Matt Holland delivered on his promise and delivered the entire Covert Missions set last Friday with a hi-res image of every single card in the set. This is old news by now, but if you haven’t seen the cards you can find them on facebook or here on imgur.

While most people like to focus on the dice cards, the first cards I like to process in a new set are the mitigation cards, so today I’m going to grade them out and give a sentence or a few sentences on each of them.

There are twenty that I want to discuss, but we’ll see how far I get before my brain turns to jelly. Also, I’m just doing them in the order they show up on the Imgur link.

Trap The Blade is pretty narrow, but it obviously has a ton of upside. Its existence could shape the meta in such a way that could make taking melee upgrades (of which there are MANY) a huge liability. I don’t think you take this card unless you know sticks are the meta, because it’s only OK, basically the equivalent of The Force Is With Me, which only sees seldom play. But, being able to take out a redeploy weapon, which blue sticks decks heavily rely, on, could push this card to an A+ on the right weekend.

This one would be a lot lower without the ambush ability, which can really swing a round. We haven’t seen ambush mitigation in a while, and it can just change the structure of a game. That it can remove any die is really nice, but needing to control the battlefield is a big ask for a lot of decks, and thus this one won’t see a ton of play. In a deck built around taking this battlefield this card will be a no brainer as it can steal the bf, get you a reroll as well as the ambush to resolve it immediately if you want.

Change of Fortune – D+

Just compared to the other mitigation you can access at a cost of 2, this card is much to big of a gamble. For one, you have to be facing someone with a bunch of dice in their pool and those dice have to have a lot of matching symbols. The upside is enough to keep this card in our thoughts as we build yellow decks, but the ask is too big to get two resources worth of value out of it, and I can’t see sleeving it up outside of the most rare of circumstances. It’s also very easy to play around should it be a thing or be seen on a decklist.

I almost nixed this card, but I think the ability is interesting enough to at least discuss. The big issue here is that it can only remove a character die, and very few character dice offer you much hope of this card milling more than two cards from the top of the deck, and almost every character has at least one chance of hitting a 0 via blank or special or both. Compare this to a card like Bewilder and I can’t see why we’d ever pay 2 for this.

My bias as someone who often builds blue-sticks decks might be showing, because this card is really similar to Taking Charge, which I gave a C to in that it has a very specific condition under which you can play it. However, unlike controlling the battlefield, having a shield on your own characters to give to your opponents is something you can have a lot of control over. Further, I think there are far more decks that can utilize this card than there are decks that can utilize Taking Charge. Oh, and it costs ZERO. In a deck with Yoda1, Qui-Gon2, or Anakin3, this card will be a staple. And, in Reylo decks it is probably cards #1 and #2 on your decklist.

If this is supposed to be their pseudo reprint of Guard they really screwed up. The only thing that’s keeping it from being an F is that most hero lightsabers have a shield side, and this might not be too bad as a Loth-Cat type mitigation card, but it’ll be difficult to get a ton of value out of it. If there’s a deck that can use this as a two-for-two consistently it might see some play, but I don’t think this one gets sleeved up in competitive play ever.

This card is a veritable Rube Goldberg machine of mitigation. Mission Plot, Apprentice die not in the pool, and it can only remove an upgrade die. These are just far too inconsistent, though if someone is actually running a mission plot with an apprentice I could see playing 1x as a prayer with some upside.

It isn’t too tough to find a character with 10 or more health, and as far as qualifications go for mitigation, that’s pretty good. In a deck that can boast all 10-health characters this card just says “remove a die.” Right now, the only way to remove two dice is with Vader Terror to Behold, OG Palpatine, or Palpatine, Unlimited Power when he has at least five abilities on him, which isn’t a huge ask, but might not have as much upside as Rout, though Rout has situations where it can’t be played at all (though Palpatine doesn’t have very many red partners to partner with who have at least 10 health. Wullf and Iden are two who work though).

