Before NOVA, way back in August, I was pretty high on Yellow Palpatine (with Watto). Previously, I’d been on Red Palp, with Wat, but felt outclassed against things like Droids and Ewoks. Red Palp ended up doing very well at NOVA in the hands of Jonathan Ruland who conceded in the top 4, up a game, because he had to catch his flight.

Between NOVA and worlds Palpatine really fell out of favor. It was bad into Droids and it was bad into Reylo. Ruland would go on to make a deep run with his Red Palpatine deck at worlds, but for the most part Palpatine decks really suffered at the main event because everybody was ready for it: ABG and NJCuenca added Scorched Earth to their villain 3-wides (one of Palp’s best matchups) and other villain blue decks were packing mind extraction; sleeving up Palpatine simply became a huge liability.

But, since the latest update to the Balance of the Force and Restrcited List, Palpatine has seen a resurgence, over the last three weeks Palpatine has won 3/6 Primes, and has accounted for over 40% of the final showdown decks (YOURDestiny incorrectly lists Palp/Motti winning Orlando, but it came in second). In Chicago this past weekend, the finals were a Palp/Watto mirror and there was another copy in the top 8. With droids still a thing, and Reylo a sound choice since it was one of the only decks that didn’t suffer a single hindrance from the Balance/Restriction, I would think Palp a terrible choice to take to a Prime. But, it keeps winning, so the real question is “why?”

For example, this is my top 4 match at the Rhode Island Prime the weekend before worlds. I lost in the finals to Chopper Droids, but this was my semifinal match against Palp/Watto, and exemplary of how I felt the matchup was:

Reach out…

To help me answer this question I started reaching out to the people who had success with Palp in this new meta. My feelings were that there were several things that allowed Palp/Motti to be able to contend with Reylo where Palp/Watto couldn’t – multi dice mitigaiton being the number one reason. For one, Red Palp can pack both Rout and The Best Defense, two cards that can remove multiple dice for just one resource, and on top of that Motti’s ability to remove dice allows any card to be mitigation, which can be really beneficial in keeping Palpatine at a low damage total early in the game, which can sometimes be difficult when you’re mulliganing for “the nuts” in terms of resource generation and ability spam.

Red Palpatine also has a hefty mirror advantage against Yellow Palp, which is another reason I suspected that version was doing really well, but more on that when we get to talking about Chicago. I want to start in Ottawa:

Ottawa Prime – Phillipe Paquin Champion

I love Philippe; he and his crazy Canadian crew drive down to New England for almost all of our Primes and Regionals, way farther than I would consider driving for anything – 6 hours! I get to see them quite often as a result and they always play tight, making the New England events extremely tough wins for anybody who attends. He was kind enough to send me an email with his thoughts on the deck, especially how he was able to defeat THREE Reylos in his championship run.

He told me he based his list off of Agent of Zion’s (above), and his thoughts on the Reylo match corroborated my own assertions. In his own words:

“Why Palp/Motti over Palp/Watto ? For the Reylo matchup, that I expected a lot (and I was right). While testing we found that Yellow Palp, couldn’t always win against Reylo. Sure he can, but because he doesn’t play that much control, sometime, Reylo can do a lot of dmg when you let them use their dice multiple times in a turn. On top of that, Palpatine main source of dmg come from Fatal Blow. Fatal Blow is really good, but in yellow it’s a bit hard to setup due to Rey power action.

Palp/motti felt way better because of his control. Clearly, Motti was most of the day a real MVP. His discard faces are pure money. They do tempo, allowing you to control a die, while attacking your opponent hand. The rest of control events are also really good in general. The best defense is also super effective in this deck.

Palp/Motti felt playable into all the main matchup I expected. Snoke MM, again because of the control, and Palp Yellow, which I expected a lot. My main concern was mill, but mill isn’t that popular usually. “

He made a bunch of changes to AoZ’s list, specifically adding Fatal Blow, which he said was an all star for him all day, and that he used Doubt over Forsaken because he never found himself with just one die in the pool. I’m surprised to see none though – he cited how he rolls in Motti first to get his ability online, but Motti can roll other sides that aren’t discard, and you may even want to resolve one of them, for example using the focus to turn his other die to discard, which leaves you able to Forsaken or resolve Motti’s die, but I’m always a big proponent of doubt so I can’t argue with its inclusion.

Philippe mentioned something else at the end of his email that I think is really important – he was able to beat a 4-LOM deck with Mind Extraction because Motti was able to discard it in the semifinal round. Having Motti to add to the other random discard sides in the deck allows Red Palp to have some nice game against Scorched Earth and people who hold Mind Extraction for a late-game kill shot.

