Reflections on the Legion 2.6 Tournament Scene

Thank goodness (and AMG) for 2.6.  The latest edition has revitalized my desire to listbuild and to play in tournaments.  I don’t know about you, but I’d gotten awful tired of playing nothing but Key Positions and Intercept the Transmissions in the competitive setting.  A year ago I began bringing Breakthrough and Danger Close to tournaments just to break up the monotony of playing one gunline matchup after another.  It had gotten so bad that I picked up both Dystopian Wars and Middle Earth over the summer as a means of reprieve from the stand-and-shoot matchups that Legion was devolving into.  

But now all of that is behind us and I can enjoy tournaments again!  

The purpose of this article is for the talking heads here at Crit2Block to discuss how 2.6 how changed and revitalized the Legion tournament scene.  I’m not going to discuss how to win tournaments or even how to listbuild in this article.  Instead, I (and the other contributors) will be sharing our reflections on the state of the competitive game. 

To add structure to these reflections I'm going to divide this article into three parts.  The first will be general reflections about the state of the game and how it has influenced our tournament experiences.  This is a rather broad section and can include anything from listbuilding to pace of play to scoring and anything in between.  

Secondly, I’ve got a few thoughts, concerns, etc. about the tournament scene that I’d like to see AMG address.  These changes could perhaps be done by the community, but most of them will necessitate direct oversight and action from AMG to facilitate change.  

Lastly, I’ll include a few ramblings and pet peeves of my own that, if addressed, I genuinely believe will improve the tournament experience for all players.  If you’re looking for hot takes, this is where you’ll find them.  

I’m going to let Travis have the opening reflections on the tournament scene.  For reference, he won his first Legion 2.6 tournament.  

I’ve got a few loose thoughts about the tournament turnout:

The second tiebreaker used should be victory points instead of kill points. I was able to win 12-3 in one of my games with only 300 kill points. Now that the game ends at 12 instead of at a turn number, it gives an easy way to tell if one player perfoms better than another over the course of a tournament. On top of that, when you focus on kill points, you may be downplaying how some armies can win. Also, a concession should be 12 VPs and 800 kill points.

Turn 0 is stupid fun and interactive for both players now. It is a real debate if I want to veto primary, secondary, advantages, or switch to blue player. Do I really want to split my 10 act army among 5 moving objectives? Do I think I can out-suppress my opponent? Do I want to allow my 16 activation opponent to have a pass token? Choosing the side of the board last just doubles down on that interaction.

Games will still take 2.5 hours for new players and tournaments will still take 9ish hours with a lunch break. However, in a year from now, I anticipate 30 minutes being cut from each game time. At this point, with similarly experienced players, I can burn through 2 games in 3-4 hours.

A quarter of the game time will be turn 1 because it affects the game way more now that you have less time to get across the board. Deploying on the edge of the board pretty much dedicates that unit to that side for the game unless it is a Geonosian or speeder.

You need more judges at the beginning and end of the games. POIs have to be placed flat on the board which requires moving terrain most of the time. There will also be more questions about deployment and all of the keyword changes. Our TO had a laminated rulebook that was referenced nonstop.

Thanks Travis!  By the way, in case you weren’t aware, Travis has been working overtime to bring LegionHq back into the limelight and he’s nearly finished with the work.  In the meantime, go see the beauty that his hardwork has brought us.  If you’re on a PC, the link for LegionHq2 is up there in the top left corner of your screen or you can find it directly through this link: https://legionhq2.com/

Next up is Richard Lavery, the runner-up to this year’s Crucible-Con and the “Baron of Crit2Block.”

The legion tournament scene has changed quite a bit with the update of 2.6. Turn zero is just as important as it was previously, but now with a lot less control for players who are just flipping cards at random. Being red player definitely seems like the strongest outcome of the dice roll to start turn zero, as the last flip of a card or stealing the ability to choose table side is very strong. 

