There have been some interesting Way of the Force spoilers this past week and we’re so excited about the release of the new set that we had to talk about some of them. Let’s dive in! but first…

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The following are from I Rebel:

NJCuenca: Closing the Deal is certainly powerful but it has a huge drawback. You might be able to get around the drawback by using a card ability like Force Speed which would give you another action after you play it. The previous rate for a card like this is Mobilize which gets you 4 resources when you spend 3, CTD is certainly better but unless you jump through hoops you won’t be able to spend those resources until next round. If your deck is really slow and you wanted to stockpile resources you won’t miss out on much since your opponent would be claiming anyway. One big issue is that getting three resources banked can sometimes be difficult in a world full of Ezra Bridger, Thief.

BobbySapphire: I thought this card was neutral when I wrote about it. I got it confused with Calling in Favors. I’m 2 weeks without coffee. Palpatine forgive me.

HonestlySarcastc: I hate it and hate is a strong word. If it was 2 for 4 or 1 for 3 i could get down with that, but i needed to have 3 resources pretty much at the end of the round, to ramp to 5 and not be able to use them immediately outside of an action cheat. Yeah, you can go screw. If we get something that lets us play a 3 drop event for free, then MAYBE we’re talking and it’d have to be somehow useable without crazy conditions like Palp2 because then we’d be leaving dice in the pool for damage (Yes, i know he can’t pack this, but draft!). Labeling it as garbage and .001% chance of finding a niche deck that wants it. POOP!

NJCuenca: This card is certainly very powerful and it made me do a double take the first time I read it but I fear it might not be as good as I thought. First off, 5 resources is tough but doable. The biggest problem is that the character comes into play exhausted which is certainly a buzz kill. Getting very little value on the turn you spend 5 resources is a tough sell. Now that I have gotten my negativity out of the way..HOLY CRAP! You can play this in any blue villain deck to bring back ANYONE! We’ll have our work cut out for ourselves to make sure FFG didn’t release something super busted. Its certainly going to be at its best when combined with a big health character, gaining 5 or 6 is where the value will be. With this card at our disposal it can make building around a particular ability much more palatable – perhaps this is the real reason why Unkar Plutt got nerfed? Some real annoying mill deck like that could be strong. Other abilities like that could be great, building around characters like Tarkin seems a little more palatable now. One of the dynamics many games have is that you’ll have a fully loaded character and then won’t have much to use your resources on, this works perfectly for that plan since the redeploys you have on your current voltron will move over once the current one has been KO’d.

BobbySapphire: We’ve seen the strength of reviving characters in the past, as Endless Ranks once made our lives difficult way back when. Dark Ritual being able to revive any of our characters opens up a door of possibilities. With the number of 11, 12, and 13 health characters increasing by the week we can seriously up our health pool by pulling this card off. For such an investment we need to somehow finance this operation, though if we can build a deck that can make it to the late game it should be easy to accumulate five resources. My biggest concern is having a character that stands up enough on its own to warrant this kind of play since they’ll wake up “naked” and without upgrades. Someone like Kylo2 would be the perfect target for this card, but Kylo decks are traditionally hard up on money. It’s possible that Kylo/Pryce with Chance Cubes could get the job done, but I question the damage output of that deck. If the final blue character makes a nice pairing for Hondo, we could see this card make waves as Hondo would be the perfect fuel for this broken new event.

HonestlySarcastc: This card is SWEET! until you realize that the character comes back into play exhausted. I could see this being used in a Mill deck with Jabba, Nightsister, and Nute and that new Support that exhausts one of your characters to put 3 resources on it or remove all the resources from it to gain that many. Make the opponent go after Jabba for multiple rounds while you mill them, then bring him back to life when they just finally got him, but then again, it costs 5 and kind of only “heals” 6 in that scenario. There might be a use for it, but most likely going to be a super niche card that is poop. There are decks that might run it out of necessity, but coming back exhausted makes the 5 resource cost really tough to swallow.

