The Leia Organa leader from Spark of Rebellion has always been in a weird spot. In that first set the leader was reasonably competitive as a red green rebels aggro deck, and was mostly barred from further use by Sabine doing the same build but with ECL. With SHD however, Leia was all but put away. The deck didn’t work well outside red, and Poe & Wrecker significantly powered up the impact of ECL. Add in a lack of new rebels and things weren’t looking good. Lucky for Leia, though, JTL is absolutely packed with good Rebels that synergize well with her ability, and she might be back on the table.

Cheating Actions

Leia does something really interesting and powerful in the game, which is to allow you to make multiple attacks at once. Many would-be good cards are made bad or even unplayable by an awkward action economy, while others are playable simply because of the value they can provide quickly. The best example of the power of action cheating is the Hotshot DL-44 Blaster.

+2/+0 for 1 resource is a fine rate, but the card is almost universally played for its smuggle cost of 3 instead. Sure there’s a tag-on of card draw there, and it doesn’t need to be in your hand when you play it, but that can be said of almost every smuggle card that costs +2 resources to come from the row, and we’ve seen that that’s typically not enough to justify it. The DL-44, by contrast, provides an extra bonus – action cheating. There is no opportunity for your opponent to interact with the blaster before you’ve attacked, and so it increases your burst damage – the damage you can deal in a single action – which is huge when you and your opponent are both racing for base damage. Leia can do this at any time, allowing multiple small rebels to provide the burst damage of a much more expensive unit.

Antifa Speedrun Any%

3x Battlefield Marine	2x Plo Koon, KOH-TO-YAH!
3x Blue Leader, Scarif Air Support	3x Rebel Assault
2x Bright Hope, The Last Transport	3x Surprise Strike
3x Chewbacca, Faithful First Mate	3x Wing Leader
3x Ezra Bridger, Resourceful Troublemaker
3x Fleet Lieutenant	SIDEBOARD
3x Han Solo, Has His Moments	2x Bamboozle
2x Leia Organa, Pilots, To Your Stations	3x Commandeer
3x Leia Organa, Defiant Princess	2x Spark of Rebellion
3x Luke Skywalker, You Still With Me?	3x Waylay
2x Millennium Falcon, Get Out and Push
3x Millennium Falcon, Piece of Junk
3x Mon Mothma, Voice of the Rebellion
3x Phoenix Squadron A-Wing

So Why Yellow?

1. Powerful Tempo Plays – Cards like Waylay and Leia Organa Defiant Princess can give you the edge in racing other aggressive decks. Against more controlling decks that want to keep your board clear we get powerful ambushers like Plo Koon and out-of-hand threats like Millenium Falcon, Piece of Junk. Lastly this meta is absolutely overrun with vehicle decks, and Commandeer is a huge asset when trying to keep those in check.
2. The Boys – We get a rare deck with the whole OT crew as Jump to Lightspeed gives us new Luke, Chewie, and Han Solo pilots. All three are powerful rebel cards that have the potential to upgrade a vehicle on turn 2 and maybe even run away with a game, or just act as extra rebel bodies should we need more to get the most of Leia’s ability. Blue Leader and Plo Koon may not hang out on the Falcon, but they’re also very strong cards that have popped up since Leia’s first run and are helping reach that critical mass of good Leia units.
3. Ezra Bridger and the Long Combo – We mentioned burst damage before, but my favorite part of the deck is that Ezra’s going to let us push that even further. This deck is full to bursting with cheap “Attack with a unit” effects including Rebel Assault, Surprise Strike, Fleet Lieutenant, and Leia Organa, Pilots, To Your Stations. This makes it very feasible for Ezra to flip one of those many effects off the top of the deck, adding a third, fourth, or even fifth attack to Leia’s ability. Typically you will activate Leia’s ability to attack with Ezra to play Fleet Lt for free, then attack with another rebel from Leia and then attack with another rebel from Fleet Lt. That’s four actions in one. But step into magic Christmas land with me and envision that you play Rebel Assault to attack with Leia, then Attack with Ezra off of Leia’s ability. Ezra flips a second Rebel Assault, so you play it. Rebel Assault 2 attacks with a 3rd Rebel, we’ll say Han, and a 4th we’ll call Chewie. Then finally we’ve resolved the first attack of Rebel Assault 1, so we can attack with another Rebel off of it to get Luke in here too. Now we’ve paid 2 resources and only 1 card from hand to attack with Leia, Ezra, Han, Chewie, and Luke all at once and everyone but Ezra got a little buff. That 5 + 3 + 5 + 6 + 4 damage for an absolutely nuts total of 23 in one action. Now you’ll rarely be doing the full 23 damage, but this strategy isn’t all or nothing: the deck is full of different chains and combos you can put together on the fly if Ezra sticks to the board.
4. No Real Leader Competition – Leia is a powerful leader, but her color and meta positioning makes it difficult for her to stand out amongst simpler, more direct leaders like Sabine or Kaz. As a rebel trait tempo deck that doesn’t include red, however, this niche is a perfect opportunity to get Leia back in the meta without hearing “why aren’t you just playing Sabine” every match.

This deck is still pretty new, and there’s lots of room for improvement and experimentation. Is Petranaki Arena worth it to make Leia a formidable 4/6 Raid 1 on deploy? What’s the sweet spot on vehicles vs pilots vs tempo plays vs free attack cards? What does our sideboard need to look like? All these questions still need to be answered, and if you’ve got ideas I’d love to hear them.