The beauty of Star Wars Unlimited is that, as long as you have the know-how, every Star Wars card has a place at the table. However, it’s a fact that some cards are better than others, and if you’re playing competitively in Premier, you’ll want the very best to help you claim those wins.
One such card that stood out in competitive play was Cad Bane: Still Faster Than You. An aggressive villain leader introduced in Ashes of the Empire, Cad’s ability lets him whittle down enemies and units, making him a powerful early-game threat. However, as the game progressed, he was downright frustrating to deal with. Cad has become such a problem that, as game developer Ryan Miles announced on Unlimited’s official website, he is suspended from Premier.
“The data behind Cad Bane is extremely clear: the leader is a power outlier through and through, and he warps the entire metagame around him while still putting up dominant win rates,” writes Miles.
Cad quickly found his feet in Premier, appearing several times throughout events and tournaments — including the winning deck of the Galactic Championship that took place in Las Vegas last month. The leader card has also featured heavily in other Unlimited Sector Qualifiers following the championship. However, with the suspension, Cad’s time in competitive play has come to an end.
Star Wars Unlimited bans keep the game healthy
Miles writes that previous card suspensions in Unlimited — such as War Juggernaut — resulted when new additions interacted with existing cards, increasing their power. As for Cad, his rise to dominance was immediate. Cad slipped through the pre-production net because of what Miles calls a “development mistake.”
“While there are many moving parts that led to Cad Bane ending up the way he did, the shortest explanation is simply that we did not identify him as the best-performing leader in the Aggression-Vigilance-Villainy shell, and felt he had exploitable weaknesses in the control-focused mirror matches,” Miles explains. “During playtesting, we failed to optimize our more aggressive strategies that could push out our greedier control decks, which ultimately gave us a bad read on the eventual metagame, and a perfect environment for Cad Bane to thrive.”
This isn’t the first time a card has been banned from Unlimited’s Premier format. Boba Fett: Collecting a Bounty was also suspended from competitive play in 2024 because it represented around 40% of Top 8 finishers in sector qualifiers. Since then, there have been other cards that have been banned, like Jango Fett: Concealing the Conspiracy and Han Solo: Audacious Smuggler. For Cad to join this growing list underscores how significant Cad’s impact was — with Miles citing that Cad was keeping an “untold number of decks almost entirely out of the meta.”
The card will still be available to play in other formats, such as Eternals and Twin Suns, but as of now, it’s a rough time to be a Cad Bane player in competitive play. But if the suspension leads to a healthier game, it’s a sacrifice worth making.
