Star Wars Unlimited has been going strong for a few years now and its most recent set release, Homeworlds, shows that it isn’t going to slow down any time soon. Homeworlds is absolutely brimming with new keywords, tokens, and the new fortify upgrades that let you upgrade your base as well as your units.
Homeworlds introduces a number of new tokens including Weakness and Beast tokens. Weakness applies as a -1/-1 to any unit and counts as a token upgrade much like a shield or experience upgrade making them highly versatile and melds well with cards that give effects to upgraded units or to just finish off annoying units with low amounts of health. If you don’t know a thing about Star Wars Unlimited be sure to check out our guide to deck building to get clued in before reading on!
Doctor Hemlock is the new leader that utilises these tokens and for the low cost of 1 resource per phase can give out a weakness token when in the leader slot or for free when attacking as a unit letting you have complete control over some of Homeworlds’ lower health pool units.
Beast Tokens introduced in Homeworlds are a 3/3 token unit much like the recent Mandalorian tokens or clones/droids from the past. A lot of cards include the beast trait and work abilities around buffing/creating beasts which allow for quick spawns of highly versatile and honestly bulky tokens to be deployed alongside your units.
I opted to lead in the pre-release with Doctor Hemlock, the weakness tokens seemed like a good choice but as you only get six packs to make a 30 card deck with I wasn’t blessed with the most utility for his ability. I was however met with the shiny face of a Grand Moff Tarkin showcase around my third pack which was an amazing pull that I certainly wasn’t expecting for the pre-release! As much as I wanted to use my new showcase his ability of playing any fortify upgrade regardless of aspect wasn’t going to help me as I only drew one out of my packs so Hemlock was the way.
I had cobbled together a mostly blue/black/red deck which featured a few unique cards such as Scorch, who allows you to ping 1 damage on a unit that has am upgrade on it as it attacks. This paired very effectively with Hemlock’s weakness token distribution making some of the early game units a breeze to deal with as I focus on hitting the enemy base.
I did notice that Red seems to be the aspect of choice for those who got the appropriate leaders, Sidious and Wickett were both common choices across the tables. Wicket is a low cost leader that utilises well with other Ewok cards as well as the Endor bases and creates a fast paced deck that can try and focus down enemies fast whereas Sidious was just raw power. With the recent banning of the Ashes Cad Bane leader (who could do 1 damage to a unit with more than 1 health) it would seem pretty obvious that he might follow in Cad’s footsteps. His ability allows you to ping a unit/base for 1 damage whenever 4 damage is dealt as an exhaustive action in the leader slot and a constant action when deployed. this led to some absolutely horrible combinations from some people in the pre-release that decimated decks at resource 5/6.
Back to talking about Homeworlds new Keyword which is Fortify, this enables bases to be upgraded, some offer minor upgrades such as giving pack units +1 attack whereas others can negate above 5 damage completely or even make other players discard cards from their hands giving you a very dangerous set of extra abilities. Unfortunately they still suffer the same weakness of normal upgrades which is of course being removed. In set there’s only a handful of cards that seem to remove upgrades but if you play the eternal format there’s plenty going around which could nullify these upgrades.
Overall after my three sets of three games I came in a middling position for this pre-release but absolutely loved it, some hard fought battles, a few nice pulls and a few extra packs for prize support left everyone happy. I myself collect the weekly play cards and are really looking forwards to the new Grievous legendary card that’s included as the art looks amazing alongside a lot of the other weekly plays that are available, plus with my new showcase I can hardly complain about my pulls!
If you’d like to learn more about Star Wars Unlimited you can check out the Unlimited website.
