Or: Five Rules to Follow to Make a Winning Deck

With pretty much all the Store Championships done and only one major tournament left in the season, we look ahead to the possibilities Empire at War is bringing. The purpose of this article is to take a retrospective look at the SoR meta and establish a baseline for effectiveness moving forward. While the deck options will expand drastically with each new set, it is all for nought they can’t outperform what is currently available. What our deep dive into the SoR will do is show why the top decks are the top decks.

Much of this is intuitively obvious. Why does Poe/Maz win? It deals a ton of damage! Well even now Jango/Veers does a ton of damage, but one is objectively better than the other. It is easy for me to Monday morning quarterback these rules after the fact but it is important to SPECIFICALLY QUANTIFY the difference in deck power levels in a way that can guide decision making. While some of the top decks did break one of these rules none of them broke more than one, and compensated heavily for the rule they did break.

A few things up front.

Pilot experience and practice goes a hell of a long way to compensate for any shortcomings in a deck. Case in point, both the AWK and SoR Phasma decks are and were considered the bottom end of Tier 1 at best, and most commonly placed into the very upper end of Tier 2. Yet Nick “Tacster” Obee took Runner-Up at worlds and Top 4ed GenCon because he has at the time of this writing over SIX MONTHS experience with that one specific deck.

Mill decks are their own animal entirely, and will vary wildly from this baseline in almost all respects.

Specific card evaluation is taken under the most common use cases. Although I am positive someone somewhere has pulled off the sickest Emergency Evacuation or Diplomatic Immunity plays they simply don’t happen often enough to warrant discussion in a broad overview.

No-one knows your meta better than you, proceed with caution and a grain of salt.

Rule #1: Be able to reliably threaten at least 4 damage on average starting turn one.

Here we have an “at-least” output generated from the extremely powerful and useful Anydice.com for the overall best decks over the entirety of the SoR meta. While there are multiple versions of three char FN decks, I’m lumping them all together because the numbers don’t vary to a significant degree.

The # column defines the total amount of damage that can be shown, while the percentage next to it shows the probability of you rolling at least that much damage.

Assumptions:

1.) Kylo special hits for 1

2.) Maz focus will modify a Poe die to show what it rolled previously but add 2 (even a blank can turn into at least two damage) while Poe special hits for four.

3.) FN/Nightsister/eBala will roll one two-cost upgrade two times.

This shows the same output but for a handful of the most popular T2 decks for the same timeframe.

Assumptions:

1.) Force Strike will be used on a Vader die not showing damage 50% of the time, which is the rough percentage of starting the game with Force Strike if it is aggressively mulled for.

2.) Snap dice will be resolved if showing damage.

3.) Bait and Switch will be used in Phasma/Enforcer/Trooper when a resource is showing 50% of the time, again assuming an aggressive mulligan.

4.) FN/Vader and FN/Jango both include a two-cost upgrade rolled two times.

The difference is (Force) Striking.

The T1 decks all have a better than even shot of rolling more than four damage, and all four have much much higher top ends that can be achieved through a combination of rerolling (all), claiming for effect (EmoKids and Poe/Maz) or better than average card draws (Poe/Maz, FN).

Meanwhile many of our T2 decks can barely threaten 3. Even if played to their respective strengths like action cheating, resource denial, high health pools, and forced discards, the primary method of winning the game is dealing damage. Our outliers all have a steep dropoff for anything higher, or rely on specific cards in hand.

If you fall short on average damage you have to leverage every other rule in your favor to have a decent chance and/or be willing to discard often to make up the difference. The ability to do one or both is what seperates the upper and lower end of T2 or puts decks in what sometimes gets referred to as Tier 1.5 (Phasma, Vader)

Rule #2: Include some damage from hand that is easy, cheap, and deals at least two damage per resource.

In other words if your dice don’t cooperate, have an alternate way to get your damage in or amplify what little you do have available. Setting aside the fact that when FN or Poe are involved EVERYTHING is damage from hand, these are the most widely played cards which fulfill that function.

The conditions to play each of these are all very easy to meet. Damage gets rolled eventually in most games which sets up the first two, simply having dice is good enough for Force Strike, and resources are almost as common as damage, and much more benign. When even No Mercy gets cut from a large percentage of blue Villian decks (while dealing up to FOUR) would anyone play Force Strike or Lightsaber Throw for 2? I highly doubt it. Bait and Switch may still have a home if it cost one, but it would more than likely get thrown into our next pile.

Moving forward into EaW, be on the lookout for cards that do roughly same thing at the same or better price (especially in hero), though it is going to be hard to top these mainstays.

Our second tier of damage from hand cards are mostly free but all have more difficult to meet conditions, have a significant downside, or both. While cards in this tier have seen play and may occasionally shine under the right conditions (looking at you Riposte), none of them are commonly played in the top decks and in many cases are only played anywhere at all because no better options exist. If Force Strike existed in Hero I wouldn’t play My Ally, that’s for sure. The fact that these get sleeved up at all is the only thing keeping them from the final group. But if they get functionally reprinted for cheaper or with fewer conditions on their use, be ready to pounce.

What a sad bunch of cards, why did they fail? For some it is because the damage dealt just isn’t enough to warrant a card, even if it might heal you or disrupt at the same time. For others they just cost too much to be relied on no matter what other effect you might get. For the rest you either don’t ever want to meet the conditions (Anger) or are so unlikely to meet the conditions (Sensor Placement, Planned Explosion) that they may as well be blank.

