Luke and Rey have been around since the beginning of Destiny, but it was only recently that they began seeing play as a viable team. The majority of my time in the SoR meta has been spent with Luke/Rey, to varying degrees of success. At the high-point was a 2nd and 1st place finish at two of the 32 person events at Evergreen Tabletop Expo and a handful of high place finishes at smaller casual tournaments. On the low end was my inability to secure a Store Championship win with the deck, getting nudged out by Poe/Maz and Vader/Raider whenever I got matched up against them.

Store Championship success (or failures) aside, I still love the deck and thoroughly enjoy playing it. I gravitate to decks with interesting combos you can pull off and you can build Luke/Rey to have quite a few fun combo turns. I also love seeing the underdog win, and, outside of Poe lists, Hero has always been Destiny’s underdog.

Yet with the 1.4 Rules Reference update Luke/Rey doesn’t feel like quite the underdog any more. Those Poe/Maz and Vader/Raider decks have to play a little more fairly now that they can’t use Fast Hands on their heavy hitters, and Luke/Rey got a significant buff with the rules change on My Ally Is The Force (if you use it on a Focus side that die can Focus itself – letting you flip a Luke Focus to 3 melee or a One With The Force Focus to 3 Ranged Damage).

My build has evolved over the past couple of months as I strove to increase the deck’s consistency – interestingly the 1.4 update hasn’t had an influence on the deck beyond making it slightly more consistent. What has come out of it is a decklist that leans heavily on two primary mechanics – Rey’s action cheating and quick usage of Focus dice sides. I’ve included the build and written up how I use most of the included cards to pilot the deck to (mostly) success.

The Build

Rey & Elite Luke at Maz’s Castle

Upgrades (10 cards, 9 dice)

2 Force Speed

1 Force Illusion

2 Vibroknife

1 Rey’s Staff

1 Jedi Robes

1 Luke’s Lightsaber

2 One With The Force

Events (20 cards)

2 Caution

1 Guard

2 Trust Your Instincts

2 Heroism

2 Confidence

2 Deflects

1 Use The Force

2 Overconfidence

2 All In

1 Force Misdirection

1 Mind Trick

2 My Ally Is The Force

The Basics

This deck’s path to victory lies in tactical use of action cheating to get Luke’s dice resolved before your opponent can respond. The goal is to get Force Speed on Rey and get double actions off of its Special and Vibroknife to then roll out Luke and pray he roll something decent.

Mulligan for Force Speed and Vibroknife – regardless of how the Battlefield roll goes these two cards will be beneficial. If you haven’t found a Force Speed for Rey yet, activate Luke first – his draw mechanic might just find one for Rey that she can get on her before she activates.

Vibroknife and Force Speed

Rey’s bread and butter combo in this decklist. Knowing how and when to use these cards makes or break this deck, and I have personally seen some pretty bad use of them out on the internet. The most common mistake with Vibroknife is overwriting it with another Vibroknife at an incorrect time. Just because you can generate more actions doesn’t mean you should – extra actions are meaningless to any deck if you have no actions you can take or the actions you can take are weak. It is generally only a good idea to do the Vibroknife overwrite if it is going to help secure one extra resolve of Luke’s dice before he would be defeated. Otherwise look for a way to get the second Vibroknife down on Rey without an overwrite – it will help keep the damage up once Luke does go down.

Force Speed’s use is easier – use the Specials and don’t reroll if it comes up Focus. Force Speed goes on Rey, and only goes on Luke if Rey already has 3 upgrades or if she has been defeated. If you’ve managed to get two Force Speeds on Rey and have no slots left to put down a costed upgrade, overwrite the Force Speed. This will help keep your damage up and sets Rey up as a bigger threat once Luke goes down.

My Ally Is The Force and All In

These two cards are the sneaky damage in this deck and are usually what creates the big swings in the game. Once you’ve drawn into My Ally Is The Force you want to prioritize its usage before it gets removed from your hand. Once Luke rolls a 3 or a Focus side comes up (Force Speed, One With The Force, Jedi Robes or Luke) use My Ally Is the Force to either double the damage or use the Focus to find a damage side and then resolve your damage.

All In is used when you’re already showing at least 1 Focus dice to help find damage sides. Tactical use of your action cheating is necessary to maximize All In’s effectiveness. A common example of this is rolling in Rey and her coming out with a Focus and a Special on two Force Speeds. Next turn, you can resolve the Force Speed Special and know that you’ll have enough actions to activate Luke and use All In to resolve both the Focus and any damage that showed up on the board.

Both of these cards are downright devastating if used with One With The Force’s 2 or 3 Focus side. Again, be tactical with your action cheating and cards in hand. A great combo off One With The Force that you can force to happen is using a Force Speed Special to create two actions, play Use The Force to flip to OWTF’s 3 Focus side, and then All In to find 3 damage sides and resolve immediately.

