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One huge plus of Star Wars: Unlimited is its strength in a format loved by many card players - Draft!  Drafting Star Wars Unlimited is a very fun and interactive way to open your packs.  For 3 packs ($15 MSRP) you can build your own deck and have a small tournament.  Locally, we have several game stores already with draft events on the schedule for when it releases on March 8, 2024.  We had the opportunity to play a full draft session with the OG Drafty Bois from Outmaneuver, JRod, Cqrbon, FA1th and His Dudeness.  We were also joined by special guest Picardy3rd, who is a Wisconsin player like me and regularly drafts on TTS.  

Basically, to draft Star Wars: Unlimited you give three packs to each player.  The first thing that happens is everyone reveals their leaders.  Then you draft a leader and pass to the right until you have three.  The leaders available to each player are public information and can be used in deck building.  Then, you start with the first pack, set aside the base/token pick a card and pass to the left until that pack is gone.  You repeat, passing pack two to the right and then pack three to the left.  At the end you should have 42 cards available.  You can play any of the leaders you drafted with any common (30 hp) base.  You can play a rare base only if you drafted it.  We continued this draft with best of three rounds and you can watch the whole thing on Youtube.  

 Moving along to strategy, after the draft I had each player write up what they were thinking during the draft and what their deckbuilding decisions were.  Here we go starting with myself, then the winner Cqrbon from Outmaneuver, then the rest of the gang. 

This was the deck I ended up drafting.  I had a pack one pick one available of A-Wing, which is a baller card for a 2 drop.  The down side was it kinda limited me to looking towards hero.  I believe I saw a fleet lieutenant and an Echo Base Defender early, and from there I was able to get solid picks as it was pretty apparent from a late passed A-Wing in Round 1 that no one else was in red hero (or that still would not be there).   One thing I've learned drafting games is that trait synergy can be strong.  There was a lot of rebel synergy here with Dodonna, Wing Leader, Fleet lieutenant, two Echo Base Defenders and then Guerilla Attack Pods.  

I'm kinda surprised in the end I didn't win. 4 A- Wings with this much force synergy is pretty strong It cruised to a victory against a very good draft player His Dudeness but lost in the semis.  The reason being is I ran into Cqrbon's deck with 4 death troopers and a bunch of removal.  The weakness of my draft was a complete lack of removal, which did in fact hurt in that game.  I know i wasn't passed an open fire, and not sure I even saw a Strike True.  Sometimes that's the way the packs are passed. 

Cqrbon's deck ended up winning the draft, beating Poem's Boba deck in the finals.  He wrote the following: 

The leaders I drafted were Director Krennic, Chewbacca, and Cassian Andor. If possible, I wanted to keep my options open during the first pack, so I could see what aspects were mostly available. With the first pack, I aimed to take mainly Vigilance cards so I would have the option to go Villainy with Krennic or Heroism with Chewbacca. I found some strong cards for Krennic early on, including 2 Death Troopers, an Academy Defense Walker, and a Lieutenant Childsen, while I found some solid neutral Vigilance cards like Regional Governor, Make an Opening, and Wilderness Fighter. At the start of my second pack, I committed to going with Krennic after being passed more strong Vigilance Villainy cards and not really seeing many Vigilance Heroism cards. I leaned towards splashing Aggression as my base aspect after picking up an Open Fire, a Force Choke, a First Legion Snowtrooper, and a Disabling Fang Fighter. With my third and final pack, I managed to round out my deck with a second Scout Bike Pursuer and Childsen. My final list had a good amount of removal, as well as great units to synergize with Krennic, especially 4x Death Trooper and 3x Academy Defense Walker.

Poem managed to make the finals with his super original Boba Fett Green Draft deck.  He wrote: 

I was surprised when a Boba Fett Leader got passed to me. Although I had limited experience with draft, I definitely know that Boba can often carry a constructed deck because of his solid stats for the cost. Once it came time to start picking I prioritized 2 drop units so that I never whiffed on my turn 1 play. So I took Viper Probe Droids and Cartel Spacers early. My pack 1, pick 1 was Seventh Fleet Defender. The defender is such a powerful unit for the cost. Later in the draft I made sure I had some more expensive bombs so I grabbed 2 Bounty Hunter Guilds and 2 Gladiator Star Destroyers, both of which were pretty clutch throughout the event. The card that overperformed expectations was the Mining Guild TIE Fighter. I would only probably run this card in a Boba Fett deck. I found that I often had a few extra resources hanging around in the mid game and being able to get that extra draw was helpful. It also pinged a shield off a defender on one occasion and the 1 chip damage every round added up. All in all I thought the deck was pretty decent for only my 2nd draft. I hope we get a chance to do another one of these again soon. Shout out to Outmaneuver and Picardy3rd for jamming with us!

