You’ll probably end up being very surprised about my disdain for some of these, unless you are a Looper in which case you’ll probably be able to guess 3 of these. I’m expecting a metric shit ton of people to chime in as to why “I’m wrong” and a few on why they agree so feel free to pile on and



… change my mind! Let’s jump right into the cards and why. Apologies in advance if you don’t have unlimited data, but i’ll avoid the GIFs at least.

This gambling fiend was making his rounds all over the place in all sorts of Villain decks with the primary reason being he makes resources and for the most part his die can’t be touched. People should be slowly finding out how great he is in decks that really need ramp (support decks) or a protected die (snoke) and how awful he is as you try to pair him with things like Palpatine or Kylo in combo and aggressive shells. If we still had Rise Again in the format, i think it’d be a different game, but outside of resources he really doesn’t bring much to the table. Don’t get me wrong, 2 disrupt is phenomenal, but very seldom is it super relevant because the resources can still be spent and he still has a bunch of dead sides. Resources don’t win you the game as much as what you can play with them and I’ve seen him thrown into WAY too many decks. You’re ramp will be undisturbed, but that just means whatever you play is the thing that will be mitigated and you’ll still be struggling. Making resources has diminishing returns at some point in the game which is usually around the end of Round 2 because things start to die and whatever big thing you plan to play won’t get enough return value. Think about the deck you are building and what it is about and stop just jamming him into decks so you can afford big expensive cards that won’t end up doing anything. Wat Tambor doesn’t have built in protection but still has 2 sides to gain a resource and actually has the impactful 2 focus side to help consistency on the supports you do play as well as getting an extra shot at that die which is quite strong if you remember the days of FN-2199.

The fear of aliens is real and most of us don’t want to be rectal probed. This card is titled very accurately because you’ll often be checking if the coast is clear when you play it, but usually you’ll only find shit and nothing else interesting. There are some decks where the card is great, which are usually very slow decks with lots of actions and enough focus to benefit from it. On the other hand, if you constantly find yourself throwing this out into 4/5 card hands hoping to hit anything, then you’re probably doing it wrong and should consider something more beneficial to you. Can you YOLO 360 degree no scope blow someone out by hitting their only removal cards, yes, but is it likely, not usually. Stronger players tend to hold back as much as possible from playing their permanents (upgrades, supports, etc) in order to prevent those blow outs or even use their removal a bit earlier at times so Probe shouldn’t be in every Red villain deck. I played this back during the days of 7th sister reset because the amount of things i was doing was a lot and I needed to protect my dice when burning Nightsister HP to “fix” them. This stopped seeing play back during the days of Jango Veers for a pretty large reason, which is it often felt TERRIBLE to play or have.

Originally this was going to be #1, but i didn’t want this to look like Top 5 Overrated Villain cards. I’m definitely going to get lambasted for this, but am I the only one who hates the card??? It’s definitely good at it’s job, which is to eject button out of god roll situations or the super focus actions that end up showing crazy amounts of damage. How often do people walk straight into this though?? Now how many of those situations are against very good players?? I’ll try to sneak 1 of these into my deck if i don’t have an eject button for those terrible situations above, but you can’t really cast it Round 1 and then Round 2 is USUALLY still a round where you are trying to advance your board state and can’t do it there either. Round 3 and after is where it shines because additional cards are tossed to rerolling for more damage / mill and you are actually likely to have the available resources to use at that point. An obscene amount of blue decks have this decked as a 2 of and it’s become the staple that doesn’t actually belong. In mill you run 2 or you could be classified as an idiot, but in everything else you really need to question how much it can actually help you, otherwise you’re just giving up slots and spending 2 resources to mitigate a die that you could’ve stopped for 1 resource… and then fondling the other dice which isn’t very likely to do much besides force reroll to get back into the ballpark.

There are some amazing applications for this card, but outside of Megablaster Troopers, I don’t really like any of them. You’ll definitely get people with your 6 dice in the pool and crush some maggots on the way to being 4-0 as a “local area pro”, but what happens when people learn to “pass” because you have 6 dice in the pool??? You’ll run out of actions at some point or just have to take whichever 2 dice the opponent has in the pool. Sadly that isn’t even the worst scenario, which happens to be playing against that person who decided to bring Hero 3-wide back and is packing 2 Easy Pickings and 2 Into the Garbage Chutes that completely make you rue the day that you didn’t resolve your dice as you tried to greed them. I believe we’ll be seeing a resurgence of some Hero Vehicle AR decks soon and Rout is going to look and feel AWFUL there. It’s pretty safe as a 1 die removal card so there are reasons to play it, but it’s quite bad early due to lack of dice / inabililty to pay and quite bad super late due to sequencing and dice being immediately rolled out to present lethal.

I don’t ever recall the best defense in any thing being to blow my own shit up. How this card sees so much play is usually beyond me. Very seldom do you get to remove 5+ damage worth of dice which is realistically it’s break even point in comparison to just being 1 cost die mitigation for 1 die, due to that expectation being that it prevented 2 damage. The dilemma with that concept is that a 3 would’ve been on the table that we could stop for 1, and then 2 damage overflows which happens to be less than we dealt to ourselves. There are a small amount of decks where this is indeed actually amazing and a terror to play against, but those usually involve being built with 2 red characters OR the red character has a solid chunk of health and is quite useless in comparison to the main target. Palp Wat is all in on Palp, so Wat taking the bullet is totally justified because that deck is going to play out similarly to a Big/Small deck. The same applies to Vader FOST and other decks like that. Two wide middle middle pairings though is a huge WTF moment when i see this played and I’m usually okay with it. The card shines in those situations and also against the horror that is Mill which is actually where it is a dominant specimen of a card. Tread lightly when running The Best Defense and don’t just automatically slot it into the deck because you have a Red character and are Villain.

Alright, so tell me why I’m wrong / try to change my mind. My body is ready!!

~HonestlySarcastc

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