The Hub and Spoke Model

Seven weeks in. Eighty-four events. 5,523 players. Eighty-four winners.

Week 7 brought us thirteen events, 1,135 players, and a 482-player Sector Qualifier in London, the largest single event of the season so far. The matchup matrix is back alongside the APR numbers this week, and the timing is solid: the results look, on their face, like a fairly predictable continuation of established trends. Boba and Lando keep winning. Obi-Wan keeps cutting. Luke Skywalker finally wins one (more on that in a moment). But the matrix gives us the tools to ask the more interesting question: are the APR numbers we’re seeing telling us what’s actually happening in the room, or are they partially a function of who’s sitting across the table?

The short answer, as it turns out, is a little of both.

The Big Three, Updated

Boba Fett / Lake Country remains the workhorse of the season. Through 84 events he’s cleared 101 T8 appearances (15.0% of all available T8 slots) and 16 wins from a 9.8% field share. Part of what makes Boba compelling as a long-term metagame signal is how forgiving the deck is to build. The card choices matter a lot less than the leader does, and that’s, of course, exactly how you know a leader is genuinely strong rather than list-dependent.

Not flashy. But there’s a reason this deck has occupied roughly one in ten T8 seats all season long.

Lando Calrissian / Lake Country sits at +87.9% F→T8 APR, the highest entry figure of any tracked archetype, and this week reinforced why. The matrix has him running 65.7% against Obi-Wan (by far the largest field occupant), 68.2% against Vader, and a solid 60.0% against Talzin. His Stage 2 at +25.5% means he’s closing above expectation as well.

It’s worth noting that Lando’s absence from the London top 8 shouldn’t be overread. Four copies finished in the top 16, he was the most represented deck at Day 2, and the margin between 8th and 9th place in a bracket that deep can be a single game flip in either direction. The sustained +87.9% F→T8 APR remains the cleanest signal in the dataset. The matrix does show two real counters worth tracking: Aurra Sing / Data Vault beats him at 75.0%, and Dedra Meero / Colossus beats him at 60.5%. Both had strong weeks. More on both shortly.

Obi-Wan Kenobi / Blue Force continues to be the most structurally interesting story of the season. He’s in 7.5% of all registered decks, cuts to T8 at a +17.2% F→T8 APR, and then posts a Stage 2 of -33.9%.

At this point that Stage 2 drag isn’t noise. It’s the shape of the deck. The matrix makes the mechanism explicit: Obi-Wan’s three most common T8 opponents are Lando (34.3% for Obi-Wan), Vader (28.6%), and Mother Talzin / Yellow Force (36.9%). Those are three of his worst matchups in the table, and they skew heavily toward the archetypes most likely to be sitting across from him when he makes the cut. At London, Vader and Talzin were specifically targeted and heavily represented against the Obi-Wan field, which explains why his representation crumbled heading into the later rounds. He converts the field into T8 appearances. Then the metagame runs him over.

The Week 7 Story: Aurra Sing Arrives

The biggest single-week APR swing belongs to Aurra Sing / Data Vault, who posted nine T8 appearances and two wins across 13 events (roughly 1.2 T8 appearances per event), pushing her cumulative F→T8 APR up to +54.6%.

The matrix provides the explanation in full. Aurra runs 75.0% into Lando, 72.7% into Boba, and 71.9% into Vader. In a T8 environment where those three archetypes collectively occupy a healthy number of bracket seats every weekend, Aurra’s matchup spread is essentially purpose-built for the current metagame. She’s not just good in a vacuum. She’s specifically, substantially favored against the decks most likely to be in seats 1 through 8. The deck’s pitch practically writes itself: I can beat Lando and I can beat Boba, and I’m probably going to lose to Obi-Wan. That last clause matters, but we’ll get there…

There’s a caveat here, and it connects directly to the compressed APR concept. Aurra’s Stage 2 sits at only +3.5%, well behind her entry efficiency. Part of that is sample size, of course. But part of it is Dedra Meero / Colossus, who beats Aurra at 92.3% per the matrix, the most extreme individual matchup number in the entire table. When Aurra and Dedra share a T8 bracket, there’s essentially only one outcome. The question of whether Dedra rises further in direct response to Aurra’s surge is the most consequential thing to track heading into the season’s final weeks.

Yularen’s Return, Dedra’s Confirmation, and the Actual Shape of the Format

Colonel Yularen / Red posted eight T8 appearances and two wins in Week 7, pulling his cumulative F→T8 APR into positive territory at +15.4%. His action efficiency in the right matchups is beefy enough that the turns essentially play themselves when the board state lines up.

It’s worth being precise about what drove the bounce, though. Yularen’s good week isn’t well-explained by a dominant Lando matchup. The matrix shows that Lando is actually slightly favored into Yularen (54.3%), not the other way around. Yularen’s genuine strengths skew toward Vader (56.5%), Maul (75%), and Beckett (70.2%). Given Vader’s prominent showing coming out of London, those matchups likely paid off in specific bracket compositions this week. His rough spots at OB (33.9%), Talzin (24%), and Chewie (29.2%) simply didn’t appear as frequently in the cuts.

Dedra Meero / Colossus had perhaps the most structurally coherent week in the dataset.

Seven T8 appearances (including two at London), a win on the weekend, and a matchup profile that’s hard to argue with: 92.3% against Aurra, 78.3% against Vader, 72.4% against Talzin, 72.0% against Yularen, and 60.5% against Lando. Dedra posted two top 8 finishes at London alone, the highest T8 representation of any archetype at the event. The reason isn’t complicated: Lando is a racing, trading deck built into a metagame that assumed control didn’t exist. Now that control exists, Lando has a real problem, and Dedra is that problem made manifest.

