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Star Wars: Legion Imperial High Command Review
Image Credit: Atomic Mass Games
Director Orson Krennic
Let’s go in order from most conventional to most interesting. Director Orson Krennic is back with a new miniature and the same unit card and commands he’s had since the 2025 overhaul. His new sculpt is a stationary brooding pose, in contrast to the striding, cape-billowing action pose of his previous mini. If you like painting under capes, even where you’ll never really see it, you might be painting him in two pieces. Krennic is still the bargain Imperial Commander, as only the Vigo, Capo, and generic Imperial Officer cost less than him. Don’t sleep on him, though - High Command and Probe Droids both give interesting new implications to the Entourage: Imperial Death Troopers keyword he’s always had.Loading...
Krennic does get one new command card. Imperial High Command comes with a two-pip that all of the High Command units can use called The Empire Does Not Tolerate Failure. It issues commands to two imperial-affiliated units (no mercenaries, please) and gives each unit the option to gain 2 aim tokens. If the unit accepts the aim tokens, it must defeat an enemy unit this turn, or else it takes two wounds. Additionally, if either of the units issued orders by this card successfully defeats an enemy commander or operative, you score one VP. This is a high-risk, high-reward card that aims to make you predict when exactly you'll be able to deal a death blow to an enemy hero. My first instinct is that it's an auto-include with all four of these commanders. A VP bounty is an incredible incentive.
Image Credit: Atomic Mass GamesDeath Troopers get their own card in the High Command box, a training upgrade called Security Detail that gives them Guardian 2 for all Imperial High Command units and Retinue for any Empire-affiliated Commander. With this upgrade, your death troopers keep your commanders alive longer and feed them tokens which most of them will then share with the rest of the army via Exemplar. Krennic can now have both Entourage and Retinue with a Death Troopers unit, which is a powerful combo.
Entourage: Death Troopers also affect the new Probe Droid unit in an interesting way: Probe Droids are classified as Special Forces Detachments, which means Krennic's ability to bring an extra Special Forces unit also allows him to bring an extra detachment. I'm not saying Krennic lists with 4 probe droids and 14+ activations are about to dominate the meta, but I am saying isn't it interesting that it's possible?
Probe Droids
Image Credit: Atomic Mass GamesWhile we're on the subject, let's smuggle a quick preview of the Probe Droid itself into this article. Simply put, the Probe Droid is a mobile environmental obstacle for your opponent. If they ignore it, Observe 3 lets your other units punish them. If they charge at it, every activation they spend attacking it is an activation they didn't spend attacking your shooters. Plus, they need to charge with enough firepower to put it down quickly or it will Self Destruct 3 in their faces. If they don't ignore or charge it, they'll have to avoid it, wasting valuable movement. As a Special Forces detachment, it puts more Special Forces tokens in your order pool, making your army more flexible. It's fragile enough that it may be challenging to learn and will sometimes feel like feeding your opponent free kills, but with careful positioning and the right shooters around it, it’ll usually be 35 points well spent.
Just don't go into battle expecting the probe droid to be a remote mine. Self Destruct 3 is interesting, and a fun way to punish your opponent for trying and failing to kill the droid, but in practice it's not something that's going to trigger very often. It can only be triggered if the Probe Droid has taken at least 2 wounds. Observe 3 means you're going to want to activate your probe droids early, giving your opponent plenty of activations to deal 4 wounds before the droid’s turn comes back around.
General Tagge
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General Tagge is also here with his graphs and his calculations, ready to show the droids themselves a thing or two about running the numbers. As a combat unit, he's exactly as resilient as Director Krennic with a bit less bite thanks to black dice on his ranged attack where Krennic has red. His value comes from Calculate Odds, an ability previously seen only on Rebel droids, and a brand new, Tagge-exclusive training upgrade called Logistical Prowess. Logistical Prowess allows Tagge to store Dodge, Aim, and Surge tokens on the card when he uses Calculate Odds on himself, and allows him to gain the card's tokens at the start of his activation. This means Tagge can store helpful tokens for several turns and, with Exemplar, share them with his entire army all at once in a late turn.
Tagge's Command cards emphasize the strengths he already has. Canny Adversary loads more tokens onto Logistical Prowess whenever enemy units near Tagge spend their own tokens, and potentially hits them with Observation tokens as well. I Have Graphs AND The Command is a one-pip that lets him move into position and collect his Logistical Prowess tokens without activating. The obvious move is to use Canny early and Graphs late.
