Get Off My Lawn – Tier Lists
A tier list, at least as far as collectible card games go, is a ranking that sorts things into what is considered the “best” or most playable down to the bottom.
Starting with the top of the list for Star Wars: Unlimited leader choices, “S” tier are the truly broken leaders that win an excessive percentage of the time. “A” tier are the really great leaders that see a ton of play and have significant chances to win an event. “B” tier are pretty good leader that can still win events but might have a bad matchup or two. “C” tier are mediocre leaders that have multiple bad matchups. “D” tier are the pretty bad leaders that have mostly bad matchups. “E” tier would be basically unplayable leaders that you may not even want to play in a limited format. “F” tier is Finn.
Not every tier list I’ve seen out there uses these same rankings, but for sake of argument we’re going with this alphabet method with S at the top. So we have 7 total ranks.
Granted with 7 total there are likely way too many ranks and we could probably condense and streamline it a bit. When you think about it, D, E, and F, are really just different degrees of being not very good. Plus Finn aside from the comedic aspect doesn’t actually need his own tier. Let’s just combine those few into a single category called “Bad”. Now we’re down to five total; S/A/B/C/Bad.
Many lists I’ve seen don’t differentiate much between A and B. At a minimum there is often some discrepancy between them in various lists. Does Kylo go in A or B for example? You could make an argument either way. So let’s just combine those two into one tier called “Good”. Now we’re down to four.
Tier C is now just sitting between Good and Bad. Probably we could look at each leader in this mediocre grouping and figure out if they are leaning one way or the other. Chances are they really are not quite there and we move them down to Bad. We could then cut the C tier altogether and we’re down to three.
At this point we just have S/Good/Bad.
Now just to keep the naming conventions similar, we should change S into something a bit better that is a word along the lines of Good and Bad. Since S tier is truly the game breaking, insanely great stuff we’re going to go with “Insane”. We now have Insane/Good/Bad.
Although, when you think about these three and the fact that nothing is currently at the Insane level, plus that the Insane level would also just be sort of a Good Plus, we can probably get rid of Insane level too and just have Good and Bad. That’s it. We’re down to two simple tiers.
However, when you think about it some more, a Finn deck technically, even though unlikely, could beat a Sabine deck. Maybe people should just play what they want and have fun since it’s a game after all. Toss out the Good/Bad tiers and now we have just a single tier called “Leaders that work in the game and that you can have fun with”.
Tier lists are goofy. Play what you want. Have fun. Get off my lawn.
**Special thanks to the late great George Carlin and his comedic act related to reducing the number of biblical commandments.
One response to “Get Off My Lawn – Tier Lists”
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[…] I wrote about how tier lists in general are goofy. (Please see prior post.). However, tier lists about art are 100% subjective, completely open to argument with zero factual […]
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