What the heck is OTK?

For those who don’t know, here’s the definition of OTK:

In Destiny we’re talking about One Round Kills, but ORK has other connotations and the acronym OTK is ubiquitous enough among gamers that anything else would be misleading.

For all the talk about the 40-card deck article, sooo many people focused on the points surrounding the power of mill strategies. When I was writing the article I wanted to cover as many bases as I could, and I felt like I needed one more reason to push for the decklist expansion, so I set out to build another OTK deck that too advantage of drawing all 30 cards as soon as possible. In my first few runs with the deck I wasn’t getting the round one kill, and I don’t think this deck will win round 1 too often (though I have included a video of it happening to an unsuspecting opponent below). However it will go off and kill in one round, thus it fits the title. In general I try and go off round two, but round three isn’t out of the question.

I’m going to take you through all the separate engines and put it all together at the end. It’s on you if you want to skip through the end and judge it. This isn’t a random aggro deck you can just punch damage through with, it takes careful thought and required careful design. But, you do you.

The Damage Engine

The goal of the deck is to play Rigged Detonation as many times as possible. Given unlimited resources the deck is capable of playing the card 10 times. In reality, most decks are 30 health or under meaning we generally only have to worry about it six times, and we can even help ourselves out by resolving some damage dice when we roll them in rounds 1 and 2, especially from the Gungan Warriors.

It’s important to figure out exactly how many times we need to play Rigged Detonation to win the game. What’s our opponent’s total health? How many shields can they generate? Are they playing Force Illusion (most likely)? This is extra important in this deck because we may need to use Rebel to recur our draw-events in order to get through our deck, but if we need to do 40 damage, we can’t do that, so we have to just wait another round. Here’s how we play multiple copies:

These are pretty self explanatory, as we use these to cast Rigged Multiple times. Fond Memories needs a draw-event (and two resources to cover them both), but also lets us recur Long Con so it’s pretty amazing.

The Squad

One of my favorite things to say is “What an insane squad” when a random group of my friends are hanging out, or my worlds are colliding like my brother is at a bar with my friends and I’m not there. But, this is truly the most insane squad:

There are a lot of reasons I prefer this squad in a deck that’s trying to draw 30 cards in a round or two, any other deck could make a case for Yoda/Rose/Anakin, but this deck specifically needs resource sides, so Yoda and Rose and their specials are a non-starter. Two Gungan Warriors are clutch because Award Ceremony is spot red, and if either one of them get nuked early we’re fine. Anakin and Ezra provide the rainbow, but even more importantly they both have Discard sides to trigger Rebel. Anakin is also clutch with that triple resource side.

Threepio is an honorary member of the squad. He’s got four sides you absolutely want, and his ability can do a bunch of work, turning a 2 side into focus, damage or resources.

The Draw Engine

The major revelation that led to this deck actually winning games was the removal of Don’t Get Cocky. Since we actually need our opponent to have resources to go off, we can’t let them draw a bunch of cards they could play, thus depleting their resource count. As such, we had to add in Ancient Wisdom, which feels a little bad on paper, but it does just fine. The only thing this deck needs to do to “go off” is draw the entire deck, and Ancient Wisdom helps just fine, especially alongside insane events like Award Ceremony and Renewed Purpose.

The card I’m most proud of, though, is Tactical Aptitude. Enough that it deserves its own closeup:

This card trigger’s Ezra’s power action, and because most of the time we’re not going off until round 2, if we get it early in round one we’re drawing four cards for zero resources. That’s insane! There are a few key cards we event want to put on the bottom of our deck, so the “cost” of drawing a card is zero. Putting this on Ezra 2 is one of my favorite pieces of technology I’ve ever discovered (there are literally zero copies of those two cards in combination on swdestinydb).

Trust Your Instincts is pretty bleh at draw 1, but it’s free and we can take the Ezra reroll if we absolutely need it. It’s spot blue, but Ezra has the most health so that’s not really an issue. I usually just cycle it without actually rerolling because just about every die side on Ezra is clutch. Again we’re just trying to draw all of our cards so a free card that replaces itself is just fine.