Trust Your Instincts

If you don’t like to discard to reroll then you shouldn’t play this deck – you’re going to be doing it A LOT and need Trust Your Instincts to cheat in additional rerolls per round.

Generally you play Trust Your Instincts on Luke to reroll his dice, however, if Rey has two or more dice that will need a reroll AND has a Force Speed (or better yet, two) that didn’t come up Special, considering using it on Rey – you might find those Specials to allow you to roll out Luke without a chance for your opponent to control his dice.

Rey’s Staff and Luke’s Lightsaber

Rey’s dice are awful unless you give them a lot of help. Rey’s Staff and Luke’s Lightsaber are found in this deck to help bump up Rey’s damage output. Rey’s Staff is a real standout upgrade for Rey – its 3 unmodified sides bumps up consistently resolving the modified side on Rey and Vibroknife.

Luke’s Lightsaber is teched in to counter Imperial Inspection and as a stepping stone for One With The Force. The redeploy of regular Lightsaber is unnecessary in this deck, by the time you get to play Luke’s Lightsaber you’ll know exactly who your opponent is going for (hint, it rhymes with nuke).

Caution and Guard

Beyond being the action-cheat extraordinaire, Rey’s job is keeping Luke alive as long as possible. Just like all shielding and healing events, prioritize Caution’s use early in the round and early in the game. Loads of shields on Luke might frustrate your opponent enough to instead attack Rey, diverting their attention away from your heavy hitter.

Guard’s use is more nuanced. The modified damage on Rey and Luke’s Lightsaber are good targets, and if you can get scary dice off the table then you should gladly use up your modified damage to do so. Using up unmodified damage is a tougher call – only do it if it ensures one of your characters lives through the end of the round or it gets rid of huge damage. Unless your opponent has action cheating, make sure you bait them into rerolling as much as you can before using Guard.

Heroism

Hero Blue is all about sacrifice, sacrifice and more sacrifice. Heroism’s use is simple, try and disrupt modified damage and throw what you can at your character with more health. The exception to this rule is if your opponent is doing unblockable damage and you’ve got shields on your main character, in that case put the damage onto the shields just to get some use out of them.

Heroism, Rey and Jedi Robes combo nicely. If you can get the two shields from Jedi Robes on Rey you’ve set yourself up for throwing damage at her with Heroism without taking a big hit.

Overconfidence and Confidence

Overconfidence is most often used incorrectly by taking the risk and rerolling one of your dice and one of your opponent’s. That is almost always wrong, just target both your opponent’s dice to ensure one of them is removed from the board. An exception to this is if you’ve only got one dice to get rid of and need a second target, or if your character is soon to die anyway and Overconfidence is your last card in hand meaning this is the only way you’d get a reroll…then it might be okay to do the hail-mary attempt.

Confidence needs to be used quickly before your opponent rerolls. Target Resource sides, Focuses when they have nothing to Focus, Disrupt when they have nothing to Disrupt (or the loss won’t set you back) and Discard (again, when losing what is in your hand won’t set you back).

Maz’s Castle

You’re going to be controlling the battlefield in a majority of your games, so why take Maz’s Castle and not something stronger for the deck? Well, it is because this deck mills itself so hard that non-mill decks can often times switch to a mill strategy to get a win. This deck also benefits greatly from additional card draw to get all its trick in hand for the next round.

If you win the roll, only take Maz’s Castle if your opponent is running mill or if they have a battlefield that is just too good for their deck. Otherwise, throw those shields on Luke.

Pep Talk

By now you should know enough about the list to get out there and enjoy some Hero blue action. This deck is far from perfect, and you aren’t going to be winning every game. However, you’ll probably be bringing something a little different to your local scene, and more importantly I bet you’ll enjoy playing this deck!

Cut Cards

You’ll see some cards missing off this list you might find in others, such as Synchronicity. If it isn’t in this list, it was probably tried and found to have a major drawback. In the case of Synchronicity, it was too inconsistent except when you managed to find the dice for it you consistently gave your opponent an extra turn to figure out a way to get rid of them. Long story short, if it didn’t add to speed and consistency, the card got cut. But give this decklist a shot and then begin your own exploring!

For The Haters

Yes, I know a lot of you hate Rey and what she does and really want an errata to nerf her. You might have even seen me post my own angry noise about all that darn action cheating. Well right now, Rey’s actions just help Hero get around some of that pesky control that the Villain dominated meta brings to the table, and lets face it, Villain has a ton of good control. Without the mechanic we’d see even fewer Hero decks survive the current meta. So until the time comes that this deck or another Rey-based deck crushes the meta and results in stagnation, hold those angry calls for a Rey nerf.