September 4, 2019

On Monday, I wrote about my US Nationals Top 16 Palpatine deck and some of the choices I Made while building it. Today, I’m going to give a tournament report and go over some strategies, game plans, and improvements I’d make to the deck if I ever decided to take it to an event again. For easy reference, here is the deck list:

The Swiss Rounds

My record in Swiss was 6-2. I won the first 4, dropped 2, and then won the last 2. Without further ado:

ROUND 1 – vs. BYE (WIN)

I cashed in my round 1 bye card I had from taking first place in the Birmingham, Alabama regional earlier this year. The important strategy here is to remember to bring your bye card. (Yes, this is aimed at someone).

ROUND 2 – vs. eSnoke/Mandalorian Super Commando/Mudtrooper (WIN)

Snoke fought valiantly. but succumbed to the original Big Bad Evil Guy of Star Wars.

This was not a match up I was expecting as the deck was not exactly “meta” or on anyone’s radar, but I could see the merits of it. It could do damage that you can’t interact with via the Super Commando’s power action, had consistency through Mudtrooper’s ability and Snoke’s focuses, and could spike damage via Snoke’s power action. My opponent also managed to get out a Conscript Squad round 1 and a second one round two or three, adding fast damage as they roll out with Snoke.



A deck that can focus heavy fire is one of Palpatine’s greatest fears as he begins with just 10 health and is the key to your deck – Watto may be able to make some mean money and offer (very) soft mitigation of your opponent’s dice via his power action, but he’s not going to win the game for you. In other words, you have to keep Palpatine alive, and this match-up is no different. I knew the game plan needed to be to mitigate the non-Snoke Character dice (as those were the ones which can be boosted by Snoke) and also build a health buffer via shields to help deal with Super Commando pings or any other surprise damage he may have had.



The game plan began with the roll off, which I won. (Side note: Palpatine/Watto has an average battlefield roll off of 5.6 – higher than any other current meta deck and higher than even elite Darth Vader 3 decks). My opponent was on dry fields. I knew that he would likely get more value out of it than I would as I am pretty comfortable with my ability to make money and carry a dollar or two over into following rounds; however, more importantly I wanted to take the shields on Palpatine to let him start with 12 health rather than 10. The plan worked – I was able to grind my opponent out and keep Palpatine out of lethal range through buffing his health, taking shields, and mitigation. My opponent was able to keep his Super Commando, my first target, healthy as well with riot shields and armor platings, so I swapped and burned down his mudtrooper.



At one point, the game started to seem like it was within his reach as he had Palpatine down to 3 or 4 health and I had barely touched his Super Commando or Snoke. However, a bacta therapy followed by a fatal blow to coup de grace Snoke quickly swung the game insurmountably in my favor.

ROUND 3 – vs. Aphra/Wat/Sentinel Messenger/Grand Design (Plot) (WIN)

Look at how happy Dr. Aphra is with her pet murder droid.

This was a match up that I felt very much favored my deck. Aphra would be throwing indirect damage my way that I could soak up on my 9 health bubble shield (read: Watto) while I could continue to buff up Palpatine and take down his characters with more precision. That is exactly how it played out, and unfortunately for my opponent nothing went right for him. My opening hand was great – it had a Soresu Training and a Force Wave, the two cards I wanted the most for this match up. I also had a Desperate Measures, which proved crippling when my opponent played BT-1 and discarded his second copy of the card, both in Round 1. While originally I had planned to save the Desperate Measures for 0-0-0, once I knew he had no way to bring BT-1 back it was an easy call to blow up the astromech of annihilation. Denied half of his BT-1/0-0-0 combo and with me shielding up, soaking damage with Watto, and peppering him with multiple Force Wave resolutions a turn, my opponent just couldn’t get anything going for him.

ROUND 4 – vs. eJabba/Wat/Sentinel Messenger (WIN)

And that mind trick is blowing up supports.