NJCuenca: If it wasn’t for cards like the ones we just reviewed I’d be even more disapointed with this but I fear that the cost for this plot is just too high. While I think you’ll be able to get a good effect from this putting yourself at one character isn’t a good thing. If you aren’t at one character then it just reduces your stuff by 1. This in theory seems fine if you are using it every turn but I can’t help compare this to the other 4 cost plot, Built to Last, which seems better. This is the part where I remind you that its neutral and that you can put this with either villains or heroes which will certainly test your deck building. Reducing 3 cost events like Mobilize or Closing the Deal will gain you a lot of resources on the first turn. While that all seems great I can’t help but look at the big 4 on the bottom and think we can do better with 4 deck building points.

BobbySapphire: Man, this card is expensive. It isn’t the cost for what it does that bothers me, simply how hard it is to find a good team with four points to spare. Strategically it just seems like a trap to me. If we’re playing three cost events, is one less per round going to be enough? That’s still ALL of our resources each round, and we have to fill out deck with enough three cost events that we can actually draw one each round, which means the rest of our deck will be bad? There are definitely some cheeky 3-cost yellow events like Reversal, Hyperspace Jump, and Bravado to name a few, I just don’t know if it’s better than the other resource generating plots out there, nor if we can give up four points in our squad for it. I mean, if it doesn’t help us fuel a dope Pilfered Goods deck I’m just depressed looking at it. I did just play against someone running it with MONO SABINE on TTS and it was kind of amazing aside from the 11HP.

HonestlySarcastc: It’s another card that is going to be a trap when being run. Sabine Ezra and Palp2/X are the only decks that run an excessive amount of 3 drop events. So cool, i can spend all my resources for round to play an event at a reduced cost??? Does it win me the game?? Probably not. 4 team building points and having to pack a deck full of 3 drop events is just pretty bad. SUPER NICHE, but maybe some sort of mill type deck. Like Jyn could jam down Yellow 3 drop events for 1 to start the game, but then you are running Jyn. I’m always enamored by how they make some cards WAY too cheap and others just way too prohibitive.

NJCuenca: This card seems solid although you shouldn’t necessarily throw it in if you have a plot. You can still resolve a die if you don’t have a plot but you won’t get the plus 1 to your die. It is a nice option to have while choosing your deck but it will create a sort of sub-metagame of plot driven decks. Early on in testing you’ll put this in your deck but if you never get to claim it still might be better to use a different battlefield since you don’t want to give your plot wielding opponents something for free.

BobbySapphire: I generally hate these battlefields that have an incredibly strong effect for either player. Unless you’re playing the absolute fastest of decks, Sabine Ezra or Obi/Maz, claiming is no guarantee, and I’ve sat down across from plenty of players bringing Imperial Armory to the table and thought “Alright, I think I win” because I look at that card and change my entire gameplan to absue it. I think Comm Tower is similar; we bring it hoping to use it once in a while, but a good player will claim early for this benefit and potentially blow us out.

I do think it presents as a pretty nice trap card if we want our opponents to claim early. This is taking battlefield mind games to the next level, but I could see my teammate HonestlySarcastc going this route as he loves to build decks that take two or three times as many actions than aggro decks. Baiting like we will claim with our Kylo/Greedo deck only to get our opponent to do it so we can Price of Failure our Greedo, untap Kylo and win the game without opposition will be legendary!

Otherwise I think this BF is fine, especially if we’re bringing a plot, and I could see it fitting nicely into a mill deck for an additional discard or shield side.

HonestlySarcastc: Rebel War Room in a new form. This battlefield will be fine in anything medium – fast speed with a plot, but slow decks should probably stay the hell away from it. If you don’t have a plot then I think you can only use this Battlefield in Trilogy if you hate all of the other ones (very likely). Fast plot decks get a pretty good boost from this since if you get stuck with it, the benefit should add up enough to the downfall of not getting the shields. Plot based mill decks might be scary, because turning a 1 discard into a 2 discard with the claim seems pretty good.

The following are from Starkiller Base:

NJCuenca: I want to say that this card is bad since its almost like a single die Anakin1 and that card saw almost no play as a single die character. At the same cost you have Yoda and well… yeah… I hope not to open too many of these since I’ll be making the following face if I do.

