Well said, +1.

Are Jedi Seers tier 1 pieces? What about Jedi Battlemasters? I posit that no, they are not. They are strong, probably tier 1.5, but not tier 1 pieces. But wait, they won GenCon in 2011! That's because having a strong squad is only one part of winning GenCon, so winning GenCon doesn't make every piece in your squad tier 1. It involves making a great meta call (which both Ian and Trevor did in 2011 and 2012), playing it incredibly well (which both Ian and Trevor did), and some amount of luck (which both Ian and Trevor got). The problem with automatically saying that a piece in a squad is "tier 1" just because it's the squad that won GenCon ignores that there are SO many other factors involved. Can a person take a squad with tier 1.5 pieces in it and win GenCon, even if those pieces are a big part of the squad? Absolutely! The great majority of people have agreed on this for quite some time. There is just so much other stuff involved. In 2009, I'd consider Deri's championship squad to be overall weaker than the popular Snowspeeder squad that everyone was playing; however, his squad specifically answered the Snowspeeder very well, so he made a superb meta call which helped him win the whole thing. This is not only possible, but pretty common.

Also keep in mind that this thread is not about "GOWK/Mace". As has been said many times by basically everyone, GOWK covers Mace's weaknesses quite well and as a pair they are really strong. Trevor and Josh's squads should probably both be considered tier 1. It's a situation where the sum is greater than the total of the parts; you can take two individually good or tier 1.5 pieces and put them together and make an amazing tier 1 combo. This is pretty common in squad building.

This thread is about just Mace though, and I don't think they their squads are tier 1 just because of Mace, but because of everything else they brought to the table. Note that Mace in Your Face did much worse (both at GenCon and just overall) than the Mace/GOWK squads; there is a reason for that.



The obvious problem here is that people just have different definitions of "tier 1", which is fine. Some people think that "tier 1" is based on performance, so if you win a regional or GenCon with a piece or a squad, it's automatically tier 1. If you're in this group, then yes, Mace is obviously tier 1 in your opinion. Some people think it's just based on the meta, so if you have something that does really well in the meta that you're in it's tier 1, even if it would get smoked by squads in a different meta. If you're in this group, Mace might or might not be tier 1. Some people think there is a standard to which things are held to determine if they are tier 1 or not; it's an often changing standard that they just kind of know based on lots of experience that has to do with a number of factors (mostly how well a piece does what its purpose is and how cost effective it is at it). This is the least defined, but in my experience is the most common among players that have that experience to call on. This is basically where I stand; I define "tier 1" on a case-by-case basis, I think that there are both "tier 1 squads" and "tier 1 pieces" and that these two things rarely have anything to do with each other since they are just totally different things that you are looking at, and unfortunately it's difficult for me to explain to someone in the first two groups why something is or isn't tier 1.

Fair enough. I'm happy to just agree to disagree with your opinion on what "tier 1" even means.