Tagge's ability to buff his army is entirely dependent on Exemplar and Inspire, so the only concern when building an army around him is keeping enough of your shooters within range 2 of him. Security Detail Death Troopers will certainly be nice to have for Tagge’s protection and extra token generation, but overall Tagge is ready to plug into most Imperial lists.
Tagge's sculpt establishes a theme that’ll remain true for every remaining unit in the High Command box: he’s standing up straight, with his arms crossing his chest. The exact hand positions change, but the overall theme holds true for Tarkin and Thrawn as well. You might be tempted to paint the arms separately because of the proximity of the hands to the chest, but other than that, these are very straightforward paint jobs. Dial in your favorite shades of off-white for Krennic and Thrawn and your go-to Imperial Officer gray-green for Tagge and Tarkin, and you’re off to the races. Speaking for myself, I like to dry brush a very thin layer of Loren Forest over a base coat of Mechanicus Standard Gray. I don’t know if it’s perfectly screen-accurate, but it feels right to me.
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Two themes are emerging from these units: Exemplar, Observe and Logistical Prowess all add up to a "buff early, shoot late" play style. It's already a winning strategy that keeps your heavy hitters out of the line of fire longer, but the Imperial High Command collection really doubles down on it. It also discourages mercenary units. Many of the keywords, orders, and abilities on offer here can only be used with units that have Imperial affiliation. Lord Vader may be willing to work with criminals and bounty hunters, but High Command agrees with Admiral Piett: We don't need their scum.
Grand Moff Tarkin
Image Credit: Atomic Mass GamesLord Vader's here too, actually. You might not spot him initially, but he's there in Grand Moff Tarkin's keywords. Tarkin is an unorthodox unit that feels true to his fictional narrative. He’s quite fragile but comparatively hard to panic, and his only attack is a relatively ineffectual melee attack called “contempt.” He can literally sneer at you so hard it kills you. He makes up for this lack of combat prowess with a new ability called Pulling the Strings, and with Entourage: Darth Vader.
Pulling the Strings allows Tarkin to give one Imperial affiliated trooper unit within range 2 a free attack or move. The natural first instinct here is a bonus attack for Vader, but I think it probably has more value letting another slow unit move, aim, and fire in the same round. Shoretroopers with squad, Dark Troopers with assault cannon, and Range Troopers with an extra trooper and heavy weapon are all huge dice pools that would love a second shot or an opportunity to both move and aim before shooting.
Entourage: Darth Vader has me doubting everything I think I know about Imperial list building. Am I wasting the Entourage keyword if I don’t make him my third commander or third operative? Should I bring Fifth Brother and Seventh Sister, too? What if I spent 700 points on Tarkin, Vader, and the four scariest melee commanders and operatives I can find and only had 300 left over for my entire army?
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Okay. Maybe that’s excessive. Tarkin definitely wants to bring Vader along, but you don’t necessarily have to feel like you’re wasting Entourage if you aren’t building a massive saber rush on top of a tiny army. Entourage doesn’t just let you ignore the rank cap, it also lets you issue orders and provide backup. Tarkin also needs Vader to make proper use of his one-pip order: Moment of Triumph. It’s a card that must be Divulged, meaning you’ll only have a single one-pip to actually use at the start of your rounds, but it supplies several powerful buffs. It gives Vader Guardian 4: Grand Moff Tarkin, lets Tarkin provide Backup to Vader and buffs Vader’s ability to provide Backup to Tarkin, and gives Disciplined 1 to allied Troopers within 2 if Tarkin is contesting an objective that’s outside of allied territory.
Tarkin’s other order, Fear Will Keep Them In Line, can be divulged during setup or played. If divulged, Imperial units have Demoralize 1 any time they’re issued orders. If played as an order, all Imperial units have Demoralize 1 for the round it’s played.
Tarkin is therefore a little bit more specialized than Tagge for list building. He should bring Vader. He should bring Imperial-affiliated units (See: ‘don’t need their scum,’ above). He doesn’t provide Exemplar buffs, but he does want big dice pools to order around with Pulling the Strings. Bottom line: bring a lot of Imperial Troopers, don't be afraid of slow units because bonus moves are available, and consider capitalizing on Vader’s presence and Fear Will Keep Them In Line to lean into Demoralize. Given that Vader and Tarkin will need to stick together, a third commander might be a good idea to control the other half of the board. This would be a good place to slot in Krennic or the Imperial Officer, given their relatively low point costs.
