With a new week comes a new set of spoilers from the upcoming set of Star Wars: Destiny, and with these spoilers come a couple substantial cards to add to our collections. This article also gives us a larger look at some of the design philosophy of Destiny going forward and seems to give some context to some of the larger changes that were made in the recent sweeping errata. Let’s dive in and look at some cards while fielding some guest commentary from Sugi of Knights of Ren!

There’s a lot to like about Luke Skywalker‘s new digs. It’s scary to say this out loud, but he’s a good, solid hero character. He’s appropriately costed, he has a lot of health for the cost, his dice are good, and his ability gives you a lot of flexibility in resolving them. Power Action is a great design angle that allows characters to have interesting abilities that can be used once per round and feel good without feeling overpowered (see: Nines). Luke’s, in particular, allows his three damage sides to be even more impactful on occasion, especially as the game moves on towards the mid to late game where you typically have a surplus of resources and not a lot to do with them in a round. The most exciting thing about Luke, however, is the fact that he enables heroes to more consistently and competently play 4-dice, 3-character suites. One of the major factors missing in hero’s repertoire is character variety at lower costs; Luke not only provides this, but he does so in a satisfactory manner that doesn’t make him feel like a gimpy version of a villains character. I’m really hopeful for Luke and what he provides for the metagame going forward.

Han Solo is… fine? He doesn’t make me as excited as Luke does because his dice are so awkward. We’ve learned from Rey that the +1 Resource side can be frustrating and that frustration is further exacerbated by Han’s 2 Ranged for 1 side. His ability is fine; it’s not great, but it’s not awful, either. You’re going to get a fair amount of use from activating and rerolling. Much like Jabba, you can reroll your own die after you’ve rolled in your dice. I just don’t find anything about Han to be especially exciting. Much like Luke, he fits into a very comfortable spot that heroes has been desperately in need of help at, so he’ll inevitably see play and he may very well fit into a niche. Han isn’t a character that is going to make big splashed in the meta game on his own, but yellow is one of the best colors right now, especially in heroes, where Running Interference has quickly become one of the most well regarded cards in the Empire at War meta game, so there’s definitely something here. Luke is definitely the star of the show in the heroes starter, though.

, like Luke, is a solid addition to our cast of characters. Unlike his 17-cost villain counterparts who are desperate for a friend, Boba has a wealth of characters to pair with at 14-cost elite, including the recently nerfed Phasma2. Three damage sides and 11 Health is always a recipe for success, but the variety in his damage types makes him inconsistent when it comes to locking with modifiers on upgrades and resolving damage in a quick, efficient manner. Still, there’s nothing to scoff at in his special; much like Phasma2, this is a special that not only does damage to your opponent, but does so in a way that doesn’t require you to build your deck around Boba. You’re going to miss sometimes on Boba’s special, but you’re also going to see 2’s and (to a lesser extent) 3’s across the table, and that’s always going to feel good. Boba’s special is a soft counter to mill decks that run things like Personal Shield and Hounds Tooth that have high value, non-damage die sides for Boba to exploit.

Veteran Stormtrooper is an interesting card, but I worry he has the same problem a teacher with a Master’s degree has when job hunting. That is to say, he’s probably too expensive to care about hiring over his less experienced equivalent. Having three unpaid damage sides is nice, but I’m apprehensive about whether Indirect damage does well enough to warrant the additional cost. We know from Palpatine and Planetary Uprising that Indirect damage can be a force to be reckoned with, but I don’t know if replacing First Order Stormtrooper’s 2 Ranged for 1 side and gaining 2 Health is worth the additional 2 point investment. FOST’s brilliance is being a disposable 7-cost character for The Best Defense with good die sides. Veteran will probably find his place in a deck that runs eBala-Tik and a 10-cost character together. It’s worth noting that this card is likely more usable than Death Trooper explicitly because of the fact that he can slot in with the 8/11-cost villains so easily.

Wrist Rockets is a card that has a problem with variant damage types, but it’s not a problem I’m particularly concerned about because all three of its black damage sides are high value. A 3-cost upgrade needs to either have redeploy or be really good, especially if it has a Yellow-only prerequisite. Thankfully, this card is actually really good. The Special allows you to adapt to your level of resources and can even give you the opportunity to split damage if a character is on the cusp of defeat. While Indirect damage might not have the character defeating oomph of regular damage, being able to slap four wounds on the board for a resource is pretty impactful, especially when your die has two other damage sides it can roll into. Imagine paying one resource for two Planetary Uprising affects. That’s pretty good, right? This will see fairly regular play and may signal the rise of mono-Yellow villains in the near future if they continue to get quality upgrades like Wrist Rockets and Relby.

