I'll Never Turn to the Dark Side - Admiral Sloane

“I’ll Never Turn to the Dark Side” - Why I Won’t Fly Sloane

Welcome to “I’ll Never Turn to the Dark Side,” a new series about cards (with a particular focus on Commanders) that I will never fly! Okay, but, we already have so much negativity, so why should you read about something based on that premise? Eh, bear with me. I’m actually not planning to focus on the negatives in this series. I’m not giving y’all names of cards that I think are terrible and so will therefore never play; it’s sort of the opposite, actually. I plan on picking out cards that I think have real value, but explaining why I personally am unlikely to use them.


I next take aim at Admiral Sloane. Admittedly, she doesn’t quite dominate the meta the way she used to, but I genuinely believe that’s simply because lots of new toys were released for the last Primes season, just before Worlds got shut down. There really isn’t anything released that reduces Sloane’s effectiveness, in my opinion. You could perhaps name the dreaded Trip Onager build that is evidently terrorizing the casual scene before having an opportunity to burst out into the open at Worlds 2020, but that’s not because of Sloane as a commander so much as what Trip Onager evidently does to...well, the vast majority of opposition.


(For those of you who are unfamiliar, I have not played against this abomination, but evidently, it involves three overlapping fields of fire from Testbed Onagers at extreme range, each boasting Orbital Bombardment Particle Cannons (OBPC). You can guess how the rest of that plays out.)


So what is it about Sloane that leads me to avoid using her? The amount of damage that ANY squadron can do to a ship utilizing her abilities is bonkers. Oh, not straight-up damage, but overall damage. Take our humble TIE Fighter, for instance. As per CGYSO (thanks, Snipa!): “With a single non-Bomber blue dice, you will do on average 0.5 damage to enemy ships with each attack and your crits and accuracy results are completely useless. With their weakness to flak, TIE Fighters really do not want to be pursuing ships unless there's nothing better for them to do, and preferably only if they won't get killed by flak at least on that turn.” Except that’s not really accurate for Sloane, right? TIEs are re-rolling that crit, and accuracy isn’t useless, as it spends a defense token. Suddenly, TIE Fighters become a decently reliable way to strip ships and prep them for a big punch. It’s an astonishing flip on which fighters are most useful in assaulting ships, which is really cool! And it’s nice to see Sloane fleets that utilize more generic squadrons, because I really do love seeing generic squadrons on the table (one of the reasons I’m extremely excited about the newly revealed Ace changes!). But it’s not particularly thematic, is it? The notion that you can toss several TIE Fighters against my MC80, and rather than watching them splash harmlessly against my ship, I might have to watch them strip my Brace and spend a Redirect so that I’m suddenly far more vulnerable than I should be after only 3-4 squadron attacks just isn't appealing to me. Call me nuts.


Her ability doesn't work on Rogues, and that's obviously cause for celebration. But those guys are mostly dangerous enough on their own. If they're bolstered by squadrons that normally don't scare my big ships, but are now a threat courtesy of Sloane, that's a very threatening proposition.


Also, her accuracy ability is just brutal. The first time I got hit with it, before I fully understood it? Oof. I was real grumpy. The implications of an opponent spending your token can be missed by players who aren't entirely familiar with the game's language.


Obviously, there are ways to combat her, which is why she didn't see a nerf the way Yavaris, Demolisher, and flotilla spam did. But it's also worth noting that she's the first Imperial commander to win a Worlds tournament. And, again, I really appreciate that she has made a much wider variety of Imperial squadron builds more viable at higher levels of competition. There are a lot of cool squadrons that I think should see wider play! But Sloane turns even a couple of TIE Fighters into a threat to large capital ships, and I am not really a fan of that. Thematically or from a design standpoint. And that’s why I won’t fly Sloane.


-IratePooka