This was a match I was looking forward to. The Jabba Unholy Trinity deck, which is the premier villain deck in the format and what I considered the strongest deck (potentially tied with Satine Droids) going into NOVA, was one of the main reasons I swerved to Palpatine. A couple of play test sessions on my old eHan4/R2D2/C3PO/Fateful Companions deck where I logged exactly zero wins vs. Jabba left me doubting the Han deck’s ability to take me far in this tournament; on the flip side, I felt that Palpatine/Watto had a positive match up against Jabba, and this was going to be the true test of that analysis.

I recall my opponent mentioning he wasn’t sure how to play against my deck shortly before playing a Separatist Embargo and locking out Force Storm. I don’t think that was a bad call – Force Storm is a very strong card which I had in my hand and can outright win games – but that left me free to Desperate Measures any support I wanted. I strongly considered blowing up his separatist embargo to allow me to play Force Storm, but since I have a Force Wave as well in my hand I opted instead to go that route and save my Desperate Measures to foil his game plan – and it won me the game. I disrupted him early on with Watto, and when he worked his way back to three resources and used Wat’s power action to play Entourage, I immediately destroyed it. My opponent never recovered and even though he got a Vader’s Fist out, at that point he was too far behind and could not keep up with the damage I was putting out.

Round 5 – Vs. Reylo (LOSS)

Maybe I would have stood a chance had they fought each other instead of me.

This game was a tough loss, and by loss I mean a massacre. I was on stream so I won’t bore you with too many details. Suffice to say the fact that when time was called I had not done a single damage to either Kylo or Rey is reflective of how miserably the match played out. I somehow lost the battlefield roll off that I was heavily favored to win, and my opponent (who took second place in the whole tournament and had a hell of a showing – Congrats Bikethief!) took the shields and I could never get any traction. I felt that Reylo was NOT a good match for me to begin with, but this one went way worse for me than any of my testing games.



In my defense, 5/6 of my damage upgrades were in the bottom 6 cards of my deck, but I did learn something valuable in this game that would be true in my final loss in the top 16 round as well- my deck needed more ways to do damage. Regardless, Reylo was able to play Palpatine like a puppet in the same way Palpatine played the Old Republic, and just like the Republic, I fell.

ROUND 6 – vs. eSatine/eC3PO/R2D2/Fateful Companions (LOSS)

Look at these droids. So friendly. They couldn’t possibly do any harm!

Palpatine’s absolute worst match up is the version of Hero Droids with Han because it is designed to sneak out burst damage – damage that can usually end Palpatine before he can tank up. Satine droids is slightly less threatening in that regard, but can threaten similarly if it gets upgrades out and has action cheat cards such as Ewok Ambush, Instigate, or Droids Day Out. My opponent, Elrathion of Artificery, had a winning combination of those cards here – he got a Chewbacca’s Blaster out early and was able to action cheat on multiple rounds, ultimately bursting me for 8 on roll out by resolving the Chewbacca’s Blaster’s 4 side and R2s 2 side after action cheating into a C3P0 activation.

The difference generally between this match up and the Han match up is Palpatine should have at least a bit more time before he is staring down death, giving him time to either tank up or take out a droid, stopping the burst combo. I may have been able to do the latter in this game as I had a Force Storm in my opening hand and the resources to play it, but I took an action too long once Elrathion took a resource; I decided to take a resource as well because I did not want to be broke after I played the Storm so that I could still use Watto’s power action defensively. Unfortunately, that played right into my opponent’s hand – literally – as he used his resource to play Scruffy-Looking Nerf Herder and rip the Force Storm from me. At that point, I couldn’t put enough of a dent in C3P0’s chrome head, and instead I wound up with a dead Emperor.

ROUND 7 – vs. eHan4/C3PO/R2D2/Fateful Companions (WIN)

Much like Greedo was, I thought I was dead on arrival.