The two areas I’d encourage people to focus on improving are their deployment and remembrance of how the objectives work. Turn 1 deployment is probably the number one area of skill differential right now. The ability to read the field, counter deploy, and set yourself up for future turns is critical and mistakes here could cost you the whole game. 

The other area I see people getting tripped up in is remembering how the game scores and getting caught by surprise when their opponent is suddenly up 4-1 or worse. Make sure that before you deploy you understand how and when points are scored; and then come up with a game plan for how to do that! While falling a few points behind isn’t insurmountable, it is an extremely difficult task. Remember, if you’re ahead on points that puts the pressure on your opponent to respond!

My last take is to remind people that we are playing a game, so have fun with it! I was excited to see how many new and diverse lists there have been (especially at Crucible) and I’m excited to see where the game will be in a few months. There is a lot to experiment with and I don’t think people have fully unlocked everything by a long shot. Keep your chins up, learn from your losses, and tinker away!

Now for our very own Eric Maylott who wants to give us some opinions that are indeed, his very own.  

As someone who has been too busy to play more than two games of the new Legion, I have very little to offer in the way of insights into whatever Dan is pontificating on this time. However, I am very capable of offering my thoughts on how the battle reports from my dear friends at the STABcast have changed with the new version of Legion. 

For starters, Ben has real life experiences! New Legion has been out all of two months and suddenly Ben is making time to go to tournaments in mythical lands (Florida) and standing up to his coworkers when they tell him his school can’t possibly function without him! Gone are the days of Ben offering insights based purely on the games he plays in his mind; he has played actual games against actual humans! Will he re-establish himself as a pillar of the local community and continue to have battle reports to share? We can only hope. 

It appears new Legion lends itself to a different style of battle reports as well. There are now two ways to score points, so it is more difficult to succinctly describe how all the points were scored. Battle reports either need to focus on key moments or risk getting really long. This is particularly damning for Ryan Sliwoski as I can typically count on one of his battle reports to get me through more than one commute to daycare. No longer can Maul infiltrate on a box and run away, or speeder bikes drop off bombs on turns 1, 2, and 3. Games typically are not a “done deal" early anymore and can have multiple momentum swings throughout; even though they’ve been shortened by a round. Add in that there tend to be more POIs in play than the previous objective system and it means there are likely more key moments to discuss in each battle report.

This has led to STABcast battle reports being more about vibes with a sprinkling of key moments. The exception being, of course, when Ryan and Tim played each other at Crucible and we were given an exact recounting of the game right down to which condiments Tim’s wookiees applied to which of Ryan’s rebels and how that enhanced their flavor during the feast that was had. 

Battle reports are a tricky thing to be done via podcast and it can end up being quite boring. In my experience, STABcast tends to do it a bit better than some other Legion podcasts because not only do they incorporate their own brand of humor, but you really can’t trust that anything they say is actually true (I have it on good authority that many details of the Dr. vs. Dr. matchup at Crucible were deliberately altered in an attempt make sense of the murky hallucinations of a diabetes induced fugue).

The Stabcast has really begun to steer into the idea that the media is meant to promote your point of view rather than provide actual facts. If you want to start holding your consumption of battle reports to a higher standard, head on over to our YouTube channel! 

Crit2Block does not normally partake in slander, but last I (Kentucky Dan) checked I’m undefeated in Tennessee so…

I'm coming for you Ryan, you did my boy Joel dirty...

Alrighty, now for my tournament reflections.

The new Legion plays very, very differently than the old.  Killing your opponent certainly helps you win, but in no way is it a direct correlation to success.  Frankly, kill points are a bad indicator of game state.  This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but the player who is chasing kill points early in the game is typically the one that will lose.  I don’t care if you’ve removed three activations by the end of round two, if you haven’t started scoring then you’ve got a tough road ahead of you.  

Secondary objectives are far more influential on the game state then most players realize.  It’s true that they reward less points than their primary counterparts, but they’ll hand you those 1-3 points that win you a game.  Don’t sleep on secondaries.  Make sure you craft scenarios in which you’re scoring a secondary objective every round that they are available.  It’s only twelve points to win and typically a quarter of those points are coming from your secondary objectives.  

