Hey, everybody. My family is dealing with a serious matter, and I likely won’t have time to write about Destiny until I figure out just how much my life is going to change. I’m not walking away from the game, but I don’t have the time/headspace to devote to keeping up with Destiny enough to write about it with the depth and attention I normally hold myself to. The past few days have kept me way away from a computer, which is where I regret to admit I spend most of my time. I have a couple ideas about what to do with my column until I’m back full-time, and I hope to have at least one ironed out by next Monday.

This article is about Time-Walking, a term that originated in Magic: The Gathering but has extended itself to several other games. It’s about trying to create a game situation where your opponent essentially skipped their turn (or Rounds, in Destiny), meaning you were able to take two consecutive turns(Rounds). This article is from February of this year, so some of the references are dated.

And, outside of this re-post I don’t want to leave you completely empty handed, so I dug up another amazing-but -old Mike Flores article to provide some “new to you!” reading. It’s about Game Theory, which is something most gamers like to wax intellectual about. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. “Magically Applied Game Theory” by Mike Flores

Hope to see you all again soon,

Mike Gemme

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The Art of Timewalking

There’s been a Magic: The Gathering term floating around X-Wing lately, and as someone who used to play a ton of competitive Magic, it’s kind of comical to hear people make such a big deal out of this commonly-used competitive term: Time Walk. In X-Wing it’s being used to refer to Asajj Ventress in a Lancer Pursuit Craft with such heavy defensive mods that she can take three or four range one shots and walk away basically unscathed. The idea is that the opponent spends their whole turn, all of their triggers and actions, to do absolutely nothing, in-effect giving us another turn. Hence, Time Walk.

Any time we can make our opponent essentially or literally skip their turn, it’s called a Time Walk. In Magic, lots of things are Time Walks, many of them blue. Any time we can tap our opponent’s lands, or their creatures before they attack, it’s a Time Walk (I’m currently watching the semifinals of the Magic Pro Tour and one guy is holding three Cryptic Command, he’s going to Time Walk GerryT three times in a row while he crushes him with his own creatures).

Loyal fans know that I’ve mentioned Time Walk as it relates to Star Wars Destiny several times on Tiny Grimes’ podcast, and have mentioned it in articles as well:

That example is the report from when I won my store championship last summer with Poe/Maz. Because most of Palpatine’s dice-sides have values of 2 or higher, a Defensive Position (which removes all such valued sides) would “Time Walk” my opponent, effectively skipping their turn. This is a deckbuilding and play-style goal that we can incorporate into what we’re doing in Star Wars Destiny – it’s a style I like very much and have tried to incorporate into my competitive play over the past year. Today I’m going to look at some of the ways we can Time Walk our opponents and I’m very interested to hear any other ideas people have in accomplishing this tactic.

Ending the Action Phase

Ending the action phase is probably my favorite way to Time Walk someone in Star Wars Destiny. In the aforementioned Store Championship tournament report I highlighted my love of Hyperspace Jump. When the team and I flew to Gen Con this summer, I wasn’t fully on Rainbow 9’s because I still had love for Poe/Maz with two Jumps and two Retreats.

While this is exclusively a hero strategy, these cards are strong enough to have taken hero decks to victory back when playing anything but villain was a joke. The main thing to consider here is that we can’t just jam these cards in a deck and hope it works out, we need to have a solid approximation of the meta. If the entire meta is fast these cards just won’t work super consistently or super well. The only way we actually get to Time Walk our opponent is if we accomplish our goals for the turn all before our opponents resolve their dice.

Right now the format is pretty mixed. Decks like Obi/Maz and Yoda Zeb activate and resolve their dice very quickly, and you can probably expect to see each of these decks play Hyperspace Jump themselves. Decks like Hero Vehicles, Tarkin7, and Villain 5-dice take a lot of actions, many many more than the aggro decks, and can get blown out if the action phase ends early. There aren’t very many decks that can take advantage of playing both of these cards right now, but one that I think could do a great job of it is a Rieekan Mill deck. Brian Lindberg of the Destiny Council took down a regional this weekend with a Rieekan/Yoda/Partisan deck that ran Jump but not Retreat, he and Will Klein ran the same thirty cards. He’ll be writing about it this week and I’m interested to know if he considered Retreat as well. Here’s his list:

I like that Rieekan can activate, you can mill them for two (hopefully), and following that you take as many actions as you possibly can before you Jump or Retreat out of the turn. No matter what happens if you mill them with Rieekan you’re ahead going into the next round, and any round you take no damage is a Time Walk.

