So far I've had a hard time each set finding a deck at the beginning of the new meta (I played Jyn Ackbar for the first month of SoR, lol). I was playing Vader-New Phasma for a few weeks and loving it but after EaW dropped I've been trying a bunch of stuff and not settling on anything I thought was actually good. Had a local tournament Monday so I went to hyperloops gauntlet page and scrolled through then just copied the Kylo FN deck at the top.

Lost my first game with the deck vs my friend on Poe-Maz, played a quick rematch and I killed Poe round one and was getting a feel for the deck. I then beat 2 Thrawn-Unkar mill decks and a New Poe-New Rey deck that night. I felt pretty comfortable with the deck but definitely wanted to make some changes.

First card I cut immediately was Boundless Ambition. I played it once on the night and when I did it was really bad. With only 12 upgrades it just didn't seem good in here. You don't really need to draw into a bunch of extra rerolls with this deck like you do with Boundless in a Vader deck since both your character dice have 3 damage sides and all your upgrades have at least 3 damage sides. I pulled open my deck building app and did a search for cards that let me see my opponents hand and when Probe popped up it went in immediately. It gives you information which makes your Kylo calls easier but also doubles as tech vs Boundless, Buy Out, Hyperspace Jump, Retreat, and a lot of other high impact events. I was sold. Then I saw Close Quarters Assault as an option for some extra discard tech and since the deck has a lot of melee sides it has potential for a round blowout vs other slower decks. Looked through the list and decided Rend is a huge meta card so I could drop one of them. Really the only zero drop this deck is scared of is Imperial Inspection. It really depends how the meta shakes out whether you want zero or two Rends, imo. Last change is I dropped Prepare for War for a second Enrage. 100% usability in all games vs potentially a dead card if you get paired up vs a super fast Cad, Sabine, Rey, or Poe Maz deck. In most matchups I do find myself claiming but not vs those decks. Easy change.

So that's the deck. Nothing super exciting happened in the event besides me having to face arguably the 5 toughest players in swiss, 3 of which made the top 4 along with me. Round 1 I had to play my friend on Poe Maz who was up to that point my only defeat with this deck. He had some bad rolls the first two rounds and I got there but it was pretty close until a huge tipping point in Round 4 when his Poe went down before he was able to use Emperor's Throne Room at all from Hyperspace Jumping to it. Round 2 I played the guy who bubbled the Gencon cut (17th) on Rainbow 9s. We both attacked each other's FN. He pinged his Nightsister 3 or 4 times throughout and played an enrage so I didn't have much extra to kill her and Bala-Tik went down fast after that. Probably my closest game of the day. Round 3 I played my other friend on his own Thrawnkar Vehicles build and he got a really bad draw and all my Kylo calls hit so I won pretty hard. We re-matched for funsies and he beat me. Round 4 vs a Han-Rey. I was super scared of Infamous into Never Tell Me The Odds so I went for Han first and an early Vibroknife completely blanked his shields. Han went down early round 3 and it was pretty easy to clean up Rey after that. Round 5 was a mirror. His build was quite different and he was running Rebel War Room - Yavin IV. I won the roll-off and chose his battlefield which actually did some work for me as my build was able to play slightly faster than his. In a middle round I was able to CQA him for 3 after seeing a boundless in his hand with As I Have Foreseen and then both of our Kylo's were almost defeated and I got a lucky re-roll at the end of a round to be able to knock his Kylo off before the round ended with mine being alive for the start of the following round.

Top 4 was me and my 2nd, 4th, and 5th round opponents. I played vs the Han Rey in semis. Not seeing the Never Tell Me the Odds in our first game I decided to just go for Rey first. She went down really fast. He killed my FN which I was able to get a Lightsaber on at the last second so it would redeploy then I played a Vibro on my full health Kylo. His Han had 1 damage and no shields, I rolled in showing 7 damage across my dice and hit on my Kylo call to put Han at 3 damage, which he told me was a 1 in 3 with him having a grey, blue, and yellow card so I guess that's somewhat lucky. He discarded to re-roll then I played CQA and got rid of his last two cards so I was guaranteed he had zero mitigation left and my lethal damage was good. Finals I played the Kylo FN mirror again and he won the roll-off choosing his Rebel War Room again over taking the shields. This time I put both shields on Kylo instead of splitting them since in our swiss game we both went for Kylo first and this baited him into going for FN first which really gave me an edge. I rolled pretty well throughout and got his Kylo down pretty quickly. My FN went down but not before dropping the Force Illusion on him at the last second making my opponent waste a 3 damage Z6 Riot Control Baton die on him. I was just too far ahead for his FN to be a match with my Kylo.

Looking back on the event I think I'd drop the Rend for a second Force Illusion because it's really important in the Cad, Sabine, and Poe-Maz match-ups and vs other decks that run the massive hitters like LR1K and AT-ST, which are now surprisingly viable because Thrawn makes a billion dollars. The meta at the event seemed to be pretty light on Thrawnkar mill/vehicles which is probably the only decks you want/need to have Rend against right now with this deck.