I’ve had people ask why I don’t post the deck lists for some of the decks that I talk about and the reason is, for those of you that don’t know, that I publish my lists on our private discord for the Tournament Prep Tier Patrons that support us. I’ve gotten the go ahead on “releashing the Kraken” so let’s get that out of the way so that the people who just came for a list can have it.

“Such Wow, So Innovations” is probably best used to describe it. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that Droids have been ridiculous for a long time now and the nerfs and restricted list additions really haven’t been enough to short circuit the hunks of metal. In the Artificery $300 event I made a single adjustment if not mistaken and ran an Ewok Ambush in addition to the Instigates to give me a bit more sneaky speed just in case I ran into something that I wasn’t expecting or to be more likely to smush a Trandoshan at the top of Round 2. Covert Missions has added some pretty disgusting options for the crew, which BobbySapphire went over a bit in his article, but I’ll go talk about them anyways at length to make people aware of just how much power is contained.

Abandoned Refinery

I’ve been playing A LOT of Abandoned Refinery as of late in different decks. NJCuenca played a piloting deck with Cloud Car and that was pretty sweet looking, so much so that I had claimed about 2 to 3 additions faster than intended to try to get the Cloud Car to my side of the battlefield, but he ended up Ejecting it anyways much to my chagrin. If you look at Refinery, the normal concept just makes it look like a very odd Theed Royal Palace in that you can get a resource value for some sunk cost die that is in the pool that is on an unfavorable side, but in this instance you lost the support / upgrade permanently which is worse.

What we’re actually looking at though is a relatively insane case for any supports / upgrades that we can get out for free. Chopper, Aphra, and Jango can all put into play particular dice at a reduce / reimbursed cost so that they’ll have been a net cost of zero (free). This means that in general you’ll have an expectation of being able to go +1 Resource via using Refinery, but the part that is often omitted is that you’ll have have gotten access to using said card. Chopper using Grappling Arm or Salvaged Arm and then dumping it to Refinery allows them the same theoretical usage as an Overwrite, except that you can actually play an upgrade on a DIFFERENT character. Now we’re looking at a situation where you got to use the upgrade, +1 Resource, get to use the die of the new upgrade, AND Draw a card. This is all without even mentioning that we didn’t use up our precious 1 Overwrite per round, allowed us sequencing flexibility of not paying out all of our resources (in accordance with that deck being a lot of 3 cost upgrades) thereby notifying the opponent of our inability to cast mitigation with a resource cost, and it causing weird targeting / target swapping issues. Imagine Aphra playing an ID10 discounted to free and getting to clear the path in hand of pesky, then dumping it out to pay for an Entourage.

A last point about it is that you can use Refinery to dump off a Unique to then play another copy of that card. Aphra dumping a BT-1 (not played the same round) after using it to play another one sets up for some Grade A shenanigans.

Anakin’s Lightsaber

I read the card and initially thought it was pretty good, but it’s even better than I had ever imagined. It seems reminiscent of Rey’s Lightsaber in ability, but the differential between the 3r1 Melee and 1 Shield turning into 2 Melee and 2 Shield is pretty astronomical, and that’s without mentioning that you can put the shields (2 instead of the 1 from Rey) on any character too, which is probably the best part. “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” resonates in my mind or even better yet, it’s like taking out a loan in that you’ll immediately get the benefit of the 2 shields, but later you’ll have to output 1 more damage. The math doesn’t actually check out there, but you shush and just ride along with me. It’d be hard to justify running it in a ranged based deck, but I’d still consider it after seeing the power it holds and knowing that there aren’t a lot of good options for ranged redeploy. Did I mention that it has Redeploy??? Yeah, CRAZY!!! I do a lot of cost analysis on upgrades and due to the 2 shield gain when playing it and the flexibility of playing it on any of your characters without the shields specifically having to go to that character, the strength is immense. The 2 health gained via shields is worth a resource, so you’ll only have to resolve the die on any of it’s 5 resolveable sides twice to have effectively paid for the total value of it. Re-rolling is for those poser wannabe god like upgrades that only have 3 viable sides (if that).

Run to Safety and Loth-Cat and Mouse

Whilst not nearly as broken, both of these cards are relatively beneficial to have around. Run to Safety has had some amazing case scenarios where an opponent tries to switch targets after some shields protect the target that they already dumped some damage in to. Indirect is used at a pretty decent clip so it’s usually a live card during most of the game. Chewbacca’s Blaster is a synergistic card that will get me that 1 damage I need in order to successfully clear the hurdle / drawback which is that I need to actually heal 1 from a character, to then heal 2 from another character that shares the subtype. For those that don’t know, you didn’t actually “heal” if you didn’t remove damage, thereby preventing the card to do the “Then” portion of the text. I’m not really in love with Run to Safety, but it’s been a relatively positive experience for me as a 3rd Field Medic with stricter requirements but better upside. Run to Safety in Valorous Tribe decks is such a pain in the butt to play against too.

Loth-Cat and Mouse is a poor heroes He Doesn’t Like You. It’s a bit particular in that you’d prefer to not have any very good die sides showing when you use it, but it’s quite useful in the scenarios where an opponent has a die showing damage and you roll out only for them to mitigate your best side instead of them resolving their die, and now you get to trade one of your less useful die for theirs. It has synergy with the action cheat cards as well as 3PO due to being able to activate and resolve a die, which is for the situations where you have 1 die in the pool that you’d like to resolve and know that you’ll likely need to Loth Cat within two actions, but a normal deck can’t both resolve the die and roll additional dice into the pool. There is a light synergy with Chewbacca blaster allowing you to take a damage to roll the die into the pool and if it’s worth it, then Loth-Cat the die back on to the card (usually because a terrible side came out). End of the round scenarios tend to be best when you’re pretty much done with your useful dice and you get to trade those off for an actual die that you cared about removing.

I’m not really into running either of them as a “Two of”, but I’ve been pretty content with the times I’ve gotten to use them and people being “kept honest” by the fact that they exist and that I’ve been known to run them.

That is all that I have for today, but look forward to hearing from EchoBase when they write about the UK tournament that was run on Tabletop Simulator this past weekend, where Chopper Droids also took 1st place… big surprise, right. It wasn’t me though! Until next week, stay safe, wear masks, and sanitize!

~HonestlySarcastc