There are still some units that need balancing.  Notably ARC troopers and Anakin (notice how I snuck him into the header photo?).  If your Republic lists aren’t beginning with two units of ARC troopers then you’re trippin’.  I don’t quite understand how it happened, but in the blink of an eye Republic has become the melee faction.  It’s not what I had on my Legion 2.6 bingo card, but it’s a welcome refresher for the faction.  Be sure your tournament lists have anti-melee counters and a smattering of pierce to deal with this newfound threat.  

Most Force Users are actually doing better than I thought they would in this new world.  Initially I figured the changes to deployment and the shortened game would lead to a drought of sabers; I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Grievous is around every corner and everyone with a force slot is bringing Burst of Speed.  It’s not a perfect world, but I’m happy to see the competitive scene feeling thematic with notable heroes bringing swords to a gunfight.  

My last reflection on the 2.6 tournament scene is an excellent hot take.  I'd rather the game stayed at 800 points.  I know the new widespread objective sets wouldn’t feel as natural with only 800 points on the table, but I’d rather our games ended faster.  I’ll get into my time frustrations later, but I had hoped that by moving to only five rounds we could squeak in a whole ‘nother game of Legion in a day.  But alas, ‘tis not to be.  Maybe in a year or so (once folks are literally up to speed) we could look into shortening the game length and squeaking in another game.  Scheduling a tournament into my calendar is a tricky task, I’d love to get more bang for my buck.  

Now that we’ve discussed how 2.6 has affected our Legion tournaments, I’d like to write about a few issues I’ve found in 2.6 that pertain to tournament play that I’d love to see AMG address.  

Advantages

The biggest issue I’d like AMG to address is the lack of diversity in the advantage deck.  Green on purpose, the advantage deck has replaced the condition deck, but has repeated its same errors.  The way I see it is that we’ve come full circle already and there's only two cards getting played.  We’ve swapped two auto-includes (Clear Conditions and Fortified Positions) for their newer counterparts (Advanced Intel and Cunning Deployment).  Viewed pragmatically, the advantage deck consists of three tiers.  

• The cards you won’t leave home without

  • Advanced Intel

  • Cunning Deployment

• The cards you won’t leave home with

  • Strafing Run

  • Ordinance

• The third card you’re required to bring (you flip away from this to get back to the first two)

  • Fortified Position

  • Garrison

Now one of the pleasures of having a blog is people claiming that you’re wrong in the comment section.  Someone is gonna say that because they’ve had success with Ordnance once (they got like triple crits or something wild) that I'm wrong and it should belong in a better tier.  So if you’re reading this while preparing to type that..

Seriously, we need some updates to the advantage deck.  I know that AMG has said they’ll be introducing faction specific cards coming next year, (which is great) but I doubt they’ll shake up the meta too much.  These new cards will likely replace “the third card” for some factions, but they’ll do nothing to resurrect the DOA Ordinance and Strafing Run cards we’ve already been given.  I’m not asking for a flood of faction specific advantage cards to muddy the waters.  I’m asking for Ordinance and Strafing Run to be fixed.  

The new edition isn’t even three months old yet.  We’ve no physical cards and no wasted resources other than printer ink.  If ever there was a time to go back to the drawing board and tweak a few things: it is now.  Alot is changing at once, no one will think less of AMG for admitting fault.  In fact, listening to the community in this matter would be a net positive for all parties.  Heck, there may yet be time to get the new replacements into the (inevitable) new core box coming out next year.  In the grand scheme of the game, fixing the advantage deck won’t change too much, but it will go a long way in relieving the “same-old, same-old” feel of turn zero.  

