Hello Legion players! Legionnaires? Good people of Star Wars™: Legion!

It is our pleasure to announce Rules Reference Guide 2.0, which features the 2020 competitive points rebalancing. This update represents a major overhaul to the game, so we’d like to take a moment to highlight some of the key changes.

Following our philosophy of trying to lift units up rather than lop off the tall poppies, we’re happy to report that the majority of changes involve points reductions to lesser-used units. In particular, we applied a host of points reductions aimed at bringing all the vehicles of the game up to the level of the TX-130 Saber-class fighter tank and the AAT. Furthermore, to help trooper units combat this new menace, we’ve applied steep discounts to numerous anti-armor heavy weapons across all factions. Additionally, we’ve made an effort to increase the viability of Rebel and Imperial Corps units with targeted reductions to certain units alongside these heavy weapon discounts.

In addition to points changes, we’ve also applied a small number of impactful errata to units and cards that we felt needed more attention than just a points reduction.  Notably, the T-47 Airspeeder gains “attack surge: critical” on its surge chart, and both the Wookiee Warriors and Chewbacca gain increased mobility with the Scale keyword and extra lethality with the Duelist and Lethal 1 keywords, respectively. We try to tread very carefully indeed when it comes to changing what actually appears on a card, but from time to time we feel that an errata is necessary to address fundamental deficiencies or imbalances that points changes cannot fully solve.

This Rules Reference Guide also contains several important changes to some foundational keywords, in an attempt to make the units that possess those keywords more effective—and more fun. These are the most significant changes:

• Units embarked on a vehicle with the Open Transport keyword are now able to perform attacks and to be attacked, and benefit from heavy cover while embarked. This should lead to some interesting new strategies involving the X-34 Landspeeder and the TX-225 GAVw Occupier combat assault tank.
• Units that are obligated to perform a compulsory move during their activation can now perform that move at either the start or the end of their activation. With the additional tactical flexibility this change provides, I expect to see units with the Speeder keyword become more popular than ever.
• The Agile X and Tactical X keyword now require a standard move in order to generate tokens. Units with the Scout X keyword and either Agile X or Tactical X can no longer produce tokens during the Deployment step of Setup.
• Finally, we come to the most decisive change: Eliminating the ability of clone troopers to use the standby tokens of other friendly clone units at range 1. Clone troopers are now restricted to sharing aim, dodge, and surge tokens.

This is a change we thought long and hard about, because it will have serious ramifications for the Grand Republic faction. Numerous alternatives were tested and ultimately discarded, because we kept coming back to the same core issues. Widespread standby token sharing is problematic for several reasons; it is too powerful, too frustrating for the opponents of the Republic, and it leads to highly non-interactive game states.

In many cases, the right move when playing against a Republic army with access to numerous standby tokens is to simply not engage. When a mechanic is able to punish players severely for doing what they need to do to win the game—namely, attack the enemy and advance toward objectives—it can feel like there’s no right answer. We want to encourage interactive games and keep Star Wars: Legion approachable, and in order to do that, the rule had to change. The simplest and best solution was simply to remove the option to share standby tokens from the core rules of clone troopers.

Republic units with the Exemplar keyword like Padmé Amidala and Anakin Skywalker will still be able to utilize this powerful ability, but by limiting it to key characters it is now more targeted in scope and limited in scale.   

It’s our sincere hope that the sum of these changes will lead to a more balanced, interesting, and dynamic game for fans of all four factions. We can’t wait to see what new lists and strategies the players cook up!