Warning! I’m amidst my recovery of cold sweats and fevers and therefore, I expect typos and the occasional lack of coherency. Most of you know by now that my actual knowledge of the Star Wars Universe is dictated by what I’ve picked up on the mean tournament streets of the Star Wars Miniatures and Star Wars Destiny games. Bala-Tik is a boss like no other, FN-2199 is the most bad ass traitor hunting trooper, Snoke is the best assistant (but actual crime boss) that ever had his own Throne Room???, and the C-3PO + R2-D2 duo had untold power when they activated their wonder twin power rings! So I’ve been told that none of that is factual and that Jedi Weapon Master isn’t the ruler of the universe with all his clone brethren, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Today, I want to take a look at an interesting card that has some power and see if we can explore some potential deck lineups that may have some promise.

A 0 cost plot with the pretty explosive effect of resolving a character die at + 1 value. My main man Snoke used to deal 1 damage to resolve a die for +2 value, but it’s hard to complain some times and whilst we have another restriction, we do gain some other freedoms in the process. The hard part is that we have to have exactly 2 characters and fit them into our team building costs with those pesky Sith and Apprentice Sub-types. I’ve done the search myself and cropped the useless stuff out in order to make life that much easier.

I’ve color coded it and as you can see, the number of Apprentices that we have access to are severely limited. Starting with 4 dice would be preference, but not everything is created equally so I won’t initially kill off the concept of a 3 die starting deck, but I absolutely refuse to consider a two die deck. Broken down into elite (*) and non elite costs we have:

Anakin – 10

Kylo3 – 11

*eAnakin – 13

Kylo2 – 14

*eKylo3 – 15

Maul2 – 16

*eKylo2 – 17

*eMaul2 – 20

For me, I’d immediately start looking at the key numbers which are 13, 15, 17, and 20. 20 is a tough nut to crack, but know that we’ll be looking at him again in the other section because he is both Sith AND Apprentice and based off of that, we could see that he could pair with 1 die Anakin and in general a 20 point character doesn’t usually get access to a 4 die starting lineup. I’ll be breaking into pictured based line ups once I start to pair them together so if you can’t remember what some of these guys die sides or abilities are, fear not and just keep reading.

I tend to work from the top down when looking at pairings because seeing limited options is much easier than dealing with the large assortment. 20 Point Maul as an apprentice doesn’t have a single Sith to pair with because the only 10 point Sith happens to also be named Maul!!! Working our way down, we are at 17 points for elite Kylo2 and 16 points for 1 die Maul 2.

There is exactly one pairing to have a 4 die start using eKylo2 and that is with our good ol buddy Dooku. 21 Health isn’t a ton to work with and considering that once one of them is defeated that we’ll take 1 damage from the plot, then it’s actually only 20 Health. What we lost in health, we’ve gained in outright viability with the plot. There are a lot of 2 Melee sides just itching to become a 3, and if we ever roll out into something like a 2 Melee and a 1 Resource then the opponent will really have to think about what die to remove since we could pump the other one and we all know how much I love a good 2 Resource side. This pairing has been seen a little bit, but it’s mostly been long gone as Rainbow had begun to dominate the tables. We’ve been seeing much more Reylo and Palpatine though and if that continues into the Covert Missions format, then Kylo2 could return to throw a wrench into things. Maul2 can also pair with Dooku if you’re willing to gamble a bit more on his (Mauls) Power Action and only 1 die being more useful than Kylo2, but that doesn’t seem to be fruitful unless you can jam a Maul’s Lightsaber early. Next up is Kylo3 taking up exactly half of our Teambuilding points at 15 cost:

This 30 point duo comes in hot with a solid 23 Health, but we’ve arrived at a new problem, which is 5 die sides that don’t actually work with Rule of Two. In general, it would be really hard to find myself rerolling either of their special sides looking for a side to pump up, but I’m also trying to think of how i’d feel on the other side if I wanted to mitigate the damage, but then how the heck do i leave them with a 2 Resource or the most disgusting 3 DISCARD!!! Using a card to mitigate a two damage only to have 3 discard thrown back at me is already giving me cold sweats… or that might be the fever coming back, but I’m definitely not looking forward to that decision. I’m pretty sure that I’d let the 2 damage in to make sure that I don’t lose my entire grip of cards. After awaking from that nightmare, I now think that having Kylo go out first could be preferential in that he’s most likely to show damage or at least 2 sides that want to see the pump, but on the other hand, wouldn’t I want to find the mighty two discard side early on in the round…. hmmm. Nothing is as scary as having 2-3 cards nuked from your hand from a single die, so there is already promise here, even if it looks odd. We do have another mighty guy to pair with Kylo3 though and that is the original old Maul in his new 10/14 decreased point costed body after balance of the force surgery.

