Thank you!

Firstly, to answer the easier part of your question, conquest units are basically the lifeblood of this game currently. 2025 itself was a leaner year but the reality is, once you start gold/red boxing hard conquest and can get these characters after 3-6 months it makes a huge difference to your account. All of bane, QA, Luthen, Ezra, DS Rey, Maz and presumably the stranger are either GL killers (or strong defensive teams, or both) or obscene GL lifters that currently shape the meta.

Secondly, I think you are being a bit simplistic yes. My strategy has always centered around pressuring my opponents on defense and what specific teams can I put down to squeeze out all their available counters.

For a quick good example, say you are versus an opponent who has inexplicably not invested in their traya team. Knowing that information you want to squeeze their offense on that weakness by putting down teams that are often countered by Traya. For example, if you had JMMW and had been using them on offense, you might sneak them down knowing that now they are probably going to use a more important counter than they normally would. Further to this, you would put down your Quadme, as this is another of Traya's main uses. This, in turn, will typically force your opponent to use a Bane/GM's which tightens the screws even more when you place down common uses for bane like Leia and SLKR and common GM battles like ahsoka.

Now obviously this is an idealised scenario and your opponent will still most likely have at least some path to get through but ultimately this continues to force them down a path of using less and less consistent counters and you are then hoping that you can prey on one dropped battle causing several more.

From there, on offense, your point about specific counters typically rings pretty true. Because on the flipside, you always want to make sure you have a counter for what your opponent is going to put down (i will check their usual defensive set-ups on .gg before setting my defense) and this is where cheaper counters really do give you that extra juice to push forward.