In my previous article I discussed the Aphra deck that I played at North American Champs at GenCon. I had hoped to have found a different deck but many of the decks I had tested were kept out the spotlight by one card:

During one of the nights leading into the tournament I had a dream…or maybe it was a nightmare? Call it what you like but the message of the dream didn’t need some high level Yungian to decode it’s message: FEAR Easy Pickings. Even my roommate had said to me “you seem to complain about this Easy Pickings card a lot, maybe you should play it?” And while I didn’t end up sleeving up one of the biggest blowout cards in all of Star Wars Destiny it did shape the one tenant that I was going to follow going into the event: The deck I played couldn’t be soft to Easy Pickings.

I unfortunately didn’t get to that realization fast enough and spend a bit too much time on decks that were weak to it. The Mace decks I tested were soft to it, his die is very good but the strength of his die is also what makes him weak to pickings – having two 2 melee sides is great in a vacuum but not in a heavy Easy Pickings metagame. Any heavy upgrade deck that can’t cheat in rolls is going to suffer the same fate unless it is able to vary its types or overwhelm its opponents with the amount of dice you play. Sadly the upgrade limit rule is quite punishing to upgrade dice spam. Jynn/ Cassian had some action cheating but when you didn’t draw it you could get picked, you would draw it and you’d roll badly (as an aside, this is what makes Jynn Blaster so good) or you couldn’t afford to play your action cheat cards AND play upgrades. That deck’s economy is really bad making you have to play a lot of questionable resource generating cards just to deal with Pickings.

Pre Gen-Con Testing in a Easy Picking Metagame

Our Testing meta favored 3 decks: Droids, Ewoks and Aphra (Coincidence that two of those decks play Easy Pickings and all of them are resistant to Easy Pickings? Nope). In the last couple of days we were doing a little more testing of Reylo because we were getting info from people saying that it was a serious consideration for them and that they knew people who would be playing it. Reylo is actually pretty good and I considered it for a few seconds after I completely crushed someone playing Aphra until the dreaded nightmare Demon reared its ugly head.

It’s not to say you can’t beat Easy Pickings with Reylo but why would I want to live in a world where I go into a tournament and give my opponents the chance to just pay one resource to end most of my turn? I’m not about that life although I do applaud the players who did well with Reylo. Reylo can reasonably compete with them because it has very fast starts, damage that can be dealt from Kylo’s power action and is quite great against non pickings draws. Because of the success of Reylo I will be taking another look at it and perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps it can compete against Easy Picking draws. I will say that if you do roll matching symbols in the first round and get picked I would put your chances of winning at something very low- it’s as if your opponent payed 1 to exhaust your character. Later in the game once you’ve loaded a character with Lightsaber’s you will have a lof of 2 melee sides that can be picked. The resource/tempo exchange in these scenarios is also devastating. In this scenerio Pickings can stop two cards for the round, with those cards costing about between 4 and 5 resources the tempo gain makes it one of the most powerful events in Standard.

Combating Easy Pickings

You can make Easy Pickings worse by:

Playing decks that roll in dice one at a time which makes you more likely to resolve dice before you roll in others. Playing a deck that has very few matching symbols. Play a deck with inexpensive dice so the tempo loss from getting picked is lessened. Do damage without the need of dice. Choosing to strategically re-roll dice that have a low chance of matching Resolving dice before re-rolling to reduce the chance of having dice that match Prioritize killing Yellow characters first.

When I chose to play Aphra I chose it partially because it fulfilled point 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the above list. The deck rolls in dice one at a time, has so many different symbols on it’s dice, its offensive threats are cheap and do damage outside of dice resolution. Ewoks excels at this last point and makes Pickings a joke although it does this for a lot of cards. I was lucky that I felt comfortable playing Aphra as it was a solid deck and things went relatively well for me.

Points 1 through 4 are all deck choice strategies that happen before you go into an event. Points 5, 6 and 7 are all in game choices that every deck should consider. In order to put yourself in the best spot against Pickings you have to hit all of those points.

Conclusion

While Pickings doesn’t always get two dice when it does it’s devastating. Even if you do play perfect sometime fortune will smile on your opponent and you will be sad. If it was banned things would open up and aggressive two character decks with matching symbols would be able to rise to the top. This might actually make a deck like Reylo too good but I doubt it. It’s a very swingy card that I don’t think they will print again. As a person who likes to makes decks to attack the metagame pickings is a card that I have to keep in mind and it limits what is competitive. It has obviously warped the metagame by making certain decks unplayable and making you have to play in certain ways just to avoid getting blown out.

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you have any questions/comments on social media or on here.

NJCuenca