P.S.: If you’d like my guesses on what the new advantage cards will do, then here you go.  I’ve listed them in order of what I feel is most to least likely:  

• Give units in your army Scout X

• Give out tokens other than dodges (aim, surge or observation)

• Give out reinforcements to your army

• Give one additional order during round one

• Some sort of order control akin to Krennic’s 1-pip 

• Give Inspire 1 to units in your army

• Another gimmicky interaction along the line of Sabine's Graffiti token

• Remove a pass token from your opponent

• A card that only interacts with turn zero (revealing this card gives you the final pick of blue/red player etc.)

• If you have a hunter, pass out another Bounty token (likely too strong)

Burst of Speed

My second complaint is frankly a unit balance issue, but it’s gotten so bad that it’s also become a tournament issue.  Show me a player who hasn’t brought Burst of Speed on their force user and I’ll show you someone that has made a mistake.  We’ve only got five rounds in the game now, you don’t got time to mosey on in there!  You gotta drop that lead foot early and start mulching through your opponents 1000 point army while you’ve still got the opportunity.  If you wait too long, the increased army size of 2.6 will make you pay for your hesitancy.  Additionally, the widespread nature of 2.6 also incentivizes you to ensure your heroes have a meaningful impact on the game.  If you’re a melee hero, the best way to help is to be there.  

In case you don’t believe me,  just go take a look at the lists submitted to any large prestigious tournament in the last month.  Anybody that is somebody is bringing Burst of Speed on their Jedi.  Rolling up to a table and knowing your opponent has Burst of Speed without them telling you is getting old pretty quick.  Burst of Speed was near auto-include at the beginning of the year and now it’s eclipsed Force Push to take over as “the upgrade you never leave at home.” 

Force Push now consumes 40 of your 1000 points; meaning its comparative cost is over triple of what it used to be.  Meanwhile, Burst of Speed has maintained its original price and increased in value in both listbuilding and on the table.  If there was any card in 2.6 that feels auto-include, it’s this one.  Burst of Speed needs a price hike if AMG doesn’t want it to be a forgone conclusion for every force user in the game.  

A way to re-use my Bomb Carts

This is a small, inconsequential request, but I really liked (and now miss) Payload.  It would be good to see these Bomb Carts brought back into the tournament scene in some way.  Ideally, a version of Payload that operates the way I dreamt of in my homebrew rule set.  I’d hate for these models to collect dust until I break down and hand them over to my local terrain guy to cannibalize them.  They’re good models and not re-implementing them (and the rest of Vital Assets) at some point feels like a missed opportunity.   

Concession Scoring

This section could almost go unwritten, since AMG is doing something about it, but I’d formulated this section before Crucible happened.  Only being rewarded 700 kill points when your opponent concedes is far too few.  As it currently stands, you’re better off stalling that early game victory point swing and letting your opponent think they have more of a chance then they do.  This is because the kill points awarded for concession victories are now only 70% of your opponents available points instead of the former 87.5%.  The first 2.6 tournament that I attended, I also ran.  I had multiple questions about why concessions were only awarding 700 kill points.  I had to apologize and point out to my players that AMG had not updated that portion of the Galactic Conquest document.  

However, the good news is that the fellows over at Luminous Gaming have heard back from AMG on this issue and implemented the incoming changes at the recent Crucible event.  When your opponent concedes, you’ll claim 900 victory points from their crushed spirit. This means that if you've got the opportunity to cripple your opponent early and bring the game to a swift finish, you’re rewarded appropriately for your behavior.  I’m glad to see this change made and I’m encouraged to see AMG listening to the voice of the community.  

Vehicles still feel bad

Like many of you, I love how vehicles can now interact with all objectives.  However, it feels as if AMG pre-nerfed the armor to ensure they wouldn’t just sit on the Points of Interest and create a negative play experience.  Armor no longer bounces every hit, but instead has counter-play through large dice pools.  The resilience threshold on vehicles has been drastically simplified, but the damage token interaction hurts the overall playability of vehicles.  The difficult and subjective cover checks for vehicles are thankfully gone, but now vehicles don’t get cover unless it’s printed on their unit card.  The Ion keyword received a slight nerf (it now has a 33% chance to do nothing) but simultaneously Ion weapons across the board became far more viable when they lost their exhaustive penalty.  The end result is vehicles that feel more fun but, for the reasons listed above, aren’t seeing the table as much.  

