On January 26th, Games and Stuff hosted the Maryland Regional. After 10 hours of rolling dice and a little Top 8 snafu I was lucky enough to win the 70 person tournament. I was piloting eSnoke/Rebel Traitor/Ciena Ree. I’ve been testing on eSnoke/<something>/<something> combos for more than a month and had thought I’d settled on eSnoke/Ciena/Executioner, but after some last minute grinding with the other ABG guys realized that Traitor + Mind Trick was better against the field. If you’re looking for a deck that can take down Snoke/Traitor/Ciena though, I highly recommend looking at eSnoke/Ciena/Executioner. Original, Manten, and myself were all on slight variations of the same list which we’ve got posted for Tester Tier and up Patrons. Onto the games!



Truth be told the entire day is a little blurry in my memory, I usually take notes on who I play and what decks they ran but this time I completely forgot. I scrambled to write down what I could remember in the car ride home and here’s what I can say with certainty.



Round 1 – Dave – Rex/Aayla/AR



First match of the day and I see something I’ve never tested against. Combine that with my strict “I only own villain cards” policy and it makes me shaky against non-meta hero decks. My opening hand had Fist and some mitigation so I liked what I saw and was feeling pretty confident. He played the first turn perfectly, mitigating both my Traitor and my Ciena dice to prevent any real resource generation. AR was used to call in Black One which landed a TLT, Dorsal and R2 Astromech on turn 2. At the end of turn 2, I was completely out of mitigation and he went on a tear with Black One reactivating, hitting the special side 3 or 4 times in a row, and then finishing out with the 2-Ranged side. Turn 4 he attached BB-8 for a free reactivate that I didn’t see coming and finished me off. I’d like to think it was close, but it really wasn’t.



Result: Loss

Record: 0-1



I’ll admit I was a bit down after my round 1 loss but there was nothing else to do but try to grind out a spot in the cut. I knew I needed to go at least 5-2 to make it, but with a Round 1 loss my strength of schedule could vary wildly and I figured I’d need to win the next 6 to stay alive.



Round 2 – James Chang – Sabine/Cody



James had made a meta call on Sabine because he figured everyone would be on mill this weekend. Sabine into a deck that can force you to activate is pretty rough. When he didn’t roll out 9 damage in the first turn I felt like I was in good shape. Details are hazy but I believe I got a Fist down turn 1 or 2 and cleared his mitigation with FILP and Probe. From there it was just rerolling to get focus on Snoke.



Result: Win

Record: 1-1

Round 3 – Tyler Flockton – Tarkin/Snoke



Tyler is one of the south Jersey/Philidelphia guys I believe and I’d seen him at a few tournaments before. He was running Tarkin/Snoke with Holocron + a few force powers/supports. By the time he was able to get Force Wave down though I was firmly ahead and his ramp wasn’t able to keep pace.



Result: Win

Record: 2-1



Round 4 – ????? – Luke3/Kit/Solidarity



Unfortunately I’m not sure on my opponents name here. Anyway this game started like magical Christmas land for me. My opponent rolled in Kit first, then I forced him to roll in Luke3 with Traitor. I hit the resource and since he had to activate Luke next I took 3 resources before he could mitigate. Not having anything great on the dice he rolled in I think he played It Binds All Things or discarded to re-roll. I played Friends In Low Places and took Caution out of his hand seeing he had 2 more events, Guard and Overconfidence, and a Luke’s Lightning Rod. He played Luke’s Rod since none of my dice were in the pool and he had nothing to do and I Probed the last 2 cards from his hand. When you’re playing Solidarity and you lose Guard, Caution, and Overconfidence, that’s a massive impact on your future turns. This sequence of events is one reason why Rebel Traitor is so strong. It seemed completely fine and even correct for him to roll in Kit first but doing so denied him playing an upgrade that turn and eventually cost him his entire hand. With no way to interact with my dice I was able to put down a Hover Tank with TLT, resolve it, and reset it all on Turn 1. The next two turns after he rolled out a character I’d force his second one in and then Mind Trick him and by the end of the 3rd or 4th turn the game was done.



Result: Win

Record: 3-1



Round 5 – ????? – Han/Qira



Again, not sure of my 5th round opponents name, and I wouldn’t go so far as to hazard a guess. This game was quick and dirty, Han and Qira run fast and hit hard. Hover tank with an Arc Caster came down turn 1. This game really came down to his lack of Hyperspace Jumps and after 3 full turns Han-Qira doesn’t have enough health to stand up.



Result: Win

Record: 4-1



Round 6 – Paul Ethridge – Dooku/Talzin

Paul’s a great guy and we’d recently played a match on stream at PAX Unplugged this year. Unfortunately for him one of the main advantages of Dooku Talzin is being able to put Force Speed on Talzin and resolve it to activate Dooku and resolve his dice immediately. Knowing this whenever Talzin is showing a Special on Force Speed, you force Dooku to activate with Traitor and it effectively removes that combo. Turn 1 I had the perfect opener with FILP, Probe, and a Fist. He never saw any Witch Magicks in 3 or 4 turns and the game was done.



