From Zero to Hyperspace: Our Journey Into SWU
Origin story: How we got into the game
I first came across this game via Watch It Played (
) as we were pretty big board gamers at the time. Coming from Yu-Gi-Oh, where I disliked how the game is just about comboing and board vomiting, and MTG, where I dislike the potential of mana screw / flooding, SWU’s action-by-action play flow and resourcing system immediately caught my attention.
On Friday, March 8th, we went to Dice House Games to buy the starter decks. We played it and we liked the game. The next day, we went back and bought a booster box. I can only recall pulling Avenger and Black One as our legendaries, can’t really remember.
Alyssa’s favorite Star Wars movie is Rogue One, so she immediately wanted to play with a Jyn deck. She also hates deckbuilding, so I had to try to build her deck. I built a Jyn Blue deck, with the idea of going into space while trying to make favorable trades with Jyn’s ability. I worked off of the Vader starter deck. I also looked up meta decks at the time, but we were heavily limited by our one starter kit and one booster box, so our decks were jank.
Using the SWU’s store locator, I found Cardboard Games (CBG). I went to their first SWU weekly ($10 - up to 5 rounds, Bo1, 1 OP pack on entry, two packs into prize pool) on March 12th and bought their season pass ($64 for 8 weeks at 20% discount).
All I remember is that Alyssa and I had negative records for the first two weeks. Though this wasn’t too unexpected as we were both still quite unfamiliar to the game and lacking a lot of the rares/legendaries. Throughout this period, I was trying to learn more about the game, from simple things, such as understanding what ramp means and how it impacts deck/playstyle, looking up meta decklists and discussion videos, and discussing the deck/card choices after playing an opponent at CBG to understand their decks better. Alyssa and I would play almost every night.
I also introduced two different friends into the game via playing the starter decks, both of which ended up buying their own copies of the starter deck, and one of which (Jae) became pretty competitive in the game.
And that’s how we got into the game.