The Stage 2 drag (-14.9%) is worth flagging. Despite that matchup profile, Dedra is converting T8 appearances to wins below expectation so far, largely because Boba (roughly even at 48.3%) and Obi-Wan (roughly even at 47.6%) still show up frequently in elimination brackets. Those are precisely the spots where she can’t run up the score. The negative closing APR is a ceiling problem, not a floor problem.

To that end, worth sitting with the broader structural picture the matrix paints: the format isn’t quite a clean rock-paper-scissors chain. It’s more of a hub-and-spoke model with Lando at the center. Lando beats most of the format by a meaningful margin. Aurra beats Lando hard (75.0%). Dedra beats both Aurra (92.3%) and Lando (60.5%). Dedra is the closest thing to a dominant control element in the meta right now. She beats the meta leader and she beats the meta leader’s primary predator. What keeps this honest is that Boba and OB remain Dedra’s ceiling, and both are still very much present in elimination brackets. In a similar vein, it’s essentially impossible to build a deck that goes 50/50 into everything in this format right now. That’s not a complaint. It’s the most interesting the matchup data has looked all season.

The hub-and-spoke framing is worth thinking on a little longer, because it does a better job of describing this meta than the rock-paper-scissors analogy that gets thrown around a lot. Rock-paper-scissors implies a clean cycle where everyone loses to someone and no one is dominant. That’s not quite what the matrix is showing us. Lando is dominant. He wins the large majority of his individual matchups, he’s the most represented deck in Day 2 brackets at the biggest events, and his F→T8 APR has sat in the stratosphere for seven weeks running. The counters exist, of course, but they don’t neutralize him uniformly. As mentioned, Aurra beats him at 75%, which is real, but Dedra beats Aurra at 92.3%, and Dedra herself goes roughly even into Boba and OB; the two archetypes most likely to be sharing her T8 bracket. To that end, the meta isn’t a circle where power diffuses evenly. It’s a wheel, and Lando is the axle. Everything else is figuring out how to stop a deck that beats most of the room on its own merits, and the answer keeps shifting week to week depending on who shows up and what they brought to stop the thing that was supposed to stop Lando.

Dark Weeks, a Milestone, and What Vader’s London Win Actually Means

Tobias Beckett / Red and Chewbacca / Yellow both posted zero T8 appearances this week across 13 events.

One dark week in a cumulative dataset doesn’t invalidate either deck, and both still have healthy win totals to fall back on. But the downward pressure on their trend lines is real. Both struggle badly into Lando (Beckett at 15.0%, Chewie at 17.4%), and as Lando’s field share keeps growing, those matchup numbers create structural entry problems that the APR will continue to reflect.

Luke Skywalker / Data Vault won an event this week, the Gaming Arena Planetary Qualifier at 48 players, for the first time all season.

His Stage 2 remains deeply negative, a product of 32 T8 appearances and only one win so far. But the Week 5 prediction that he’d close the season without ever winning is now officially in the failed column. His matchup spread shows some genuine strengths (65.8% into Vader, 57.8% into Talzin, 52.7% into OB), but Lando at 15.4% and Dedra at 25.0% are brutal spots to be sitting in.

Darth Vader / Yellow won the London Sector Qualifier outright. At 482 players, that’s the largest event of the season, and it’s a meaningful result on its face.

That said, it doesn’t change the fundamental read on the deck. Vader had one of the lower overall win rates at London itself, and the tournament winner specifically avoided facing Dedra throughout his run, which is a notable path given that Dedra beats Vader at 78.3%. There’s also a population-level nuance worth acknowledging here: Vader’s field skews meaningfully toward casual players compared to something like Lando (probably a function of how cheap the cards are overall combined with the relatively straightforward gameplan), which seems to be more often piloted by very competitive folks. Even APR, which normalizes for field share, can’t fully account for skill variance within an archetype. The casual end of a large field drags the cumulative numbers down even when the competitive Vader pilots are performing well. His competitive role in the meta remains what it’s been all season. The matchup spread says 71.4% into Obi-Wan, the best anti-OB number in the table and the clearest reason to register this deck. He runs 31.8% into Lando and 28.1% into Aurra, which is why the Stage 2 doesn’t get much further off the ground regardless of what happens in Swiss.

Checking the Predictions

The “Aurra Sing / DV cracks 20 T8 appearances” prediction hit in Week 7 (she’s now at 30). The “Luke ends the season without winning” prediction failed at the Gaming Arena PQ. The “Lando F→T8 APR moderates below +60%” prediction is still tracking in entirely the wrong direction at +87.9%. Pushing that number down would require a structural shift. Given that Aurra (75.0% vs Lando) and Dedra (60.5% vs Lando) both just had strong weeks simultaneously, the conditions for a shift are at least present. Whether it actually materializes is, of course, a function of who shows up and what they’re prepared for.

The Full Table

There you have it, Week 7 in the books. The matchup matrix doesn’t just explain the APR numbers this week; it explains the meta. The season is running long enough now that the signal is outpacing the noise, and that’s exactly when these metrics start to earn their keep.

Archetype counts and wins from SWU Competitive Hub (84 Premier PQs + London Sector Qualifier, >32 players). Field estimates from Meta Stats deck count data (5,523 Hub players). Matchup matrix from SWU Meta Stats top-20 archetype matchup data, May 11, 2026. APR methodology from “We’re Talking About It Wrong” (swu.report, August 2025).