We may see Firepower get bumped up a notch right out of the gate for EaW but my instincts tell me that a red Lightsaber Throw isn’t good enough when it hinges on a vehicle die. A Reversal effect printed at two-cost would be amazing to see, even if it was gated behind a small condition.

Rule #3: Include at least eight easy to play mitigation cards that can prevent/remove two or more damage for one resource or free.

That’s a mouthful for sure, but it does highlight that figuring out what removal is best is the hardest part of deck construction.

Why eight? With eight mitigation cards, the odds of having at least one in any random five card hand is just above 80% and gives you at least four different options to handle a variety of opposing deck types. Going from down to seven and then six, you lose 5% off of your sample rate, then once you go down to five you start losing more than 8% and increasing. With mulligan decisions already difficult enough for game-winning cards, trying to mulligan for things to simply not get blown out is a bad position to be in.

These are far and away the most commonly played mitigation cards at the moment. All of them have very easy to meet conditions, are free, or in Defensive Position’s case are SO powerful in their effect that they are worth planning your turn around. Where one-cost or free removal usually fails is by giving your opponent choice in whether or not the removal actually happens (Let the Wookie Win, Closing the Net, Kryat Dragon Howl) or by being hyper specific (Parry, Evade).

We see no mitigation that is commonly played for two or more resources at any power level, and the reason comes down to opportunity cost. If you pay one for removal, you still (usually) have money available to pay for dice resolution, damage from hand, or simply to save up for an upgrade in a future turn. When you use an entire turn (or more) worth of resources you aren’t progressing your win-condition enough, while allowing your opponent to use their resources to advance their board position. A saying from other card games: “That just makes you lose slower” is very appropriate here.

However, when you can negate or prevent an entire turns worth of your opponents effort the guidelines go right out the window. To use these cards and any other cards that completely alter the basic structure of the game you need to plan for them starting turn one but the payoff can be huge.

Rule #4: All your upgrade dice need to deal damage, most should cost two, and redeploy is ideal.

These are the sum total of non-redeploy upgrades commonly played at more than two cost.

Rocket Launcher is only planned to be paid for in the FN decks, where it functions more as a damage out of hand card alongside IQA and Vibroknucklers and all three are replaced ASAP with a Riot Baton. Thermal Detonator is never paid for of course, and DL-44 is only played “fairly” because it has soft mitigation built in and both Han and Rey get additional use out of the ambush keyword.

Two-cost is really the sweet spot. If you have free mitigation turn one, you can immediately start building your board but if you have to pay one for some other effect, you can do the same on the following turn and still have the resources to get your upgrade on the field. Most of the weapons that cost two are playable, and redeploy is just a bonus when you can get it. And if you are playing fair with your three cost weapons, you had better look for the word redeploy.

Of course rules are meant to be broken. Free dice will probably always be worthwhile no matter what their effect is, it just so happens that this one enables an entire class of upgrades.

Rule #5: Have some action cheating, and have something to do with your extra actions.

I think force speeds are the first two cards added to any primarily blue deck these days, and with good reason. Being able to protect a reroll, deal damage then claim, chain mitigation, or simply regain tempo in an otherwise clunky deck are great reasons to include the card. Then again, there are a couple of characters that function as action cheating on a stick, which is a major contributing factor to their common use.

It is important to not spend too much effort on getting so many actions that you run out of meaningful things to do with them. Or as I like to call it, the Han/Rey effect. If you have a lot of extra time on your hands, cards like Planetary Uprising, Hyperspace Jump, Backup Muscle and Hunker Down can be a good fit. Free action cheating is always better than paid action cheating, hence why Tactical Mastery and All In aren’t taken in any competitive deck any more.

Conclusion

As you are perusing spoilers and coming up with concepts for new decks keep these rules in mind to start off a step ahead. The one wild card that I see already looming is the efficacy of Vehicles, which may well shatter rules one, four, and five simultaneously to just overpower your opponent in the mid to late game. Agree or disagree, come talk about it on the Artificery Discord server, and stay tuned for upcoming events!

Bonus Rant!

The only effective damage out of hand is Villain. The overwhelming majority of good removal is Villain or Neutral. All the best weapons are Villain or Neutral. The only cost effective way to play blue abilities are Villain. The point cost to HP ratio is stacked in Villain’s favor, and the abilities/dice for Villain chars are at least as good as the Hero ones for comparable cost. Nothing we have seen thus far from EaW changes ANY of these facts. The one thing Heroes have in their favor are gimmicks like My Ally, Hyperspace Jump, and Second Chance, but all of those require significant compromises in deck building and play-style to use effectively.

By way of example, take a look at the A180 Blaster. On paper, the A180 costs beats out Holdout Blaster and F-11D hands down. Four damage sides and a ton of flexibility on half of them? Amazing! Unfortunately the opportunity cost to not play great damage out of hand and removal leaves it by the wayside. It simply cannot carry a Hero deck on it’s back, a fact which is only exacerbated by the lack of redeploy. Want to hear a sick joke? The card on the left is fake, The A180 actually costs three, and has a worse die.

Repeat the process for almost every Hero card in all three colors and you end up with a competitive meta that shakes out to be over 70% Villain on tournament entry and 80%+ after the cut. Changes need to be made, either through errata or aggressive compensation in future sets.

#HelpOurHeroes