Result: Win

Record: 5-1



Round 7 – Jacob Brandon – Aphra/Executioner/Executioner



Jacob and I have known each other for many years from the competitive Malifaux scene. The last time I’d seen him we’d gone to Manchester for an International Team tournament on different US teams. Their team won and we never heard the end of it. Luckily I’m better at Destiny than I was at Malifaux. This game was incredibly tight, he opened with 0-0-0 and after a FILP I knew he was holding BT-1. I kept him off resources so he wasn’t able to play it turn 1 and managed to put down a Firespray. I’m never really sure who to go after first in this match up but he ended up taking 4 shields Turn 1, 2 on Aphra and 2 on an Executioner, that made my decision real simple. I was able to kill both Executioners before losing a character and while it was still insanely close i pulled out the win with the Firespray.



Result: Win

Record: 6-1



That did it! I’d firmly made the cut based on record and didn’t have to worry about SoS. I’d finished 4th in Swiss overall. After they announced the Top 8 there was a bit of a kerfuffle though. The TO’s had accidentally valued byes at 1.5 wins instead of 1. This caused a big reshuffling of everyone that was 5-2 and took almost an hour to resolve. The lesson here, use FFG’s Tome software and post the standings every round. It kind of sucks for large tournaments but you avoid all of these kinds of situations. If the standings had been posted every round this would have been discovered Round 2 instead of after Round 7



Top 8 – Paul Ethridge – Dooku/Talzin



Paul was my round 6 opponent and while he wasn’t looking forward to playing my deck again, these two matches were the most fun I had all day. We were both a little manic, extremely happy about making the cut, and while the play was competitive, it was also friendly and fun. Exactly what I look forward to at large events. The details were pretty similar to our round 6 game, I was able to keep him off of Force Speed plays and huge No Mercy swings long enough to grind him down with Hover Tank+TLT both games.



Result: 2-0 Win

Record: 8-1

Top 4 – Nathan Bastanzi – Vader/Greedo



I’d dodged Vader all day but had gotten lots of practice vs Manten the previous night with it. He’d whopped on me but it was always pretty close so it felt like a coin flip as long as the person running Vader is a top tier player. I can say with certainty that Nathan knows exactly what he’s doing and is a top tier Vader player. Game 1 he got the battlefield and ran away with the game. Nathan put down some upgrades and was able to Rise Again before I was able to Probe it. He started by focusing on Snoke and eventually moved on to Ciena and then Traitor to win Game 1.

Moving on to Game 2 I was able to start with Theed and put down a Fist. The was the closest game we had for sure. Nathan again targeted Snoke first but with Fist down so quickly I was able push enough damage to put him on the ropes. He never found Rise Again and the last turn of the game was me rolling out the Fist and hitting the 4-ID/1R side twice naturally which was enough to kill him. The kicker was that he was holding At Odds in his hand, teched in specifically for Fist dice. If I had hit any other side either time we would have had another turn.

Game 3 Nathan wasn’t able to find any upgrades and through Probe/FILP didn’t have a whole lot of re-rolls. Forcing Vader to resolve his shield side is probably the best case scenario for me and I was in a great position all game. Hovertank + Arc Caster came down early and through use of the specials I was able to kill Greedo before he saw Price of Failure. Around turn 3 or 4 Vader was on 10ish damage and he started the turn with 4 resources. He immediately used the Theed PA which to me said “I’m going to play Rise Again right now” I rolled in the Traitor, forced him to activate Vader (still with 0 upgrades) and hit the disrupt side. Snoke’s PA removed 3 resources and Rise Again was firmly out of his grasp. From there I was able to get through the shields and eventually bring down Vader for the win.



Result: 2-1 Win

Record: 10-2



Top 2 – Manten (aka Cody Williams) – Snoke/Ciena/Traitor



This is where playing on a team with some of the best players in the world really pays off. One of ABG’s long term goals is to get our entire team to Worlds this year. While the lottery will get lots of people in, the only way to be sure is to win a Regional or place in the Top 2 at a Nationals. Since Cody already has a Worlds invite we shook hands and he conceded to me. Cody is currently holding onto the trophy for “safe keeping” until we play out our mirror (Cody and I have a 2 card difference in our decks) and decide who really won the whole thing.



That’s it, after an exhausting day I had planned to take the bus from Philly back to NYC and then try very hard to stay awake on the subway back to Brooklyn. It didn’t work out that way though due to some annoying traffic in Baltimore I missed the last bus out. On the plus side if you ever win a Regional and crash with Original (aka Drew Warren) he’ll make you cheesy eggs in the morning.

