Are you tired of early plays running rampant at your locals? Do you dream about playing the most badass set in all of Weiss Schwarz? Looking to join the dark side? Look no more!

The Deck



I’ve tried using Excel to make up for the loss of WSDecks and it works quite well so far.

Quick stats:

Colors : 50 red

: 50 red Level 0 = 17 characters

= 17 characters Level 1 = 10 characters

= 10 characters Level 2 = 5 characters

= 5 characters Level 3 = 10 characters

= 10 characters Cards with soul triggers = 21 (17 characters + 4 climaxes)

Level 0



4x “Skillful Strategy” Darth Vader

[C] If all your characters are red, this gains +2000 power.

[A] FORCE [Discard a red character] At the start of your CX phase, you may pay the cost. If so, choose a character opposite this and 1 of your opponent’s other level 0 or lower characters, then stand them and swap their positions.



4x Captain Phasma

[C] Global +500 to red characters.

[S] [Rest this] Give 1 of your characters +500 power until end of turn.





4x “Dark Side” Darth Vader

[A] When your other character gets reversed in battle, give 1 of your characters +500 power until end of turn.

[S] BRAINSTORM: Pay 1, rest this / flip 4 / salvage a character for each CX revealed.



3x “Persistent About the Outcome” Kylo Ren

[A] CIP you may mill 3.

[A] [(1) Discard a card] CIP, you may pay the cost. If so, salvage a red character.





2x “Mask Off” Kylo Ren

[A] [(1) Clock the top card of your deck] When this reverses a character, you may pay the cost. If so, salvage a character.

[A] Level 0 suicider.



Level 1



4x “Tainted by Darkness” Darth Vader

[A] CIP this gains +1500 Power for the turn.

[A] CX COMBO w/ You Are Beaten: On reverse, salvage a character.



2x “Blitz” Darth Vader

[C] This gains +500 power for each of your other red characters.

[A] When this gets reversed, your opponent may choose a character in your WR and put it on top of your deck.

[A] FORCE [Discard a red character] At the start of your CX phase, you may pay the cost. If so, choose a character opposite this and 1 of your opponent’s other level 1 or lower characters, then stand them and swap their positions.



2x “Dark Commander” Kylo Ren

[C] If you have 3 or more other red characters, this becomes a level 1 suicider.

[A] FORCE [Discard a red character] At the start of your CX phase, you may pay the cost. If so, choose a character opposite this and 1 of your opponent’s other level 1 or lower characters, then stand them and swap their positions.



2x General Hux

[A] When you use the BACKUP of this, give 1 of your red characters in battle +1000 power until end of turn.

[S] BACKUP 1500, Level 1 [(1) Discard this card]



Level 2



4x “Carrying Out the Dying Wish” Kylo Ren

[A] CX COMBO w/ Show Me: [Put this in the WR] On reverse, you may pay the cost. If so, salvage a character, and choose up to 1 “Kylo Ren” in your hand and put it rested in the slot this was in.

[A] Anti-change bomb.





1x “Don’t Be Overconfident” Darth Vader

[A] [(2) Sac one of your characters] Anti-change to WR when you use the BACKUP of this.

[S] [Counter] BACKUP 2500, Level 2 [(1) Discard this card.]



Level 3



4x Kylo Ren

[C] This gets +500 power for each of your other red characters.

[C] Character opposite this gets -1 soul.

[A] [(2)] On reverse, you may pay the cost. If so, burn 1.

[A] FORCE [(1) Discard a character] At the start of your CX phase, you may pay the cost. If so, choose 2 of your opponent’s characters, then stand them and swap their positions.





4x “Reunion And Duel” Darth Vader

[C] Early play if there are 2 or fewer climaxes in your WR.

[C] If you have 3 or more other red characters, this gains +1500 power and you do not take damage from effects of your opponent’s characters’ AUTO abilities during battles involving this.

[A] CIP heal 1.

[A] [(2) Discard a card] When this is front attacked, you may pay the cost. If so, burn 1.



2x Emperor

[C] Early play if you have 4 or more red characters-

[C] ASSIST All your red characters in front of this gain +2000 power and the following ability: “[A] During your turn, on reverse, look at the top card of your deck and either return it there or put it in your WR.”

[A] [(1) Rest this] When you use FORCE, if this is standing, you may pay the cost. If so, burn 1.

Climaxes



4x You are beaten.

Gate.





4x Show me

2k1soul.

Breakdown

I’m not a Star Wars fan and even I think this set is freaking amazing. Especially when it comes to red stuff, the art is gorgeous and the cards have all the necessary versatile effects to build a decent meta deck – so by now, you’re probably wondering “where the hell is the Vader finisher???”

Safely sleeved in my binder, that’s where. Because this is not a meta dark side deck, it’s an anti-meta deck pretending to be a meta deck all the way until level 2.

