Building Shadow Collective, Part I
Seizing What Power I Can, Despite the Drawbacks
I wanted to write about my experiences building Shadow Collective lists in Legion 2.6. Those of you who have followed me know I am fond of comparing piloting lists to driving cars, and I have written before about how some lists have that “Ferrari feel.” I'm finding driving this particular car inflexible relative to some other lists I’ve driven. I’ll go into the reasons why below.
Shadow Collective, despite how interesting I find the army, doesn’t rate highly with most players, competitive or otherwise. I think that has to do with them being kind of a narrow part of the lore, and whether you enjoy Maul as a more complex character. They also have a somewhat limited unit selection, which will be expanded in the future with Weequays and the Pirate Tank.
Shadow’s Narrow Mobility Options
As far as competition goes, Shadow doesn’t have a lot of top-of-round mobility plays, which is where a number of the competitive lists find some success: Landspeeders, ARC Troopers, Sleepers, Bad Batch + Scouting Party, or Infiltrating Aquas; there’s little Shadow Collective has that’s comparable.
The closest alternative in Shadow is transporting units with the A-A5, and the Swoop Riders compulsory move. However, Swoops are very short-range and very fragile, even with Independent: Dodge to the point where most players are just hiding them behind LOS blockers turn one, then swarming a distant point at the bottom of Round 2 with the swoops in a wolfpack.
Buses are a whole other ballgame; you’re not just paying for a keyword, you’re taking a whole different unit (a Backworld Medic bus for example) to sling a more expensive unit up the board and trying to get as much out of the bus as possible before it dies. If your opponent doesn't focus the bus, they are going to be in for a rude surprise when the bus starts healing Mandalorians or Black Sun, and if they do focus the bus, they've only killed a somewhat cheapish non-combat unit. If I have two medic buses in my list, my opponent will have to chop through 16 armor wounds to get rid of them. In theory this will soak a good amount of firepower, however, anti-armor is rampant thanks in part to Aqua Droids, and the buses may just provide an easy target for that anti-armor, and ideally, buses will be more useful than just an expensive scout move.
Good examples of units buses don’t want to see: triple rocket BARCs, mass heavy crabs in CIS, AT-ST Tempest, and landspeeders in Rebels. It's worth pointing out that shadow Collective has no way to heal their A-A5s, and honestly Shadow Collective was hurt the most by the removal of the Gonk Droid because it was the only way for us to regenerate our buses.
Short and Long Rope Styles
As far as I can tell, there are two major paths with list building in Shadow Collective. One of them is the “short rope” which is threat saturation, low activation count and chunky units like Black Sun with Vigo, Shotgun and Stims, and Mandalorian super Commandos with Gunslingers for the Lethal (which works in melee now!) I haven't really experimented much with this approach because part of me thinks that if I was going to make a list like this I would play a faction that could just do it better. Republic has proven itself king of these low activation lists thanks to token sharing and the presence of GAR Bad Batch which can, essentially, snipe an activation early by using We Do What We Do, else the opponent gives up too much board presence and later-round shooting.
The second list type is “long rope” which is taking slightly higher-than-average activation counts, we're talking 12 or 13, sometimes with no real centerpiece: a classic multiple small unit approach, trying to drown the enemy in bodies and hopefully have enough firepower to deal damage. The best example of a winning long rope list I can think of is Lyla Clare's recent win in London (I believe) where she went 5-0 with Gar Saxon, Pyke Footsoldier + Disruptor spam and triple swoops, a list that's been on my radar to try. In fact, I started my experiments with Shadow Collective with a Pyke gunline since they were the recipient of a small points cut recently. Here it is:
I have shied away from playing the “long rope” style without Maul, because I firmly believe that Maul is a cut above in what he brings to the table for Shadow Collective. He replaces an awful and generic command hand with some very powerful cards. The three pip, Seize What Power We Can, is basically Yoda’s Luminous Beings for Shadow Collective except it's got no range cap. You can generate more tokens by having Maul steal them. When Maul goes into melee with token spenders, you play that card and he starts absorbing enemy tokens, and it can snowball. Witch Magic, if timed correctly, gives Maul an effective 7 wounds. Phantom Menace gives him Infiltrate on Divulge, and Duel of the Fates can shut down all tokens against him. Force Choke in the right spot is devastating, and Cunning and Force Push have benefits far beyond the scope of this article. But I think a crucial element here is that Shadow Collective does not have access to, in my opinion, “good melee.” We don't really have a dedicated melee unit that isn’t Maul. The best we can do is Gunslinger Mandalorians/Rook, or Magdet Black Suns.
My Latest Obsession
I have become obsessed with making Mandalorian Super Commandos work, and so far, the best I can do is Emergency Transponders and Emergency Stims. I think those two upgrades really push the unit to another level, being able to remove suppression when needed or manifest an extra aim for precise or lethal has high utility. Emergency Stims allow the unit to maintain effectiveness after a save goes bad, as well as giving the Mandalorians an end-of-game clutch factor.
If you’re familiar with Mandalorians in Legion, you might be thinking about the Jetpack Rocket alpha play. While it’s strong, I've discovered that in 2.6 the four rocket alpha is watered down by the fact that things don't start on the board right away. It used to be that you would deploy everything in such a way that you could just fire off all rockets one after the other and destroy something in an exposed position.
Now with units entering the board or starting behind terrain with Prepared Position, it’s much more difficult to make the rocket alpha work. You won’t have perfect order control, even with two copies of Improvised Orders and an Uplink on a bus, and your opponent is probably aware of the rockets and has started hiding units, diluting the power of your rocket strike. Lately, I find the Blast keyword is the most useful part of the Mandalorian rocket when paired with the Marksman at range 3. It’s a nasty shot, but prone to whiffing unless you have a couple of aim tokens.
I like to back up my Shadow Mandos with Medic buses. In the long run, it may prove that the combination of Backworld Medic and mass Emergency Stims is just too expensive to be competitive right now. Still, I think stims plus Emergency Transponder and Transport are what push Mandalorians over the top, and I’m going to keep working at them. It feels like something is there, I just haven’t unlocked it quite yet.