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Luke Skywalker painted and photographed by Matthew of www.oldenhammer.com

Campaign

“The force is strong with you …” especially if you decide to recruit Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker. Breaking with the recent trend of making unique figures cheaper and cheaper, he does cost a hefty 12 Deployment Points. But he packs a mean punch for that. 16 Health, a white defense die an automatic evade result and … 4 Speed? How is he going to get anywhere with just 4 Speed? Both his earlier version and his sister have 5 Speed and a ranged attack. The solution is his Heroic ability that gives him a free attack every turn. So you really don’t need the speed, you can double move over to your targets and just slice through them with your lightsaber. Speaking of attacking, a melee attack with blue-green-yellow as well as an automatic +1 Damage is decent. The yellow die seems a bit misplaced, though. With only 2 Surge Abilities for +1 Damage and Pierce 3 each, you won’t see these crazy high numbers. But it should be very consistent, and if you attack twice per round, you still reduce most enemies to ash rather quickly. Lastly, Deflect returns all ranged attacks for 1 direct damage to any other figure in line of sight. And it also works for adjacent friendly figures! Together with Vinto, this can lead to some amazing amount of direct damage distributed across the battlefield.

To recruit Luke for your campaign, you need to win the side mission A Light in the Darkness included in this pack. This mission requires map tiles included in the Jabba’s Realm expansion.

Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker appears in the following campaign missions:

• Jabba’s Realm Story Mission: From All Sides
• Wave 8 Pack Like Skywalker Jedi Knight Side Mission: A Light in the Darkness

Skirmish

Jedi Luke uses the same deployment card for Skirmish as he does for the campaign. Could he ring in a meta where lists can finally survive without stuffing generic army units and just running unique figures? With losing Inspiring he now needs to bring other stuff to the table. Also losing the ability to recover, and the automatic block is heavy. Even if his viability in skirmish might be tenuous, there are other parts of the pack that might interest you. The skirmish attachment Motivation lets you give one figure per round an advantage. So it’s not geared for trooper lists in any strech of the imagination. You can use it to push around Gideon or C-3PO to better benefit from their abilities. You can also use it on Leia to get her into position or removing Stun on her for taking down big bad enemies with Battlefield Leadership. Point being: it’s a card that gets more powerful the more powerful your figures are. And don’t forget that you can use it with other factions too. Especially Captain Terro lists that also run other Troopers might find a place for it.

The real star of the pack are the Command Cards. All 3 are very similar and are designed to be filler cards. And what an amazing filler they are! Positioning Advantage gives +1 Damage to any attack with any figure. Parry can only be used by Guardian or Brawler figures, but gives you +1 Block to your defense results. The trio is complete with Blitz which literally gives you a Blitz! You get +1 Surge to your attack results for any figure. All of these can be played after dice have been re-rolled, so they are incredibly flexible and can really drag you out of the mud in sticky situations. Expect them to invade Command Decks left and right.

Model

My first gripe with the model is that the stance in his card art and on the model is quite different. On the card, Luke is holding his lightsaber to the right and looks ready to attack. The model has him holding it front and center, which looks much more defensive and less dynamic. Also, the cloths in his card art and model are different. This is a minor point for sure, since both of them are black, but still something that could irk some players. Lastly, his model is just not impressive enough. Mainly black and with a very static stance, there isn’t much to look at.

Thanks to /u/Vee492 for pointing out missing missions.