Just Bryce, Wake Forest, NC (2026)

03/28/2026

Evolving Skies alt art Espeon V picked up from

02/24/2026

The best map in the greatest video game that will exist

02/22/2026

Unpeeled Star Wars Miniatures Revenge of the Sith window cling given to stores by Wizards of the Coast in 2005

02/19/2026

Year of the Horse post featuring one of the strongest PSA 8s ever graded….. 🐴❤️

12/16/2025

No name (no imprint) chibi secret rare Stardust Dragon and Black Rose Dragon

09/22/2025

General Windu was the retrained Mace Windu released in Champions of the Force, the 5th set. This offers another decent look at power creep when compared to the original from Clone Strike.

For only 9 points more, the cost of a single Clone Trooper, he gains a ton of Force Powers and one of the most powerful Commander Effects in the game. He does lose the ability to use Lightsaber Block, which is a rarer power than you’d expect and is a downside that should be acknowledged, but overall the piece is an upgrade that made playing the original questionable.

He retains the same stats and basic abilities including Triple Attack. Shatterpoint granting a guaranteed critical hit every round sounds broken on paper but its cost of sacrificing an entire turn is very significant and usually you’d just swing three times with a 15% chance to crit each time instead.

All that stuff is true, but the reason you’d run him is his Commander Effects granting everyone else on your squad EXTRA Attack. Some commanders offered Double Attack, but unlike all of those, Mace’s commander effect could stack on top of characters that already had Double Attack and essentially give them Triple Attack. 72 points makes General Windu the highest point cost piece in the Republic faction but he offers solid value to a team, especially when paired with Republic Commando Sev.

Another interesting way this piece speaks to power creep though is how it’s a directly upgraded version of the original yet it was easier to obtain, being only a Rare (in an accessible set) opposed to a Very Rare. It was like $10 for this one that offered actual utility to a team opposed to like $50 for the vanilla Mace.

#2006

09/21/2025

Darth Sidious from Clone Strike is an interesting piece. He represents the Sidious from Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones where he’s just a shadowy background character who is implied to be powerful but not seen doing anything himself. Wizards did an excellent job of capturing the intersection of lurking in the shadows and being a true threat, since his abilities work equally well even if he’s just sitting way in the back. He offers unique gameplay possibles and is a decently complex piece for so early in the game’s lifespan.

The idea behind Darth Sidious’ abilities are that he puppets others to do his bidding. Throughout the prequel trilogy he cycles through apprentices and plays everyone on both sides of the Republic as pawns in his plan to rule the galaxy. More than most minis, this version of Sidious aligns very well with his lore and is a snapshot from a special era from 1999-2004 where the prequel trilogy was unfinished.

His point cost is fair for what he does, and like a lot of Clone Strike figures, he got better as more relevant beneficiaries of his effects were released. When he was released you could kind of only fully take advantage of his Dark Master ability with Darth Maul, Count Dooku, or Asajj Ventress since they were the only Fringe or Separatist pieces in the first two sets that actually had Force Powers they could spend the Force Points on. But those 3 were literally his apprentices, which is an awesome touch. You could also just assign the ability to a character without a force rating like Jango Fett and basically give them the ability to reroll missed attacks. It really did offer a lot of options for such an early character. His commander effect leaves a lot to be desired since the primary grunt troops you’re going to use in a Separatist squad are battle droids, which specifically do not benefit from Commander Effects. The sculpt is pretty boring, but he was basically just a hologram in the first two prequel movies so I guess what else were they really supposed to do?

#2004

09/20/2025

The card for Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight is probably the biggest widespread ball drop in Star Wars Miniatures. Somehow, on the card of ANAKIN SKYWALKER, the main character of Star Wars, a character who appears on one of the three booster pack arts for the set they just… failed to put an actual sketch of the miniature on the card. The Revenge of the Sith Anakin features a picture of the pose from Clone Strike. What’s additionally weird though, as you can see, is the fact that the image wasn’t just recycled. They used a totally different version of the sketch with no shading at all, actually a downgrade if anything. To my knowledge this was never corrected by Wizards.

As far as the actual piece, both of the first two Anakins were shockingly underwhelming given the fact he is Anakin Skywalker. This version IS a direct improvement on the original for only 4 more points and has a much more respectable attack stat, but ultimately he doesn’t really do anything. You can pair him with the Revenge of the Sith Obi-wan to have +16 attack which is actually good and reliable, but that takes wayyy too much investment to basically just play a vanilla melee attacker that consistently hits for 40 damage. We didn’t get a decent Anakin until much later on so during my time playing, I basically never used him. I don’t think I ever even owned this piece as a kid despite being 11 years old when Episode III came out and Revenge of the Sith was the first Star Wars Miniatures set I got into. Honestly though I think I may have been held back by the misprinted card. I love misprints in general but to me this is just a straight up mistake, and as a kid I think I was like “Well I don’t want to pick up this [essentially useless] piece if it doesn’t have the right card…”

The sculpt is fine though! Honestly the quality of the miniatures themselves in RoTS in general is pretty high. Multiple well known characters got downgraded to regular Rares despite being featured on the front of the booster pack, but their actual minis improved.

