I want to tell you something I’ve never admitted to anyone in a game store.
The first time I sat down to play Star Wars Unlimited, I lost every single game. Not close losses either. I mean the kind where your opponent has the grace to stop making eye contact around turn four, and you’re sitting there looking at your cards like they personally let you down. I went home, ate an entire sleeve of Thin Mints, and rewatched the Ahsoka finale because I needed to be reminded that some things in this universe work out eventually.
And then I went back.
I can’t fully explain that, even now. I think it was the cards themselves. These specific cards, with these characters on them… there was something about holding them that made me want to understand the game rather than just walk away from it. I’ve tried other games and I know what it feels like when something doesn’t quite catch. Lorcana caught, for a while. I spent almost two years with it, and I genuinely loved parts of it — the art direction, the way the flavor text felt like it was written by someone who actually loved the source material, the community that built up around it fast. It was a good on-ramp. Patient with new players, forgiving to build around, and populated almost entirely by people who were there because they loved Disney the way I love Star Wars. That counts for something.
But I also think Lorcana taught me something I didn’t expect: that I wanted more game underneath the feeling. At some point I realized I was showing up to play mostly for the community and the aesthetics, and less because the decisions felt weighty. I don’t know if that’s a knock on Lorcana exactly (it does what it sets out to do) but it wasn’t quite scratching the itch I didn’t know I had yet. So when a friend dragged me to a Star Wars Unlimited prerelease with zero preparation, something clicked that I hadn’t felt before. The decisions felt real. The losses felt instructive rather than just unlucky.
The fact that every single card also had a character I’d cared about for twenty years on it didn’t hurt.
I am, first and foremost, a Star Wars fan who plays a card game. That’s different from being a card game player who happens to like Star Wars, and I think it means I see things a little differently than some of the voices you’ll find in SWU coverage. I notice when a card feels like the character it represents. I get excited about flavor text in a way that probably marks me as a certain kind of person. When I’m evaluating a new card, I’m asking both what it does in a game state and whether it earns the name on it. And when those two things align, it tells you something real about what the card is supposed to do. Good design and good flavor aren’t usually an accident.
I’m not going to pretend I’m Kennon. If you’ve read anything on this site, you know what he does: he buries himself in tournament data, builds frameworks, runs numbers until the meta gives up its secrets. It’s very impressive and I recommend reading it. It’s why I started reading The SWU Report in the first place.
What I bring is something else. I remember, with uncomfortable clarity, what it felt like to sit at my first prerelease not knowing what a basic base was. I asked someone what “shielded” meant and got an answer that raised four more questions I was too embarrassed to ask. Nobody was unkind, the SWU community is warm and I mean it, but there’s a gap between you’re welcome here and let me actually help you understand this, and I want to live in that gap.
I’ll be honest about one thing, though, because I think it’s worth saying: I came into this game expecting flavor text and there isn’t any. No little italicized quote at the bottom of the card telling you what Cassian said in the moment, or what the battle felt like from the ground. Lorcana had it. Most of the games I’d played before had it. I mourned that a little, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.
But here’s the thing… the art carries more weight because of it. When there’s no text telling you how to feel about a card, you look harder at the image. And the mechanical design picks up the rest of the slack in ways I’ve come to genuinely appreciate. When a card plays like the character it depicts, that’s doing the same work flavor text does, just differently. Cassian Andor’s leader card feels like Cassian Andor not because it says so in italics, but because of what it actually does on the table. That’s a different kind of craft, and I’ve learned to respect it even while I occasionally wish someone had just put one good line of dialogue on there.
So: if you’re new, this column is for you specifically. I will not assume you know a term without explaining it. I will tell you when I made a mistake and what it cost me, because that’s almost always more useful than being told what someone did right. I will, on occasion, spend a paragraph on flavor text I wish existed, because flavor text matters and I’m not apologizing for that.
And if you’re not new… if you’ve been playing for years and you came here expecting data and meta reads, I’d ask you to stick around anyway. I have opinions about cards. I will grade things and defend those grades. I will be wrong sometimes, in public, and I’ll tell you when I am. I think there’s a version of card evaluation that starts with feel and works toward rigor, and I’m curious whether that’s useful to anyone else.
At least, I think it might be. That’s usually how it starts.
It took me a while to stop feeling like a visitor in competitive card game spaces. Like I’d walked into a room where everyone else had been there for years and I was still figuring out where the light switch was. Cold in there, for a minute.
That thawed. Slowly, then all at once, the way it does.
I’m here now. Pull up a chair.
— Jadis
