Darth Sidious, Dark Lord of the Sith

Darth Sidious, Dark Lord of the Sith may not have great numbers, and he may not have good factional synergy, but he does have one of the longest names of any piece in the game, and by God that still counts for something.

I was deeply disappointed when I finally got to see what the new Sidious does. Once you clear the 60-point mark, you're up against some pretty stiff competition in this game, with the likes of Mace Windu and Darth Vader, Jedi Hunter (not to mention the two 80+ horrors in the Sith faction). The point is, if you're going to cost me 61 of my precious points, you'd better be able to help me defeat the pieces that my opponent will have paid similar amounts for, and this is where Sith Sidious falls flat.

An Attack rating of +14 isn't really acceptable in this point range. A mere 130 hit points is definitely pushing it. But a Defense of only 19 is embarrassing. Sidious, you should be ashamed of yourself. Go back to Defense school; take some summer classes; do whatever it takes, but don't come back here with less than a 22.

In terms of abilities, Sidious is all right. He's got your basic Triple Attack, and Force Lightning, which are both nice. Lightsaber Sweep is an odd choice, and not likely to come up except against grunt armies. The thing that's presumably supposed to sell Sidious to you is that he packs Force Renewal and a Commander Effect that lets him share Force Points with the other Force-using members of his squad. This sounds great, except that he's a Separatist who costs 61 points.
As of this moment, in 100 point play, Sidious has access to Dark Side Acolyte, Asajj Ventress, and Aurra Sing as potential Force-sharers. Of these, only Sing is a competitive piece, but Aurra has better options to team up with in other factions (the old Mace + Aurra team starts to look pretty good again).

So Sidious is exclusively a piece for 200+ point play. Fine. Unfortunately, his options don't really improve all that much in 200 points, because you only have 139 points left after buying him, and most of the options (various version of Maul, Dooku, and Grievous) are in the 50-or-so-points area. You can also bring in Aurra, but the fact is that at this point you're sort of fighting to make him more useful than the Clone Strike Sidious, who can share Force Points with any one Unique figure. The only Force-sharing advantage the new Sidious brings to the table is sharing with more than one ally, but since all of those allies are very expensive, you'll probably blow most of your 200 points on about three pieces, which is usually a Bad Idea.

What I'm getting at in all of this is that while Sidious is probably going to be a fun piece to play, I'll be shocked if he ever finds his way into any serious competitive squads.

Overall rating in 100: 1.5
Overall rating in 200: 2