For the third year in a row the Star Wars Destiny North American Championship will be played at GenCon in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Coverage of this event has been spotty at best; like most major events, if you’re not in attendance and want to know what’s happening your best bet is to follow along with people posting updates in Discord. However, at GenCon it’s even worse because the cavernous convention center has pretty rough data coverage. Last year YOURDestiny.dk roasted the US for not having coverage at GenCon, and that in 2018 we could have bad WIFI, but they must not have massive buildings built with lead over in Denmark.

This year, TheHyperloops have come to the rescue (at least in terms of streaming Destiny at GenCon)! We will have a stream table set up both Thursday during the swiss rounds and at least some matches of the top cut. I’m not sure if we’ll be the only streaming table at the event, but we’ll stream as long as they’ll let us; hopefully the entire top cut including the final!

This has been in the works for some time, and we’ve been working with other great members of the community to help bring you the best possible stream. Jackalmen Games is helping with the stream overlay, and a stream table with handcams might be on the… table. Jackalmen, along with Golden Dice Podcast, will be handling the off-site commentary (though this is subject to change and alteration), because we don’t want to ask anyone attending GenCon to not play in the main event, especially when there hasn’t been a major Destiny in the US in ELEVEN MONTHS.

We’re also working with a friend of mine and proprietor of SurlyGoodDesigns on Etsy to have oversized tokens for better viewing on the internet (if only he could make something to help with dice). The Destiny set is already complete, and he’s currently working on a set of oversized X-Wing tokens, because we’ll also have a stream table set up for X-Wing! The internet at GenCon is really expensive, and Destiny and X-Wing don’t overlap, so we figured why not?! SurlyGoodDesigns makes Destiny tokens and does plenty of custom orders at affordable prices, and the oversized tokens will be listed around the time of GenCon if not sooner.

Okay, let’s talk about the storylines going into the event.

1. Will Anything Be WTFBr0k3n?

As of this writing only 67/160 (42%) of Spark of Hope has been spoiled though more are imminently on the way. There is plenty of room for something to be absolutely broken, especially when the set will only be out for a month leading up to the event. I went on ArrowBrook Gaming’s Podcast last week to discuss content creator responsibility and hiding broken things, but not every player is a content creator (though it kinda feels that way sometimes), and it’s very likely somebody will be able to break a deck wide open. The main question is whether or not that’ll get shared.

The first GenCon featured a pretty broken deck that we were able to keep under wraps despite Joe winning 7 Store Champs with the deck; Rainbow 9’s utterly dominated, putting four copies in the top cut, including 3/3 by team TinyLoops, shout out to Tiny Grimes and BooHiss for NJCuenca who played emokids. The second GenCon also featured what we felt was a pretty broken deck in Millionaires, which not only won the event, but put four Loopers into the top cut where it only lost mirror matches on the way to taking down the entire event. Millionaires wasn’t the most secret deck in the world, but it certainly widely played, and there wasn’t a definitive list out there until after the NA Championship.

I’ll lament one final time that Spark of Hope will be legal at GenCon: we just had a new RRG completely shake up the meta, breaking apart the dominant Snoke/Watto/Fost deck that crushed UK Nationals in the hands of Greg Pike, setting up GenCon to be a real test of deckbuilding skill. Instead, we’ll never actually know what the Convergence Meta could’ve been like. To me, it deals a blow to the confidence in FFG – should I have even bought boxes of Convergence? The fact that a new meta dropping a month before the event doesn’t bother me, what bothers me is that we just got a new meta a few weeks before and didn’t get to play anything on it. This is, of course, exacerbated by the fact that the US hasn’t had a major event in a year, but what can you do?

Right now it seems like there is some potential for SOH to feature something truly overpowered, but with so much of the set left to be revealed there’s too much unknown.

2. What Will The Meta Look Like?

Over the past several months we’ve been playing Destiny in a world where three-wide support decks have seemed oppressive. Without Snoke to generate lots of resources players will have to look for other ways to power out big supports like Vader’s Fist and Megablaster Troopers. Since the nerf, many voices have cried out that Aphra will be the queen of the castle, and her pairing with Wat Tambor does indeed seem extremely powerful. Aphra’s droids are already very strong, and getting to resolve some of their dice an additional time is excellent. The fact that you can get extra resolutions out of powerful cards like Hailfire Droid Tank and Assassin Droid (with an extra ping) just buries its opponents with damage.

Two Wide decks classically struggle vs. Aphra because they can rarely get above 25-ish health, but Blue Hero is looking like the shield archtype with the drop of SOH. The new Yoda can carry six shields and protect an apprentice partner, which might be dope against the onslaught of indirect damage Aphra can output. Yoda even got nifty shield-adding upgrades in Jedi Lightsaber and Yoda’s Lightsaber. Jedi Lightsaber can also help power Qui-Gon Jinn, who is also a shield powerhouse. Shielding up Qui-Gon buffs his dice, which lets him resolve his own 2 Shield side for 3 when putting it on another character. This could be the kind of strategy two-wide blue needs to get relevant again.

For people who think that the Millpocalypse never happened, I contend that it’s never ended! While Three-Wide mill has lost a lot of what it can do to stay alive, General Leia mill decks haven’t lost any of their potency. Pair her with Lando, Cassian, or Yoda and you have a competitive mill deck that can end the game in just two or three rounds. The No Answer nerf means it’ll likely never get played in a top cut game, but you could power your way through the swiss rounds preying on people who refuse to discard the last card in their hand to save three cards off their deck. You can even play Leia three-wide with Ezra and Anakin, and its possible that her promotion to Admiral puts Leia over over the edge.

Personally, I think GenCon will be the wild west of Star Wars Destiny. I don’t think any deck other than Aphra will take up more than 10% of the meta unless something truly busted gets spoiled and pushed by content creators, and I think that’s fairly unlikely. There will just be so much to try and with nothing to copy people will really be on their own to take what they think gives them the best chance to win. It could be anything!

3. Who Will Win?

Look, it’s no secret that TheHyperloops have crushed the North American Championship in the two years it’s been run; first putting three out of four in the top 8 in 2017, including coming in First and Second, then last year when we put 5/8 of us in the top 32, four in the top 8 and three in the top 4, before winning the entire thing. Can we three-peat in such a short meta? Will another team rise up to crush us?

I don’t know but I can’t wait to find out.

See you at GenCon!

BobbySapphire