Well, we went from a black hole of Destiny news to spoilers, spoilers, regionals dates, and more spoilers. Not only are we getting new cards from the mothership, but Spoiler-Gate seems to be over now that I Rebel and Golden Dice got their exclusives from FFG this weekend. Some stores are already getting their regionals dates out there, so expect to do some driving in January, I know I am!

Okay, enough chit chat, let’s get to the spoilery stuff.

Editor’s Note: I (HonestlySarcastc) found some time to chime in on my takes on some of the card reveals so i’ll just sneak them in. Assume that my takes on the cards aren’t there in the case that the flow of the article seems to be disturbed.

I Rebel – Hero Red Spoilers

I had the pleasure of being invited onto I Rebel to talk about the spoilers Jedi Geek Girl got Friday night. It was pretty fun, as she didn’t send them to me beforehand, and I got to react to them live. You can listen to our short podcast here. And be sure to check out the I Rebel facebook page for all of the great commentary already going on about these spoilers.

Since I already have comments on the podcast, I’ll keep my comments here brief:

What I like about all these cards is that they do broken stuff. Cody lets you get 8 point characters for 7, and by including three Clone Troopers on your squad we’re really cheating by 3 squad points. While “only” a four-dice squad, it’s 33 health. Still weak to things like Thermal Detonator and Force Wave, aren’t all three wide decks? With that much health our minds automatically drift towards supports, and it’s possible that the best way to make Cody’s Special side is to find something with big time value. There are some pretty awesome options that give us real value like Arena of Death, Jedi Temple, or Outer Rim Outpost. Honestly, Cody’s ability makes a LOT of the battlefields look really, really good, the trick is finding ones that won’t also blow you out (like Carbon Freezing Chamber).

If sticking with supports, I really like using Finalizer Docking Bay to use Cody’s ability as a pseudo resource that also can pull vehicles or Honor Guard/Suppressive Fire out of the discard pile. Suppressive Fire will be especially important to recur in the new meta with Vader running around… But back to supports, being able to cheat out Crait Speeders or Y-Wings or X-Wings that we discarded to churn through our deck and take advantage of Docking Bay could make a really cheeky support deck. Deployment (above) gets really interesting if we can spam Crait Speeders and X-Wings to go along with our triple Clone Troopers, getting 5-8 dice in the pool in one action can overwhelm even the most Beguiling opponents.

Attack of the Clones (above) is cute, but I think it’s a casual card. I can’t see it hitting the competitive scene unless we also get some interesting way to cheat it out. As I mentioned on the podcast, it’s asking a lot to build up, and have alive, enough non-unique characters to make a 5 cost event worth it.

HS: I very much DISLIKE “Deployment”. If it was free, then I’d still dislike it, but it would at least have value in that it put all of your dice into the pool and can hamper your opponent’s removal that isn’t multi-targeted. I’d also want it to cost 0. If not mistaken we have 0 cost cards that do each part of that effect and they are rarely used and tend to be god awful, so off into the POOP tier you go, but it has a place late game so keep it in mind when you are missing that speed umph late game. “Attack of the Clones” seems pretty terrible at 5 cost and even if it was 3 cost then I’d have to question if I really want to run what is probably a Mono deck but it would at least be use-able at that point and potentially good enough when an opponent can’t start picking off your people. It is Hero, so it’s not like you have to worry about Battledroid teams, but I guess the concern was Gungans or Triple Clone Trooper teams with Cody. The effect is super niche and in the “right scenarios” it is bonkers but that might only come up once an event, so i’ll add it to my POOP tier of cards. “Clone Commander Cody” is interesting in that he helps your team setups, but the downfall is that we are looking at a lot of red when doing eCody/Clone/Clone +3 cost plot. My current theory is eCody/Clone/eAnakin2 with the Mos Espa Arena and some Podracers so that we can get maximum abuse from our field by turning Cody specials into Ezra1 specials which is definitely one of the most hated die sides to play against. In general, the effect is interesting but hard to use and there is no real way to determine how good or awful he’ll be. Cheap elites are hard to come by usually and the 13 is in line with Aayla, Kanan, ad Yoda so it is a hard place to be, but the die sides are reminiscent of Rex and Aayla so they are just good enough, but likely to end up being underwhelming and I very much am not a fan of the 9 HP. Cody is likely to stay in the Tier 3 type decks unless we really get some strong red stuff to work off of. Trilogy format might be feasibly though, but new Vader with Fear and Dead Men is scary for all of the wide decks.

