Star Wars: Unlimited - It's Basically Here
A prerelease preview
When we first demoed SW:U at Gencon 2023, it felt like its release was still in a galaxy far, far away. Like most other times in life when looking back, it’s amazing how not so long ago August feels. Even if I keep up my renewed goal of a weekly newsletter (press “x” to doubt), this will be the last Opossum Paper before prerelease weekend!
Real quick - what are prereleases?
I learned with Lorcana that when a big intellectual property gets a card game, a lot of first time card players jump in, excited to battle with their favorite characters. To that end, I understand a lot of people who stumble on this newsletter may not know what a “prerelease” even is!
I’m a big fan of the maxim, “If you want to learn Plato, don’t read about Plato. Read Plato.” So, let’s hear from the FFG themselves on what a prerelease is:
Just as it sounds, the Prerelease phase occurs just before the release of a new set of Star Wars: Unlimited. This phase consists of “prerelease events,” which take place the week before the new set’s official release date. Each of these events involves a sealed tournament, and they allow players to get ahold of cards from the new set early.
When you go to a prerelease event, you’ll pay some amount of money (about $30) in exchange for a prerelease “kit”. This kit comes with 6 packs for you to play sealed matches with, a quickstart rules guide, new Luke/Vader promos, and tokens. You’ll get additional packs just for competing in the sealed tournament, as well as additionals packs for each win you rack up.
The coolest thing in the box is a little sheet on “how to build a prerelease deck”. Here’s a screenshot of the sheet’s front side.
The picture comes from this FFG video. I don’t have a screen grab of the second side, unfortunately. It purports to give some deckbuilding ratio tips, how to choose a leader, etc. Lots of people are going to play in this event without doing any research on the game or its rules, so having these cheat sheets handy is excellent.
How does SW:U prerelease stack up?
The biggest reason I wanted to write this week was to “review” the prerelease kits before playing with them and compare them to other TCGs prerelease kits. A Lorcana comparison isn’t fair because it’s really kicking someone while they’re down. Okay, okay I’ll stop (again, press “x” to doubt).
Then I realized that, after Flesh and Blood, I don’t really have a bead on games’ prereleases anymore. I know that Magic does them, but Magic is a shell of its former self. Alpha Clash does them, but I haven’t had a chance to go to an Alpha Clash prerelease yet (on my to do list), and I genuinely have never met anyone that actually plays One Piece. I’m basically out of touch.
So, how do you pre-judge a prerelease kit without anything to compare it to? On its own merits, I suppose.
To this end, I love the SW:U prerelease model. I’m a big fan of giving someone a kit that has everything they need in it. It’s beginner friendly, which is the perfect tone and tenor of a prerelease. A person, with no experience in TCGs, can pay their $30 and have a physical product in their hand that feels designed for the experience.
Prereleases that are just sealed tournaments have little flair to them. You pay your money, and a person hands you six packs. It really feels like a normal pack buying transaction. With the kit model SW:U is adopting, you have a product that feels unique to the event. It adds a bit more magic to the experience.
I also like that SW:U dropped its comprehensive rules just ahead of the prerelease. Being able to adjudicated those rare times where the game is ambiguous is important. It’s even more important when people are paying money to play in a sanctioned tournaments. To that end, good on FFG for getting these out early. Even if the rules need amended at some point (they will), it’s better to have them now.
In a future Opossum Paper, I’ll be walking through the comprehensive rules and point out the big hits. I think it’s important for tournament players to actually read the rules documents, but I also realize it’s one of the more mind numbing experiences out there.
Conclusion
This one sort of got away from me. I really wanted to write about starting new communities and use the prerelease as a back drop, but I got excited by the kits and wanted to tell folks how cool I think they look.
Next time I’ll probably recap my prerelease experience (does the hype match the juice), get into my community building thoughts, bash gatekeeping, and make fun of people that call other players “new” to a game that hasn’t came out yet.
For now though, I’m excited about prerelease and going to be spending time looking at videos where people theorycraft the best decks!
If you’ve read this far, I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d consider subscribing, for free, to this newsletter. The weekly newsletter will hopefully grow as I get feedback and experience, and I truly look forward to sharing it with everyone.
I’d also appreciate it if you check out my Lorcana podcast, which I co-host with my good friend Dan Norton (DJGigabyte). Quest for 20 started as a Lorcana podcast, but it’s really just a TCG podcast now, and we will certainly be talking about all things SW:U as the game really takes off.