Level 0

The early game is comprised of the 3 most basic cards – a brainstormer, a global boost and an oversize. It’s really not hard to get all 3 on the field as early as turn one, and that gives you a nice 4k body that can be pumped to 4.5k on your turn. The fact that the oversize Vader has Force also means that you can start getting rid of your opponent’s problematic backrows as soon as level 0 – and I can personally testify to the fact that getting your brainstormer repeatedly killed is, indeed, not fun.

Other than the basic package, there’s also a drop searcher and a Riki … somewhat. It’s a red deck from a time before Bushiroad picked up the color wheel and chucked it out the window, so there’s no deck search here and all the search effects target your waiting room instead. Both cards are not in their objectively ideal form, but to be honest, they kinda work for this deck. The drop searcher has an optional mill 3 that you can resolve first, so it actually gives you more things to salvage with its second ability, and its true purpose in the deck is more often just to mill you and make sure your WR has targets for your climax combos anyway. The Riki doesn’t directly help you push yourself to level 1 before your opponent since its effect triggers on reverse, but it also doubles as a level 0 suicider and has no level restrictions on the character you salvage with it, so there’s that.

Level 1

A surprisingly simple game: get as many of the combo Vaders as possible, play the climax, profit. With just the climax, each of the combo pieces is at 7k the turn it’s played. With one global boost, two are 7.5k and one can be pumped to 8k, so unless your opponent’s level 1 game is specifically focused on walls, you shouldn’t have much trouble reversing things.

But if you do, there’s the 1/0 Kylo Ren, a level 1 suicider if you have 3 or more other characters, and the other 1/0 Vader, which gets +500 power for each of your other characters and is pretty nice to have on defense. Both of these cards also have Force, and it’s important to note that the effect scales – level 0s can swap the character in front of them with a level 0, but level 1s can swap it with a level 1 or lower. And no, it doesn’t matter what level the character opposite yours is, just what level the one you’re swapping it with is.

On the topic of the beefy 1/0 Vader, it should be noted that once it’s reversed, it does have the downside of your opponent getting to put a character from your WR on top of your deck, so either they’ll set you up for 1 guaranteed damage or they’ll give you a shitty draw. Ideally, you wanna use the 1/1 2.5k backup to prevent them from reversing it on their turn and then crash it into something bigger on your turn.

Level 2

And here’s where things get a little tricky, seeing as there are two different level 2 game plans that in extreme circumstances completely contradict each other. The 3/2 Vader wants to have a near empty waiting room to fulfill its early play condition, while the 2/1 Kylo Ren climax combo wants to have enough cards in there to actually be able to salvage something meaningful for your endgame.

In most games, this isn’t a problem at all since you have enough tools to mill yourself when necessary, and enough big characters to keep board so that you don’t have to force brainstorms when you’d rather keep cards in your deck. I bring up this point because yes, there’s always an off chance that you’ll be locked into just one of these game plans by the state of your own deck, but for the most part, it’s not your deck deciding what you’ll play at level 2, it’s your opponent’s.

Do they have early plays out, or maybe easy reverse targets? Play the CXC and be done with it. If they don’t, or if you want to shed some damage so that they don’t instantly kill you from 2-5 next turn, healers are probably the better choice. The same also applies if you know they have a powerful burn finisher, since the 3/2 Vader prevents AUTO effect damage from your opponent’s character during battles involving him (given that you fulfil the requirement of 3 other characters on board).

At the end of the day, there are always more factors to this decision, and it’s not even a decision that needs to be made in every game – often, you’re able to field both at the same time and it works just as well. I’d say the better you know your opponent’s deck, the more defined your level 2 game plan is. And once the turn is done, if everything went according to plan and you opponent didn’t throw an anti-change counter to your face, you should be left with a similar outcome either way: a nice field of decent power level 3s. That’s also why you kinda wanna have the Emperor assist out at level 2 as well, if you can.

Before I move on, it’s also worth noting that the Emperor brings a lot more to the game than just a power buff. Getting to scry on reverse means you can both manipulate how much your next attack will swing for and mill your deck at the same time, potentially cancelling more damage than otherwise. Plus, the ability to burn for 1 when you use Force isn’t anything to scoff at either.

Does it even count as Level 3 if literally all of the characters can be out at level 2?

Given the deck color and characters, your end game isn’t really explosive, but it’s flavorful as hell. The dark side corrupts slowly, one by one, punishing your opponent’s weaknesses until they suddenly realize that they have to side your level 3s and hope for a trigger or else they’re dead.

True story – these level 3s don’t push a lot of damage at once, but they’re absolutely merciless to your opponent. Between Vader’s burn when he’s frontal attacked and Kylo Ren’s on reverse burn, there is absolutely no feeling of safety for your opponents when they’re attacking your level 3s, especially if they started the turn at 3-5 or more damage and are possibly also nearing a refresh. I’ve seen people making side attacks and praying for a trigger more than once because they couldn’t risk to take 1 damage or they’d lose the game.

