The US Nationals for Star Wars Destiny at NOVA were this weekend and it’s so awesome to have coverage of a big event like this. Can’t help but give it up to The Chance Cube for streaming the entire event, and paying $800 for internet access at a tiny convention like NOVA. I can’t imagine they are operating in the positive with only 100-150 viewers for most of the stream, but I know I was one of those 150ish who really appreciated having something to watch.

The event was taken down by the ArrowBrookGaming crew with an exact, 34-card mirror match in the finals between Drew Warren (Original) and Cody Williams (Manten), two players I’ve grown to respect immensely over the past few months and am really proud of. Drew and I tested quite a bit before Gen Con and he was a big part of my training for that event. Manten has never been able to attend a big event, so making final table at his first one and coming in second is awesome. Our squad did pretty well, with Cuenca making top 4 after taking out North American Champion Andrew Cox in top 16 and former North American Champion Joe Colon in the top 8. Beyond those three, a bunch of Loopers (people in our private discord) made the top cut, including the two finalists, and as always I’m very proud of the people in our group.

It was the first week of school for me, and I would never want to miss the first couple days with my students to go to a card tournament, but NOVA runs Destiny Nationals in the middle of the week so I have no choice but to skip (long time readers may remember that I scooped in the finals of two regionals to my teammates, both of whom top 8’d). As such, I watched a lot of coverage, and even had my own stream of most of the top cut for other Loopers to watch live or on video later. Given that my teammates were in many of the matches I felt like I could offer some solid insight. Those videos are archived on our twitch page if anyone wants to check them out.

Anyway, the following six things are what I think I know following a weekend I spent too much time watching Destiny during

1: A Challenger Appears!

I’ve been trying to figure out how to word this without sounding too douchey and igniting the ire of the Jabronies who love to hate me, but I can’t come up with anything, so I’m just going to say it: our team crushing at Gen Con felt easy (emphasis on “felt”). It, of course, wasn’t easy, but the fact that almost all of us placed high, we put 6/7 in the top cut, and our mill deck only lost mirror matches on day 2 can certainly back up my claim. TheDestinyCouncil brought some heat with a deck that had very little hype and exposure going into the event, and put three people into top cut, and they’ve always felt like the best “other” team in the US, but a new foe has appeared!

I have a ton of respect for the Arrow Brook Gaming team, and I’m not sure Manten is officially part of that squad or how they do it, but Cody and Drew (who finished 1-2 at Nationals) tested/talked for 3-5 hours every day (!!!) leading up to the event, played the exact list, and even drove down to NOVA together, so in my eyes they are on the same team. Drew helped me test a ton for Gen Con as we were always home during the day over the summer and grinded a ton of games. I’ve been on their podcast before, and have mentioned them a bunch of times in my articles, they also helped popularize Yoda/Hondo in the Legacies meta. Manten has terrorized TTS for a long time, but has never made it to a large event, so to see him crush his first big event. He’s another player I’ve respected for quite some time, and even had a conversation about a month ago about how good I think he is.

Child, please.

It comes as no surprise to me that these guys crushed, I even referenced two of their lists in my NOVA meta article two weeks ago. They’re both very active Loopers who are part of the largest competitive community in the game, but what I’m really excited about his how “try-hard” they were for this event. Three to five hours a day! Fuck yeah. I think the reason Gen Con “felt” easy was because of how much time I put into preparing for the event. Like for worlds, I grinded hard, and I’m not sure how many people prepped and tested as much as I did (I’m sure plenty did, some more so), and I also got insanely lucky at times, but I firmly believe that to do well at this game you simply need to work harder than everyone else. That probably isn’t too shocking, as hard work will get you far in any endeavor, but I think there are a lot of people who play this game that take it half-seriously, or maybe 75%. These guys went all out, and it paid off, congrats to them. I’m hyped that there’s another team out there willing to put in work like this, as it will force me and my crew to up our games as well. Love it.

2: NJCuenca is the Hero of the People

Everyone loves Cuenca, and it’s easy to see why. The dude does his own thing, plays things that are not expected, and crushes. He just rattled off back-to-back top 4 finishes at both the North American Championship at Gen Con with Snoke/Aphra/Battledroid before most people were even on it (and, of course, it went on to win Nationals), and Nationals using Dooku/Talzin, a deck most people had written off.

I’m pretty hyped Cuenca both ran, and did well with Dooku, because it stemmed from a conversation we had at a store championship a few weeks ago. He had won an SC with Grievous eTalzin the previous week, but then got worked over a bit at the next one (he wrote about his adventures here). While we were watching the finals I was trying to convince him that Dooku/Talzin was the better choice; for one it’s four dice, and secondly either character can carry the Force Speed which makes up for losing Tactical Mastery.

I wrote about this after Gen Con, but I’ll echo it here again: Cuenca is one of the best in the world. It took him a while to get that big finish on the big stage (even though he won a 100 person regional, which is pretty legit), and now he has two top 4s in a row at national-or-higher events. I can’t think of too many people who can say that; off the top of my head only myself, HonestlySarcastc, and Mads from YOURDestiny come to mind (and Tacster top 16-ing literally every major tournament is a streak unto itself).

What’s even more awesome is that Cuenca went into full mad scientist mode; he never even shared his list with the group for feedback. Hell, he didn’t even bring Dooku dice to NOVA he had to find someone to borrow them from! And, while I’m gushing, he also wrote about possibly using it at the event in his article last week. What a beast.