Prime Week 13 Recap

Chris Mangold got top 4 at the Orlando prime with yellow palp, and because originally this article was just going to be about red Palp he was able to snag me the runner up list (below) piloted by Cody Barrick. And, while this list is a little different from Philippe’s he is packing both Fatal Blow and Rout, cards Philippe and I mentioned at having game into Reylo, respectively. Cody also included a Force Jump and cut a Forsaken, so had other similarities to the Ottawa-winning list.

Cody Barrick’s Orlando Prime Runner Up List

The Georgia winner ran Palp Watto, and he ran two Fatal Blows for the spikey damage. You can read his tournament report at the link in the previous sentence, but he played against Reylo twice, losing in swiss but winning the finals. He defeated Lake Quittenmeyer in those finals, and Lake’s Reylo build sounded odd, packing No Mercy as its spike damage card. This is the last card I would include in a Reylo deck for a number of reasons, but it’s especially bad against Palpatine since it’s more of a round 3 card, and you really need to kill Palpatine round 2 before he can Bacta Therapy out of range of a kill. Furthermore, several of the cards in Reylo are worth two damage or more, cards like Polarity, Power from Pain, Conflicted, and Steadfast to name a few, so discarding them to do one extra damage is just bad planning.

The Canto Casino is a really interesting call, and a really cool way to get some ramp going, especially with Watto’s dice. I would think we see a bit more of that in the coming months with Theed Palace more difficult to play because of the Restricted List.

Both of this Palpatine’s matches vs. Reylo were streamed, but I can’t find the video – it seems that Entourage didn’t archive them on Twitch and I can’t find them on YouTube. Including those here was my plan, so I am sad.

January 4th Weekend Recap

To see three Palp/Watto lists make the top 8 in Chicago really surprised me. I was already working on this article last week, but wasn’t expecting to include this section. For one, I thought the meta would heavily adjust to Palp, though possibly less so without anyone calling attention to it (I haven’t heard much about it, and there isn’t a lot of content out there these days). This is exactly what happened in Texas where zero copies of Palp made the top cut and it was taken down by Reylo. Louisville also saw no Palps in the cut despite several at the event (that was a crazy meta where the top 8 was: Reylo, Yoda/Leia, Snoke/Mando/Mud, Grevious/SM/Greedo/Droid, Maul/Mando/Retribution, Bo-Katan/R2/BTL (!!!), Han4/Jyn2 (???), and Red/Yellow Ewoks).

Here is the Palp/Watto deck from the Chicago Prime Champion, and in the decklist notes is a very in depth tournament report from DZ. I’m adding this just before bed on Monday so I’m not going to delve too deeply into his notes, but they provide a bunch of insight into why he took down the event (also important to note that he faced no Reylo decks).

Based on reports from our Patreon subs, Chicago had 9 or 10 Palpatines out of 42 players and Lousville had 7 or 8 out of 34. Those are pretty good, and similar clips, so to see Yellow Palp do very well at one of them but not the other is very interesting. Normally I think of Palpatine as something that slaughters Jank, and that was a janky top 8, but the Jank skewed aggro which could be why Palp struggled there.

In casse you’re interested in checking out the streams from these events, the Illinois Prime was streamed by Loth Wolf Pack, and the Texas Prime was streamed by AEGIS_Broadcasting.

I’ve been told there were NO traditional Palpatine lists in Texas, only a single Palp/Beckett list in the entire event, which makes trying to figure out where Palp sits in the meta even more difficult – One with a bunch of Palp but all did poorly, one with a bunch of Palp and three made the cut, and another with no Palp at all.

In Conclusion I think it’s a precarious time to run Palpatine, especially yellow Palp. I think that the Motti version gives you more play against the hate, but there are more silver bullets for Palp than maybe any other competitive deck, and I think that number will increase if and when Covert Missions drops.

If Covert Missions does not drop before LVO (there were some changes to the Upcoming page on FFG’s website and the 1/17 date is no longer confirmed – LOL), I can’t recommend playing Palpatine, but I heavily recommend being ready to face it. If playing Reylo, I would heavily test against the Motti version to see if its heavy mitigation can be beaten. If not it’s possible that spiking Motti and drawing Mind Extraction is a course to victory we would need to look at.

I hope this was insightful, and please share your feelings on both Red and Yellow Palpatine, and how to win with or beat these decks on Facebook, Reddit, and/or Twitter!

Thanks for reading,

BobbySapphire