The short answer, bring Kylo, hit your calls and roll sticks. Two months before Nova I had been seriously stressing about what deck I was going to run. It was my first major tournament on Team ABG and I wanted to make an impression. I’d been trying to make a Piett/Mando/Mando deck work that ran on tiny supports all getting turned to the 1-R side and getting nowhere (Talzin’s just better). A week before Nova I decided to go back to Kylo/Pryce as I had some success with it during store champs. I knew it wouldn’t be the “best deck” but I figured it was above average.

So here’s what I settled on:

It’s a pretty standard Kylo/Pryce deck, I added Dark Counsel, Maul’s Lightsaber and Closing the Net all to counter the mill meta I thought would be heavy. Overall they worked like a charm and I was really happy with the decks performance. If I had to play the same event again I’d swap Maul’s for a second Heirloom and find a way to work We Have Them Now in. I left out Vibroknife simply because it didn’t work with It Binds All Things.

Next step in prep was to make sure I knew what my Kylo calls would be. To help with this I created a table of average number of cards per color of what I thought would be the meta decks. I only play Villains, so memorizing this table helped immensely when I was playing against a deck I wasn’t super familiar with.



All that was left was to roll some dice.

Day 1A:

Round 1: Jason Boim – eSnoke/eBazine/FOST. Starting the day I ran straight into villain vehicles. Can’t say I remember much about the game beyond it being very close straight to the end. Jason played it well and we went to time, but he was able to close it out on the last turn. Jason spent the rest of Day 1 tearing up the top tables and ended 3rd in Swiss. Loss:0-1

Round 2: Austin M – eFinn/eRex. Austin was a great guy but mono red vs Kylo is gonna be a free climb up Everest. He soaked 6 damage on the first turn with a Field Medic and First Aid but the game was still over by round 4. Win:1-1

Round 3: Rich Dunkley – eSnoke/eThrawn. Rich was running an upgrade version of this deck with huge ranged weapons. I started out firmly ahead with some early damage but stalled mid game. Last turn with Snoke on 2 damage left he rolled out and hit 9 damage (lethal). I rolled Kylo and called Grey since he had 3 cards left and I knew 1 was a Chance Cube. I missed, and that was the game. Rich also went on to make the cut ending 7th in Swiss. Loss:1-2

Round 4: Pete Staulker. – eYoda/Cassian/Ani. Pete is one of the Golden Dice Podcast guys, and was a pleasure to meet. I ran away with this game by putting down 1st turn Maul’s, 2nd turn Heirloom and also having my battlefield. Win:2-2

Round 5: Todd R. – eLuke/eAyla. Todd’s one of the Knights of Ren guys and was playing an off meta version of Mono hero blue. Obviously Kylo is the last thing you want to see across from a mono deck and the game went about as expected. Win:3-2

Round 6: ? – eYoda/Cassian/Ani. Sadly I’ve forgotten the names of my 6th, 7th and 8th round opponents. Sorry guys. This mill match was the hardest I had all weekend. It came down to the bitter end with Cassian on 4 life and no Second Chance. I had an Ancient on Kylo and an Ancient as the last card in my hand. I made a huge misplay by first action playing my Ancient from hand instead of healing with my Ancient on the board. I had seen a Hyperspace jump from the previous turn’s Kylo activation and that was that. On the positive side, I was able to play my two Closing the Net cards SIX times this game with the Ancient cycling to give me what should have been 3 extra turns. Loss:3-3

Round 7: ? – eThrawn/eSnoke. At this point I need to win out to make the cut, but I know my SoS is great because Jason and Rich are crushing it. This version of Thrawn/Snoke was vehicle based and was a slug fest. The pivotal point was somewhere around turn 4 or 5. My opponent was sitting on 6 resources and not doing anything with them while Thrawn was on 1 life. I correctly guessed he was holding a Dark Ritual to bring Thrawn back once I resolved damage, so I made sure I had 4 dice showing sticks and discarded his entire hand with CQA. Was pretty much cleanup from there. Win:4-3

Round 8: ? eTalzin/Mando/Mando. Last round of the day and I line up against Mother Mandos. I hadn’t had much practice against this deck but it’s solidly blue and I felt like it was a matchup in my favor. Even though my opponent was able to put down a first turn Force Wave on a Mando I killed Talzin top of Turn 2 before she could fix any dice. From there on it was just about controlling the Force Wave die while soaking the Mando damage. I won and finished 5-3, 12th in Swiss on Day 1.

