I’ve been trying to wrap my head around how to start this post, as it’s been rattling around my craw for quite a while. It starts with playtesting. I’ve seen lots of different people say in lots of different forums that you should playtest games where you start with a really bad hand and see if you can win. This assertion makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

I’ve talked about this before on this site, but Star Wars Destiny’s mulligan mechanic is the most forgiving I’ve ever come across. Couple that with the minuscule decksize and it’s pretty easy to get one of your deck’s mulligan targets in your opening hand (if you think your deck doesn’t have a mulligan target, you need to do some more playtesting). I think it’s okay to say, “my deck has a couple of gameplans depending on what my opener is,” but for the most part you should have a pretty specific type of card – like Holocron or Enrage in a Vader/Raider deck or a Thermal or a vehicle if you’re playing Poe/Maz.

While I am not behind the ‘give me a bad hand and see what happens’ mulligan testing, I do think fixing your hand can be beneficial, especially having just played a store championship where only two of my games extended beyond two rounds (which was a complete shock to me). One thing you should absolutely do is put cards that you normally don’t put on the table in your opening hand AND PLAY THEM. Since every card has the built-in gametext of “discard this card to re-roll any number of dice” it’s really easy to treat a card like I’ve treated mushrooms for the entirety of my life. “They’re fucking gross. No I’ve never eaten them.” It’s the same as saying, “I really don’t like Overconfidence/C-3P0/Doubt, but I’ve never actually played it. I always discard it.” It’s really important to play games and try these cards out. Make it a point to play them and activate them as often as you can so that you can make proper evaluations. Trying to reason that you never had a good time to play the card is a cop-out. If you play it and you lose because of it, that’s one thing; but, if you discard to re-roll and call the card bad I think you could be playtesting more effectively.

Another thing I heard, especially heading into Worlds weekend, was play what you know and don’t make any last minute changes. If I followed that adage I definitely would not have won my store championship this past weekend. If you haven’t listened, I went on Tiny Grimes’ Podcast last week and we talked a lot about Poe/Maz and how to beat it. I was (and still am) pretty sure that building a deck that can always remove one of Poe’s dice is going to have a good chance of beating the deck. Now, people may not have listened, and I’m sure many who listened don’t think that’s true, but in our testing we’ve found it to be the best way to hamper Poe/Maz. My teammate HonestlySarcastc was bringing a deck that I expected to be very good against me and employed this strategy, and since he’s also a very, very good Destiny player, I knew I had to think of something if I was going to beat him.

Adding 2 Cunnings to my list (and cutting 2 Holdout Blasters) absolutely won me the tournament. I played it as my first play of the game in four of my six rounds and it was massive. It was a third Poe die in most games, but in my first game when my mirror-match opponent killed my Poe before he even got to activate a second time, it made Maz my Poe and she went the distance for me. It allowed me to do 4 damage to Baby Vader in both the swiss rounds and the semi-finals allowing me to cruise through each game with a round 2 win. I even threw it with Poe to copy another special on the board once, and another time I could’ve done so to win the game and I missed it.

As much as I think it’s totally okay to make last minute changes, the reason people say that you shouldn’t is because it’s going to lead to misplays and missed opportunities. In my game vs. HonestlySarcastc I pitched Cunning to reroll Poe’s die that was on special b/c I needed to do damage. I missed that I could’ve pitched Cunning to copy my Thermal’s special and win the game. Luckily I was able to win in the next round, but it was an opportunity for my opponent to take actions he shouldn’t have been able to take. Those things are going to happen and the card you’re putting in at the last minute has to be good enough to mitigate those mistakes. Fortunately, Cunning was.

Before we go, some quick matchup notes:

Mulligans and Playing Versus Baby Vader

Our mulligan priorities in Poe/Maz are Fast hands and either Thermal Detonator, Uwing, or Rocket Launcher, but ater that Cunning is a top mulligan target. There isn’t a single matchup that I wouldn’t want this on the table turn one at the moment, as it is super important versus the field. However, it is definitely most important versus Anakin Vader. I would probably throw back every non-cunning card against any deck with Baby Vader, as resolving Cunning’s special to copy Vader’s means Vader takes the one damgage in addition to the three damage you dole out. You can find out more about this in ReadyToRole’s Decklist Writeup where he describes the massacres that were our matches.

The Emperor

I’m going to be honest, I didn’t think the Emperor would “show up” even when I saw that one of the better Massachusetts players was running it. When we played in the swiss, I won the roll and took his battlefield, the moisture farm, to get the shields and more importantly prevent him from getting shields. Giving Palpatine 17 health gives your opponent an entire extra turn to find and play a backbreaking Rise Again.

It is imperative, however, to make sure you claim the battlefield early on turn 1. This is an extremely favorable matchup when you’re able to use Defensive Position to play a virtual Time Walk. It’s possible you can extend your life a turn if you simply have an electroshock, but in the finals of my Store Champs the same Palpatine player I crushed in swiss, missed his win on the table allowing me to steal the win. The game lasted two rounds and he rolled damage on 3/4 of his Palpatine Dice, both times supplimenting the damage with Lure of Power +2. The game was over in 7 minutes, and I didn’t have the battlefield (or an electroshock) on either turn. I neither won the roll or had a chance to claim.

FN-Centric Decks

One of the greatest threats to our galactic livelyhood is FN-2199. FN decks are already tough to deal with but have some very natural counters to the Poe/Maz way of life. Because FN decks don’t claim fast enough to really hang with Poe/Maz’ claim rate, it plays for the long round, opting to use their removal early on Poe’s dice and do all of their weapons shenanigans late in the turn. This is another matchup where Cunning is solid, as it lets us play around this removal method to a degree, but it is important to get an extra damage die ont he table no matter what. Making sure to get a Rocket Launcher or DL-44 on the table to maximize damage is really important because whenever you claim you honestly don’t know if you’ll be readying one of your characters next round. Taking the extra time to play these upgrades and rerolling them is necessary will keep pace with the FN opponent, but you should be able to claim reliably, especially if the upgrade you play is Rocket Launcher or Cunning since they have specicals to use with Throne Room.

Plutt-tastic Decks

Unkar Plutt is the other threat to our galactic livelihood as Poe/Maz players. Against a Plutt deck I work to keep high cost cards out of my hand by aggressively using them with Poe and Aggressively re-rolling with them. HonestlySarcastc and I got in a pretty interesting debate in this video about throwing U-Wing over Thermal Detonator because I was worried he was going to Plutt me. He didn’t, and so I discarded the Thermal to re-roll. He thinks it was wrong of me to do this, but I was operating under the assumption he would Plutt me in his very next action, but he didn’t. Obviously if we could predict all of our opponent’s actions perfectly we’d all win a lot more games than we do. I defend my actions, but feel free to chime in if you haven’t already on Youtube.

In any event, one of Plutt’s tricks is to Endless Ranks back one of your guys. Since a ton of our cards do damage to multiple characters, we have a leg up here. Getting a Rocket Launcher on table can be solid in this case too, as it gives us one of these abilities to resolve at our own pace (hopefully). We don’t want to be in a position where our opponent has 5 resources available and we can’t kill both Troopers at the same time, so having Rocket Launcher on table gives us something to focus to, or resolve with our Battlefield. There are, of coures, a variety of Plutt decks out there, but the ones with Endless ranks seem to be the most successful, so I think it warrants mentioning.

I hope this article is helpful for your store championships. I know there are a ton more decks out there, and I’m happy to talk about any of them if anyone has questions. You can comment below, or hit me up on facebook or twitter @BobbySapphire. Thanks for reading, and good luck at your store championships!