McBober lost a hard fought match up to Poem in the semifinals.  His explanation of the draft:  

I had a bit of a rough draft. I got forced villain, in that all leaders I could take were villain, so I ended up with Boba Fett and two of IG-88 (If I recall, my first choice was between two Boba Fetts and Tarkin, and every choice after that was only IG-88). In a way this can help to narrow down your draft choices when you're backed into a corner, which can help when you only get middle of the road choices, but it can be painful if offered a really strong card that you can't play, such as if I had opened a Luke in one of my packs, for example. 

I didn't get offered any really strong "bombs" in my packs. My three rare choices were Bendu, Galactic Ambition and Pong Krell, all cards that are pretty bad, with maybe the exception of Bendu if you somehow are able to go mono-blue in draft. My only real choice here was try to just pick the strongest commons/uncommons I could find. I was stuck in Yellow/Red villain, so I was trying to grab any decent villainy cards I could find, as I figured those would not last long. I noticed an Ozzel that I'd passed in my first pack wheeled back to me, so I figured there weren't any other red villain players to compete with, so I'd decided to put a lower priority on those cards. In the end I think I ended up with a deck that wasn't very strong, but I had enough decent cheap cards to get a round 1 win before being knocked out in round 2.

FA1TH is an excellent competitive player in leagues and has done many drafts.  He writes as follows: 

For me, in draft the first few choices I pick play a significant part into what I end up playing. I had Krenic, Iden, and Leia as leader choices, and so I had was either playing blue villainy X or green heroic X. I have found that blue villainy tends to be more open then other colors, and since my first few packs had many strong blue and green villainy cards, I settled on that pairing. Krenic and Iden play differently, and so I decided to try and build an Iden trooper deck. While I believe I was effectively able to buidl a deck to fit the idea of the deck, I was missing some significant peices which I beleive ended up being the difference maker towards an early exit. 

Internet legend and OG drafty boi extraordinaire His Dudeness was, together with Mcbober the player I feared most.  I met him round 1 and thankfully the Leia deck i fell into was enough to win the day.  He writes; 

 It was more or less, the people around me were forced into villainy leaders, so I was going to go hero. I had Jyn so I wanted to just get into hero yellow. some blue cards were being passed around like yoda, so that's the second color I went into.  

His deck was sneaky strong.  Jyn Erso is proven to be a good hero in limited. I think there was a lot of force synergy there, just not quite enough oomph to get over the Leia aggro barrage with four A-wings on board. . 

For my first choice in the leader draft, I chose Jyn over Leia mostly because I hadn't had a chance to play Jyn in draft yet and wanted to test her out in the format. I was then passed Palp and Iden. Poem was to the left of me locked into Villain, the table seemed likely to be villain-heavy, and Loopee to my left was probably 50/50 Leia vs Boba. At that point I figured the best choice was going to be hero, which meant Jyn. 

Unfortunately, the first pack wasn't great for heroes (you can see what I passed Poem 9:50 into the stream), and I ended up taking an A-wing for pack 1/pick 1. Pick 2 wasn't much better, and I think I took a Lothal Insurgent. Pick 3 I took an Auzituck Gunship over the Fleet Lieutenant (probably the wrong choice in hindsight). The rest of pack 1 was a mix of yellow hero, neutral hero, and red neutrals . Pack 2, Poem handed me a Home One, which I took in case I wanted to pivot to green. An Echo Base Defender was in the next pack, and a bunch of other decent green stuff started coming my way. In the end, I ended up with a playable yellow/green build, but McBober crushed me in our games by focusing on removal with his red Boba, not letting Jyn get good trades in. 

Jrod is an excellent player and doubles as a high intesnsity coach for Teamfight Tactics.  He tried to win using theme with the card Outmaneuver that their podcast is named after.  He writes: 

My initial strategy when sitting down to draft is always stay as open as possible. However when sitting down all that got tossed out the window once I realized I could end up with 3 Boba Fetts. With my first option being Fett Fett Chewbacca and the person passing too me also had two Fetts I knew I needed to take Chewie. At the end of the leader draft I ended with Chewie, Fett, Fett and most players to either side of me had villainy leaders so I knew I wanted to try and go hero. 

Proceed to open pack 1 and I get overwhelming barrage. Which is great cause its an excellent P1P1 in most cases, however in this case I think it was correct to pass it. This would force the person to my left to take it most likely and put them in villainy. I did not do this and tried to fight the "force Fett" battle. Halfway into pack two I had a lot of space units and I was passed an outmaneuver and I thought to myself well if I get to win this draft with our namesake card that would be awesome and having a lot of space in draft is rare so I figured it was a possible option. P3 I was able to aqcuire 1 more outmaneuver and more ships and I was ready to play! Until Carbon ruined my content plans with his "good" deck. Blah how boring.... 

That's it for our draft recap.  I sincerely hope all of you get a chance to draft this excellent games.  If any of you have additional strategies or want to know more about drafting in Star Wars unlimited, hit us up on our discord!   https://discord.gg/sf9B6Zfr9j

-Loopee 

L8 Night Gaming Team Member