People have been begging for this card to be reprinted and for good reason. Villain has been dominating the 0-cost mitigation game for quite some time (mainly because we haven’t gotten new cards in quite some time, but I digress…), but once upon a time this was the best 0-cost mitigation in the game. It’s back, and as long as it and Easy Pickings are both in rotation, expect to see a LOT of yellow hero across the table (and in your own hands).

As far as Blue Neutral goes, mitigation this reliable is hard to find. Remove a die showing damage for 1, just have to spot blue. It’ll be a staple in mono blue decks and maybe even a 1x in decks with two blue characters. That it gives an extra damage when we have Shien Mastery is just a bonus, because decks that pack that card will be packing this one.

If there’s a reason we want to be damaging our own guy then obviously we would look here (like how we use cards that proc Aphra’s ability to draw a card), but otherwise this card is pretty awful as it isn’t just a “spot red” card, it’s a “spot a red character with enough health that this won’t completely bone us” card. This card is a C- in a Wookiee deck since you actually want to take damage and you can heal via the plot, but, like, I dunno – this card isn’t for me.

This card is all about how you play the game. To most of us mere mortals we’d never consider this card playable, but if you’ve ever played hundreds of games vs. HonestlySarcastc your interest should be piqued by this card. Joe loves his 2 Disrupt sides and loves making money. Free mitigation is free mitigation. This might be too rarely used to maximum effect, but in a three-wide maximum durdle deck I can see packing this heat as a one of. In reality this is probably an F, but the Joe in me wants to give it a C- so I did!

This is a functional Hasty Exit reprint, but it isn’t as good in my opinion. I am probably the Destiny player who values Hasty Exit the highest, I ran 2x at Worlds in 2018 and ran 2x at Gen Con and 1x at Worlds in 2019. I’m a huge fan, and one of the reasons is that it can take out any damage die for free if we control the battlefield. The tradeoff with Survival Instinct is that it can only remove dice showing 2 or less, but it can remove non-damage dice, which is huge. Specials are often worth 2 or more damage, and this can also remove a back-breaking 2Resource side. I think once Hasty Exit rotates it will see equivalent play, and while they’re both in the meta people will pick based on meta.

This is a card you have to evaluate as only being in decks with cards that put resources on them, because you literally can’t play the card without them. In those decks I think this card could be as high as an A+, especially if you’re talking about the supports like Improvised Explosive that come in with 2 resources as a timer that this helps tick down. I downgraded this to a B+ only because I think those decks will be few and far between, though this combo seems amazing in Ewoks.

Uhhh, sure. If you’re playing all grey characters you might play this, but otherwise you’re not.

If you’re a fast deck this card can really help you deal with things like Entourage and Vader’s Fist, as well as any number of strong upgrades and supports. I think that any super aggro deck that doesn’t want to lose a character too early, and runs out of things to do against big support decks too often, then this card is a nice BF to choose.

This one has some upside, but the fact that your opponent gets to choose where the damage goes is really bad. It’s great late game when they only have one character, provided you can hit a big die side, but otherwise I think character dice are skewed too low to make this very strong, even though this will blow some decks out enough that you might consider packing it if the meta is full of big character dice (and this one might be).

This card is the mirror of the Red Hero staple Suppressive Fire. I love this kind of design when two cards are very similar but have very different abilities for their respective affiliation, but these came out too far apart in my opinion. Villains will be happy about this card, but I think Suppressive is better. Sometimes it was best to just remove a die even though it didn’t roll damage, and Viper Probe Droid can’t do that. But, any mitigation card that doesn’t cost you an action is a solid A in my book, even if it has to be on table first.

This card is just solid, and if piloting is as big as I think it’ll be we should see this card quite a bit.

Okay, my wrist is going to fall off so I’m going to stop. I hit all the ones I wanted to, and my plan was to always skip the two Anakin/Ahsoka mitigation cards. If you’re really wondering, those are both Fs.

Be sure to tell us what you think about these mitigation cards, especially which of these get an A in your gradebook!

Thanks for reading, and enjoy brewing with Covert Missions!!

BobbySapphire