During a time long long ago, great great grand papi Ewok was the killer of named characters as he ran out with his brethren under the lead of Ithorian Commander and Han Solo. No need to zoom in, i’ll type the relevant parts of the card for the mobile readers.

I’ll have to bore you with some context to start, but bare with me for a bit.

Ithorian Commander Effect: Followers in your squad with Damage 10 and Melee attack get +4 attack and +10 Damage.

Han Solo Commander Effect: Followers gain Charging Fire (replaces turn, can move up to double speed then attack).

Ewok ability: This character gets +1 attack against a target for each other allied Ewok adjacent to the target.

Ewok stats: 10 Health, 12 Defense, +1 Attack, 10 Damage.

So Ewoks themselves seem pretty harmless when staring down a few of these bastards (my favorite piece).

Last part of relevant context is that when you attack in this game, you roll a 20-sided die and add that to your attack value. If your damage beats the opponents defense then you deal your damage to them (ssh if i’m wrong because i can’t remember if equal does it). So this is where my story is going: The ewok itself was absolute trash, but once you put the accompanying pieces together, you made this little shit 3 point guy go from 1 attack and 10 damage to 5 attack and 20 damage which is more than double the initial viability, and you could normally only move 6 spaces and attack but that doubled to 12 and attack with Han. With a 100 point team which was the lowest normal setting, you could run 21 Ewoks, Han, and Ithorian (you would adjust a bit more for game reasons but no reason to bother explaining that). The little furballs would completely over run teams because in that game, much like ours, we would take actions back and forth activating guys, but there was no PASS. So your 5 unit teams vs my 23 unit team meant that the first 2 rounds of play running up the board, you we didn’t do much. On the 3rd round is where Ewoks wouldn’t a couple of generic pieces around until you were tapped out and then rush your squad and obliterate things. It was fun and it was beautiful and I won a lot with it.

What Does That Have to Do With Destiny

So the thing here is that Ewoks themselves aren’t very good or even remotely busted. There is a lot of hate about the not having a die in a die game, but there is an overall issue with that concept, which is that indirect is often TERRIBLE, because you can’t focus down your preferred target usually. So I should have made it 4 points with 4 health and 1 indirect, but the concept is still there. I wouldn’t be concerned about this guy below.

It does add up eventually, but with a team of these, you really don’t get very far. Would i consider running 4 of them and Allies of Necessity, sure, but you don’t get the equivalent in the Ewok form without running one of the elite Ewoks first:

At bare minimum, you have to spend 6 points on Chief Chirpa (the other 4 is the Warrior he brings in when rationalizing cost) so the full dream is 6 total Ewok Warriors (5 for team and 1 via Chirpa) and there is a drastic difference between 6 indirect a round and my proposed 8 indirect. With 8 indirect a round, then in theory you got 24 indirect by the end of 3 if you some how lived, where as there isn’t a normally played team comp that dies to the 18 indirect from 6 per round.

The second dilemma is that for each 4 direct damage your opponent can point at a Warrior, they’ll have ended it’s life and have reduced the damage incoming over time, thereby making it easier to survive the Final Countdown.

People familiar with Magic the Gathering should be familiar with Red Deck Wins or Burn decks which were decks that would put their entire emphasis on just burning out an opponent’s health and not much else. When they played guys, they were often cheap, and hit fast and hard and didn’t look to care for card advantage or board state. I can’t remember it word for word, but the saying used to be something like “Burn is really good at doing 20 damage, but 21 is a different story” and it was pretty much that the deck was made quite good at doing the expected amount of damage, but once the number changed, it struggled. Gaining extra health while decreasing their damage output is the key.

It’s hard to narrow down on what should be your plan of attack against the deck, but primarily it’s about swapping out some of your hard mitigation (Automated Defense, Flank, other stuff that just removes dice) for soft mitigation (Field Medic, First Aid, Pacify, Defensive Stance) because healing and shielding is actual health where as if all you can do is remove dice, then those are just usually dead. Disrupt goes a long way to prevent from getting hit with Strength in Numbers, which is something you really want to avoid in Round 1 and potential Round 2 based on how much damage you put out. If you can mix in a little heal or shielding whilst punting Ewok Warriors off the table, you’ll notice that the damage dwindles quite fast. Provided that you can avoid / remove target acquired, then usually Ewoks can only blast you with massive amounts of indirect in order to actually remove your characters from the table.

That Explained Nothing

You knew what you were getting in to when you started reading. It’s the cards surrounding the Ewoks that make the deck so good, similar how to in the Miniatures game, ewoks were trash, but with some help they became a force to be reckoned with. For the most part in destiny, we’re accustomed to spending resources on getting more dice cards and also spending resources on mitigation to stop our opponent. We used to commonly use things like Lightsaber Throw and the old concept of 1 Resource and 1 card for 2 damage. Ewoks itself doesn’t play upgrades, so it uses it’s money to mitigate at times but mainly is heaving more indirect at the opponent to more quickly take down the opponent. Ammo Reserves, Strength in Numbers, Glider Attack, Rigged Detonation, and Inflict Pain all help to put that damage at levels that get out of hand quickly. What happens when you make some of that inaccessible to the deck?? All of those things are what combine to make the AR Ewok deck work and if you remove bits and chunks of it, you’ll often find yourself not being able to get that extra bit of reach that you need to win.

Arena of Death is the most vital card to the whole thing though. If you can prevent your opponent from flipping the battlefield, it makes like a whole lot easier though. Armored Reinforcement into Across the galaxy is the single biggest piece of technology that makes the deck so good and consistent. It’s all of those things together that combine as a force to make Ewoks so very good. I grabbed a pie chart from our friends over at Your Destiny with their German Grands (Nationals) write up, and of the 32 players that showed up, 8 were running Ewoks which is 25% of the field, and 50% of those made Day 2 / Top 8. That is a very high percentage, but we do have to keep in mind that 32 people is such a low amount of people, that it can easily inflate the numbers, especially when we consider that 34% of the field could be considered to have been “the sea of jizz” which is just decks that weren’t likely cut out to be considered Tier 1 or 1.5 in the current meta. There were 3 of each of Jabba, Chopper, and Han Droids played at the event as well as 4 “kReylo” players. The remaining 4 slots of top cut were taken by 2 Chopper, 1 Jabba, and 1 kReylo so that leaves us with 66% top cut for Chopper, 33% for Jabba, and 25% for Reylo. Do you now see why the percentages can seem so obscene with the small turnout???

***Spoiler Alert ***

In the end, Ewoks lost in the finals of Germany to Chopper. Ewoks isn’t an unstoppable beast, people just have to get used to it and plan accordingly and I don’t believe it needs a nerf. I’m interested to see how the EU Champs event goes down this upcoming week and then Nova after. Will Han droids finally take one down? Is Satine going to go down in history as the worst of the 3 Rainbow droid builds? Will HonestlySarcastc miss top cut again and drown his sorrows in milkshakes? The world can only wait to find out, but we can make shot calls. I’ll take my shot and say that not only will Ewoks NOT win Eu Champs or Nova (US Grands), it won’t even be in Top 4 of either event. What is YOUR call??

~HonestlySarcastc