by BananaCrapshoot

Good Day Troopers. I hope everyone is healthy and well rested. Today I wanted to take a look at the resource mechanic in Star Wars: Unlimited and talk through some thoughts and strategies I have had in my demo games of SWU.

To start off I want to address resouefe mechanics in games. Now most MTG players are aware of the potential to becoming land locked or mana screwed. This happens if you do not draw into your lands giving you the inability to play cards from hand. This happens with the variability of card draw math and the amount of lands you have to include in your deck to consistently hit the cost curve of your deck. A few ways modern card games have addressed this issue is by giving you access to a set number of resources a turn, like Star Wars Destiny giving you 2 resources every turn to spend on cards, with the potential to gain more through other in game effects, A set 1 resource per round and it goes up by 1 each round like Hearthstone, or more commonly the ability to take cards from your hand and play them into a resource zone, using those resources to pay for cards.

Most card games utilizing this similar mechanic offer you the chance to play one card into your resource zone each round. Dragon Ball Super Card game is the biggest one I can think of that allows you to do this, but their are others. VS system 2PCG takes a hybrid approach, each turn you can play any card face down as a resource but you can also include locations in your deck with symbols on them that you can later flip face down to generate that symbol to pay for super powers on cards.

Star Wars: Unlimited does something rather unique with this mechanic by allowing you to place 2 cards into play during set up. This allows you to get in the action sooner as most games turn 1 is rather boring and this lets you have more gas to go from the start.

Now when you get your opening hand you have to pick 2 of those cards to row for resources, which 2 do I pick? It really depends on a few things from what I can tell based on some demo games and playing other games.

1. What’s your matchup? What you keep or row as a resource can depend greatly on your matchup. If you are Vader playing into Luke and you know you have to deal with shields, keeping a bunch of low cost cards makes sense so you can use the Vader ability to ping off shields so you can keep the pressure on.

2. What does your curve look like? Most decks are constructed to fit a certain resource curve so you hit certain cards during certain points of the game for efficiency and optimization. One of the decisions you might have to make on what to row to your resource zone is based on that curve, if you have a 2,2,3,4,5,5 cost hand you may want to resource a 2 and 5 so you can be hitting your cost curve each round.

One more thing I wanted to touch on slightly is a potential trap I see people walking into. I don’t think it’s correct to automatically resource the highest cost cards in your hand. If you miss your curve or depending on the matchups you can potentially hurt your mid-late game by dumping those cards early. Really think about some of the stuff we talked about today to gameplan and don’t set yourself up for failure.

That is it I think. Thanks for stopping by. I’m sure I will be proven wrong at some point soon but hopefully this at least gets you thinking about how and what to resource! We will see you in the arenas.