Sugi believes that thisreplaces the old, 4-cost support in almost every situation, but I’m more apprehensive about the widespread usefulness of Indirect damage. Being able to directly choose where (more) damage goes when resolving a die feels like an important aspect of making sure you kill a character and get ahead on the board before your opponent is able to stabilize. Granted, this Slave I dodges Deflect a lot more easily than the other, but I feel like you’re getting a lot for an additional resource. Sugi also loves the Power Action, but I’m not convinced it’s as over the top as he does. The reroll is great, don’t get me wrong, but the other portion of the ability is going to have a limited capacity for removing a die. However, if we start seeing more cards that interact with Indirect damage in a positive way from Legacies, this new Slave I could, in fact, get a lot better than the 4-cost version for me. It remains to be seen whether the set has the tools to lift this Slave I above its counterpart, though.

provides a lot of context for the recent nerfs to It’s a Trap and Heat of Battle. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m happy about the nerfs, but this card at least shows that the designers were hoping to bring those cards more in line with the power level of events in future sets. It’s a Trap and Heat of Battle are both pretty unplayable now. Does that immediately make Locked and Loaded bad? Sugi feels this card is hard to evaluate right now, and I agree; we don’t know what the suite of cards dealing with Indirect damage looks like right now. Sugi doesn’t feel this card is likely to go very far, but I disagree with that point — I think this is probably a better card than people are giving it credit for, at least when paired with yellow. Running Interference, which solves the problem of this card not having ambush, is going to continue to be a staple in Legacies. We don’t know a lot about the breadth of Indirect damage in Legacies, but what we have seen is that Indirect damage sides typically have high values to compensate for the inability to do focused damage. There are also ways to see into your opponent’s hand or pull removal from it, and oftentimes a good player can gauge whether their opponent has removal in their hand or the capacity to play it. I know I was just hard on Indirect damage above, but that was on a die side replacing Ranged damage with a smaller amount of Indirect damage. I’m not saying this card is going to be bonkers, but I’m not going to count it out of the running yet.

Sugi and I both totally dig. Red has finally gotten a boost in the removal events they can field. 0-cost removal is always good, even if it’s not necessarily good — look at stuff like Sound the Alarm, Loth Cat and Mouse, and Doubt. Do these cards sometimes screw you over? Yes, of course. But they also don’t cast you any resources and can have a large impact on the playing field when they’re used intelligently and successfully. This card essentially plays like a Guardian trigger with fairly significant upside if you’re running a 3-character suite. Keep in mind, this doesn’t always necessarily just redistribute damage; it procs affects like Dr. Aphra’s allowing you to draw a card and will remove the ability of a Vibroknife from the field alongside its die. This card is going to immediately get slotted into a lot of decks and I’m excited to play around with it.

And so we move on from a fun card to an underwhelming one in Force Focus. Sugi feels that 2 Resources in Blue needs to get you more bang for your buck than Force Focus offers, as this card does little to nothing to help you win games — and I completely agree with him. The “Spot Blue” prerequisite doesn’t help this card’s numerous deficits. There are just too many qualifiers about this card. There are no sides with a value higher than 1. The special requires you to have another blue card in your hand to get the full breadth of its affect, and it can’t chain with other Focus dice because it’s a Special. Don’t use the Force, Luke. Go grab a Vibroknife instead. Trust me, you’ll thank me later.

My initial instinct with Heirloom Lightsaber is to complain about the power creep of this card, but I actually really dig the design of its redeploy ability. Not having a card be color-only but giving it an ability that only activates when attached to a character of a certain color functions similar to Crossguard Saber and Rey’s Lightsaber and I dig that mechanic. This keeps Heirloom from being as good on a character like Nines, who would handily abuse it, but makes a great featured upgrade in a 3-character mono blue list. This is the kind of dynamic design I like to see on upgrades.

