All true. I think Ahsoka Ghost Crew and Plagueis from set 12 will both make tier 1.

Have to include Prison Break... It won GenCon after all.

Togorian Grenades is if Bastila isn't in the meta.

Rebels might be one of the better factions suddenly, right? They've always had good tech (Dodonna, Leia, Levitation, Rieekan) and they've recently got a whole lot of sexy new attackers to go with them. Kyle is really good, Luke from set 6 still might shine in the right meta.

3 point Mice probably hurt them the most as well. There's still probably something good somewhere, but a lot of their traditional tools have been blunted with the loss of 2 point pieces and the strafe counters - lots of their stuff is fragile.

Mandos - New Jango aside (tbd), suck right now. Believe me. I've spend the last several regional seasons beating my head against the wall trying to find anything that works.

Obviously anything CAN win right now. Heck, you only have to win 2 matches in Swiss then get the right matchups to win it all.

But Mandos would have to get super lucky to do it.

Can't get enough activations to compete with high act squads.

Don't have enough beef to take on the super stout squads.

Not enough movement to compete with Yodabuck swap or Thrawn.

Well this one the Canadian Regionals:

Revan+Dessel+Sith Kreia+Glooms

Wheelbike + Commando Droids is probably the only tier one Sep squad right now, I won Regional two years ago with it and it's still strong

The double loss of Poggle and drones (still don't like how both got nerfed instead of just one) really crippled any Dooku builds which is unfortunate.

And:
Republic Commandos
Fringe Talon + Cad/Boba

Feel like they should be on there.

The latest team to be doing extremely well in our meta is Kylo, Daala, Hux and Stormtrooper swarm, gets hacked up by strafe but otherwise it's brutal charging tons of damage

Her and an army of light could be good too

??? Obikin won the first regional out of the gate.

That aside, Movin Mandos is good, not great. It squeaked into the top 8, then got the right matchups. Run by a good player of course.

It's not gotten any better, but other stuff has.


I would have loved to face it with my squad at GenCon 2016.

I feel like Cognus should be in there somewhere.

I also think that Separatists need to focus on making some of the Sith more playable.
In Clone Wars we saw Asajj take on Anakin and Obi-Wan plenty of times.
We saw Savage Oppress kill a master and hold his own with Obi-Wan,
Dooku straight up cut off Anakin's arm and would have killed both Obi-Wan and Anakin had it not been for Yoda.
Than you have awesome people that need a re-do like Sora Bulq (or at least a Dooku with some kind of Force Bond), General Grievous killed lots of Jedi and beat down lots of others in fights,
I also feel like there needs to be a good cheap Maul.

People have different exact definitions of Tier 1, but it basically means a contender to win a large, major tournament. In order to do that, it has to be able to contend with everything else in Tier 1. Or - if it does have an auto-loss against another Tier 1 squad then it also has an auto-win against something else to make up for it. Then you just hope to avoid the auto-loss.

We actually don't have large, major tournaments anymore (talking 25+ people)... even GenCon is at best medium-sized. With smaller tournaments, winning doesn't automatically mean you're Tier 1... perhaps the squad just got good match-ups and is really Tier 1.5 or Tier 2. It's much harder for a non-Tier 1 squad to win a large tournament.

I wrote up my definitions of the tiers a few years ago when I was doing a "squad of the week" thread:
http://www.bloomilk.com/forums/default.aspx?g=posts&t=14256

I'll paste in my definitions of Tier 1-4 here:



As far as what is mandatory for a Tier 1 squad... the list is pretty short. I think it's just movement breaker and door control. (And, actually, even the movement breaker might be optional if you have massive denial like Bastila.) After that, it depends on the meta and what the gatekeepers are. (Gatekeeper: A Tier 1 or 1.5 squad that is likely to deal your squad an auto-loss if you do not take it into consideration.) That's where the Rock/Paper/Scissors part of the game comes in. If a squad is clearly Tier 1 then any squad that auto-loses to it is probably not Tier 1. But if your squad's only auto-loss is to a Tier 3 squad, no big deal... that squad probably won't be at a tournament anyway.

In some previous seasons, the meta was a lot easier to analyze. When Daala was popular, you had to have some way to deal with it: CE suppression or major scissors damage or high defense that they had trouble hitting. When Lancers were popular, you had to have some way to deal with it: CE suppression, Riposte, etc. The current meta is so large that you can probably afford auto-losses against 2-3 other squads if your squad is good enough, since the meta is large enough that you might find other squads that you can get an auto-win against. But then it's more about match-ups. On the other hand, you can bring a more balanced squad with no auto-wins or auto-losses and plan to outplay each opponent.

(Here's a longer discussion about the definition of tiers.)

I'm going to say no. Even a really strong 100pt piece like Sidious doesn't get to Tier 1.5 if the rest of the squad is utter garbage (e.g. all Arcona Smugglers). But with a really strong "Tier 1" piece, you have a lot more leeway with building the rest of the squad to still end up with a Tier 1-2 squad.