Normally I have an expertly crafted, well thought out plan for how to fix problems like this.  But frankly, I don’t get to play Legion half as much as I’d like to.  So my proposal to make vehicles viable is as simple as points decreases.  Maybe a sprinkle of Sharpshooter thrown in for good measure, but I think a bit of incentive may be all that is required for players to start playing those technicals again.  There are, of course, some vehicles that are doing excellent in the new 2.6 world (looking at you Airspeeders) but for the most part players are choosing to leave Armor at home in favor of troopers.  Perhaps this trend will fade in time, but I’d hate for 2.6 to feel just as tank-starved as the last edition.  

The following reflections aren’t arranged in any particular order and are also outside of the purview/realm of AMG influence.  These are my own personal wishes, and all of them are flawless, infallible and should be implemented at your earliest convenience:

Pace of Play

Let’s tackle my biggest disappointment with 2.6 so far: not enough games of Legion in a day.  Since I started playing, my biggest gripe with Legion has always been the time limit.  Two and a half hours feels like an eternity compared to other game systems.  When I saw the changes to 2.6, I hoped things would improve.  I had suggested moving to five rounds previously and was delighted to see that happen.  However, the points increase from 800 to 1000 essentially put things back to square one in terms of game longevity.  We’ve shortened the game length by 16ish percent but added 20% more units, decisions, actions, LOS checks and dice rolls instead.  In fact, I’d argue games are taking longer now than they used to.  

I hosted a tournament three weeks after 2.6 dropped and attended another tournament the weekend after that.  At both events I collected counts of which round was the “final” round at each table.  My limited sample size of 111 games (across both events) showed me that the average “final” round was 3.5.  This is a problem.  Players should be playing more rounds of Legion.  

Now before I go further down this rabbit hole, I'd be remiss to not mention that the game is a vastly different beast than it was at the beginning of July.  Believe me, I understand the differences.  There were a handful of games each round that didn’t progress past round three due to concessions, scoring all twelve victory points or because it would have been superfluous.  Games such as these aren’t a game design issue, but rather a player skill discrepancy.  As we get further acclimated to 2.6 these results should grow more infrequent as everyone gets up to speed on how to win games.  

The problem that needs addressing is the slow pace of play our community has grown accustomed to.  The gunline game is over; long live the scoring game.  To return to my earlier statistic, most games ended in round 3.5 when the time ran out.  This is unacceptable when you remember that each primary objective and half of the secondary objectives don’t begin scoring until round two!  If you aren’t making it past round three, then you’re cheating your opponent out of half of the scoring opportunities in the game!  Far too many players have grown accustomed to the pace of TableTop Simulator and casual weeknight games.  Legion 2.6 demands a brisk pace of play and opponents that will hold each other accountable for slothfulness.

I’m not calling for chess clocks (though they do have their place) but rather a self-evaluation of your own playstyle.  Are your games reaching a satisfactory end?  (concession, five rounds etc.)  If not, then observe your own pace of play and note where you are spending those precious minutes.  Most players burn up their time in the following two ways: having an indecisive gameplan and not understanding the objectives.  

Telling you how to get better at having a gameplan is basically telling you how to get better at Legion, and that’s outside the scope of this article.  However, I will offer two quick tips on how to mitigate that analysis paralysis:

• The first tip is to understand your odds.  A basic grasp of the expected dice results will go a long way in helping you decide whether your risky maneuvers are worth the biscuit.  Statistics will betray you, but frankly you don’t have the gametime to fret about statistical improbabilities.

