Star Wars: Unlimited is a force to be reckoned with in a resurgent TCG landscape

My biggest beef with trading card games, a genre now in its fourth decade of existence, is just how hard it is to get ahold of the damned cards. The challenge of searching inside random packs is obvious, of course, but two other obstacles loom large. On one side of the spectrum, you have newer games like Disney Lorcana, where sometimes there just aren’t enough cards being manufactured to meet demand. On the other, you have more established games like Magic: The Gathering, where the very best cards in a set can only be found in quantity on the secondary market. That’s why fairly mid Commander decks can run you, at minimum, a couple hundred dollars each.

So, what if you just… didn’t need as many cards to play in the first place?

The more that I learn about TCG history, the more I find that design decisions — fundamental principles laid down at a game’s inception — play just as big a role in card availability later on as manufacturing bottlenecks or artificially created market pressures. Star Wars: Unlimited, which launches today into a resurgent TCG marketplace, is designed with this in mind. By reducing the number of cards needed to construct a competitive deck from 60 to 50, the game becomes more affordable to own at the start. Additionally, the cards themselves form highly modular blocks that can be used to quickly build different decks, which makes the rest of the cards in the game so much fun to chase after. So to me, it’s the perfect mix: a game that respects my wallet by allowing me to play with fewer cards, and one that respects my time by making those cards easy to plug and play into different decks.

The secret to Unlimited’s remarkably concise launch set, titled Spark of Rebellion, is something called an “aspect.” Here’s how it works: Rather than different mana colors like in Magic, cards in Unlimited are assigned aspects — blue for Vigilance, green for Command, red for Aggression, yellow for Cunning, gold for Heroism, and purple for Villainy. Most cards will only have one aspect, and when you’re sorting through a box of boosters, those will be your biggest stacks of cards. Let’s call these cards the core of a given aspect.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

Outside the core are also multi-aspect cards. The bulk of Cunning cards, for instance, just have one aspect. However, you also get a second and third stack of Cunning cards, each one about half as tall as the core stack. One will be Cunning and Heroism, while another will be Cunning and Villainy. All three work off each other, so while you can only choose Heroism or Villainy as a secondary aspect when building a deck, you can still use the core of Cunning-only cards for either stack.

The game gets even more modular with its approach to combat. Units in Unlimited fight either on the ground or in space, and those two lanes of combat almost never intersect. So to build a balanced deck, you’ll also need to have a good mix of ground and space forces across both types. Sprinkle in a few big-ticket items, and you’re off to the races.

Here’s where Fantasy Flight Games’ design chops really come to the fore: To make a deck of cards, you first need to select a leader and give them a base of operations. Together, these two cards give your deck its personality. They also clearly show what aspect color cards belong in that deck; your leader contributes two of those aspect colors, and their base contributes the third. Together, these three colors become your deck’s identity. Once you’ve selected a leader and a base, all you need to do is find the stacks of cards in your collection that match those colors, plug in the most potent space and ground modules from those stacks, and you’re ready to rock. Honestly, once you get a booster box sorted, putting a deck together feels almost like Legos.

The emphasis on easy deck building extends to, and is complemented by, Unlimited’s iconic IP. As an example, you might find that the unit card for Ezra Bridger from Star Wars: Rebels has both a yellow and a gold aspect icon, meaning he’s both Cunning, Heroic, and allied with the Rebellion — which all checks out. Bounty hunter Bossk, on the other hand, is yellow (Cunning) and purple (Villainy), making him Imperial thanks to that one time we saw him chase after Han Solo on behalf of Darth Vader. Meanwhile, Jabba the Hutt’s Gamorrean Guards aren’t taking sides; they’re just yellow (Cunning).

Unlimited also features a selection of cards that only include Heroism or Villainy aspects — stuff like TIE fighters and probe droids on the Imperial side, and X-wings and Rebel Pathfinders on the Rebel side. There’s even another short stack of cards that have no aspect at all, and these are your true multipurpose filler cards that can find a home in literally any deck. By mixing and matching cards from all these different aspects, there’s plenty of flexibility — even within a single booster box — to create synergies and strategies across multiple decks. Not happy with a deck? Fine! Those blocks can easily be pulled apart and then used to build other decks.

It’s also worth repeating that Fantasy Flight has also helpfully reduced the number and type of cards that are needed to build a deck in the first place. Instead of the 60-card standard common in games like Magic and Lorcana, Unlimited only requires 50 for a legal deck. Additionally, you can only have at most three (not the genre-standard maximum of four) of any given card inside that deck. Both design features mean you’ll need fewer cards overall to build decks.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

So, with just a single box of 24 booster packs, each with 16 cards, I was able to quickly build three viable decks just by sorting out the cards and smooshing a few piles together — and I’m pretty sure there’s a few more in there I could build as well. Best of all, the experience of cracking open those packs was a lot of fun, since each one includes both a leader and a base card right on top. There was literally a friendly face from the Star Wars canon waiting for me every time I opened a pack, ready to inspire more deck building.

True to its name, however, Unlimited also refuses to say no to players who don’t like these rules. Can you put cards into your deck that don’t match the aspect of either your leader or their base? Sure. You’ll just have to pay more resources for them when you bring them from your hand onto the table. Can you swap out that bog-standard leader and their boring little base, trading things like hit points and other useful features for wild, one-time-use abilities? Yes, you can. In fact, those more glass-cannon-style leaders and bases are more rare, so they’re tougher to find in booster packs. Would you like to have more than 50 cards in your deck? That’s a thing you can do, says Fantasy Flight. But don’t say they didn’t warn you when the right ones don’t turn up when you need them.

Star Wars: Unlimited is an extremely impressive game from a mechanical perspective, and that’s overlooking the stellar original art that draws from all across the canon, including places like Rebels and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. I feel like it’s teaching me the skills I need to learn just by opening up packs of cards and sorting them out, which is not something I’m used to with other card games. In fact, Spark of Rebellion feels both more engaging and more lively than Disney Lorcana did at launch.

It also feels more complete.

Don’t take that as a knock against Lorcana. Again, it comes down to the game’s design. Where Lorcana seems to be doling out new pieces of a much larger game with each new set of cards, this first dose of Unlimited feels like it’s shown me most of the tricks it has up its sleeve already. What I’m hoping is that while Lorcana gets wider, its sibling Star Wars: Unlimited gets more complex, because both are perfectly viable ways to build a trading card game for the long run.

The first set for Star Wars: Unlimited, Spark of Rebellion, is out now. The next, titled Shadows of the Galaxy, is expected in July. Fantasy Flight says it has already wrapped the design of the next four sets after that — and it has plans for releases all the way out to 2027.

Star Wars: Unlimited was reviewed using pre-release retail products provided by Fantasy Flight Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.