Sadly neither Marcin or Diego were able to make the restart of the lcg/tcg/ccg night. But Dave was.

It’d been a long day for me. To be at work for 6am I need to get up at 4:30. Or 4:45 if I’m feeling particularly lazy. Having started at 6am, these last three days I’ve been finishing at 3pm.

After getting home just before 4pm, I had a bath and nearly fell asleep. Yeah I was that tired.

I threw the two starter sets you can get for Star Wars Unlimited (SWU) into a bag along with the two player game mat.

After pleasantries, getting refreshments, and having to apologise for the very poor quality of the starter set components (they are shocking) we chose our decks from the Spark of Rebellion starter set.

Dave went Vader, which means I played Luke.

The first game went my way. It wasn’t one sided by all means. It was a bit to and fro, with each player having moments having the upper hand.

We stayed with our respective deck choices, and played a second game.

Dave definitely had the upper hand in this game. For the majority of the game I felt I was just holding on for dear life. Delaying the inevitable.

Finally Dave managed to deliver the winning blow.

Our third game was going to be with the second starter set that goes with the latest set Shadows of the Galaxy.

Dave played the Moth Gideon deck whilst I had the Mandalorian deck.

These decks were completely new to me. I had no idea what the focus of them were. I’d avoided any talk online about them.

I had to mulligan my opening hand and the resulting six cards still left me lacking a turn one play or even a decent turn two play. My turn one action was taking the initiative token.

Yeah I was on the backfoot right from the start.

Whilst my deck continued to hate me giving me no synergy between cards I had, no combos etc. Dave’s was just delivering him the goodies to overwhelm me, remove any defences/threats I could muster. In the end he just totally destroyed me.

I know within SWU there is targeted removal of one for or another. But I would have loved a board wipe card in this game. Maybe that’ll come in future releases.

Our fourth and final game saw the tables turned. I was getting upgrades, went all Voltron on Mando once he was out (I had him hitting for eight points of damage and a final winning 9). Dave was struggling to keep up or deal with the heavily upgraded Mando.

I do really like these starter decks. They are great fun to play. Seem relatively balanced. Great design on the player mats with the helpful player aids. But as pointed out these decks are let down by poor component quality.

I’m currently (as you have seen) using these like MtG duel decks for casual play with friends.

I had a great evening playing SWU with Dave.