The scary part here is that Maul comes in with some built in “protection” for his dice in the form of you getting to snag an opponent’s die as well in the process, usually anyways. Anyone who has played old Snoke knows how dangerous a control side (disrupt / discard) is when they they get pumped up so maybe if you don’t want to give up on pumping up damage, then this other #2 card makes sense (seriously, all 3 are card #2, WTH is up with that…. now did you notice that Kylo2 and Dooku3 were both #1… yeah, go scroll up!!)

Anakin is one hell of a lonely guy. No one wants to pair up with him as a 4 die start that can’t already go with Kylo3 instead. It’s okay though, he’s fine fighting with a handicap though and get’s to play ball as a one die character with the big boys… okay so the little voice in my head says that Kylo3 is only 11 points for one die and he can fit with Dooku2, Palp2, and Palp3 as well. Fine fine, but you know what Kylo3 can’t do… he can’t fit with elite Maul2 or be 3 die with non-elite BANE!!!

Oh yeah baby, the power of the sith coming right at ya. Both bane and Maul come in with large amounts of health and pack enough punch that your opponent will want to mitigate their dice. Maul2’s best partner is largely disputed, but maybe Anakin can take up the mantle now and you weren’t getting a 4 die start with Maul anyways, so what’s the difference now??? When Maul rolls out, an opponent will usually wait for one of his dice to be Power Actioned or resolved so that they can mitigate the other one, and that now puts them in the predicament of having to likely deal with Anakin’s die too otherwise he’s 3 Melee, 3r1 Melee, 2 shield, 2 Resource when pumped with Rule of Two so they’ll have to choose wisely when they have limited removal options at hand. Bane can start the game with a Force Storm or Shien Mastery by spending the 2 Resources (and his ability) which should add another die to your opponent’s Mitigations Most Wanted list.

Will any of these be Tier 1, who knows, but any time you can get “free” pumps then there is a least a conversation to be having and some testing to be doing. The last couple 3 die pairings seem very feasible as options of things to terrorize your opponent with. Let me know how it goes and your thoughts as we all wait for Covert Missions to drop.

Separate Note: Don’t Caulk your faucet to your sink or you might be an A-hole. Photo’s and story below for context.

~HonestlySarcastc

A few days ago I was replacing the bathroom sink faucets in my house, a “job” that shouldn’t be too hard provided that you have the proper tools, which i have. They were old and janky and quite frankly, didn’t even seem like proper fits for the actual sinks installed. I take all of the clutter out from under the sink and expect to be in and out in 10 minutes. I was not ready for this at all. Beat up shut off valves that i had to hold with a wrench, rust as far as the eye could see, and solid METAL supply lines… man I’ve never seen that before. I use my basin wrench to try to take off the of faucet nut and that thing won’t move. I spray some magic stuff to try to kill the rust and i scrap around the nut to get the rust off, but still nothing. I buy a “basin buddy” which is a sweet tool that works with a socket wrench to just make life easy and take it off… still NOTHING. I have two options, i cut just destroy the faucet and risk damaging the sink, or i could just try to cut / destroy the plastic nut… clearly i’ll go for destroying plastic over metal every day of the week. I drill through the plastic nut in multiple places only to find some other stuff. 1st Image. “Sarah” in the picture is the softish metal supply line and the white plastic nut with drill holes and some other material behind it.

On the top of this next image you can see that some asshole did something like caulked the faucet to the hole. I had protection and a face mask on, but this was a nightmare and I probably got sick in the process.

On the next episode of “My Little Old House”… follow the maze of Comcast cable wires!