Sorry, do I need to tell you that this card is good? Because it’s really good. Three unmodified and free damage sides, all of the same damage type, and a resource side on a single 3-cost weapon with circumstantial redeploy? Is there literally anything not to love about this card? I immediately see this replacing all other 3-cost lightsaber upgrades, including Rey’s Lightsaber. You generally only need redeploy once and if you’re running melee damage with a Blue character, you’re probably running a Blue character that your opponent wants to target first.

Sugi also thinks that this new, lower cost support is better than the old one, and this time I’m more inclined to agree with him. Millennium Falcon loses its Special for a blank, but otherwise has some interesting things going for it that don’t necessarily make it worst than the Awakenings version despite costing one less resource. The 2 Shield side is a bit underwhelming on a support of this cost (especially compared to Focus or Discard on the previous Falcon), but gaining another damage side is a pretty substantial upgrade in roll consistency. I’m willing to take a hit to the 4 damage side in exchange for a more well rounded die. We haven’t even talked about the Falcon’s ability. I agree with Sugi in that action efficiency is very powerful in Destiny, and although one additional action doesn’t necessarily break the game, it certainly puts you one step closer to claiming the battlefield and keeps you a move ahead of your opponent. I’ve long touted that Destiny has needed something like Partnership and this ability in order to make supports more playable and relevant, and Millenium Falcon doesn’t disappoint. I could definitely see this card having the potential to replace its Awakenings version.

Sugi says Impulsive slots in well with decks with mixed damage types and that it has serious potential in the hands of experienced players because it acts as a psuedo-Kanan ability. I fully agree, but my problem with this card is that it’s competing for slots in a thirty card deck. Impulsive might have been a great card in Awakenings or Spirit of Rebellion, but now that we’re going to have four sets of cards to work with, I worry that it won’t make the cut because of its limited affect. Still, Impulsive is a 0-cost event, and one of the pillars of success in Destiny is making good use of all five cards in your hand to their fullest every turn. There’s nothing awful about this card; it lets you get to your battlefield claim all the faster if you have a few dice you need to resolve but none of them share a symbol. I just think it’ll be too circumstantial, particularly if you’re the faster deck or you’re waiting to use removal against your opponent.

Maz’s Vault is unplayable in competitive decks unless it gets a supplemental card that negates the effect. You can’t afford to give your opponent additional resources because you have no guarantee that you’ll be able to use the extra resource more effectively than they can from turn to turn. Sugi really likes this card because he’s an economy player, but he agrees that it isn’t particularly usable if you’re looking to craft a competitive deck. This card is a filler card for the set at best and a nuisance at worst. I’m sure it’ll work beautifully as a frame for your next house of cards alongside your Heat of Battles, though!

Of the two new battlefields, Arid Wasteland is by far the more interesting. As Sugi says, the effect may be unique but it’s not all that impressive compared to other options available. You can’t get rid of your opponent’s resources if they don’t have any of them, but when this battlefield does kill a resource, it has to feel good. This can be particularly useful at the end of a round when your opponent only has one resource remaining. Still, I imagine consistently fast decks have something better they could be utilizing that will have a larger impact each round.

Outer Rim Outpost, on the other hand, is Moisture Farm with an extra benefit. Not an especially inspired card. Sugi thinks this makes Moisture Farm obsolete, but I can see there being a deck that wouldn’t necessarily want to take the additional card to cycle through their deck or, alternatively, allow their opponent to gain the cycle. If mill ever has legs for more than a month, the card draw would be a detriment. I don’t know if this card sees play; Maz’s Castle cycles better and Moisture Farm gives less benefit to your opponent if you can’t claim for a round.

There are a lot of things to take away from this latest set of spoilers, but I think some of these new cards solidify my interest in the upcoming set and definitely inspire some confidence in the future of Fantasy Flight Game’s design choices. I know our community sometimes likes to claim that the sky is falling (and by ‘sometimes’, I mean every other month), but the recent errata promises to shake up the meta game in a good way. Empire at War, barring the problems with the Two-Player Set and some necessary rules updates, has provided a pretty exciting set of cards. Legacies looks to be building on the lessons that the designers have learned in the past, and I’m hopeful that we’re going to continue to see a better balance between villains and heroes going forward.

Think we missed something? Did I severely overrated or underrate a card? Want to just make fisticuffs with words about all the cool new spoilers that are coming out? Come join us on Artificery’s Discord, where we regularly talk about all things Star Wars: Destiny and host tournaments every other week for sick prizes. You can also follow us on social media by checking us out on Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube!