Building with Plo Koon makes me think of legos. Being able to customize how we construct decks around him using pre-defined pieces (non uniques, probably 8 points each) is a tenet of building with blocks. Naturally, the children’s toys called Duplos (if you’re a parent or an older sibling you’ve certainly stepped on one of these and landing yourself in the Emergency Room) entered my brain due to its phonetic similarities to what we’re trying to accomplish with Plo + 2 (Deux is French for two). Thus, I’ve been calling this build DeuxPlo – it’s not that exciting, but bitches be complaining about not knowing what Stairs is so I’ve tried to compromise with a name that at least addresses what the deck is/does.

I <3 Plo Koon

Plo Koon was my favorite of all the random jedi from the prequels, mainly because he was a freaking boss in Jedi Power Battles for Dreamcast and Playstation. Dude had an ORANGE lightsaber and shot ORANGE FORCE LIGHTNING; badass. They reasoned that Plo walked the line of the dark side but was able to control himself, and I was sold. I loved him.

Almost 20 years later I don’t really love Plo Koon. I poured one out for him when he got clipped by his clones, and he’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for discovering Ahsoka, but the love just isn’t there anymore (although I do rock the dope alt-art Guard promos with his art). He’s a weird looking cat, but nothing out of the ordinary compared to the rest of The Jedi Council

Let’s be real here. The Phantom Menace got a lot of things wrong, but it did not disappoint in the “What the hell is that alien supposed to be?!” category. Even years later I would get random texts from friends asking things like, “What were they thinking when they made Plo Koon, he’s looks like a vagina wearing a gas mask.” Now, I don’t have the most mature friends, but the jabronis on The Jedi Council are jacked up. Take a look:

Let’s be real, you might as well swipe left anytime you find yourself with a few minutes to kill in downtown Coruscant circa 32-19 ABY. Yarael Poof and Opee Rancisis are especially ridiculous looking, but I digress..

As with parts I and II of my series on Way of the Force Synergy where I discussed deckbuilding with Captain Rex and Arihnda Pryce respectively, I find Plo Koon equally interesting. I was busy crushing it at worlds when Plo Koon got spoiled, but word on the street is that if you use two of the same non-unique character their abilities “stack” in that Plo gets double the bonus. For example, if you use Plo with two Padawans, the first weapon you play on Plo will be -2, because he gets the -1 ability from each Padawan. That means you can potentially get 6 cost worth of upgrades out round one for just two resources; two!! Padawans aren’t the only br0ken strategy we can use with Plo, and that’s what I want to look at today.

DeuxPlo Padawans

Out the gate this seems like the most broken. Plo with two Padawans feels Poe/Maz busted, and like Spirit of Rebellion, Way of the Force is dropping just as Store Championships are starting. I won the first Massachusetts Store Championship with Poe/Maz after running just a few games with it on TTS, and I feel like I DeuxPlo Padawans has the same potential.

The best place to look to guide us to a double Padawan deck is none other than Eric Wainwright who won two regionals with the deck, most famously with BB-8. Here’s his worlds list:

Two time Regional Champion Eric Wainwright always keeps a solid charge on his phone.

I couldn’t find Eric’s list in the world’s file (lots to pour through), so I asked him to send it to me. He happily obliged and we got to talking about that deck as well as his thoughts on DeuxPlo Padawans, which I’ll include below. While we can’t focus on wiwwt’s weapons package exactly, the numbers are what I want to analyze. He ran only seven weapons, and two Lightsaber Pull to supplement them (as well as Stolen Intel to draw an extra card), with five more non-weapon upgrades, and two “dice supports”. With the potential to spam three weapons for two resources in DeuxPlo I feel we should probably up the number, especially since we won’t have Stolen Intel to lean on.

