Early LAW Impressions: Alliance Outpost Base is Interesting. Multi-Aspect Payoff Cards Seem Questionable.
Some quick thoughts on a recently revealed LAW rare base and multi-aspect cards in general.
Table of Contents:
Alliance Outpost Base
While I don’t think this is a strong base at the moment (I think every base going forward is going to be compared against Data Vault and Colossus), it does open up some interesting deckbuilding creativity with Avar Kriss.
This pairing allows a player to play a 3-drop on turn one, or a 2-drop + experience/shield token.
Here are all of the ≤ 2-drops in this aspect pairing:
Here are all of the 3-drops in this aspect pairing:
Some notable 2 and 3-drops for consideration at the moment imo:
Some turn 1 play examples:
Jedi Consular with either an experience or shield token can make it resilient for a turn 2 resource cheating.
Similar case with GNK Power Droid and Malakili + a token.
Any 3-drop or a 3/6 via Gungi with an experience token.
Something like a Loth Wolf + shield token or Lobot + experience token may hinder an aggro deck.
Multi-Aspect Cards
Thought #1: I feel that multi-aspect cards “restrict” deckbuilding creativity. Look at this particular <Aspect 1><Aspect 2><maybe heroism/villainy> card, I wonder what aspect pairing I’m going to go with if I want to play it 🤔?
Thought #2a: I don’t think the common bases alone are enough to support the multi-aspect payoff cards.
Thought #2b: The revealed payoff cards so far are not worth the deckbuilding requirement.
There are two approaches from a deckbuilding perspective:
Approach #1: The above multi-aspect payoff cards are the ones not in-aspect with the leader/base aspect pairing (e.g. a Red/Blue/Heroism deck playing Ezra Bridger).
Pros: It’s much easier to trigger as the player most likely will have abundant conditional units existing on the board.
Cons: If there are no conditional units present, the payoff card would be off-aspect if it’s played.
Approach #2: The above multi-aspect payoff cards are the ones in-aspect to the leader/base aspect pairing (e.g. a Blue/Green/Heroism deck with Ezra Bridger playing few off-aspect red unit(s)).
Cons: It’s harder to trigger as it requires drawing and playing the off-aspect conditional unit, and then have it survive to play the payoff card.
Pros: Even without the payoff effect, the card can still be played in-aspect.
I’m assuming most decks will be built following Approach #1, just because of how hard it is to get the conditional unit to survive in Approach #2.
We’ve seen decks where players are even willing to hard cast off-aspect cards just for one payoff card, such as LOF Anakin Skywalker with Force Lightning and/or Power of the Dark Side in heroism decks. (LOF Kylo Ren leader doesn’t even need to hard cast heroism cards to enable the payoff).
LOF Anakin Skywalker probably follows more closely to Approach #2 where this payoff card is in-aspect to the deck and the off-aspect conditional card is what needs to be sought out for. However, this unit is very much playable without the additional -3/-3 payoff effect and it also doesn’t have a base “restriction,” unlike these multi-aspect payoff cards so far.
Some deckbuilding questions to ask:
How good are these payoff cards without the payoff?
I think Ezra Bridger is playable without its payoff effect, the others seem pretty meh imo.
Is it worth going with the 27 HP common base over Data Vault or Colossus?
Conclusion
Like most early impression type content, we’ll see how it turns out when the full set is revealed/released.
Compared to SEC’s 256 card pool, we’ve seen about 19% of LAW so far (excluding common bases).
[Credit to a fellow CBG’r who helped looked over this and gave their input.]