The Resource Engine

Respite could go in the card draw engine because it really fills both slots. I’d love two of them, but it’s sort of a nonbo with Award Ceremony. If we draw Award Ceremony it’s best to have our guys exhausted, so when we draw into this later it’s a dead card. The real money maker in this deck is Long Con. Combined with Fond Memories we cast Long Con three or four times per game, and the first one we draw is a free reroll for as many dice as we need, which makes it clutch.

The Truces are the best of both worlds, they get us resources and our opponents resources, enabling Rigged Detonation. I don’t play Well Connected for the same reason I don’t play Don’t Get Cocky, we can’t really let our opponents draw a bunch of cards, but I have considered adding Maz’s vault since most of the time we’re going off in round two so if we can slam it down in round one it’s like a third Truce.

The Protection

Protecting our Discard die is pretty important, and making sure the coast is clear in this kind of combo deck is pretty important. We wouldn’t want to have to deal with Probe or anything, so two Friends in Low Places seems like a no brainer, but it’s possible we only need one.

I feel the opposite way about Scruffy. Since we’re handing our opponents resources, we need to make sure we take their upgrades and supports so that they don’t spend said resources (especially if we can’t get them to claim). I only have one because I really don’t want to spend two resources on this effect, and maybe there’s a better card to play, but we should be able to tell the coast is clear with FILP and maybe even snag their Second Chance or Force Illusion with Scruffy.

The Tricky Shit

So, how do we get our opponent to have five resources? Well, we have to give them to them sometimes.

I mentioned earlier that we couldn’t use Special sides to generate resources, it’s because we often need to “Fair” Trade our opponent over five resources. Remember that you resolve the one you’re Fair Trading so once we have four we can pull a switcharoo, and obviously we want to account for our Truces when we do this. We don’t need to even play Fair Trade if we win the game by getting them to 4, which is easy to do between two Truces and Outer Rim Outpost. There are two Fair Trade in the deck because it’s very important, we don’t want it to get FILPd, but also for us to Fair Trade our Five resources back if the math works out in our favor.

Tinker is to swap a die to Discard for Rebel, or, once we’re done using our Rebels, to swap that die to a resource to keep our engine cranking.

Hasty Exit is for giving them the battlefield if we’re somehow stuck with it, especially since it might be right to take our battlefield (more on that in a second). Because we have Hasty we can take our battlefield, we actually get to have a damage mitigation card, and we ensure we never have the battlefield again, even if we get stuck in a pass-pass situation. (This came up on Facebook, but for people who didn’t know, you can play Hasty Exit simply to give the opponent the battlefield even if there is no damage showing).

We play the Outer RIm Outpost to make it very tempting for our opponents to claim. Once we’ve gotten through our deck without Don’t Get Cocky there’s no reason for them not to claim, and the extra resource off of that claim can be huge for us.

The Masterpiece

This deck is pretty killer, and it’s really a nice exercise in what you can do with a Star Wars Destiny deck if you break free from the normal routine of taking actions and resolving dice. Our dice mainly don’t matter, we just want as many Resource sides as humanly possible. We want to draw our entire deck ASAP and we want to loop our Rigged Detonations and Long Cons with Fond Memories and draw them back with OP Draw Spells. Losing 2 or even 3 characters simply does not matter if the rest of the engine is cranking.

I’ve had the benefit of playing people who hadn’t seen the deck and didn’t know what was going on. Even when I tried to test with people who had seen the list, it skewed everything because this list really works best when it is an unknown quantity. However, I also think that if you’re smart about when you go off, and when you play your FILP and Scruffies, nothing can stop this deck. It’s super impervious to all sorts of issues that meta decks throw at you. Even discard isn’t that bad because of our recursion engine.

One thing I try to do, and you can see it in the video below, is that I do try and make it seem like I might claim the battlefield by resolving my dice. This makes opponents jump at the extra resource and card from Outer Rim Outpost, which only helps me win more easily.

I think this deck is crazy, and I’m kind of surprised nobody had come up with it yet because I’m not a wombo-combo kind of guy (Even though the one infinite-life magic deck I built got second at a pro tour once). Either way, I hope you enjoy it.

The Video

I have a few videos of the deck going off, but this latest one was my favorite. I’d lamented when I originally published it that I think a better pilot would be more successful with the deck. Nobody has really been into it so I worked on a bunch of math and how best to play it and the result was this gross Round One murdering of Zardra’s Built To Last deck. Please enjoy

Thanks for reading,

BobbySapphire

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