Alright, this is probably going to sound pretty harsh, but here's my opinion on this: If you lose to that Macebuck squad that many times, you either played a bad squad, played something that Mace is specifically good against (some kind of all-melee squad with no way to reduce damage or do a lot of burst damage), or you played the game poorly. If you lose to it once, it could have been luck (that's a reason my challenge is best 2 out of 3, to try to help account for that), but consistently losing to that is just poor. The player is not necessarily bad, but they could very well have just played a really bad squad for that matchup, or made some mistakes. For example, earlier in this thread (or maybe a different thread, I honestly don't remember), someone said that Mace killed Vader Unleashed in a single turn, and then did 40 damage to Vader's Apprentice. That means the Imperial player set his pieces up so that Mace could get adjacent to BOTH of them. That. Is. Poor. Play. If you play like that, you WILL lose to Mace. That's not because Mace is strong, that's because you played poorly. You will also lose to Dass Jennir Super Star (one of greentime's squads that he's played
at the Mystery Map tournament at GenCon), which is another bad squad. This might sound harsh, and I don't mean to insult anyone, but come on. If you let a piece like Mace base not one but TWO of your high-value pieces, you just screwed up. Don't blame Mace for that.

Ah I see it now, I didn't scroll down on the first look :)

Anyways, yes, my overall point is that in a squad game, he isn't going to be much different than other options. And the key to winning, isn't just pumping up one insane figure, it's how the squad as a whole performs from beginning to end. I know it might seem unfair to grant LV opportunist, but that's how he's always played (with Thrawn/Mas/Ozzel) and when done so, he almost always gets opportunist, then the ability to go first as well. Which unlike Mace, can allow him to survive the counter assault in almost all situations (MTB or NTMTOs are usually the only things that stop him on the initial strike, which is what we are talking about in terms of trying to assassinate a big nasty in one swing). It's further complicated by the fact that in practice, LV also gets to go first, which means he has another chance, at lower odds to kill the figure. Mace again won't get this in nearly as many scenarios as LV. It would be a total guess as to how many times, but let's just say this is about a 3-1 advantage for LV across the meta.

As for what we should give Mace at a similar cost, you can go the momentum route, but I generally think that's too expensive of a combo, considering that Mace doesn't have access to tempo control (LV gets away with being the main threat because against so many squads he can go last/first). Mace will not have that luxury. So you are going to have to spend points on things other than just a damage boost, which in reality, isn't all that necessary anyway (most of the time Mace should be used to nearly ensure a 1 shot kill, so you target a Rex, Dash, etc on the first strike typically.) Only against the strongest of figures would you really want momentum. The rest of the time, Ferus or a Gungan SB will be more valuable than General Skywalker. Second, you are going to need secondary attackers, I like Rex and Darmin because they together have 6 on the move shots, which can clear the space to get Mace to the best spot. Panaka/Mas is a take or leave part. I prefer using BG or SB with tow myself, as unlike Yoda on Kybuck, Mace can't get nearly as far across the board.

One of the advantages of Jarael/LV/Thrawn is that you generally get to go last, so Jarael can go her max, and send LV running across the board, to try for the won init-kill on a key piece. republic swap always is out activated, so you always have to go when there are still significant threats. Which means you can't run your swapper nearly as far out there. Alternately, if you do what I do with Yoda, which is tow into hiding, then next set turn run/swap, Mace will never get nearly as far, or be able to go into disruptive and out of it.

So with all of that taken into account, and the prevalence of parry/block/defense on almost all 120+ characters with a 23 defense, I'd say your math which shows both Mace and LV have about a 50% chance of one shoting without taking into account block/parry, is pretty comparable. I'd say the increase of 30 dmg over Mara for the 50% increase in cost is pretty spot on as well.

Further, let's look at Mara. She doesn't need to do 120 in most cases, as the current favorite build includes Ganner and Anakin as well. So to compare Mara, you should add in her counterthreat in Anakin. Mara gets chucked up by Ganner early for an Assault and does what she can. Now your opponent has a choice, kill Mara now, which means next turn you probably can't stop the lobbed Anakin, or go after Anakin and risk another Mara Assault. You rarely can do both. When you add in the additional round, Mara catches right back up. Then add in that Ganner is superior to either Thrawn or Panaka as an attacker/clean up piece, and that Han GH is a serious threat and deterrent on his own, then Mara's "value" to her squad for her cost is at least equal to Mace or LV in their best squads. And that's the argument that's being made here. That you can't make a Mace squad that will perform better than either LV B&B or Solo Charge, two of the current top tier assassinate style squads. I'm hoping someone makes a comparable squad and that we actually made a tier 1 Mace, but I don't think we did. I think we made a tier 1.5-2 mini that is a little too random for top tier play, but a lot of fun for Mace fans and good enough that he can be played in competitive games with a reasonable chance of success (unlike any of the other Maces who aren't even good for casual play).

Yes, it's likely that Mace will get to one of your characters very early on certain maps. If he's basing more than 1 character, you played poorly. If your squad is so based around one character that losing one character loses the game for you and you let that guy get got, you played poorly (and didn't build a great squad).