If we’re trying to win Gen Con (that’s my goal atm) we really need to cut out the chaff. R2D2 can stay, but BB-8 has to go, and I’d probably prefer a second R2D2 to the Journals of Ben Kenobi, but I’m interested in trying it out. I assume he plays Journals, draws a card, hopes it’s a weapon, and overwrites it with a weapon for free if he needs to, which seems chill. Another thing to look at is the cost of the weapons. To get three out in round one, which I admit is both a stretch and not necessarily strategically viable (three weapons in our hand means we have, at most, two mitigation cards to keep our 7 health Padawans alive, with no rerolls), we would need to skew to having more twos. But, I think we want a solid mix; if our goal is to simply get two weapons out for two resources, we can put a 3-cost on a Padawan and a 2-cost on Plo (or vice versa, depending on the weapons we draw in our opener [for example, we likely want to get the redeploy weapons on the Padawans because they are such flimsy targets]). This strategy also lets us play a two cost weapon on our other Padawan the following round, while still leaving our other resource available for mitigation, but with the disgusting amount of dice we are rolling we may have had the chance to accumulate resources to really ramp out.

Because of the ability to spam weapons, I would like to fit Shoto Lightsabers in the list as well, as I think the extra shielding will go a long way to keeping our characters alive. As such I think we could consider eschewing both grey weapons and Force Speeds (a card I’m not a huge fan, but is a sweet include considering every single one of our character dice features a focus [a combination that also makes Vibroknife attractive]). If I were trying to build a list faithful to Wainwright’s vision I would probably rock something akin to this:

I think the Vibros are too good to not include, but they do weaken both Shoto and TPOTF a bit. I think with 11 weapons we can shave a pull, I’d much rather just draw into our weapons, but having an extra Redeploy or Shoto in a deck like this is too good to cut completely. I didn’t include Light Bow since it’s much, much worse without Aayla special chaining it, but you could put it in if you wanted, especially if you didn’t want to be on the Speed/Vibro plan. I think Crafted lightsaber is also worth a look, since it synergizes with spamming weapons a bit; we use up all of our resources early in the round, but take some late and can push it out while still drawing into a full grip of mitigation. Either way, if the 2x The Power of the Force is interesting to you I would shave a Vibro for the second one and call it a day.

Talking with Eric

So, I spoke with Eric about the deck and I’ll give you some important hits.

He used to run 10 weapons in Aayla/Padawans but thinks 9 is probably correct, though either is fine. He thinks you need to hit three weapons in round one to really take advantage of the ability stack, but I think I might’ve convinced him to consider my stance on two being best. He thinks Trust Your Instincts is too important not to include. He hadn’t considered the Force Speed/Vibro combo, but thinks it’s probably good. He likes Force Pull as a “Natural Stall” tactic to get his opponent to tip their hand on a first target His perfect hand in Aayla/Padawans is 2 weapons, 1 mitigation, 1 reroll, 1 force speed Needz Moar BeeBeeAte (jk)

I plan on having a much more in depth discussion with Eric about Blue Hero, hopefully next week, so we’ll save the rest for that talk. Also, I’m hoping he reads this and comments below about anything else he wants to include, so scroll down!!

DeuxPlo Partisans

I’m super into mill. I wrote about it right after worlds but I came very, very close to running BR Mill in Minnesota. Even having gone undefeated until the semis, if I could go back and live in a world where the timing rules weren’t severely against mill I would switch it up. So, when I found out that Plo stacks non-unique abilities and we could mill four(!!) off the top while flanked by Jedha Partisans I became aroused.

I’ve worked quite extensively with Blue/Yellow Mill, as I was a strong proponent of Yoda/Padme/Proftiable Connection mill before discovering the strength of Rieekan/Yoda/Jan Dodonna mill. I’m currently intrigued by the Lando/Yoda mill deck that came in second at the New Zealand regional a few weeks ago, and did a pretty awesome analysis video for our Patreons where I compared it to my Yoda/Padme and built my own version, so Blue/Yellow mill has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Not to mention, Blue/Yellow hero is widely considered the best combination of characters you can bring to a Star Wars Destiny game.