Day 1B:

Having a day off would have been nice, but instead I had signed up for X-Wing Nationals. Playing X-Wing hungover was not ideal and I coasted to a somewhat respectable 3-3. I tried to pop in as much as I could to support the rest of ABG but they didn’t really need the cheerleading.

Day 2:

My goal for Nova was to make the Top Cut and I had accomplished that. From here on out I didn’t really care how far I got, I had never expected to take Kylo/Pryce all the way, and was just elated to be one of only 5 people to make Day 2 without Snoke, Yoda or Talzin.

Round of 32: Dan Rutkowski – eObi/eMaz. Dan’s a NJ local (my neighboring meta), and was also my roommate for the weekend. He’s a long time Obi/Maz player and I was not looking forward to playing him first. Our first match was an instant slugfest with Maz going down on the second turn. Obi made a good showing but couldn’t close out. Game 2 Maz died turn 3 or 4 which was enough to load up Obi and keep him alive through his entire deck. With two cards left he was able to roll enough 3s to close. Game 3 was looking terrible for me, turn 3 lacking any kind of mitigation Obi was able to kill Kylo. Lucky Arihnda inherited a Heirloom Lightsaber and with an Ancient was able to push through 8 damage the same turn to kill Obi. It was a little stressful as Maz kept hitting 1X / +3X with her Vibro/Dagger of Mortis combo but between Ancient healing and a pair of Shotos Arihnda turned out to be a slightly better closer. Win 2-1

Round of 16: Olivier De Ridder – eKylo/eSnoke. I had met Olivier at Worlds this year and knew he was a solid opponent. Amusingly he had also spent a night crashing with me Wednesday because his team’s Airbnb wasn’t set up yet. Both him and Dan claim sleep deprivation due to my snoring is why they lost. In reality mono Kylo vs not mono Kylo is a hard matchup. I was able to keep my hand 50% red at all times which caused him to miss several calls. He never found his Holocrons or Rise Agains, and on the third turn of game 2 I was able to CQA his entire hand to remove Doubt, New Orders and Chance Cube, effectively removing most of the grey in his deck. Win 2-0

Round of 8: Noah Wade – eYoda/Cass/Ani. Noah was running a pretty standard mill deck. To his credit he only fell into the Closing the Net trap once – Mill players love to roll that Ani’s Podracer die first with nothing in the pool. Game 1 was super close and ended on Noah’s misplay forgetting I had an Ancient down. Game 2 he was never in any danger from me at all due to some cold cold dice. Game 3 came down to the wire but two Ancients were able to extend the game enough for me to close. Win 2-1

Round of 4: Cody Williams – eSnoke/Aphra/BD. Cody’s another NJ local but one I hadn’t played before. I’ve never seen anyone be as accurate at calling out what cards I was holding in my hand as Cody was. At one point I checked to make sure there wasn’t a mirror behind me. I had 0 reps vs this deck before Nova and that certainly hurt. Game 1 I never had a chance but it allowed me to get a feel for what the deck did and what I could do against it. Game 2 I found an early Heirloom and was able to push through enough damage to get ahead on the damage race with that and Arihnda’s special. Crossguard from hand was enough to finish it out. Game 3 was much closer than Game 1, but without my battlefield I was behind the entire time. I made it close but by the end of turn 4 the vehicles out damaged me and Snoke was left standing with 5 health and a Force Illusion while Kylo and Arihnda finally fell. Loss 1-2

Overall I couldn’t be happier with my performance, and it was still fun to watch localish guys battle it out for the top spot. Congrats to Drew and Cody, they perfected a monster and got a well deserved win.