Where other TCGs pump out expansions so often that your wallet feels actual pain, Star Wars: Unlimited has a more modest approach to its release schedule; with only three sets a year, it seems more focused on meaningful changes, rather than building a massive card library quickly like Disney Lorcana or overwhelming players with new sets like in Magic: The Gathering. With Set 3, Twilight of the Republic, Star Wars: Unlimited continues to evolve in the right direction, with new tactics and keywords offering some thrilling deck-building opportunities.
Thematically, Twilight of the Republic puts the Clone Wars on centre stage, with all the classic characters, ships, and weapons that hailed from the conflict between the Galactic Republic and the Separatist Confederacy. Battle droids and clone troopers take to the field in a big way, and that brings the Set into new, familiar territory for TCG fans, with the introduction of token units.
Token units will be instantly familiar to anybody who has played MTG before; essentially, token units can be spawned by abilities on other unit cards. They’re usually low in attack and defence, but are a good way to get multiple units on the battlefield quickly; when defeated, they don’t get removed from the game or put into the discard, they simply get placed aside to be used again. For example, Captain Rex allows him to create two Clone Troopers when he is played, so you can quickly overwhelm your opponent.
“…it caught me off guard a couple of times, leaving me unprepared to defend against such a high-powered adversary.”
The use of token units is particularly effective when used in conjunction with the new keyword, Coordinate. Particularly useful for decks built around Ahsoka Tano, her deck is all about aggression, with Coordinate offering buffs to attack and defence when you have more than 3 active units on the battlefield, in any combination of ground and/or space. Using the pre-built deck in the Two-Player Starters showed off quickly how useful this can be; filling your battlefield with low-cost units fast, Coordinate instantly makes everything stronger; to counter this, opponents need to focus on destroying units, but the tokens make that quite difficult to stay on top of.
Ahsoka herself is built around this new mechanic; on her non-unit side, while you control at least three units, she gains an action that allows you to perform a boosted attack with a unit. When you deploy Ahsoka, she gains a different Coordinate ability, one that grants herself an additional +2 power. Combine this with Ashoka’s Padawan Lightsaber item (for the low power cost of 1), and you have yourself the ability to hit for 7 damage each turn, an easy way to whittle away at your opponents base, or remove some large opposing units from play promptly.
On the flipside, the Separatists (led by the leader of the droid armies General Grievous) is all about Droid units, with his core ability letting you give them Sentinel, a move that still annoys the hell out of me when it’s used against me, meaning Sentinel units must be attacked first, before the base or other units. He’s also able to give a boost in attack power, allowing you to stack and make Droid token units far more effective.
The other new keyword to keep an eye on in Twilight of the Republic is Exploit, which lets you defeat your own units in control so that you can play high-value cards at a discount. For example, a card may cost 8, which is a lot of resources to play, but each unit you destroy reduces that cost by 2, making a super-powerful card much cheaper. Again, token units can be incredibly handy here; low cost, easy to spawn and reusable, knocking them off to bring in a game-changing card can be quite the flex; when my opponent did this, it caught me off guard a couple of times, leaving me unprepared to defend against such a high-powered adversary.
Where the prior Star Wars: Unlimited set Shadows of the Galaxy offered new tactics that made for adaptability and sneaky moves, Twilight of the Republic feels like it’s evolving player options for deck-building, with token units intrinsically linked to massive moves on either side. Both of the included leaders here are wonderful examples of how you can take a tactic and make it your entire strategy, both geared around filling your ground area with multiple units, disposable and handy in high volume to capitalise on the person sitting opposite you.
Star Wars: Unlimited continues to make for a compelling TCG, where battles are a balance between mitigating units and making smart attacks on your opponent’s hefty base. I like how combat-focused it is; to me, it sits in a nice middle-ground between the light-hearted questing of Lorcana and the rules-heavy intensity of Magic. And, the cards still look fantastic. The cartoon style lends itself well to the Clone Wars in particular given its animated history, making for a colourful set full of dynamically-posed droids and troopers.
It’s enticing to think about how Star Wars: Unlimited will grow as tried-and-true mechanics, along with new keywords, continue to evolve how it’s played. With over 250 new cards in this set to muck around with, it’s a solid next step that continues to add more layers to one of the more thrilling and combat-focused TCGs on the market.
Star Wars: Unlimited: Twilight of the Republic is available now in all good hobby stores.
Star Wars: Unlimited – Twilight of the Republic packs were provided by Fantasy Flight Games for the purpose of this coverage.
About the Author
Luke Mitchell
he/him
Luke spends his time making radio, playing video games, binge-watching TV, getting unreasonably invested in wrestling, hosting bear events and hanging out with his beautiful pets.
