Another Star Wars Destiny top 16 at the Nova Open with Aphra, yay. Here’s the list for your perusal.

The changes to the list from the Gen Con Top 16 go as follow: I swapped out 2x Fickle Mercenaries for 2x Hailfire Droid Tanks. In testing Fickle proved awkward into Jabba and Palp/Watto. Both those decks could kill a droid with Desperate Measures and then steal a fickle. On top of that they would just have a ton of money a lot of the time and you’d have to wait a while into the round in order to play it which made it a much more unreliable die or at times you couldn’t even play it which made it an unreliable threat. Being behind on the board happens against Satine a bit and while it hadn’t bit me in the butt yet I suspected it could be a problem. Having said all of that Fickle is always fantastic into all the low resource decks like the mirror and Reylo. When you are ahead in or at parity against big resource decks it can still be great but I had experienced the negative side of variance in testing. I did a little experimenting with Megablasters and Umbaran Hover Tanks but I didn’t love any of them. I tested them a little but I made the Droid Tank call mostly on feel. In hindsight I wish I had retooled things a little and played Megablaster Troopers, the card is so insanely powerful and I really want another threat that can win the game by itself.

Crash Landing came in for A Sinister Peace. I was mostly happy with that although I did play against Jabba a bit but the rest of the deck was tooled to beat Jabba so it didn’t hurt too much. I suppose crash is even worse vs Satine now that they are playing Hired Muscles. When they show a 3 for 1 its real awkward to crash that and save them a money. I didn’t play against Reylo but two made the top cut which makes Crash look pretty good still. I didn’t play against Chopper or Han either but it was out there. I was pretty happy with them, they never feel too bad but sometimes they can clog up your hand.

I took out Coruscant Police for ID10. ID10 felt better to me by a hair. The utility of being able to take a card from your opponent’s hand seemed phenomenal into decks like Jabba and Satine, being able to focus dice seemed great as well. With Hired Muscles, Entourages and Fickles everywhere I could see myself going back to the Police… especially with Satine players having a better idea of how to play the match up.

I took out an Act of Cruelty for an Electromagnetic Pulse. The Pulse was way better than the act and I would have loved to have a second. The Act is nice to keep people honest but It seems like that card loves me or something because it’s always in my opening hand. At that point you have to reroll which is fine but then you aren’t threatening it later on. Act was very good into the one Palp/Jango deck I played and its our get out of free from jail card vs Ewoks so its hard to cut but man it just seems like I never draw it at the right time and I’m generally not rolling well enough for me not to discard it.

I felt this tournament had a harder schedule for me than GenCon, we talked a bit about this on our Podcast Monday. GenCon provided a couple of layups but the Sea was strong this past weekend and I played all solid opponents with meta decks. I suspect this is a product of a few things: First, the meta is a bit more defined now which will lead people to better decklists and second, the people who were there were there just for destiny. At GenCon you got a lot more Destiny tourists who were there playing a bunch of different stuff. Admittedly Menion’s Palp/Jango/Lightsaber Mastery deck wasn’t a Meta deck but any Palp Desperate Measures deck that’s 4-2 is meta enough for me.

My Swiss Match ups were 2 Satine, 3 Aphra(one of them being Double Executioner), 2 Jabba/Wat/Sentinel and 1 Palp Watto. My loses were to Drew on Satine and French Canadian guy in mirror. In top 16 I lost to Drew on Satine in two really close game. I could have made different decisions in both of those games with one mis-sequencing error being 100% incorrect.

While I’m relatively happy with my placement at Nova I’m somewhat disappointed with my play. I find this to be a positive and negative experience because I can point at stuff and say to myself “I need to work on XYZ.” At least its something that feels like I could have controlled. On the negative side I say to myself “WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU PLAYING LIKE SOME SCRUB YOU SACK OF SHIT.” My inside voice is kind of brutal sometimes. I’m also willing to consider that I shouldn’t of been playing Aphra at all but only a little. Platform made top 16 as well with his Jabba/Aphra/Wat. I beat Luke Magnuson on the spicy Aphra/Double Executioner in the last round of Swiss in a win and in situation. Had we not been paired there could have been 3 Aphras in top cut. One of my loses was to one of the French Canadians and that whole team seemed to be on Aphra. Not sure what happened to all of them but feel free to let me know since the guy who beat me played really well.

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you have any questions or comments on here or on social media. Take care and as always….

May The Rolls be with YOU!

-NJCuenca