#2005

09/19/2025

R2-D2 Astromech Droid was ahead of its time in terms of utility, especially for the first Republic version of R2. This was a staple piece for Republic squads from its release and never stopped being good.

He does soooo much for just 9 points, the same as a single Clone Trooper. He can lock or unlock doors from anywhere he has line of sight to. He can attack now, albeit only against other droids, but Separatist was a strong faction. But the real reason he’s amazing: Tow-Cable AND Flight. For 9 points, you can have any character of your choice gain the ability to move around the map without spending their own movement at all, meaning they can still take advantage of any abilities that require them not to move, such as Careful Shot or Double Attack. AND they gain Flight as well which allows them to ignore terrain while moving.

In line with his Flight ability, the sculpt of R2-D2 Astromech Droid is flying, which looks sick. This piece lives up to appropriately being a Very Rare in terms of both power level and how cool it looks. I was lucky enough to pull one of these super early on before I even understood how strong it was.

09/18/2025

He may not look like much but the original Clone Strike Yoda was a well-designed, fun piece. The sculpt was pretty basic but he offered some never before seen Force Powers at a fair point cost. Of course, like the rest of the Very Rares from Clone Strike, Yoda’s price in USD was very inflated, but he at least offered some unique gameplay possibilities.

Yoda was the first Light side character to have Force Renewal and is one of a very exclusive handful of pieces with Lightsaber Reflect instead of just Deflect. I believe he was also the first piece to have Master of the Force at all.

Flurry Attack is his lowlight… it’s kind of a random ability that doesn’t synergize with him in any way other than I guess in an extremely desperate situation you could re-roll an attack 3 times in hopes of hitting the 5% chance of a critical hit in order to trigger Flurry Attack.

On release and for the first few sets after, his Commander Effect was fairly niche. It’s objectively a positive and has no downside other than making Yoda not benefit from other commanders’ effects himself, but the only time your followers were really going to roll saves during the first couple sets was the off chance your opponent was running Grenades or if you happened to have a non-commander Jedi who knew Lightsaber Deflect or something. But, like a lot of the earlier pieces that remained relevant, Yoda did get slightly better as more followers with Evade came out. Like the name implies, Evade let the character using it avoid damage from a non-melee attack with a save of 11. So, understandably, giving all your followers the ability to roll twice for their Evade checks was pretty strong. Boba Fett, Bounty Hunter, for example—the best piece in the game—is technically a “follower” so he can gain the benefit of Yoda’s Commander Effect.

09/17/2025

Mace Windu was the only “unique” character in a Clone Strike pack art so he was effectively the cover card of the set.

63 points is kind of a lot for what is essentially just a vanilla beat stick, and his real world cost was overvalued too since it’s Mace Windu in a cool pose. It was also a Very Rare in the priciest set, to be fair.

In terms of what he can actually do in game, he’s incredibly similar to the Darth Maul that came out in the same set. Both have Triple Attack and score critical hits on rolls other than just 20s. Having a 15% chance to roll a critical hit three times per turn is not weak, and I think it was kind of hard to account for when WOTC was developing Mace which resulted in him having a pretty hefty point cost while not offering much utility to a team beyond dealing lots of damage. That said, he fulfills that simple role of putting out damage fairly well and his HP, 22 defense, and Lightsaber Block make him relatively hard to take down.

09/16/2025

Today we have one of the first “non-unique” pieces I’ve featured: the ARC Trooper from Clone Strike. A Chad unit if there is one, for sure.

This piece was popular purely because it looked cool and was mildly hard to obtain. It was an Uncommon from Clone Strike, a set that quickly climbed to almost 4x MSRP for a booster pack. So, this Uncommon piece ended up solidly $10.

Unlike every other piece I’ve featured so far, ARC Troopers were expensive PURELY because they looked cool. They have decent stats and only cost exactly twice as much as a regular Clone Trooper, but they don’t really “do” much of anything. Often times in practice it was better to just take two normal clones since your non-uniques were probably going to be buffed by your commanders anyway.

The nail in the coffin for ARC Troopers was the release of the Republic commandos. For some reason, despite being directly based on and named after four specific characters from the Xbox game Star Wars: Republic Commando, the commandos were not classified as uniques in Star Wars Miniatures. So, given that they actually did things beyond having higher stats than a normal trooper AND their point cost was even slightly lower, the Republic commandos overshadowed ARC Troopers in essentially every situation.

ARC Troopers did undeniably live up to their goal of looking really cool though. They were more expensive than many higher rarity, more impactful pieces, pretty much entirely because they looked badass.

Just Bryce

03/28/2026

02/24/2026

02/22/2026

02/19/2026

12/16/2025

09/22/2025

09/21/2025

09/20/2025

09/19/2025

09/18/2025

09/17/2025

09/16/2025

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Establishment

Shortcuts

Share