I’ve been playing the Trilogy format and have been having a blast with it. Last week I went over some cards that had impressed me, check that out if you haven’t. I hadn’t posted anything concrete since I wanted to make sure what I had was reasonable. This past weekend I won the Artificery Trilogy event with Tarkin/Aphra. Our patron Symbiode swept his local event with it as well which finally makes me feel confident enough to post a list and give it my seal of approval. Here is my current list for Tarkin/Aphra.

This is what I played at the tournament and it worked pretty well. I had been winning quite a bit but since it looks janky as hell I didn’t want to start the hype train. After our performance this weekend I’m more confident about its place in the metagame. It’s a good deck because Tarkin’s power action plus a combination of low cost upgrades and droids really add up the damage. In Trilogies no one has access to free dice that can potentially do 2 indirect damage and all of our 1 cost upgrades can also be flung for that same value. A lot of people think that Aphra doesn’t have enough droids to make her worth it but here 4 is just enough since you’ll be mulling for 1 of them and 1 cost upgrades. Even if you miss on a droid in your opening hand the character’s dice are still respectable- 2shield, 2indirect and resource are all great hits early and the rest of the sides can be potentially used with Tarkin’s power action.

I initially thought that this would have a tough time against 3 character decks but it can hold its own. Those 3 character decks end up being slow as well and Tarkin’s discard can really help to slow them down even more. That’s the plan, slow them down and drown them in a sea of splash.

Your opponents Bubble Shields are annoying but because you generally get so much value from your dice you can afford one turn where two of your dice do one damage at the expense of your opponent playing a card and spending a resource. Going through that is an exercise in brute force and swinging tempo by using Aphra shields and using mitigation to cancel out your opponent’s damage is how you win those grind sessions.

You should be heavily favored vs two character decks because at some point your opponent will run out of places to put their damage and you will be able to knock out a character with the little bit of direct damage you have. That will let you knock out a two die character compared to the three wide decks where you generally end up having to kill a one die character first.

I have already tried Droid Commando and I just think Slave 1 is a better card even when Commando costs 3- a lot of times Commando could cost 3 at the expense of not playing another droid for one less and that has just felt worse. I still need to try Separatist Landing Craft and Ark Angel in these versions. I like those cards more in Standard since they end up costing 1 on turn 1 because of Weapons Factory Alpha but here they cost two and I think they are worse than all the 1 cost upgrades, droids and Slave 1.

With that in mind I thought to myself, ya know, maybe I can make this work in Standard? Decks are more powerful but you also get to power up your deck as well. The top metagame seems to include a lot of two character decks and I would feel pretty good against any of those vs a Standard version of this- aside from Sabine Ezra that can just god roll you to death without you having a say in it but it can do that to anything.

Standard Tarkin/Aphra

After my success with the Trilogy version of this deck I felt I had a pretty good idea of how the deck needed to operate in order to win.

I’d say that this deck might prove to be similar to that of R2P2 except that it can interact with people’s resources and hands. It doesn’t look broken but it has some staying power through the power of shields! Ideally I want to play 3 dice cards on turn 1 which is possible with all the cheap dice we have. You get access to free droids which might look bad but have reasonable dice that work with Tarkin’s power action- that’s essentially a two damage support for free! You can’t have too many cards that just work with Tarkin since all dice do that, you need to think about whether the die is good beside that. Probe Droid is good because his disrupts will protect your good dice or will just slow down your opponent which is definitely what you want to do, hitting its one resource is insanely good, its special just trolls your opponent, the blank will usually get eaten by the power action and sometimes you just need some lame die to play He Doesn’t Like You. Landing Craft is a card that isn’t played at all because its usually better to play offensive cards but here if we win our battlefield we can play it for 1 resource which makes it into a great card. Early you can resolve it for money, shields or just use Tarkin’s ability and later on it’s plus 6 health and a small offensive die. Astromech will let you get the Landing Craft special when you need it, I see Astromech as a poor man’s C3PO which is sometimes even better if you hit the double focus. Relentless Pursuit is quietly one of the best cards in the deck, sometimes you just kill a character as your first action, when that happens you get way ahead. The values on the character dice are insanely high which is an underappreciated aspect of deck building, this allows you to have battlefield choice more often which is very powerful. This deck doesn’t have a ton of vehicles so if you don’t draw one or value the shields more in a particular match up you can just give your opponent their battlefield.

This is still a work in progress but so far the results have been promising. Right now we have six droids which gets us in that 1 in 5 math which is acceptable. People seem to think you have to play a million droids to make Aphra worth it but you don’t. In fact I think you only need to use the droid ability twice to have it be worth it. I might want to fit another offensive upgrade or support, readers know that I love me some Slave 1 and that will be tried as a 2 of at some point. We might try some Tactical Mastery to see if we can jump ahead of our opponents on crucial turns but with Tarkin being public enemy #1 that would be turned off once he dies. This deck has a ton of hand disruption which will make many decks cry, because of Tarkins ability you can cash in those non offense dice and make them offensive from time to time.

I used to play a game called VS System and won a big tournament with a deck that I ported over from a smaller card pool format. People couldn’t believe it and some even went as far to say that they thought I had payed my last opponent to concede (I didn’t). Sometimes you can apply what you learn from a smaller card pool format to a bigger one. In the bigger VS format there were two decks to beat and the deck I picked had an insane match up vs one deck and the other one was slightly unfavorable. That coupled with people’s inexperience against the deck propelled me to win the event. Tarkin/Aphra might not end up being tier 1 but its certainly a blast to play and reasonable enough. If you have any feedback about this deck I’d love to hear it. It would be great to win a regional with something from out of nowhere like this.

Thanks for reading and as always…

May The Trolls be with You

@NJCuenca

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