Grand Admiral Thrawn
With Tarkin in the bag, it’s time for the main event. I know who you're really here to see: the fanbase’s favorite blue guy has arrived, and he hits like a truck.
Image Credit: Atomic Mass GamesI expected Grand Admiral Thrawn to be expensive and weird. I expected him to buff your units and interfere with your opponent’s tactics. I didn’t expect him to have a 4 red melee attack with duelist and tactical 1. To put it in practical terms, he kicks as hard as an AT-ST - harder, if he aims.
For all that, his wild orders and long list of other keywords mean you’re much more likely to use his powerful kicks as plan B to punish your opponent for trying to corner him, not as plan A. We’ve seen all of these keywords before, but never all together like this. Cunning and Direct buff the Command phase. Strategize, Tactical, and Exemplar generate and distribute tokens. That leaves One Step Ahead, previously unique to Lando Calrissian. When Command cards are revealed, if the pips match, Thrawn gets a speed 1 move. If they don’t match, any allied unit gets a speed 1 move. Every single turn, one of your units is going to be out of the position your opponent was expecting before the shooting starts.
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Thrawn’s Orders double down on this, and are all about interfering with your opponent’s activation order. His one-pip, Architects of their Own Destruction, chooses an enemy unit and requires that your opponent activate them first or last. If you choose your target carefully, either option might leave a valuable unit exposed at exactly the wrong time. We Must Wait And Watch, his two-pip, is unusual: it can be divulged or not divulged, but it can never be played as a command during the command phase. If you divulge it, it gives three Imperial units the Reinforcements keyword for the entire game. If you don’t divulge it, you can discard it any time your opponent finishes an activation. When you do, an allied unit within 2 of the recently-activated unit gets a free move or attack. Saved for the right moment, this could be a free kill shot on a unit that’s blundered into the wrong position.
Thrawn’s three-pip, I Want You To Know Failure, might be the centerpiece of the entire expansion. It gives all of your Imperial units a free aim if the target of the attack has not activated yet. This turns “buff early, shoot late” on its head for both players as your opponent rushes to activate their most valuable or vulnerable units first and you also potentially rush to score the aim tokens on offer. To inflict added frustration, hold on to We Must Wait And Watch for this turn and use it to snipe a unit your opponent thought they were saving by activating early.
If I had to criticize, I would say that Thrawn has a very high skill floor. With six keywords to think about and orders that turn whole rounds on their head, he’s got a lot to keep track of. I worry that I might be too scatterbrained to keep it all straight and take full advantage of everything he does. I would strongly advise that new players get a few games under their belt and get comfortable with keeping track of keywords before trying to get their points worth out of the Grand Admiral.
Thrawn is another generalist, in the sense that he isn't terribly picky about what units he brings with him. He's as inconvenienced by mercenary units as any of the high command, and his orders will benefit from some big dice pools for devastating attacks at decisive moments. He's a bit more robust than his High Command compatriots, so the Death Troopers retinue is just as useful but a bit less imperative. He hands out free movement, so slow heavy hitters like Death, Range, and Shoretroopers will have less trouble moving around when he's present. Keeping your units close enough to benefit from his keywords is ultimately more important than which units they are.
All Together
Before I sign off, I should qualify my comments about high command’s allergy to mercenaries. Yes, it’s true that several orders and keywords in this pack are specific to units with Imperial affiliation, and I would probably limit myself to one or fewer mercenary units for a Recon list with any of these commanders. That said, a standard match plays on a big map, and even a highly mobile commander can only fully command about half of it. It’s perfectly viable to focus Imperial Trooper units on one side of the board under a High Command unit and run a small force that’s heavy on mercenary or non-Trooper units on the other side of the board. Just don’t run Black Sun Enforcers right on General Tagge’s heels and find yourself surprised when he can’t help them out.Bottom line, the Spring 2026 releases have given the Empire a lot of new toys, and every one of them is worth your time. With the High Commanders and the Probe Droids, the Empire now favors large armies with many activations and slow-developing attacks more than ever before, and it needs to be careful about how and when it uses mercenary units. These aren’t just good units in their own right, they make the Empire feel more like the Empire.
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