I want to thank everyone for their support in messages while I’ve been away. I’m not “back” back, but even I couldn’t stay away when FFG dropped a new card via Team Covenant named after one of my favorite characters from one of the most formative movies of my youth. Double Down.

A couple of months ago I wrote about how decks were filled with the same cards and it made the game worse (paraphrasing here), and that, if anything, FFG should increase the number of cards in decks to try and breed some diversity in the meta.

Nope. They doubled down on letting us play the same 20 some-odd cards in all of our decks by letting us play THREE COPIES of some cards!!!!

By bringing a 28 point or lower squad we can have three copies of some of the most broken cards in any meta populating our deck. To quote my arch-nemesis, “Seems good.” Today I want to look at some of the broken cards I’m most worried about in triplicate. This is by no means exhaustive, as I’m not really at the point where I can spend a lot of time delving into Destiny, but I wanted to strike while the inspiration was hot.

Quick Aside on the Spoiler Ban

Over the weekend FFG decided to send a bunch of content creators a terse email saying that they wouldn’t be receiving spoilers anymore because their websites advertised Patreon or Merch. Shockingly, we were not one of these websites, but several of our favorite content creators and many of our friends got hit.

Spoiler posts are always the posts that get us the most hits because people love new toys, but to pull the support of your free advertisers when you literally do nothing to help push your game (in fact, you kind of do the opposite – FFG and its handling of Destiny reminds me of 30 Rock when Jack tried to run NBC into the ground so Hank Hooper wouldn’t sell it to KableTown).

I get their being weird legal issues when small, amoeba-sized “companies” are trying to make a little money to offset the time they spend pushing a game that they love playing, but FFG could’ve spent a couple minutes, like 10, thinking up a list of things they’d like Content Creators to change in order to get the spoilers. Help us help you, FFG. A bunch of CCs have been pulling down their Patreon links from their sites, but that wasn’t instructed by FFG, they’re just hoping. It would take very little time and effort to make a list of things for websites to do in order to get spoilers rather than just shutting them down with a two sentence email.

The only reason I stick with Destiny is because of TheHyperloops community. My love for X-Wing is already starting to annoy me because of how awful FFG is at supporting its players. There are plenty of fun games out there to play, and it has crossed my mind that we should all just stop playing Destiny out of principal (or at least stop creating content for it). I don’t want to lead that kind of a negative charge, but if the content creators banded together to refuse to cover the game (even if it were only for a number of days/weeks/months I would join in).

Hyperspace Jump

In super fast combo decks, Hyperspace Jump can be backbreaking for opponents to deal with. Imagine playing three?! They literally had to errata the card to make it get removed from the game so you couldn’t play it more than once! LOL!

There are quite a few decks that could take advantage of running three of these bad boys. The most obvious choices are Yoda/Hondo and Yoda/Cassian, but there are others. Yoda/Cassian would have to eschew Profitable Connection, but for three Jumps it might actually be worth it.

It’s possible that the power of Jump is so strong that we could go back to playing some three dice decks since otherwise it would be impossible to run a plot in Obi/Maz and Sabine/X without running three dice. Sabine is already at that point, and I’ve contented for some time that Sabine/Gungan/Long Term Plan is the best version of the deck since her balance, but maybe Sabine/Ezra/Double Down is better. It’s not like Ezra got worse of an option, and having three jumps could definitely make up for that second die especially when you can also run three Second Chance (LOL, wut). Obi/Maz running only one Maz die is a little more precarious since Maz is actually a decent finisher if Obi can do enough work before he dies, but it’s a consideration.

Force Speed

Force Speed isn’t a huge problem, but in triplicate it might be. I would certainly like three in my Plo Padawans deck (and might even push me to run 3x Power of the Force, though I’d likely settle for Ancient Lightsaber), but where I really see it shining is in a Cad Bane deck. Cad Snoke did some damage early in the WTF meta because it was such a natural fit for Snoke to land and do some wild damage. I loved the deck when I first built it, and my squad had some early success winning some Store Champs with it. It was the only other deck I brought with me to Gen Con, but got off of it because I really struggled when I didn’t get Force Speed, but playing three would certainly mitigate that problem. We’d have to drop Snoke to only 1 die, but it might be enough to make it acceptable.

Yoda-based blue decks would love a third Force Speed, especially decks like PYW PYW (Padawan, Yoda, Wookie Warrior) that are looking to continually setting up unblockable damage strings. PYW PYW was famously played by Grandpa Jake into the top 16 of Gen Con and top 32 of Worlds, and a slight variation of the deck in mono-blue form has gotten some attention overseas this past week. Finding the right three character version might be tricky, but Yoda/Maz is a good place to start, especially if the other 3x we take is Force Wave…

Snoke

Plenty of people say that you don’t bring Snoke for his dice. I disagree, his dice are pretty fucking insane, but now those people can put their money where their mouth is! If someone doesn’t think Snoke’s second die is worth it they can just swap it out for Double Down! Snoke’s second die only costing 2 has long perplexed me since it’s so bonkers, but if we’re really just interested in his power action, it’s a very easy swap in a Rainbow Snoke deck to trip him down to single die and bring Double Down. People have already explored three dice Snoke decks, but we could easily do this in Snoke/Aphra/BD making them all one-die and bringing three copies of each of Aphra’s Droids. I’m not sure what we’d want 3x of in Snoke/Bazine/BD (Chance Cube maybe?), but we could take our pick.

Again, I like Snoke’s dice so I don’t know if the value is there, but it’s certainly worth a try.

Rally Aid

Any time our vehicles opponent lands a Rally Aid round one it pains us in our loins, but having three would make opening the game with it a 68% proposition with a five card mulligan (two copies is 52.4%). There’s honestly not much more to be said here, but in a Yoda/Maz/Rookie Pilot deck we can run Double Down, three Rally Aid and three Crait Speeders (or Force Speeds, or Y-Wings, or whatever) and have a pretty aggressive deck that might be able to contend with Snoke based villain vehicles decks.

I wanted to look for a few decks that already run at 28 with a two point plot, and Leia/Yoda jumped to mind, and obviously we’d need to find a yellow character to pair with here, but the combo is what we’re focusing on. My boy Reflex ran Leia/Yoda when WTF first dropped mainly because of how savage this combo is. Imagine being able to run 3x of it?! That’s absurd, especially since Commando Raid draws you a card, making it easier to put the second and third iterations together. And, Leia discarding 3 or 4 cards from your hand three times per game is going to make opponents cry.

Resetting a heavy hitter can be insane, and there are a few ways to take advantage of it with Double Down. One deck I liked following worlds was Kylo/Greedo. The deck ran Fortify to start Kylo with 1 or 3 shields, which made the deck hit like a truck. There were plenty of games where I never drew Price of Failure, but with three in the deck I don’t think it would be a problem. You could also put together a 7th Sister reset deck with Seventh (14) Greedo (7) and a FO Trooper. You would lose Leadership but gain the free option.

Blue/Yellow in general has been a strong color combination over the last several months and we could see the inception of more two-wide versions to take advantage of Double Down. I could see Zeb/Ezra 2 being decent simply because it could play 3x Ancient and 3x Force Speed making it super consistent, especially with having three free dice cards to proc Ezra’s draw ability.

I’m sure there are a bunch more ways to abuse Double Down, but I can’t sit here and write about them all. These were a few that popped into my head, and I’d love to hear what you guys think could be great as 3x either on Facebook or in a comment below.

Thanks for reading, and remember, always Double Down on 11.

BobbySapphire