On the same note, Kylo’s -1 soul ability is a two-edged sword: there are times when, given the state of your compression, it will hurt more than it helps. But just like with everything else here: heaven forbid your opponent doesn’t have a climax to play, or that they survived your turn but have no stock and no level 3s left on board. Crashing in their last three level 0s as a hail Mary to end the game is simply not an option – not when they have to trigger to deal any damage at all, and they can get burned for 1 when their character is reversed. I can’t help but love how this card invites side attacks and punishes them at the same time.

Additional Commentary

This is where I wanna take the time to elaborate on some of the obviously weird deck building choices going on here. Anyone who knows me and is reading this is probably wondering how on earth I ended up substituting the obvious finisher combo with a 2k1soul. Right off the bat, let me assure you of two things: yes, stock-soul is objectively a better climax profile, and yes, I still hate 2k1souls with a burning passion.

But Weiss (or any other TCG in general) isn’t something where cards can be evaluated and ranked in a bubble. So while I used to blatantly disregard all 2k1souls, I’ve since learned to hate them in context – and the context of this one matters a lot.

The deck itself isn’t necessarily top-end heavy, but it’s definitely soul trigger heavy – in no small part to the 4 copies of the 2/1 Kylo Ren. If the 2k1soul had a combo with a trigger-less level 1, I’d be much less inclined to see it as an acceptable part of the deck. But between the 4 characters it makes you run and the high number of level 3s it has because some can be cheated out for cheaper than 2 stock, it actually compensates for itself pretty well. In other words: the soul this deck steals from you for running 2k1souls is the very same soul you recoup from triggering characters that wouldn’t be in the deck if you were playing a different climax. In its own context, it solves the problem it’s notorious for, and that’s why I believe it works.

And no, this build didn’t look like this from the very start. I, of all people, definitely didn’t set out to make a deck with 2k1souls to prove myself wrong; I’m not that self aware, let’s be honest. It’s not even a deck I play with as much as I play against it, since it was a gift for my boyfriend when he picked up Weiss last year. In the first version I built for him, there was the stock-soul and 4 Vader finishers as you’d expect from a red Star Wars deck. But as he learned how to play better and began finding his own playstyle, he told me he didn’t really like that combo, so out went Vader and in went Kylo Ren. It was supposed to be a temporary build, and I didn’t really expect it to work. But a few local tournaments went by and it undeniably did work, so that’s the way it stayed in its current form.

Far from saying that the Vader finisher combo is bad – I don’t think it is, in fact, I think it’s a good way of chipping away at your opponent until they die. It provides a way to get its own climax in hand, it helps with its own stock and even comes with the signature Force ability – it’s what you’d want from a finisher, essentially. So the decision between that build or this one is probably up to your playstyle and the sort of decks you’ll be playing against, which brings me to my next point.

Good and Bad Match-Ups

It’s kind of sad that Star Wars as a set is region locked to Japan, so taking this to regionals is out of the question. You are, however, allowed to play it at level 1 tournaments such as local leagues or monthly tournaments, provided they’re okay with JP decks.

It’s a really fun deck to play though, and extremely satisfying too. It raised hell against pre-ban Love Live Sunshine, because all you had to do was let them reach level 2 first, then slaughter all their early plays the next turn, leaving them with an empty field while you have a board full of level 3s. And I can see you saying that at least one of their Yous would survive because of whichever backrow support they’re running that lets them pseudo-encore it, but I’d like to remind you of the fact that against a deck with an ability like Force, there is no guarantee that those backrows will be there when they need them.

Now that the set got hit with a limit of 1 You per deck, the above isn’t as directly relevant anymore (unless you’re lucky/unlucky enough to come from a place where your locals run mixed language tourneys), but the same can be applied to pretty much any deck that relies heavily on early plays for its strategy. Yes, it’s a reactive play – but it leaves them with their board empty and you with the exact opposite, so it’s still a huge tempo swing that not all decks can recover from.

And what is it bad against? The obvious ones, really: sets with anti-burn like Kemono and Log Horizon, or anti-salvage like TLR and Kantai (where the anti-heal doesn’t do you any favors either). Surprisingly, it’s not as hurt by sets that just manage to wall-off the level 1 combo, which I also think is at least partially due to the fact it doesn’t have to wait until level 3 to pull off its next combo.

All in all, it’s a good deck that makes for a lot of peculiar, unusual game states. Amusing for both the one playing it and the one losing to it! So if you wanna try playing Star Wars, try this and I promise you’ll either love it or absolutely hate it – but you’ll learn a lot and improve as a player either way, because this is one of those decks that, in their uniqueness, push the one playing them to adapt and develop faster than they usually would.