Fantasy Flight Games has finally suspended the Boba Fett, Collecting the Bounty leader from the Star Wars Unlimited trading card game, basically because it was completely broken.
Boba Fett is no longer a legal card to use in the leading Star Wars Unlimited format, Premier, as of tomorrow, November 8. It can’t be used in Competitive or Casual organized play events, though will still appear in Twin Suns, Draft, and Sealed.
The suspension comes exactly eight months after Star Wars Unlimited was released, as Boba Fett debuted in the original set Sparks of Hope. Lead game designer Danny Schaefer said in a lengthy blog post that “the dominance of Boba Fett” is now “too much to ignore.”
Leaders are the main piece Star Wars Unlimited players build their decks around and Boba Fett was almost immediately discovered to be incredibly overpowered, a poor advertisement for a trading card game in just its first set.
Fantasy Flight Games endured through a secondary set release but Boba Fett’s dominance continued, representing 40% of Top 8 decks at the Planetary Qualifiers and a staggering 55% of winners. This comes in a game which has 32 total leaders (before the third set adds another 18 tomorrow), meaning Boba Fett should represent just 3% or 4% of the winners if everything was balanced well.
Boba Fett was banned altogether because it’s “clean and easy to understand; it’s timely, in that we can take immediate action when problems arise; and it’s precise, allowing us to target only the most problematic cards without collateral damage elsewhere,” Schaefer said.
He called the card “the most severe power level outlier” and said a ban of supporting cards instead wouldn’t work becasue Boba Fett is powerful enough to dominate with their replacements.
Star Wars Unlimited players quickly noticed the huge power disparity in Boba Fett. Like Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone, and several other trading card games, Star Wars Unlimited relies on mana generation and management.
This means players slowly amass an increasingly large pool of mana over the course of the game, using it to play more and more powerful cards. Any card that can generate extra mana or recover used mana is therefore incredibly powerful, and Boba Fett did just that.
That’s not all though, as Boba Fett could be deployed with just five mana himself despite having high stats more equitable to a leader that deployed at six resources. Boba Fett is also the only hero to have multiple support cards designed to work with it specifically, with cards such as Fire Spray and Boba Fett’s armor boosting it even further.
Star Wars Unlimited players will therefore have mixed feelings about its banning. Many, if not most, competitive players will have lost their main deck, but many others will be relieved the meta will balance out a touch by Boba Fett’s banning.
The competitive scene will also enjoy a boost through the release of the aforementioned third set, Twilight of the Republic, which brings new heroes such as Ahsoka from The Clone Wars and General Grievous from Star Wars: Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith.
In our 7/10 review of the base game, IGN said: “Star Wars Unlimited delivers a solid core game, with plenty of opportunities to look at deck building strategy and in-game tactics.”
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