3: Mill no longer “auto-beats” vehicles

After Gen Con and the “Millpocalypse” I was keen on seeing whether or not the meta would adjust, and adjust it has. We first saw this at UK nationals when Gameslayer989 rocked mill on stream with heavy ramp, and with all of the smart vehicles players transitioning to Snoke versions it has become impossible to mitigate the ramp those decks can churn out (more on that in the next section). It seems to me that Vehicle decks are now all-in on ramp, and Mill decks are having trouble keeping up with the overwhelming amount of dice being put out. Cards like Hidden Motive aren’t going to cut it anymore, and control decks like mill may need to max out on things like Into The Garbage Chute and may even need to consider something like Negotiate moving forward.

One of the ways mill had grown to be an auto win vs. vehicles was by ending rounds early with Hyperspace Jump, which may need to be more of a focus going forward, however it isn’t very strong in many of the matchups. Further, two-wide mill decks that move and end the rounds faster are better at ruining lives with Round-Ending effects like Hyperspace Jump and it’s Command Cousin Retreat, but their low, low, low health pools have them a huge liability right now in a meta where decks are doing 10-12 damage in round one no problem, and indirect damage is crushing even the three character decks out there. The fact of the matter is that supports with health stacking is, and may always be the most viable strategy in Star Wars Destiny; it’s hard to make a case for much else at the moment. When your characters die the supports keep cranking, and that’s really strong. I think mill might just go away, but it’s kind of a bummer that these Snoke support decks seem to have no natural predator. Maybe because…

4: Snoke might be too good

After I wrote my article about thinking 40 cards I felt that too many people focused on the idea that I thought mill should be nerfed. I’m not the kind of person who chicken littles and wants things changed, I’ll pretty much play in any meta, broken or boring. I don’t necessarily think Snoke should be balanced, but results speak for themselves.

Snoke is insane, and I think we all know it. He was in the decks that came in first and second at UK nationals AND US nationals, and then it won German nationals WITH A THREE DICE LIST just for funsies (Tacos got second there). So, out of the three nationals we’ve had in the first two weeks of natties season, Snoke has won every event. That’s FN-2199 levels of unreal.

Snoke, post nerf.

What makes Snoke so insane is his ability to get us resources early and push through a gross amount of damage late. If we sequence correctly we can make things a huge bitch for our opponents to deal with; roll out our characters early and force our opponents to deal with those dice so they can’t blow you out. Drop a Chance Cube on Snoke, roll focus, get a million resources, ramp out, and then no amount of mitigation can stop us. It’s really that easy, which is kind of a bummer. Snoke is a “support” character, but in the lists he’s showing up in he’s (usually) the highest health character and an elite character; he’s the supreme leader, the grandmaster, and everything runs through him. He’s making it very difficult for decks to play defense, and I don’t see a great way to consistently beat the support based Snoke decks.

5: Executioners are real, Emulate is not

Anytime The Destiny Council shows up to a major event with a new deck, the world should (and will) take notice. This time Luke Magnusson ran a train on the Day 1B competition, an Executioner train. Luke even tipped his hand two days before the event by writing about Executioners and some of they ways they could be really good following Brian Lindberg’s Store Championship win with the squad. LMag looked downright dominant on stream, and I was shocked he got bounced in the top 32. I played a few games with his deck Saturday morning, and I liked the way it ran. Even First Strike was really good, as I got to live the dream and First Strike a Planetary Bombardment die for the win in my very first game.

I wasn’t, however, too impressed with Emulate and was shocked when Luke posted his list and it was a 2x. I watched his streamed games to put the list together and was sure he would never run two, but alas, I was wrong.

It’s not like I don’t see why emulate is in there. Beyond simply turning one of the dice of your two characters on table, it’s a lot better in this deck because it takes a lot of actions meaning there’s a strong likelihood that our opponents will claim first and we can get more use out of it. Further, if the deck is doing what it’s supposed to and killing a character, we might be light on cards to reroll (especially if we’re running Reprogram, yikes).

I like this card a lot better in Snoke Executioners where we are able to Snoke the shit out of the dice we Emulate AND we can run Training to make damn sure we have plenty of dice to Emulate. I could see running 2x there, but not here. This shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone but I like the Snoke version of this deck much, much better. I’m not a fan of a bunch of the cards that DC packed in their deck (also not likely a surprise to anyone), but Force Illusion and Ancient Lightsaber do a ton of work in an Executioner deck, and I love Training to increase our Snokeable dice. I actually wish that I had even a store championship to play in; there are a ton of decks I want to try right now, and Executioners is right at the top. It’s too bad that…

6: None of this actually matters

For those of us who reside in the US of A and don’t regularly travel internationally for Star Wars Destiny tournaments the Way of the Force meta is basically over. We can game for GNK prizes like smoked 3 damage tokens, but there aren’t any big events. I have the benefit of needing to grind games to support the site, so I’ll be making videos, especially for the international players who have their Nationals to tune up for.

There are a shitload of Nationals in Europe coming up over the next two months and I’m jealous as hell. I’ve got my eye on regionals otherwise, but if you’re an international player I wish you luck in the Snoke meta. I’ll be messing around with all of the decks that blew up this past weekend, and any that spring up at these events, so I hope you have something spicy for me!

Thanks for reading, and I hope the nationals meta keeps us all entertained!

BobbySapphire

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