore difficult terrain, allowing you to bypass it without using Environmental Gear. And of course, Advanced Positions is incredibly useful if you are running Commandos and Scout Troopers, since it buffs their Scout keyword further. A Rebel Commando unit performing a Speed 3 move across difficult terrain: amazing! It’ll sure make getting Proton Charges to their destination easier. It’s important to note that Rapid Reinforcements and Advanced Positions do -not- combine, due to the language on Rapid Reinforcements that units are “placed” on the battlefield and not deployed.

Objectives:

In my experience, three of the most important factors when choosing a suitable objective are your average mobility, your activation count compared to your opponent, and your average range of engagement. Key Positions, and Intercept the Transmissions focus the battle around a few central locations, meaning your opponent must go to a specific place in order to win the game. These are good if:

your mobility is generally low

your army doesn’t want to move because it’s able to do significant damage at long range (4+) or is busy doing something else (like aiming)

your army is very good at holding in place (think Rebel troopers in heavy cover with a dodge token)

you have an excellent “bunker buster” unit that can dig units out of cover (usually a unit with Blast, Sharpshooter, Pierce or strong melee)

Also, Key Positions strongly favors the Blue player, since they choose two of the three terrain pieces to hold for the win. If you intend to bid for Blue, this one is an auto-include.

Breakthrough is nearly the opposite of the last two. Your army has to cover a lot of ground, so a force that is highly mobile, and has a high activation count is the most ideal. If you out activate your opponent, you can make aggressive moves towards the enemy deployment zone that she cannot immediately respond to, and can put more units there. All the better if your army is faster, or dropping in with the Rapid Reinforcements condition (more on that later.)

Two of the current objective choices are a bit of a gray area with these criteria: Recover the Supplies and Sabotage the Moisture Vaporators. These depend at least as much on pregame tactical decisions, and possibly faction choice, as mobility and activation count. Will you Recover the Supplies because you are faster than your opponent and can escape with the middle crate before they can react, or will you cover the middle crate with your all your long range units until you can reach it with the hard-to-kill Vader, or another trooper unit? Will you turtle up on the two closest moisture vaporators and attempt to win on points killed, or will you aggressively attack one of your enemy’s vaporators and win by denying them the necessary wound tokens? It is up to the player to decide which idea suits their army composition best.

Conditions:

Two relatively easy ones: Long range units love Clear Conditions, and short range units love Limited Visibility. A hot tip: always measure while advancing during the early turns of Limited Visibility. It is easy to overextend a unit, believing it is safe from harm, but range 2 is still 1 foot of distance! Limited Visibility also favors a high activation count, since you can aggressively move your last units into range and get some free damage in, or scoot them past an enemy force when combined with Breakthrough.

Rapid Reinforcements naturally favors a high unit count. Setting aside units has an inherent risk, since it lowers your activation count for the first two rounds. However, it is legal to put zero units aside, turning this objective into Clear Conditions for the player that sets aside no units; a good idea if you find yourself out-activated from the start. If you are playing objectives like Breakthrough, Rapid Reinforcements will be good since you can “drop” in the enemy deployment zone, advancing quite far on the board without being vulnerable. Also, any unit with short range benefits greatly from being forward deployed, especially Snowtroopers with their ability to move twice and shoot. It’s important to remember that on the turn the set aside units drop in, they count as activated, and can’t do -anything- until the next turn.

Hostile Environment means that trooper units that aren’t touching a piece of terrain don’t remove their suppression at the end of the round. Vehicles are immune to this condition, and several types of trooper units don’t care as much about being suppressed, like Snowtroopers, who will always get to move and shoot unless panicked. Leia Organa and Veers are good here with Inspire to help manage your suppression. And of course, Vader, with his nil courage value, is completely immune, and suppressed troopers near him will not flee no matter how much suppression they take. Hostile Environment is due to become more punishing with the release of the E-Web and FD Blaster, which will make Suppressive weaponry more common.

Lastly, I am quite certain that Minefields favors Imperial players. Speeder Bikes are a strong choice generally and ignore the mines completely. Imperial troopers will resist more mine hits naked thanks to their red defense dice. Rebels can stack up dodge tokens with Leia as a mediocre workaround. Since mines need line of sight to kill models, both factions can hide everyone but the unit leader out of sight when rolling for a detonation to limit the casualty count against troopers.

Tying it all together with a real world example:

I’ll restate a little bit of what I said in the Week 2 Battle Report from the Sacramento league; feel free to click through and read the whole report. Here is the list I used, using the “build your deck around your army” method:

Leia Organa (Esteemed Leader, Environmental Gear)

2x Fleet Troopers (Extra Trooper, Scattergun Trooper, Environmental Gear, Impact Grenades)

4x Rebel Troopers (Extra Trooper, Z-6 Trooper)

3x AT-RT (Flamethrower)

798/800

View in Tabletop Admiral

Mobility is excellent – none of my units move below Speed 2, three of them ignore difficult terrain thanks to Environmental Gear. AT-RT’s are fast and can walk over barricades and other low terrain with no difficulty, and can also clamber. Activation count is high with 10 activations. This list should do well at Breakthrough. Six units operate at Range 2 and below, so I will take Limited Visibility and Rapid Reinforcements to help them out. The trooper units can turtle decently with Leia and dodges, and I have three units with Blast, one unit with Sharpshooter, and 3 units with Pierce, making them strong at Intercept and Sabotage. I also have a bid of 2 points, which is not high but probably enough right now to get what I want, so I will take Key Positions. My Battle Deck will therefore look like this:

Objectives: Key Positions, Breakthrough, Intercept the Transmissions, Sabotage the Moisture Vaporators

Deployments: Battle Lines, Disarray, Major Offensive, Advanced Positions

Conditions: Limited Visibility, Rapid Reinforcements, Hostile Environment, Clear Conditions

Closing thoughts:

Whether you are Blue or Red, knowing what your list can do well, and what cards in the Battle Deck benefit you, is invaluable. It bears repeating that taking a bid is strong because it allows you to get rid of your weakest battle cards. Constructing the Battle Deck is just one part of creating a path to victory – the next part is navigating the Define Battlefield step to get what you want, which will be covered in a future article.

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