On the forums I see a lot of players who are somewhat interested in playing but are still unsure of what to do in order to start playing. In order to acquire all of the cards you’d have to spend hundreds of dollars and that’s not feasible or desirable to most. With the introduction of the new 2-player starters I thought this was the perfect opportunity to try and make somewhat competitive decks with a limited card pool. Unfortunately, this will require a small up front investment but I will break things into stages.

Stage one will just be two copies of the new 2 player starter. It may seem strange that I’m asking you to buy two of the same thing but trust me, these starters contain a lot of great cards that you will be using for a long time. If you decide that the game isn’t for you then you will probably be able to resell some of the cards if not the whole set.

In stage two I will include past set commons, uncommons, cheap rares and there will be no legendary cards. I will actually play one of these decks at my local tournament to put my money where my mouth is!

Cards like Riposte and Jedi Robes will power up your hero deck at a very reasonable cost. If you have a good community you will be able to find people to sell, trade or maybe even give you some of cards I will be suggesting at this stage. The best way I have found for searching for these communities is through Facebook groups. Generally if you type in something like Star Wars Destiny (your state, country or province), you will yield something useful. You can also start with the main groups like Star Wars: Destiny and Star Wars Destiny: Discussions and inquire about play groups in your specific area. There’s also an active subreddit which can possibly help you locate players in your area if you don’t use Facebook.

In a future article there might be a stage three where I will fully power the decks up like I was heading into a serious tournament. That will depend on the response of the article and whether any of the decks seem reasonable. So for those who are interested in making the new Rey and Poe a viable archetype you’ll have to…

Stage One: Two copies of the 2 player starter (MSRP: 60$)

List of Cards in 2 Player Starter. Note: Teamwork is an upgrade not a support. You can click on any of the decklists to get to the SWDestinyDB link if you want to play around with the options.

For those not in the know the villain side of the two player starter has better characters. I believe this will yield the more competitive deck but perhaps I’ll be wrong. Regardless, these starter decks won’t yield too many wins against top competition but will be good to fight against each other. If you are still getting your feet wet and aren’t sure you want to invest more money and time into the game this is a fine place to start. While one starter is fine this approach will give you access to two starting characters with two dice each which will make it more fun and be a better representation of a real constructed deck.

Upgrades, events and supports are all a big part of the game and these decks contain all of that at the expense of being a little unfocused. A big issue I ran into when building this is that the card pool from just two starters is somewhat limited. Some of the neutral cards like Flank and Logistics only a appear once in each two-player starter so I decided to split them between each deck but if you were to bring one of these decks to a tournament you’d be better off putting both copies into one deck.

Stage Two: Getting a Little Competitive with a Budget.

This is the most interesting part since it opens up the card pool immensely. I’ll go into detail about choices and gameplay since we have more options.

I skewed this to have as many of the starter cards as possible, you’ll notice first starter cards as well. The strategy here is simple: put upgrades on your characters. F-11D Rifle could be something else but since most people will decide to go for Kylo first its useful in the end game when you’re finishing off with Phasma. It’s also an excellent card worth having in your collection. I think you want either a Lure of Power or a Crossguard Lightsaber in your opening hand. Lure seems particularly useful since it can pair with anything which will make for a better gameplay experience. After they go into Kylo you can overwrite into a Lightsaber which will save you some of your investment. The lighsaber will move over and you can then overwrite into Phasma’s Blaster which is no joke. I felt like I wanted most of my events to be either offensive in nature or mitigation. Once you’ve loaded up you can use Tactical Mastery to get an action ahead of your opponent. I find that card to be hard to play for new players. If you have two characters its sometimes best to wait until all of your dice are in your pool and then use it for a reroll that can’t be responded to. Direct Hit is like a poor man’s No Mercy, its usually best to use it as a finishing blow. Otherwise, develop your upgrades. In the late game you can use Tactical Mastery into a direct hit and your opponent will be a sad panda indeed. Your battlefield should be something low impact and perhaps Obi Wan’s Hut this is too high. For the lowest of the low look at Secret Facility.

Here we want to start off with Jedi Robes since it will power up Rey’s ability and help fuel a potential Riposte. If that doesn’t show up you can play a droid or another 2 cost upgrade. Using Flank with supports will help you keep your characters untapped for longer allowing you to play a slower value game early on. Later on you can use All In in combination with Hit and Run to get ahead on actions and protect your dice when Poe shows his 2 focus side. Using supports is a good way to maximize value and since your deck has a bunch of different symbols that it wants to resolve you’re almost never the one to claim anyway. Again, we are using Obi-Wan’s Hut which can help turn on Rey’s ability but if you find that its helping your opponent you can choose something like Secret Facility.

Since we have so many defensive tools we want to get our opponent to commit to a character before we start developing upgrades. Because your damage output is lower than Kylo/Phasma its only natural to play good defense. This deck is trying to go long and the card choices reflect that. You want to reach a point where you have one character fully loaded, with the droids helping to resolve whatever you want.

C-3PO is probably the biggest wallet buster costing about 3 or 4 dollars but its a solid card to have in your collection. You could choose to exclude it in lieu of more upgrades like Rey’s Staff. If I were to try this deck with a complete cardpool I’d investigate one without the droid package because it is terribly slow although it would make Flank worse. Its worth it to try the droid supports if you haven’t. It can give you an idea of why they are “slow.”

Let me know if this was helpful or if there is anything else you’d find helpful as a new player. This will be the deck that I will be trying tonight so watch out because I’ll be BB-8’ing all over the place!

-NJCuenca

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