It was mid day when a FFG article dropped notifying us of the updated Rules Reference Guide and Holocron Documents. For the most part, there wasn’t anything awe-inspiring in the RRG, but the Holocron on the other hand was a sight for sore eyes and I’m quite happy about it and believe that you should be too. We were going into the North American Championship and potentially our Nationals (Grand Championships) looking at 2 Wide decks being nearly unplayable into Order 66 Rebel Traitor decks and I was even practicing a Order 66 Rebel Traitor Daka combo deck that was nearly an auto win against 2 wide and even knocked some 3 wide lists on their butt and beat them over the head.

Two Wide decks really were kept under lock and key by both Hero Droids + Military Camp auto disrupt and Order 66 / Execute Order 66 + Rebel Traitor and it was disgusting. We hoped for their freedom from the oppression and they did it, FFG gave it to us!

I took some creative liberties with rearranging the ordering of the restricted list to the above picture so that we could talk about it in combo sections. Let’s talk about what was hit and then get into the pros and cons of a restricted list. The same combos hit in Trilogy were also hit in Standard and those ones were also hit in Infinite so I’m starting with the smaller formats, but keep in mind that they weren’t limited to just that format and they exist in each format after as well

Trilogy+

I have no doubt that this pairing was going to cause many a rage quit at an event. You could easily have a 5 die configuration which put you in a strong spot for winning the opening roll for battlefield, then choose your Military Camp and use it for your First Action. You were capable of doing 2 disrupt to your opponent 100% of the time, but you were 63% to gain 2 resources for yourself at the same exact time. Sure you used up 2 character dice and 3 abilities to do it, but it put you way ahead of your opponent when you still had 3 character dice left and 4 resources to their 4 character dice left and 0 resources. If you didn’t wrestle the battlefield control away from them, then you would have the pleasure of the same exact thing happening again to you during the next round and there were a lot of decks that just couldn’t contend very well against that start. The combo is left, but now it’ll require finding specific events to do that each time and not just simply winning the roll for battlefield. It was going to be a major player in both Trilogy and Standard and maybe it was even useful in infinite.

Standard+

I had already written about this way back and that whilst the deck isn’t likely to be unbeatable as a whole, it would absolutely crush deck building and preparation for events because if it was remotely feasible against 3 wide decks then wouldn’t you want to go into an event where you were at least 50/50 against half of the field and 90/10 vs the other half?? We no longer have to concern ourselves with the tyranny of this combo. You might still see Order 66 get some play, but now they can’t automatically force the activation from the beginning of the game. I could see some DJ Order 66 decks happening and Two Wide will still have to adjust during those games, but not being an auto loss / hit for all of your character dice makes the match more salvageable. For those that weren’t familiar with the combo, it went like this: Assuming double Rebel Traitor, against Two Wide, you’d just activate Traitor, opponent rolls one character in, then you do the other with your other Traitor, then Execute Order 66 and deal 4 damage, and remove 4 dice for your 2 resources. Against Three Wide, you wait for them to activate one character and then force the other activations with Traitors and boom, same thing. Realistically there were adjustments to only run 1 Rebel Traitor so that you could make the rest of the deck better and you would still have Two Wide locked down and could cause trouble / odd sequencing for Three Wide still and also run the full 6 copies of EO66. You can still Lure an opponent but you can only run 2, have to draw them, and need a 3rd resource to do it.

Infinite

Most of you don’t play the Infinite format and may not have even known about this, but there was a deck entirely built around claiming Mean Streets and ending the round via Retreats and Hyperspace jumps. You might be wondering how you would win the game doing that, and the answer is with Planetary Uprising, which they would have 3 copies of due to Double Down. Fond Memories was also in deck to cycle retreats back into the deck and overall it was a pretty disgusting combo which if I’m not mistaken was built by Menion who goes by the name of RunningOnion on discord. I talk about him at times in my Vlogs and he is an absolute mad scientist and likes to deep dive into crazy combo things and sometimes it pans out and blows every one away. Anyways, imagine playing at a Galactic Qualifier and your opponent drawing cards and seemingly like they aren’t doing much of anything only to plop a couple Uprisings into play and then just starts claiming the Battlefield over and over to end the rounds and make you take 2-6 damage until you die.

As you can probably tell by now, each of the sets of combos had a few things in common which are: High Frequency of Occurrence, which means that they would happen automatically or near automatically and would continue to do until the game ended or the advantage was too high, and that it never felt good as the opponent. If it was a really hard combo to pull off and required several cards from your deck all at once, then it often isn’t happening at a frequency that makes it super reliable and consistent to happen. When you get to start the game with most of the combo or ALL of it and there is no counter play, then that is when we can be at the level of the Negative Playing Experiences that I talk about. We want to do cool things and win the game, but we also can’t have 0 cost cards with the effect of “Flip a coin 5 times, if you find heads at least one time then you win the game!”

Pros and Cons

The huge Pro of this list is that if there is a ridiculous combo that they want to nip in the bud, they can just toss on two parts to this so that you can’t run the parts together. It does it without being super invasive with the text / point cost memorization or devaluing the card as a whole. LAAT gunship wishes that it was on the list with Kes Dameron instead of the errata being a cruel hit. I absolutely love the ingenuity behind it, but there are going to be some potential problems down the road.

The longer the list gets, the more restrictions get placed on things. The list is currently only 7 cards, but now it means that we can’t run C-3PO at all with Retreat, Hyperspace Jump, or Mean Streets even if the interaction isn’t very strong. It’s a small price to pay right now, but if we add another 10 cards to the list, then it becomes that much more annoying. Another Con is that the list (to my understanding) was only listed on the Holocron Document, so it is now ANOTHER thing where if a player walks in to an event and didn’t know about that document, they might be disqualified for running certain restricted cards together.

This is in by no means a huge complaint of mine, but merely mentioning the potential future downfalls of it in hopes that it doesn’t get relied upon more than necessary. I’m excited that I can test with Two Wide decks again even though most of you may have never known that I even play anything outside of Three Wide Rainbow lists. What hopes and aspirations were brought to you in part by the Restricted List? Share your thoughts, we love to hear from you! Thank you to all of you for your kind words and suggestions in the comments. Constructive criticism goes a long way to improving the work that we do so that you can enjoy it more.

~HonestlySarcastc

Shortly after the posting of this article, it had come to my attention that many had felt that the usage of scenes from Amistad was tasteless and that I was belittling the grave atrocity that is slavery by comparing it to a card game. Whilst I don’t understand how I did that, I do know that I meant no harm in the sharing of my view and for offending others, I am sorry and I hope that you accept my apology.