Han shoots first. That is one of the canons of Star Wars, and the reason he is Palpatine’s absolute worst match up, as I outlined above. So, when I sat down for this match up I was already calculating what I would be doing Sunday since I would not be making it to Day 2. However, I lucked out – my opponent’s dice didn’t cooperate and he played a slightly slower version that included supports and was built more like the Satine version typically is. Between that and me selecting his Mean Streets Battlefield after winning the roll out to get shields, I was able to buy enough time to kill one of his characters. I knew from my testing on Han Droids that once any single one of that deck’s characters go down the deck’s power level drops drastically. I killed R2 (or maybe Threepio – I’m not sure) and from there the balance of power had shifted. Palpatine bulked up, I got off a game-clinching Bacta Therapy, and survived by the skin of my teeth. Phew.

ROUND 8 – vs. eChopper/C3PO/eR2D2 (WIN)

Aww, look at them nuzzling. Or headbutting.

My third droid match in a row but also the third of the three archetypes – and also the one that I felt threatened me the least. Without the Fateful Companion Plot, this version of droids cannot threaten nearly as much burst damage, and the set up tends to be a bit slower too as compared to Satine’s ramp or Han’s early natural damage. I don’t remember too much about this match to be honest – probably the symptom of it being Round 8 and late in the day – but I remember it ending with a Fatal Blow to kill C3PO from 8 hp to 0 and then finishing off whichever astromech remained with a Free-For-All for more than his remaining health.

TOP 16 – vs. Chirpa/Ewok Warrior x3/Hoth Trooper/Armored Reinforcements (LOSS 0-2)

Just like they wanted to do to Han, I was roasted.

I hadn’t had the opportunity to test Palpatine too much into Ewoks prior to NOVA – I think I only played 2 or 3 games in my accelerated play test schedule. However, in theory I thought I had a good game plan – I was going to take their Battlefield (you can’t prevent the battlfield swap with the Podracer’s ambush anyway) in order to start with two shields on Palp to make Target Acquired difficult to pull off – I’d then let Watto soak damage to 8 damage, only swapping indirect over to Palpatine when a Target Acquired no longer meant that much – and hopefully by then I’d have a few upgrades on Palpatine. I also knew that like in Aphra, the two key upgrades for me would be Soresu Training (to survive) and Force Wave (to kill murder bears with).

Here’s the thing: Game one the plan took too long to get going. I underestimated how fast a properly piloted Ewok deck could dish out damage, and I soon felt like Han in the picture above – I was frantically trying to put out fires but not making any real progress. Part of the plan was to resolve Force Wave to pop 3 Ewoks at a time – 3-2-1 and then 1-2-3 via the Power Action roll out or just going into the next round. However, my opponent was able to control my Force Wave die and ultimately destroy it with Convergence – and by then he had gotten a Diplomatic Protection off with an Inflict Pain, and I just didn’t have the damage to race him.



Game 2 was a failure of similar proportions, though it felt worse. I played a Force Storm round one and it was instantly hit by Convergence. Watto died early Round 2, and though I was able to get out a Force Wave, that too was immediately targeted by Convergence. I was now 7 resources behind with my resource generating character gone. To make it worse, I rolled out double 2 melee sides on Palpatine and got hit by Easy Pickings. I was impossibly far behind, and I wound up a bloodied, beaten mess from the Ewoks’ constant peppering of damage.

IMPROVEMENTS GOING FORWARD

This attempt on my life has left me scarred and deformed.

While I would have liked to do better in the tournament – and maybe could have done better with more testing and/or some different deck choices – I am overall pleased with taking Palpatine to a Top 16 finish. I think if I were to play him again in this meta -and at this point I’m not sure whether or not I would – I’d want to include more ways to do consistent damage. I think I would cut the Force Jumps for Sith Teachings, and cut Niman Mastery for Formidable. Yes, Niman Mastery is an incredible card and does have a damage side, but it is often awkward trying to “float” between it and Soresu Mastery. Formidable offers damage, shields, and the ability to remove die via moving your opponent’s upgrades, all things that this deck looks to do. Then, after those changes, if the damage smooths out I might cut Free-For-All for another Formidable – Free-For-All is an amazing closer, but it is only good as a closer. I’d also consider cutting Doubt instead of Free-For-All, but I need to see how the deck feels without the Force Jumps first.

Thanks for reading, and remember:

WRITTEN BY:

MOOPHISTO