• The second tip relates to my favorite pastime, listbuilding.  If you can focus on eliminating variance in your order pool and gaining control over the odds of pulling something inopportune, then you’ll save yourself many a headache.  As our very own Travis Clark ruminated “I wonder if a lot of 2.6 now is figuring out how to give yourself better order control, since a lot of command cards haven't updated.”  Travis was referencing a discussion we’ve had previously about how much less common three pips and generic, multi-order command cards are in Legion 2.6.  With one less round and alot more points on the table, chances are high that hero-specific cards will be played four out of five your rounds. Hero-specific command cards seldom order more than two units at a time, meaning most of your army will be left hanging without orders.  If you simplify your order pool you’ll waste less time scrambling to salvage a bad twist of fate.  

Ok, one last point about slow play and I’ll move on.  There are twelve objectives in the deck, get to know them.  I don't care what strategy you will use to learn them, but please take the time to do so.  There are so, so many advantages that come from knowing the objectives: 

1. You’ll have more time to actually play the game.

2. You’ll save yourself the embarrassment of misreading a card and losing the game because of it.

3. You’ll understand it better than your opponent and beat them into submission with your superior knowledge.

4. You’ll be able to explain the objective in your sleep.  

5. You’ll gain the awe and respect of all your peers.

6. You’ll become the TO’s best friend.  

7. You’ll win the World Championship.

8. George Lucas will invite you to Skywalker Ranch to shake your hand.  

9. You’ll be interviewed for this blog.

Learn the objectives already.  If we all learn to increase our pace of play, then maybe, just maybe we’ll get to a point where we can cut our round timer down to two hours and play four games of Legion in a single day.  When this happens, Legion will become the best tournament game ever, 40k will be banished to the nether-realm and the Droideka will finally get the balance update it’s been waiting on.  

Gamertags

With everyone moving over to Longshanks for their tournaments, it’s high time folks realized that going by a gamer name is cringe.  I understand the Europeans have privacy law hurdles to jump through, but those of us here in the promised land of America need to put their real name on Longshanks.  Don’t make me call out “BigBlazer420” or “redbladeSlazher” at a tournament, that’s not gonna happen.  I’m a grown man.  (I know that as I write this my Longshanks username is Kentucky Dan, but at least my nickname incorporates my honest-to-God name.)  If we’re paired up at an event and I don’t know what your real name is, how am I gonna refer to you?  The first interaction we’ll have is me asking you “what is your real name and why aren’t you mature enough to use it?” 

Ok, I won’t be that mean, but you get the idea.  Think of the shame your great-great grandparents would have knowing that you spend thousands of dollars traveling across the country to play with plastic toys for an entire weekend.  Now imagine how much worse that shame would be if they knew you went by “IdenVersioIsBae” the entire time you were there.  So, if you’re playing in a tournament please use your first name, last name, or a reasonable nickname instead of a cringe gamertag as if we’re in a Fortnite lobby just waiting to drop (here’s looking at you “PoisonDart”).

Margin of Victory

Alirghty then, time for my next hot take.

I still think Strength of Schedule is a bad tiebreaker. 

I understand the can of worms that each tiebreaker system brings with it, but SoS is my least favorite.  I don’t like my tournament result being dictated by my opponent’s performance in the games that I was not a part of. This paragraph could be put under the “AMG’s Responsibility” section, but I doubt they will ever consider another system.  I’d love to see Legion move to either Order of Loss or even back to Margin of Victory.  I understand the problems MoV presents, but with a host of new objectives, more available points and a vastly different turn zero I think its return is feasible. 

There’s always the potential for a game one blowout that’ll skew the standings, but with the variance of 2.6 I think these differences are not insurmountable.  The Legion 2.6 objectives have so many victory points up for the grab that overcoming early setbacks and winning with a large MoV is feasible.  More importantly, Margin of Victory puts the ball back in your court.  If you wanna swing for the fences to compensate for your earlier loss, then that’s your choice to take.  Furthermore, if everyone takes my suggestion and hurries the heck up, then we could play four games in a day and even the playing field even more!  

Margin of Victory isn’t perfect, but I hate SoS and thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.  

Welp, that’s all of the original thinking I can summon for this month, but I’ll be back with more hot takes in the near future™.  In the meantime, be sure to speed up your pace of play and learn those objectives!