Another deck that can take advantage of these two cards won a regional in Portland last week: Poe/Hondo. While the winner of the event didn’t have both cards (if you clicked the link you can see that he only ran Retreat), he mentions in the Artificery post he wrote that he considered Jump as well. I think if the format slows down, being in a position to play both of these cards will be huge.

Removing Multiple Dice

I’ve gotten into several arguments with Facebook plebs about the weakness of three-dice lists. For the most part I don’t like them, but of course there are exceptions to every rule. The reason I don’t like three-dice lists is because they are so easy to Time Walk, and it got even easier with the release of Legacies. But, we’ve had ways to remove multiple dice from as far back as Awakenings, and a card that I’ve recommended in multiple places at multiple points of time is Mind Trick.

I’ve been recommending Mind Trick specifically since people started ratcheting up their Tarkin 7 play, but it has remained good through the advent of OTK and Hero Vehicles. This card can do work with as few as three dice in the pool, and I’ve proudly played this card against two dice at times in my career. This doesn’t fully Time Walk our opponents since it does leave them with dice to resolve, but it’s close enough that I think it should be included here because of the rise of Yoda.

With Yoda seeing a lot of play as a support character, the burden of damage-dealing decks is on the “big” character paired with the little green menace. Playing Mind Trick against a Yoda deck allows us to remove whatever pile has the most damage-dealing dice, leaving our opponents with a bunch of support-style dice. But it doesn’t stop there, cards like Easy Pickings, Into the Garbage Chute, Defend, Dive, and Entangle are all removing multiple dice, that can totally blow out the slew of Yoda decks we’re facing regularly. These cards aren’t just limited to crushing Yoda decks though, Easy Pickings can do serious work against Obi/Maz or any deck that relies on specials; and also hurts Villain 5-dice. Into the Garbage Chute does much of the same, and you’ll feel pretty great removing both of one of our opponent’s dice before they can can resolve them.

Very few decks are created with two characters equally sharing the damage dealing burden, and when we can use these cards to lower the potential damage output from our opponents we effectively Time Walk our opponents. We could’ve taken 8 damage in a turn, now we’re taking 2, we live to see another day, another turn; we took another turn after this one.

Erasing Resource Use

Barring a few exceptions, most rounds of Star Wars Destiny with each player gets two resources in addition to carrying over any unused resources from the previous turn. Most decks want to spend these resources “developing the board”, playing upgrades and supports to add dice to their side of the table, allowing that player to do output more damage, shields, resources, etc. When we discard (or bounce) a card from table that our opponent spent resources on, we’re Time Walking them in a sense. Our opponent used their resources for the turn, and we erased what they did with them, their resource use skipped its turn; it was Time Walked.

We’ve always had some ability to do this, cards like Confiscation, Sabotage and Disarm have been around for a while now, and while they don’t see a ton of play, they have been used in limited spots to be very good. With the release of Legacies we finally have the upgrade removal card that we’ve always wanted in Vandalize.

Vandalize discards either a support or upgrade for a minimal cost compared to what we’ve been given in the past. We can use our support characters’ character dice (and in some important cases, our main characters’) to remove high impact upgrades like Ancient Lightsaber, Hand Crafted Light Bow, and Maul’s Lightsaber, or crazy-powerful supports like the HWK 290. While the trade off is a fair one, remember the goal of the Time Walk – we’re trying to take another turn after this one. A vehicles deck might spend their time developing resources and removing damage from a HWK via Rose, if we then discard that HWK before it gets rolled or resolves its die we’ve negated what our opponent did for the turn and Time Walked them.

Another card that has seen some play in Hero Mill decks is Fall Back

Since Hero Mill doesn’t need to play out upgrades, this card can blow out our opponent’s resource use over the course of several turns. Hero Vehicles could also consider playing one of these as it too plays very few upgrades. It’s quite expensive, but both of these decks do a good job of generating resources, and the cost can be offset by the amount of resource use being erased.

Conclusion

One of the things that should be clear having gone through all of these Time Walk like options is that one deck can play them all effectively, and that’s Hero Mill. Using Will Klein’s list as a template and going all out on trying to fit in many of these elements, I think we can come up with a list that Time Walks our opponents enough times that it reaches a tipping point that wins us the game.

This list is 1000% untested, but it applies most of the tactics we’ve discussed here today. It doesn’t feature Vandalize because of being a three character dice deck, but it does feature the same Fall Backs Will’s list had. I’ll give it a shot and get back to you.

That’s it for today, we’ll have a regional recap for you ASAP as there was a lot of hot technology taking down regionals this past weekend. Our regional is still five weeks away, but seeing a lot of great players do well has definitely given me the itch and if I can find a babysitter you might hear of my travels down to the New Jersey regional next weekend. Until then, good luck Time Walking your opponents!

Thanks for reading,

BobbySapphire

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