BobbySapphire: Non-Unique characters that cost more than 8 tend to see little play, and the ones that cost 10 have seen almost no play (Rebel Trooper and Death Trooper). Sentinel’s die is pretty good, as three damage sides is quickly becoming the standard by which we measure all dice in Way of the Force, but like most 10 point characters it’s hard to see where Sentinel fits. While I think she’s strictly better than Anakin Skywalker, and probably better than Kanan, if we have 10 points in our squad and looking for a blue character, shouldn’t we be taking Yoda or Aayla? And, since she doesn’t fit with Yoda + Aayla, I can’t see too many situations where we would actually choose her to put in our list.

She has some nice applications with Plo Koon, but also because of how good Plo is, she’s likely overcosted at 10 to not actually fit well with the Jedi Master. If we want elite Plo Koon and Sentinel we only have 6 points left over, and since Gungan Warrior doesn’t have an ability and Jawa has a pretty bad one (with different damage sides and no second color for us to fill our deck with), there really isn’t much of a reason to take Sentinel with Plo. We could Sentinel/Plo/eJar-Jar, but that seems terrible. The best spot for her is proably in between elite Aayla, and either Padawan (#girlsquad) or Jedi Temple Guard. She has great synergy with Aayla because of the special chaining, and Padawan and JTG are the gold standard for 8-point blue characters depending on what we want to round out our squad.

HonestlySarcastc: FFG have you learned nothing after your foray into expensive non-uniques of Rebel Commando and Death Trooper?? AND you put a damned pay side on the 1/2/2 die which may have made it just feasible enough. It’s equivalent to a Kylo2 die, but 10 is still a really steep price for that when I can pay 12 and have Aayla with 2 dice. 2 POINTS for the 2nd die!!!! Is she going to get a nerf?? I guess you can’t run 2x Aayla’s, so if you want to go Aayla, Padawan, X your options are this, Yoda, or Kanan. The character is useable enough and lets you start off with the shield so you can Adept for a resource, but in the land of plots, cheap characters are King!

NJCuenca: The die is unexciting for the cost but the ability is very powerful since it can generate 3 resources throughout the course of a regular game. Indirect damage decks are going to hate playing against this. If your deck can move around damage or use cards that can deal damage to itself like Enrage then you will be able to turn it on. This is all highly specific since it only reduces abilities and those are generally overpriced anyway. It can be a nice fallback plan for Holocron deck but I didn’t want to build with that anyway. As a deckbuilder its nice to have something like this but its highly specific.

BobbySapphire: At nine points this character also falls into the “more than eight ain’t great” category of non-unique characters, but she offers us quite a bit in the way of upgrades over our OG ranged damage, blue villian character in Nightsister. For one, she has the exact same die as Nightsister, but for one more point she has two more health and can continually get us resources throughout the game. This is really interesting because FSO’s natural pairing is Mother Talzin where we’ll be running very few free cards.

FSO has a lot of interesting applications; for one, we can always put a free Force Illusion on her any time she’s damaged. However, I’m most intrigued by her ability to break Enrage. With an Enrage, we can play a round 1 Force Lightning or Mind Probe, making her a great fit for Holocron decks that have struggled whenever they can’t draw their Holocron. FSO + Enrage doubles the opening-hand draws that can ramp us up into big hitting upgrades. Because her ability perpetuates each round we can really build her into a monster, and blue villain has plenty of tricks to keep her alive to the mid/late game.

HonestlySarcastc: I should’ve just wrote at the beginning that expensive things need to be absolutely broken or just throw them in your junk pile. This character needs more cards to enable it than just enrage otherwise we are paying 1 extra team building point for a bad Nightsister with 2 more health / same price for a Talzin who lost a focus side. If some better enablers come out and a way to shift Blue abilities post death, then there could be something here, otherwise, just move on until those get printed. 9 point non-unique, i poo poo on you!

Thanks for reading. Let us know what you think of these cards in the comments or on social media.

-TheHyperloops

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