FFG recently dropped a bombshell of an article on us, which you can find here if you haven’t seen it yet. We’ll probably be doing a Round Table on it tomorrow, but like with Across the Galaxy, one card stood out to me as absolutely insane. I first learned of the 501st Legion after a buddy I met playing Star Wars Destiny was talking about it, but I still wasn’t quite sure what it was or how it tied in to the SW Universe.

Anyways, the Loops discord is blowing up with messages and after skimming I come to find that a new article comes out and people are talking about Vader and his cards, so I find the link for it and go read for myself before I let other people’s opinions have an effect on me. I find Vader’s Fist and I now know of its might. I know I want to talk about the card representation of it and how it could be a game changer! I’ve included two photo’s of the card, with the 2nd one only being there to show you the 2 Shield side of the die in case you had missed it (don’t worry, I missed it too the first time around).

Vader’s Fist

At first glance you’ll notice that big ole 5 sitting next to the Resource symbol in it’s cost and if you are anything like me, then you already start looking down on the card and are prepared to call it trash. I next looked at the die sides and wondered why the hell any pay sides existed on it, but figured the effect might be able to carry it a bit and it at least doesn’t have a blank on it.

This is where things started to change: I get to the ability section and see that it MAY roll it’s die into the pool when you play it and think “man I haven’t seen this text since FN-2199, that’s cool at least you get to use it twice that round, alright I might be able to get behind this in a Delve or Friends in High Places deck as another fatty option”. I proceed to read the Power Action of the card and then stop and wonder if I just read the same line of text twice and wasn’t paying attention. My focus slowly creeps back up the card to see that the other text is still there, but I reread the text from scratch again anyways and get through the Power Action portion. I reread it all again, and then one more time. As I sit at my Kiosk in the mall reading it, I can only imagine that I looked like this as I was doing it:

Nope, couldn’t find anything glaring besides the cost and pay sides and we get to use it THREE times the round that it comes into play and TWO during other rounds. In my mind I really wonder what the designers and play testers are doing. I can only assume that this was created when that same group didn’t understand the power of Snoke and couldn’t foresee ramp decks being able to put this out Round 1 and going to town. Let’s talk about the decks that can use it because off the top of my head, there are a couple that can most adequately get this going right away to which there should be no surprised but both are Snoke decks. In theory there are a bunch of lines to do this with, but I’ll keep it separated to cheating it into play and paying for it’s actual cost.

Cheating

We’ve had a couple of Rainbow Snoke decks that trotted out 2 single die henchman and an elite Snoke whilst running packages that include both:

and their key targets revolved around 4 fat supports:

Realistically, Vader’s Fist puts all of these to shame because they all had the same glaring weakness which is that die mitigation would completely make you cry. With Vader’s Fist being able to pretty much bypass mitigation due to it’s ability to be used multiple times a Round, it puts a much larger strain on the opponent to try to answer it if they don’t want to let you resolve it. If we compare it to Hailfire Droid Tank, it got a buff on the die values and an extra payside + resource cost to play but is making so much more value than 1 damage per vehicle you get out. I could easily see it replacing anything besides AT-ST which really only keeps its slot because you absolutely do NOT want to let your opponent keep a Vader’s Fist in play if you get into an ill-fated mirror match.

The cheat into play decks with their beefy bomb supports also have the ability to ramp out and hard-cast it, so I think those might very well end up being the best option for the deck path, but let’s take a look at the deck lineup that probably get’s the biggest boost from Vader’s Fist and other items from Across the Galaxy.

Thrawn Snoke

My biggest issue with the deck after playing it for a while was that the damage output was often heavily lacking and if you were under heavy fire early, then you were going to be doomed with only 1 character left and not enough time / ramp to get out anything with enough damage. Vader’s Fist can seemingly single-handedly answer that issue. The ridiculous amount of focus sides on our starting character dice also shore up Vader’s Fists other issue which is getting to a resolve-able side that you are happy with before you run out of your hand. The round that it comes out, it can be used 3 times, and it costs so much that it’d be really hard to try to use it’s payside 3 times, but with our good buddies here, they can completely bypass that issue, but they also run into the issue of having to actually pay full price for it. Getting to 6 resources and doing 9 damage off of Vader’s Fist seems great to me and you’ll already know what your opponent is planning because you’ve seen their hand and most decks can’t draw additional cards during their normal turn.

Overall

I could very well be overreacting since I haven’t played with it yet, but it seemingly has the making to be absolutely devastating and the next big thing people complain about, but you still have to draw the card to play it right and with only 2 copies that’s only like 52% is you mulligan all 5 cards trying to find it. Do we have a gamebreaker on our hands or another card that we thought was going to be absolutely filthy but doesn’t end being getting used …. remember this beauty???

~HonestlySarcastc

Notable mentions for Reaction Gif and if you don’t know what it is, you can click it and it’ll bring you to the Youtube Vid:

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