Also, it's not stalling or slowplaying to stay in a room until the Republic player is all activated. If I've got 20 activations and Ozzel and you have 10 activations and no tempo control, you'd better believe I will just spin 5 dudes while you activate everything. There is absolutely no reason for me to ever not do that. It's slowplaying if I do that very slowly (like take a whole minute to two to think to spin Ozzel), and it's stalling if I do that round after round and never attack or give you an opportunity to attack. But yes, I would just put my characters in a room and you wouldn't get to them, you finish activating, and then I run out and attack you. It's 100% legal, and there is pretty much nothing at all you can do about it. I might also bring 4 Caamasi Nobles in with Lobot, and block another way to my characters. Have you ever seen someone do that against Mace? How did it work? Because I practically guarantee that I can make it work, whether or not you've seen it happen before.

Also if you play one of the factions with Disruptive/Distraction/Bastila Shan it is relatively easy to trap Yobuck or Mace. I have done this several time while using OR.

A quick follow-up: several people rightly pointed out early in the thread that Mace's damage comes with very high variability. In high-level play, variability is your enemy. That something good might happen, if these three contingencies fall into place, will usually not work against an opponent who can read the squad and work against it. Compare Mace to Mara Jade. They have the same attack, and both have very high potential damage. The difference is that Mara Jade just needs to hit and I get everything. With Mace, hitting isn't enough; you also need the right kind of hits. In effect, there are two things that can go wrong instead of just one. And then you get into the conundrum about whether you should use Force points to reroll hits when you might end up putting damage back on the table (rolling a 1) or waste the points you will most certainly need to keep Mace alive to try again later.

I've had some success with this squad: (even vs Vong)
--yo-win-pa--
65 Mace Windu, Legacy of the Light Side
51 Yoda on Kybuck
27 Lobot
23 Captain Panaka
9 Polis Massa Medic
9 R2-D2, Astromech Droid
8 Mas Amedda
8 R7 Astromech Droid

Preferred Reinforcements:
(Lobot) 12 Kaminoan Medic
(Lobot) 8 R7 Astromech Droid

(200pts. 10 activations)

It's a one trick pony kind of squad.
yobuck does his gallop. ends up basing a important piece(yammosk)
swap and NEWindu kills or cripples the piece
opponent attacks Mace.
if he can survive, swap him back then heal him till he can do it again
the look on your opponents face when you heal a piece they tried so hard to kill is great
map choice and override are important to allow yobuck to do his thing
and to hide from shooters while maintaining Gambit.

I'm no SWM master jedi, but I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned healing Mace.

General Kenobi or Bardan Jusik also seem like possibilities for healing. General Kenobi in particular brings both healing and extra speed to get Mace where he needs to be (not as much as Yobuck, though, obviously).

uhhmm.....I was facing a bomb squad, aren't all vong squads bomb squads these days?
as long a yobuck doesn't attack he can damage/eliminate non- and still base yammosk

Right, but you really can't afford both GenKenobi and YoBuck. YoBuck is better for getting into place for swapping, but once Mace is already in the midst of things, it might useful to move 8 instead of 6... if you don't have to have Yoda's 26 speed or whatever it is.

As Bill pointed out, this is 100% patently false. For one thing, most of the tier-1 very competitive players are somewhere on the design team. We make it a point after that to seed out every piece to other less competitive playgroups to get their opinions on it. In fact, here's a quote from the playtest thread regarding Mace from a playgroup that was not very competitive:



The squad that the Mace player was up against was a Blizzard Scout swap squad (using the Desert Skiff to swap), so if you think that was a "competitive" test, you're crazy. This group played a number of games with Mace, and gave resounding praise for him. Again, this isn't a test between me and Weeks or anything; this was a test between some good but much more casual players. That's how testing works with every piece, ESPECIALLY the ones with more potential to be powerful, like Mace.

I don't believe I've ever seen your name in any playtest reports, Greybird, so it sounds like you're on the outside looking in to a process that you can't see. We know that playtesting needs to be done outside of the super competitive players, so we do that. If you were to volunteer to playtest and help us with that, I'm sure you would see that.


On another note, it is possible that your local meta has some quirk that makes Mace better than he usually is. Maybe no one in your group plays good shooters, and you're all about just fielding a few melee beatsticks. Mace will do better in that meta than he will overall. Instances like this are true all the time, though. If you had a meta where everyone played low-HP swarms, I can't imagine how Yobuck and Lancers affected your group. If every squad played at your FLGS is 50-75% commanders with one big dude to receive all that power, Bastila probably started taking that meta apart. If your meta consists of basically no movement breakers, I'm sure you had some very frustrating games against Luke's Snowspeeder where it kept picking you apart and you could just never keep up with it to even hit it. The fact is, design can't attempt to keep all of these little quirks in mind, and it never did. WotC didn't do it, and we can't do it, because it's impossible.

We will make pieces balanced for the average meta (both casual and competitive), so that the vast majority of players will have balanced pieces. Every local meta is different, though, and if yours is particularly weird, you can't expect pieces to cater to your meta. If you like your weird meta as it is, and some piece comes out that just wrecks it, don't play that piece; but understand that it didn't hurt everyone else's meta the same way it hurt yours, so it's not a fault of the piece, it's a fault of the environment that you're playing it. And that's fine. It's not wrongbadfun to play with certain less than optimal squad types, but don't complain that pieces that were made for EVERYONE don't work in your specific local meta.