We had the great pleasure of seeing another 3 cards revealed from Spark of Hope and this time it was from I Rebel. You Can Find the I Rebel Spoiler Article here: https://irebeldestiny.com/2019/06/24/military-might-an-exclusive-spark-of-hope-spoiler-article/. I recorded a vlog as well as stripped it into an audio format for those that prefer that; both of which you can find below. I definitely suggest listening to the audio as that will be more in depth than this short write up.

Audio Only Download Here

Admiral Motti



Photo Edited by Norman Horn

Conan is a barbarian of a man as he brings new found efficiency to the mill genre. All 5 non-blank sides work wonders for mill, and being a 12 point elite gets us that much closer to having a 5 die villain mill option available. Conan brings a 2 and 1/3rd average to our battlefield die roll off which is quite solid for the point cost. 9 Health is a bit of a downer, but it’s made up by the pseudo built in mitigation. The ability to resolve a discard side and then turn any card in your hand into a 0-Cost mitigation at the same time seems quite amazing as it helps to answer the age old question in mill: Do I discard their last card in hand or do I mitigate a die which will let them pitch their last card to reroll again with?? Conan’s response is:

Counterintelligence

I’m very much expecting the next Arrowbrook Gaming Podcast to be about their love for this card. Rotation has left a void in super strong hand denial after Friends in Low Places rotated out and I could easily see this replacing the Probe slots in decks that have a Leader. Being able to open the round with hand information and toss back either an opponent’s mitigation or their scary cards like Fear and Dead Men or No Mercy just puts you in such an amazing spot to do what you want. You don’t get rid of the card permanently but sometimes all you need is to delay for a round and it’ll be similar. Pushing back an Easy Picking until the next round and then killing off their only Yellow character so that they can’t spot it will be so backbreaking. I was wrong in the video, it was Raiza the Storm Monarch… not Wind Monarch. It doesn’t hit a card in play, but going into someone’s hand can often be much better.

Separatist Embargo

I’ve seen it asked too many times already, so let’s kill it before it becomes a thing; If the Embargo leaves play, it no longer restricts playing the card… I find it hard to believe that it was being asked and it makes me shake my head. There is a pretty disgusting plague coming to the meta with Spark of Hope and it is called Order 666 (one of at least two disgusting things). Embargo is probably one of the better silver bullets printed because it can theoretically work in every match up and just makes the very linear combo type decks cry inside. I expect Embargo to see a TON of play early on, but honestly I’m quite skeptical of running it, because the role that the card plays is predominantly a hate card and I tend to try to avoid running hate cards when I can, not to mention that it is a proactive hate card which requires you to get it down first. Spending a resource in an attempt to MAYBE foil your opponent’s plan IF you find it FIRST is usually outside the realm of cards that I’d normally like to run. As an example, it will be great against Armored Reinforcement decks IF you can find it before they tutor up their vehicle; for those that are newer, AR decks tend to only run 1 or 2 vehicles and the main vehicle is SUPER important… usually Shadow Caster or Firespray. I expect every Red Villain deck under the sun to run the card at first but then it’ll fade away as it starts to feel terrible and “dead” frequently.

In top level play / top cuts where you have your opponent’s deck list to view is where it’ll shine immensely, because you can pre-emptively cut off key removal / damage cards, but in a game where the most important rounds are 1 and 2 with the game ending in round 3 or 4 usually, when do you really have the excess resources to spend it on this?? Control in Destiny is very different from control in other games, so I could see this being decked because a specific deck in the meta that crushes you is running around, or if you are playing Mill and want to lock down a disgusting damage card like Vader’s Fist, Megablaster Troopers, or Entourage. Mill can often afford to play defensively because they are this games Control deck… usually at least.

Don’t forget that it locks you out of playing the card as well, so tread with caution.

Where is the Hero Love??? I guess they already got some, but we’ll see how this format shakes out at Gen Con with about a month of practice and building.. back to the lab for me. As always, share your thoughts and let’s get a real discussion going!!

~HonestlySarcastc