Quite rightly, most of our initial excitement about Star Wars Legion‘s bumper crop of reveals at Adepticon 2025 was reserved for the game’s awesome looking, eyebrow-raisingly cheap new starter sets and custom leaders. But folks may have overlooked another nugget of nerd bait for SWL’s new era: an expanded range of frankly superb looking promo cards for in-store organized play.
I mean, Star Wars Legion isn’t a trading card game, it’s a miniature wargame – so I’m not going to feel bad that we gave higher billing to the stupendous new Legion starter sets, and the innovative custom character kits that’ll let me make the weirdo spider droid of my dreams.
But if there’s one thing the feeding frenzies over Magic: The Gathering Secret Lairs and the ever more eye-strainingly colorful special illustration rare Pokemon cards teach us, it’s this: nerds love getting special alternative art versions of cards that other nerds don’t have.
And Atomic Mass Games understands this assignment, because – alongside a Star Wars Legion roadmap full of snazzy new and re-packaged models – its Adepticon 2025 presentation revealed a much expanded range of promotional unit and command cards, specifically for in-store organized play events.
Per AMG’s paired blog post, its previous line-up of Tournament Kits is being expanded to three per year, each including “prizes for all players for four rounds of play”, as well as “gold foiled Top 4 versions of the fourth round award card for the event finalists”, and “a special award for the event champion”.
What’s more, local game stores (LGS) and clubs are now getting weekly play kits featuring three-card blind boosters, each drawing from a set of five new alt art cards released every week. AMG says they’re “designed to reward and support general in-store play”, with all the weekly promo cards available at different rarities.
You’ll earn your weekly pack by completing two of the following actions, it seems:
- Play a game.
- Paint a new unit.
- Teach someone new to play.
This sort of promotion isn’t really aimed at lifers who already hit their local club weekly to play, or the competitive folks who want to win leagues – it’s obviously more to help welcome newbies. But, as someone who’s been painting miniatures and playing wargames for 15 years and yet never goes to organized play events, I can’t help but feel more pulled towards this than the average Warhammer 40k round robin.
I love trading card games and cracking packs to chase the prettiest alt art variants (I’ve got the bulk cases full of surplus MTG cards and Pokémon Pocket Pokégold credit card receipts to prove it) – and I like the idea of getting a booster of possibly rare promo unit cards as a participation trophy.
It beats the knowledge that winners will get a $150 Warhammer army set, but that I won’t win, so the game is its own reward. I get enough reminders that I’m not one of life’s winners from social media and its bombardment of pseudo-motivational ‘entrepreneur’ content.
The promise of some cool shiny cards – with a wider range of original art variants, and the puissance of random packs – whether I win games or not might finally get me to drag my thirty something year old carcass to a local store and play some Legion. Once I’ve finished painting my droid army, that is.
What do you reckon to SW: Legion’s new organized play promo cards? Let us know by joining the Star Wars discussion in Wargamer’s Discord community! We’re a lovely bunch and will refrain from using force powers unless totally necessary.
Alternatively, you can always check out our recommendations for the other top Star Wars board games available.
Source: Wargamer