My main issue with this deck is that there aren’t a lot of ways to trigger the indirect damage. Short of running Runaway Boomas there really aren’t any blue or yellow hero dice that let us get a consistent indirect damage. The only event that does it is Explosive Tactics and that’s too huge a gamble for two resources. One card I didn’t include, but think I probably should is Stealthy.

It’s only one additional indirect side, but it also has a double special that mills. It could honestly replace a Force Meditation since it does a similar thing while giving us one more 16% chance of hitting indirect damage but also has a 2 Shield side. In fact, I think I just convinced myself it’s better than Force Meditation, but it’s too late to change the picture. It’s also possible that the Ascension Gun+Imperial Palace plan isn’t good enough, but those 2 Discard sides on the Gun are just so left of the brake.

I streamed some games with this bad boy and it did pretty great. Check it out and let me know what you think. One change I made since the stream is to add Friends in Low Places. I thought I could survive without them, but it’s too easy for my opponent to mitigate the Partisans’s 2 Indirect side. Normally it’s a bad move mitigating dice vs. Mill because you are making a 1-for-1 trade most of the time. With this deck, mitigating a 2 Indirect is a 1-for-4 tradeoff, so players will make it every time.

Anyway, here’s where I’m settled, but like I said I’ll likely add Stealthy (it was dropped after I built this).

DeuxPlo Temple Guards

I don’t have a ton to say about DeuxPlo Temple Guards other than you have to play ridiculously fair (for the most part). While this is kind of cheating on my hypothesis that stacking abilities on Plo is broken, I think this is a consideration just because of how strong triple Guardian is. Splitting damage is one of the most powerful things you can do in any game, and what bringing two Temple Guards to the table does is allows you to keep on using the Guardian ability even when one eventually dies.

Being able to keep the damage split evenly between our characters lets us dictate quite a bit, from who our opponent’s target will be, to who we want to kill off first. I think it’s one of the strongest things you can do in Destiny, but not a lot of decks can truly take advantage of it. This one can. The big tradeoff is that we have no resource generating help, nothing to cheat our plan out. We’ll suffer from having less dice on the table so we’re more easily susceptible to mitigation. The one trade-off we get is that we should be able to extend each of our character’s lives a round or two because of the constant Guardianship.

This isn’t very different from the Padawans list above, but I subbed in It Binds All Things and Destiny to try and get more dice out consistently. Just because those two cards don’t work together doesn’t mean they aren’t each worth an include in the deck. I’ve been running both in Stairs and they’ve been very solid. You could shave an IBAT for an R2D2 or a second Vibroknife too.

Mix and Match

There are a bunch of non-unique characters with cool abilities, and even the ones above can be mixed and matched to come up with some cool combinations. I don’t want to get too far past 2500 words, but I will include a two characters I like as a 1-of Plo Flanker with any other character.

I think you can combine either Jedi Instructor or Clone Trooper with any of the other above options to make a pretty dynamic “fair” three character deck. Clone Trooper would allow you to bring in a second color with one of the blue options, or let you go rainbow with the mill option while also providing an indirect damage side and some solid red cards (though this is probably just a bad mill deck). Either way, each of these provides some dice-fixing. Jedi Instructor is particularly interesting with either a Padawan or a Temple Guard as it allows you two opportunities to fix dice, when she rolls out and when Plo rolls out. Plo rolling a 2X on either of his dice turns his other to a 2X which makes him a badass melee machine. Clone Trooper is another interesting option, because anyone who has ever tried Jedi Instructor has surely been disappointed when she rolls a side that doesn’t match. He mixes the damage, but adds red, which can be nice in a meta with a decent amount of Kylo. These two also work pretty well together, because Plo can fire these triggers off in any way we want, letting us get a reroll in before we have to turn our other die, giving us better odds of hitting the 2X side. Plus, Jedi Instructor’s ranged side isn’t wasted if you include Clone Trooper.

You could also run Plo with just one non-unique and then rock someone like Ezra2 or Maz to fill out the other side of Plo’s flank. Either way, Plo has a lot of interesting deckbuilding options and I look forward to putting him back on the table.

Thanks for reading,

BobbySapphire

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