Golden Dice – Blue Villian / Nightsister Spoilers

FFG is quadrupling down on Nightsisters being the main blue-villian affiliation in Star Wars Destiny, bringing us even more nightsisters and odd-costed goodies. Be sure to check out the roundtable by Jack, Tommy, Scott, and nobody else, over at the Golden Dice main page.

Luce is reminiscent of the OG Nightsister in that she lets us reroll one die at a time including our opponents, but giving us a different cost as well as the option of bringing her at elite. Discarding a card for one reroll is a pretty steep cost, but there are plenty of situations where we’ll trigger it. She doesn’t stand up to the OG b/c Nightsister let us use our health as a resource, something very few cards allow us to do, and when you can put shields on her or even heal her, we get a lot of rerolls. Since we want to be using the cards in our hand, presumably, for other things, rerolling one die at the cost of a card will be scarce, but she will be able to replace the original once Awakenings block cycles out.

The weapons included here are not bad, but Chain Sickle is just a blue Z6 without redeploy and redeploy is a pretty clutch keyword. Pacing and sequencing will be so insanely important in making this card work, and opponents will be able to play around it with their own elite sequencing that I can’t see this card making the cut over Heirloom Lightsaber in any deck where you’d make a choice. You might lose 1 damage on a side, but you pick up a shield instead of a blank, plus the redeploy (assuming we’re playing it on a blue character). The only other advantage this card really gives us is the ability to play Anger in our decks. Even though Anger is a 0 cost card, it’s a huge blowout, and the fact that both of these new weapons have double blanks on them lead me to believe that they are not only trash, coach, but also that Jay_Z also wants us to be looking at including them in the blank package like erstwhile Nightsister support Crystal Ball.

Energy Bow is certainly a playable 1-cost upgrade, something blue has really needed, especially in a Mother Talzin deck, but it is slightly underwhelming. Like, we’d have to have a LOT of base sides to make us want to play this, as nobody is playing Hunting Rifle outside of a random TaCos deck. A more serious TaCo player might have a better feel of it, but Energy Bow is going to be better the more base ranged sides we have in our deck, especially in a deck that is starved for resources.

HS: Energy Bow is definitely the best card to come out of the Golden Dice spoilers (at least to me), but most of you know of my overwhelming love of DH-17. It should help the Talzin 2 Commando’s deck immensely upon release as well as any other Talzin decks in general. Hunting Rifle just wasn’t cutting it, but maybe with 3 sets of 1 drop guns, we’ll see a return of Talzin Rainbow aggro decks. Only 2 sides with 1 being a modifier is a bit rough, but it’s often hard to ask for much out of a 1 cost weapon. Chain Sickle is interesting in that it can be beneficial as annoyance for the opponent when you get out in front, or you can even hit your own character if you’re against Mill and REALLY wanted another reroll on other specific dice. I very much dislike that it lacks redeploy and it having 2 blanks isn’t great either. I’d be more inclined to value Heirloom or Dagger of Mortis over this and that feelings make me think that it will very seldom see play unless we get some other cards to combo with a trigger off of rerolling dice, and no I don’t count Energy Bow effect there. Luce what has FFG done to my poor Nightsister?? It is often hard to value the damage of Nightsister of old, but discarding a card to reroll 1 die is pretty trash level. There has to be an effect that benefits from reroll for you to ever do it on your own die, because you can just use your Action to discard to reroll multiples of yours. I think this needed to reroll one of yours and one of your opponent’s at the very least to be strong enough, but maybe they just wanted to give Talzin Odd decks an option when they had no resources and wanted to mess with a die. The die sides in general are okay here because you get access to the Elite version and 2 base Ranged sides. Will we be seeing some eTalzin / eLuce/ FOST or Greedo decks now?? Maybe, just maybe, but the guns still kind of stink so probably nothing amazing going on for the decks that want to relive the 5 die aggro deck dream.

Hopefully we have more spoilers to cover this week as we lead up to the Across the Galaxies release on November 8th. We haven’t been told we aren’t getting them, but we haven’t gotten any either, so who knows. Whenever we’ve gotten spoilers in the past we’ve spent a night gathering our thoughts and doing a roundtable write-up, and I’m sure that’s what we’ll do again should we be so lucky.

If you’re dying to try out the new cards, the guys from Jackalman Games have them all loaded on TTS already, and generally only take about 24 hours to push them out. So be sure to give them a like or donation if you’re a fan of their work or like to take advantage of the expediency of their work.

Thanks for reading,

BobbySapphire