Fantasy Flight Games has announced a new constructed format for the Star Wars Unlimited trading card game, and its the most interesting competitive format I've seen from any major TCG in far too long. 'Trilogy' is a best-of-three format which requires players to build three distinct decks - but that's only the first layer of nuance that makes this into a genuinely exciting deck-building challenge.
Star Wars Unlimited has been out for just over a year now, and it won't be long before the earlier Star Wars Unlimited sets start to rotate out of its Premier constructed format and into the evergreen Eternal format. Trilogy will be another format with access to the full card pool, but it puts some big limitations on how players must build the three decks they'll take into matches.
First, each deck must use a different leader and a different base. The requirement that you only take three or fewer copies of any card still applies, but this time, it's the maximum you can bring across all three decks. Players simply can't run multiple decks that all rely on the same few best in class cards.
Then there's the matches themselves. Players start by presenting their leader and base pairs to their opponent, who gets to ban one of them. If you're sick of facing a specific deck, or know that it's a hard counter to your decks, you can simply strike it off the playlist.
Players then secretly choose a deck for the first game. Whoever wins game one has to set aside the winning deck, and play the second match with their other un-banned deck. Winning the match overall will require you to claim victory with both your un-banned decks. This puts pressure on your deck-building skills - you have to ensure that each deck has just as much juice as the others.
Because of these restraints, Trilogy should hopefully have a much broader pool of playable cards than the Eternal format - dominant decks will be auto-ban targets before matches start, while archetypes that perform well because of a few high powered cards will be limited to running one full-power deck or multiple weaker ones, encouraging players to spread out into the less dominant archetypes. And any truly multi-deck all star cards will only show up in one deck in three.
It reminds me of the fan-made Canadian Highlander format for Magic: The Gathering, which uses the same MTG banlist as the incredibly high power Vintage format, plus a points system, but requires players to run a 100 card deck with no duplicates (and no Commander).
As a result of the strict deck building requirements, many more of the best MTG cards get played in Canadian Highlander than in Vintage, and the decks are vastly more diverse than other constructed formats. Check out the tirelessly cheerful Serge Yager and the laconic - some would say regal - Benjamin Wheeler in the North 100 Showdown video below, to get a sense for the diversity of this format.
Trilogy wouldn't work for every TCG - building three competitive Yugioh decks which don't all have access to the best Hand Traps would give most games to whoever got first turn. But I think it's a genuinely great approach to Eternal formats that I'd like to see in more games.
What do you think? Has this been used before in another TCG we've completely overlooked? What would be the major drawbacks? I'd love to chat about it in the official Wargamer Discord community.
If you want a different way to diversify your Star Wars tabletop gaming, check out our guide to the best Star Wars board games.