Star Wars Armada: Rebellion in The Rim Cards Spoiled
Admirals, let’s take a look at the new upgrade cards from Rebellion in the Rim.
The new campaign expansion for Star Wars Armada is set to come out soon, and we’ve all been spoiling for a look at the new cards. Well, some keen eyes on the Facebooks have posted spoilers to most of the cards. They seem legit (but in this day and age could always be clever fakes), so let’s take a look at the new upgrade cards coming in the set.
Ezra Bridger
The young Jedi Ezra is coming to us a nice cheap disposable officer upgrade. At 3 points he’s quite affordable. Though his ability is one use only, it’s potent moving obstacles can literally rearrange the playing field. You could save a friendly ship from dying by running into one, or kill an enemy ship by forcing them to hit one. You can use the ability to manipulate objectives and a power that’s only going to get better with the new obstacles coming in the expansion.
Captain Rex
The redoubtable Captain Rex is another Rebel officer. He gives you a nice easy way to throw raid tokens on enemy ships and hamper those big Imperial warships. He also makes it harder for enemies to get rid of raid tokens. He seems solid, but not crazy good.
Sabine Wren
The Rebel artist Sabine Wren has a pretty nifty ability to deploy a proximity mine during the battle. Frequently these mines are deployed before the game starts, so dropping one mid-battle is pretty cool. Overall, the ability seems decent and flavorful.
Iden Versio
Iden comes to us as an Imperial commander. She has the ability to make your evasive defense tokens a bit better and can be discarded to put a raid token on an enemy. She seems nifty, but not a lot of Imperial ships get evasion tokens.
Commander Woldar
Now here is an upgrade that looks hot for the Imperials! Woldar lets your non-swarm squadrons re-roll a nice vs. squadrons. That’s a pretty nifty ability and gives a boost to elite Imperial, or scum, squadron wings. On top of that, he’s cheap, so not hard for him to earn his points.
Commander Vanto
Vanto is a fairly simple card; he lets you get extra command tokens. He’s expensive (and has kind of a Spoke vibe to him), but everyone loves command tokens. Overall, looks like a good card to have around.
Expert Shield Tech
Here we have a pretty nifty generic officer (anyone find it odd this is an officer card?) that helps keep your ships going a little bit longer. Basically, when doing redirect instead of spreading the damage around you can reduce the damage by one. This doesn’t seem like something you want to do every time, but it seems like it has its place. If you are only taking one damage, for instance, and it’s the last shot you’d face, you could get to ignore it. Likewise, if you don’t have any shields left to shift the damage to you could still mitigate it a bit.
Auxiliary Shields Team
Another shield based upgrade, the Auxiliary Shields Team is a support team card that lets you get better shields on your side arcs. Now mind you, it doesn’t actually give you the extra shields. It just allows you to spend engineering points to increase them above their normal max. You’ll have to invest in it a bit but it will make your ships stick around more. This could, for instance, help the old Neb-B out a bit.
Weapons Battery Techs
This is nice little weapon teams card that helps make sure you aren’t wasting accuracy hits. While it only works on one dice, it’s an extra way to get crit results. I can see it combined well with Quad Turbolaser Cannons to get you extra free crits, or on a ship with lots of blue dice to help you get off those special ion cannon attacks.
Reserve Hanger Deck
This is a pretty interesting little card as it lets you bring back a destroyed squadron. Now outside of that it doesn’t do much, and the squadron it can bring back is going to be worth between 7-12 points at full health, and it won’t be at full health. This is a way to get an extra 4-9 points in your list and cheat the squadron cap a bit. I guess if you managed to take 4-5 of them you’d get technically up on points over your foe and have a significantly over max squadron wing. Not sure if that’s any good, but its something to look at.
Proximity Mines
Here we have the main way of getting Proximity Mines. Since you get half your engineering value, you could get to place quite a few, especially if you’ve got more than one ship with them. Since they are placed before deployment, you can’t surprise your enemy, but they seem useful for area denial.
Advanced Transponder Net
This nifty upgrade basically lets your heavy squadrons not count as heavy; letting them tie up enemy squadrons better. While both sides can use this, it seems especially good for Imperials. Both the Decimator and YV-666 are heavy ships with a ton of hit points, and letting them screen your capital ships is great.
Linked Turbolaser Towers
While expensive, this card has its uses. First off, it lets you just generically re-roll a die, which is nice. Its main ability, however, is in allowing you effective focus your anti-squadron attack into one big attack, only targeting one squadron, but getting two dice, and a re-roll. Combine this with some other upgrades, like Agent Kallus and Ruthless Strategists, and you can snipe enemy aces with ease.
Harrow
Harrow is a new title for Victory Star Destroyers which I really like. It’s cheap and lets them turn better, something they need. On top of that, it gives them a support team upgrade slot, allowing them to take some new options, like engine techs.
Corvus
This new Raider title lets you redeploy it. It’s simple. It’s cheap. And it’s tricky.
Vanguard
Another simple title, Vanguard really changes up how one of your Neb-Bs works. It gives the ship a redirect token and a weapons team upgrade. This allows you to make a Neb-B that’s both tougher and more offensive than a stock one.
Liberator
A CR90 Title that lets you get a fleet command card seems really good, but I’m kind of on the fence about it. Due to its limitations, you will only be able to use the fleet command once, and the cost of the command plus the title seems a little steep for a one use only thing. There are likely builds that can really make sure of this, but I’m not sold.
Take Evasive Action!
Holy Moley. Out of all the new upgrades, this really seems like the stand out one. Maneuver is the key to winning Armada games, and a fleet command that increases yaw is crazy (almost too good, I worry). The vast, vast, majority of ships in the game have a final yaw of 1 or 0. This will help out almost every ship in the game, making them more mobile and more deadly. It’s nearly a must-have. Combine it with Moff Jerjerrod, and suddenly you can have Star Destroyers turning on a dime.
Let us know what you think of the new cards, down in the comments!
