Between moving and grinding my playtesting for GenCon I don’t have a lot of spare time to write about Destiny, but I didn’t want to take a week off. I’ve been exploring a lot of different decks, mostly Vader/Palp/Droids/3-Wide Beckett/Aphra and, of course, Droids. I’ve begun to get more and more droid reps, but there are so many ways to build it a lot of my games have been trying different versions, and that’s what I want to look at today. Most of these ideas are yellow to get the rainbow, but I think it’s important in the droids deck, which can make sooo much money, to be able to bring the Entourage package.

Five Dice w/ Satine

Satine finally has a time to really shine in droids. Her 9 health for 10 cost is so above the curve of everything else Heroes have at that cost, and her dice are absolutely bonkers. The fact that she has two resource sides and two focus sides but still a 2 damage side is absurd. I was low on her when she first dropped, mainly because there was just no situation where she could thrive, but she’s a perfect fit with R2 and Threepio.

Satine lets us go to value town, and makes our Threepio activations a lot safer since she’s about 50% to roll a resource side, making us not really cry when our Threepio whiffs on his own dice. Her yellowness also gives us the perfect rainbow setup.

Aayla Secura

Todd from KOR played this deck at a local and took it down, and you can read about it here on SWDestinyDB.com. I tweaked the deck a bit and tried it out and it’s pretty solid. We lose a lot of great mitigation with yellow, but there’s enough good red miti to make up for it. I especially like Rout in a Droids deck as our resource generation lets us get a bunch of upgrades out quickly.

Our resource generation is certainly not as high as it would be in other droids decks, but getting multiple upgrades with Resource sides out will help us set up. And a great card like Niman Mastery can help us set up resources somewhere. I love that this deck is almost all upgrade based (though I added Republic Cruisers to mine, because that card is just bonkers), and the blue upgrades just have great synergy and have high damage sides. Aayla works really well with Treasured and Yoda’s Lightsaber, and of course can be defensive while special chaining.

Anakin Skywalker

Anakin, like Satine, gives us a 5-dice attack and rainbow colors, but his lack of a damage side is definitely missing. He does allow us to practically auto-hit resource between his and Threepio’s dice, which can finance quite a hefty squad, especially with an Entourage package. Even if we have to use his discard side, it lets us be a bit more controlling with our droids deck, which I kind of like. Droids has to pack a lot of dice cards to really thrive, so the mitigation falls by the wayside. Having Anakin to control cards out of our opponent’s hands feels good to me.

What really kills me about Anakin is his health. Seven health is sooo low, and it gives us a three wide, 23 health deck. That’s depressing as there are two wide decks with more health than that. Still, the deck has enough shields and healing cards that this isn’t completely unreasonable.

Chief Chirpa and an Ewok Warrior

This is a very spicy pairing but it does give us 11 health out of our “fourth” character and some automatic damage. This makes our redeploy upgrades go a longer way than previously, or it keeps our other, more important characters around longer. It would also let us splash crazy shit like Glider Attack, Diplomatic Immunity, and Blaze of Glory in our deck for the real spice. This one is probably a little too loopy to actually run, but it doesn’t sound like the worst thing I’ve ever thought of.

Cassian Andor

Cassian is another 4-DIce start but the extra damage from his die regardless of what side we resolve makes it five dice-ish. He’s got 10 health, but his discard sides are a bit underwhelming here. The above-mentioned Anakin discard sides came with a real five dice start so I didn’t mind them as much, but in this role we probably wan’t Cassian doing damage, though it’s possible we could catch some people by surprised in a long and grindy game and mill them out. Cassian is probably slightly better than a single-die Han because he isn’t a scoundrel, though Han’s extra resource sides are for-sure good.

Han Solo 4

There are a lot of interesting ways to do Han with droids – you can do a five dice start without the plot, or use one die and run Armored Reinforcements like the deck that won the Alabama tournament a couple weekends ago. You can also just run Han with Fateful Companions which I think is probably the best way to run it, though I ran some 5-dice, no plot today in testing and it was pretty good. The main thing Han brings is Mean Streets and the trickiness that battlefield provides in allowing us to resolve our events for super cheap; most of which are in the deck to be complete blowouts. I was a little underwhelmed by what the droids could do in the non-Fateful version, but if we draw all of our cards in the right order we can certainly “go off” and crush some souls.

Jar Jar Binks

Jar Jar would let us go six dice without the plot, which is kind of amazing. He also dramatically increases our Disrupt sides from our starting characters which is really strong. One of the strongest things about droids is when they play Droids Day Out to auto-disrupt your two resources, and some opponents might even activate jar jar with their first action, setting up a DDO on themselves just to avoid the roll-out. It’ll be the last time they do that, that’s for sure. Jar Jar is definitely the weakest of the characters I’ve considered today, but he doesn’t suck.

That’s it for today, I’ve gotta get back to grinding. I’ve really enjoyed thinking outside the box when it comes to deckbuilding, especially in the new meta. When you have something like Droids which is really good on its own it’s pretty fun to try and dream up ways to attack from a different angle. I think Support hate is going to be on the rise after Droids won in Alabama on stream and Falcon Punch won in Minnesota on stream over the past two weekends, and finding a deck like the Aayla droids deck that can focus on high-value upgrades and deaden cards its opponents are holding.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you net week at GenCon!

BobbySapphire