With Star Wars: Unlimited’s Twin Suns, multiplayer is now fully armed and operational

When Fantasy Flight Games launched Star Wars: Unlimited, its most popular collectible card game in a generation, it did so with multiple styles of play — including a multiplayer format called Twin Suns. But on launch day early last year, there was only one set of cards to draw from when building your exotic multiplayer decks of cards. As a result, the casual format that emerged was hobbled by its developers, limited to 50 cards instead of the 80-card decks it was originally designed for. That all changes on March 14 with the launch of the game’s fourth full set of cards, Jump to Lightspeed.

While an official blog post will announce the update in more detail, Polygon sat down with FFG designer Danny Schaefer for an early look at how it will work. The Twin Suns format is now ready to emerge from the shadows as a fully armed and operational superweapon, at long last capable of going toe-to-toe with Magic: The Gathering’s own beloved multiplayer format, Commander. 

“It feels like we do kind of have a full foundation,” Schaefer said. “We have enough of a card pool, enough diversity and reach […] that we really are at the point where we can make that change.” 

In the main Star Wars: Unlimited format, a 1v1 dueling game called Premier, decks need to have two main things to be legal to play: a leader card and a base card. The leader gives the deck its flavor, bringing in one or, more commonly, two colors called Aspects that must match all the rest of the cards in the deck. 

Twin Suns also requires the single base card, but, as the name suggests, it also requires two leaders for a legal deck. Schaefer said that even though decks require that leaders have matching Heroism- or Villainy-aligned Aspects on the front side, those leaders’ special abilities will combine for combos that simply aren’t possible in any other format.

“A great one there is Jabba the Hutt, who gives out bounties on your opponents’ units,” he said. “Then there are a couple of bounty hunters — Bossk being one of them — who get a bonus when you collect the bounty. So Jabba can put a bounty on someone, and Bossk can collect it for a reward.

“Some are just mechanical combos,” he continued. “The Grand Inquisitor can deal damage to your own units to ready them and let them attack again. There are a few different leaders that work well with him, but in particular I think Qi’ra from Solo is a good one. She works well with units who are already damaged — she can protect them.”

Like Commander, Twin Suns is a singleton format, meaning that players are only allowed to place one copy of each card to fill out the 80 other slots in their deck. With a full year of launches behind them, Schaefer says that players will now have hundreds of cards to choose from, giving the game the depth needed to allow for different play styles and offbeat gambits. 

The first set of cards, titled Spark of Rebellion, was an all-around set with lots of classic characters that set the game in motion. Later, Shadows of the Galaxy expanded on mechanics for smuggling, bounty hunting as mentioned above, and all other things related to being a scoundrel in a galaxy far, far away. Twilight of the Republic focused more on massed ground combat, with dozens of Clone Troopers and Droids taking the field in epic battles. Jump to Lightspeed completes the launch arc by taking the action into outer space.

“It kind of covers all the different elements of space battles [in the Star Wars universe],” Schaefer said. “On the one hand you’ve got your fighters — you’ve got your X-wings and TIEs — and you’ve got the pilots. That’s kind of the big new mechanic: You can have Han, or Boba Fett, or Biggs [Darklighter], or Poe [Dameron] hop in a spaceship and make it stronger, piloting it. On the other side of the spectrum, you also have the big Star Destroyers, with Admiral Piett bringing out the Devastator a lot earlier than you’re otherwise expecting [him] to.”

Even with all those different avenues of attack, players should also expect a hefty amount of horse trading as well. The format is intended for either three or four players, of course, so the enemy of your enemy is often your friend.

“There’s going to be a politics element where you’re negotiating with your opponents, trying to figure out who the big threat is at the table and work around that,” Schaefer said. There are even special cards in the new set that bake some of that back-and-forth right into the gameplay. One of those cards is called Stolen AT Hauler, which is a ship with decent enough stats and a special ability that says after it’s defeated, an opponent gets to play it to their side of the table for free — representing someone else boarding and taking control of the ship before turning it on its previous owner’s remaining fleet.

“It’s a really powerful unit, but it has an ability that’s a drawback in one-versus-one,” Schaefer said. “In Twin Suns, though, that’s not necessarily a drawback because you can choose which opponent is allowed to play it. You get a couple good attacks, it gets defeated and you say, ‘You want to make a deal? I’ll give you my ship and we’ll work together against the other two players.’ So there’s really good politicking there.”

Whatever comes of the launch, Schaefer said he’s just happy to see the team’s hard work finally make it into the community’s hands.

“It’s players really just out there trying to have fun, trying to play combos they don’t get to play in a normal game,” Schaefer said. “We want to adapt our future design of Twin Suns to accommodate that.”

“We always wanted to go up to a larger deck size,” he continued, “but the fact that we’re hitting it now really speaks to that more fun, casual experience where there’s just going to be more variety, there’s going to be more cards in your deck, [and] every game’s going to play out a little bit differently. We think that’s going to be really great for the format.”