Sam Phillips won the Destiny Regional in Alaska a few weeks ago. Like normal, we offered him a chance to talk about his deck, his meta, and what made it possible for him to take down the trophy and secure his spot for Worlds. Link to his decklist and write up on swdestinydb. If you’ve won a regionals or know someone who has and they’d like to tell their story, please do send them our way. It’s not a shocker to see Kylo2 doing well, but a Wild Bazine has appeared so let’s go see what’s going on!

Alaska Regional Winner Deck Write Up

Sam Phillips

I just want to start by saying I appreciate that our small regional tournament has been mentioned in the community. I also want to thank The Hyperloops for giving me the opportunity to do a write up on my deck and explain my philosophy behind it and why I think it’s a good deck and performs well. I can tell there are a lot of reservations about this deck and I can understand why. Bazine has a pretty bad wrap and I made it into the finals with a measly 2 and 2 record during the Swiss rounds, after the Swiss rounds I was 4 and 0 to my credit. I was also able to go 4 and 0 with this deck in our prior tournament.

META

So I want to start by talking about META. The advantage of our location is that there are only around 16 regular players and about half of that number are veteran players doing their best to play competitive decks. I realized that in our small community we had a lot of people playing mono color decks, on top of this there are three players that regularly play Emperor decks. We have one very skilled player that has piloted the Emperor to victory in a couple of tournaments making the Emperor popular here. This deck is designed to mimic the Emperor deck but has more health and has a major advantage against mono color decks.

Playing to your opponent’s weaknesses wins games and that’s what I did. 10 and 2 over two weeks in competitive play is not a bad record.

Consistency Versus High Risk & Reward

R2P2 is a very popular deck and one of the main reasons it does well is because of consistency, but there is a flip side to that coin which is high risk for high reward. I personally like taking big risks and getting the big reward. This deck capitalizes on this concept on both sides of the playing field. Cards like Bazine, Chance Cube, Sith Holorcon, It Will All Be Mine and Rise Again fall into this category. I’ll discuss specifics about cards later just note that this is the philosophy behind this deck. Knowing when to make a risky move and what risk to take is important in this deck and just like any other deck the more you practice the better you get at it. I’m also a pretty optimistic person, which makes taking these big risks easier for me. My wife and son, who are both more pessimistic than I am, absolutely hate Chance Cube and Sith Holocron because “They never roll good”.

Building a deck around your own strengths can help you just as much as building around your opponent’s weaknesses.

Glass Cannon Versus Tank

Because of the nerf to Vibroknife the slower survival decks are going strong and this deck is no different. Rise Again, Ancient Lightsaber, the Royal Guard and even Bazine all help make the most of Kylo2’s 12 health. One way of playing tank is using control to slow your opponent, this deck uses lots of control to do so. There are 10 dice control events and two Force Throw upgrades, that’s nearly half the deck dedicated to control, on top of the Royal Guard and his guardian ability.

Deck Theme

Every deck has a theme, even if it’s just doing as much range or melee damage as possible. The theme in this deck is using your opponent’s dice against them. This also plays into our high risk for high reward philosophy. I chose this strategy to deal with only having 3 starting dice.

Anger takes advantage of your own poor rolls, with all the dice with two blank sides in the deck we’ve got a decent chance of getting an opportunity to use Anger.

It Will All Be Mine takes advantage of our enemy rolling bad. This card has won me more games then I can count. I’ve used this many times on just a single die to kill a character. This is huge because death removes the rest of that character’s dice.

Force Throw fits into this theme nicely. Throwing a 3 side on your own chance cube or even the 2 shield side on Bazine is always fun too.

Characters

Bazine

Lets talk about Bazine first since she seems to be the big controversy. This deck is a package deal and she fits into the theme and philosophy of this deck well. Early game her 3 damage special is the high risk versus reward I talked about earlier, the only other characters that can do 3 damage with no cost are all 15 points or more. She has 8 health, which is the most of any 7 cost character, and her die has a 2 shield side for 1. Both of these factors play into our tank theme. Both her and Kylo have disrupt sides so they have some synergy there.

So why not the First Order Stormtrooper? The Stormtrooper gives you access to The Best Defense and Cannon Fodder but that makes him an easy kill for the other side. You need Bazine to live as long as possible because she is your Chance Cube target, she is the expendable die for He Doesn’t Like You, and if they really go all in on Kylo2 then she is your Sith Holocron target as well. With shields being strong again, Bazine’s 2 shield for 1 is just about as good as the Troopers 2 damage for 1. That really only leaves the trooper with a 1 damage side over Bazine but less health and less flexibility.

Royal Guard

This guy has made me fall in love with the Guardian ability. It’s extremely frustrating for your opponent when they know Kylo needs to die and this guy just keeps pulling damage away from him. If you can get his Guardian and a dice control card off in the same turn that means slow going for your opponent. This gives you the time you need to find your Ancient Lightsaber and Rise Again cards to just bring Kylo back up in health. The only downside is that his die has no resource side. It maybe tempting to put upgrades on him but don’t, just let him kill himself on enemy dice and be happy for his sacrifice.

Kylo2

This guy is just all around good. 12 health makes him a big challenge to kill quickly. His activate ability is another one of those risk versus reward options in the deck. Yeah against mono color it’s a no brainer but at a tournament you’re going to go up against a lot of different decks. If you can prep ahead of time and know what you have better odds of guessing against certain decks it can help. But it’s no worse odd’s than trying to roll the 2 damage side on Kylo’s dice. The disadvantage is you can’t reroll your guess, but the advantage is your opponent can’t dice control your guess either.

Cards of Note

I’m not going to cover every card in the deck but there are some I should explain that I haven’t mentioned already.

Voices Cry Out

The only reason I played this card was because my wife had my Sound the Alarm cards in her deck. Put two Sound the Alarms in and take out the Voices Cry Out and one of the Scramble cards. (It was worth the sacrifice)

Chance Cube & Sith Holocron

You want one of these two cards in your opening hand. Chance Cube accelerates the speed at which you can use It Will All Be Mine and Rise Again. Sith Holocron accelerates getting your abilities in play. I call these my gateway cards to winning the game. Both cards bounce back to your hand and can be either replayed on a new character or give you an extra card to discard and reroll.

Lightsaber Throw

This is another card I use to compensate for only having 3 starting dice.

Dark Counsel

This card gives everything this deck needs for cheap. Card draw for rerolls, focus for whatever you need and resources for the high cost cards.

Isolation

I would put two of these in the deck and pull out either an Electroshock or the other Scramble.

Well there you have it folks. I find the interaction of Chance Cube with Mos Eisley Spaceport to be an interesting one. Most of the deck’s initial damage is front loaded into Kylo2’s ability, his die, and the Royal Guard so you could possibly out claim people after likely losing the die roll to decide who is first. After that it is a Holocron deck with some very neat tricks from it’s event package. I’m quite surprised at not running Force Lightning, but it makes sense when trying to afford “It Will all Be Mine” or Rise Again. I’m curious if he had any auto-wins off of an opponent hitting a triple blank and him smashing It Will All Be Mine down and ruining their world; Feel Your Anger can already be a win in that scenario so how much worse is it for them when they probably lose a character at the same time.

Congrats to Sam for taking down the competition and also many thanks to him for taking the time to do a write-up for us and you. If you have any questions for Sam, leave a comment directed toward him and i’ll pass along the message. May the rolls be with you!

~HonestlySarcastc