There is a ton of additional time in our lives right now with the whole pandemic thing and you would think that all of the ideas would flood in and be all sorts of great content. Sadly, it’s only felt much harder to focus on specifics when it feels like the Destiny World, if not the whole world, is at a stand still. I remembered the days when I’d do the random musings during my drive and just talk about whatever came up in my head. I set aside a solid 90 minutes to just write and try to make some magic happen. There has been a lot of video content (Corona stuff) and I figured that I’d take a shot at doing it written, which is a bit harder due to my hands needing to keep up with my mind. Let’s see how it goes and I hope you enjoy.

I played in the $300 Standard event (Destiny) that Artificery hosted and it ran pretty well. I think a lot of people enjoyed the event overall and with Agent of Zion running it, things went quick and smooth, outside of the 35 minute time being right from his announcement and us losing a few minutes to setup and getting connected / deciding who is hosting. It felt almost like a real tournament where you internally yell at the organizers for not giving a couple of minutes to get to your seat and set up. If you’re jonesing for some play, I’d heavily suggest joining the League for the month of April. In general, I hope that they start running events again weekly or bi-weekly, especially now that most of us are hanging out at home far more often.

Let’s talk about some of the decks that I’ve seen during the event, and no I won’t be getting into the exact lists, but just the most important part, the lineups. There were a solid amount of different decks making the rounds and that even goes past the normal crew of Bane and the Trandoshans. We had 3 Trandoshan decks and if I’m not mistaken, only one of them made the Top 8, but honestly I only remember 4 of the other lists besides my own. If you told me prior to the event that Palpatine would be making an appearance and doing well, I would’ve laughed in your face. How would he ever make a comeback with all the aggro and Trandoshans running around?

I went undefeated through the entire event and I played against eKragan Gorr / Palpatine 3 two separate times during Round 4 and Round 5 so they were clearly doing really well to be in that position. It’s a really interesting concept due to the resource theft being quite debilitating to being able to both afford your own game plan and trying to mitigate to slow down your opponent’s. I’m not quite sure how well it operates in general due to only having seen it against me, but it is a place to look at if you still wanted to force Palp but haven’t had any luck as of recent.

Full Spectres and Valorous Kashyyk Spectre were a couple of other decks that I played against. Both decks seemed to be heavily predicated on using Kanan’s Lightsaber combos to get it’s consistent damage / action cheat kills and outside of that, it was often a crapshoot. I probaby should’ve separated them into their own paragraphs, but it’s too late. Full spectres damage was mixed but has some interesting tricks available and a slightly better removal suite due to Near Miss being available. Full Spectre wasn’t very good at tanking damage though in comparison to the Valorous Tribe Spectre deck, so keeping your KEY guys alive is much harder. VT Spectre on the other hand was really good at keeping damage off of their main target, but seemed to struggle much more in the early rounds due to only starting with 4 dice that weren’t very good and really needing to get a couple of extra resources going to get jump started.

I just realized that I never mentioned what I played. It was just Chopper Droids, I know, so much innovation. I’ve just played Droids for so long that it’s easy for me to play and know the situations even with rust and a bunch of new decks running around. We did a split at Top 4, but my Top 8 match was against the Spectre Valorous Tribe deck (eChopper, Kanan, Kashyyyk, VT) and against that deck you have to try to represent all of your damage at once if you can so that you can just one shot a guy and bypass the VT keeping them out of range. I did just that and had 8-9 damage and had the choice of taking out Chopper or Kanan and then it was pretty easy. The Top 4 split happened with 3 people of which I had all played against during Swiss (Trandoshans, Reylo, eKragan Palp).

Meta wise I think the average player believes that Trandoshans are unstoppable, but they actually aren’t. They definitely gatekeep out slow decks at times, so it increases your need to push enough damage fast enough to maintain pacing and trade a kill or be able to nullify enough of it with shields / removal to get the time needed. The deck is good, but if you think it’s unstoppable, you’re bad and it’s time to come to terms with that or at the very least just not knowledgeable enough to know that it isn’t. It IS very good though, so it’s not like I’m calling it some trash deck. Kill a Trandoshan quickly and life will be much more bearable.

Past that, I think there is still a lot of testing that needs to be done to really find out the best fits for a lot of the new stuff. There are some very sweet cards and options floating around that just haven’t been figured out. I’m a bit sad that Desperate Measures is still seeing play because it’s really hampering the overall viability of support based decks and that means piloting as well as trying to go deep with the Scoundrels too. I’ve had some enjoyable moments trying to play the Piloting decks and it can be super sweet at times and utter trash at others. Not to mention when you just get your vehicle obliterated and want to flip the table. Blah, all my hopes and memes of running 6 cost falcon and playing a bunch of stuff and burying my opponent in advantage isn’t allowed to exist right now. Curse you FFG Designers…. curse you!!!

My thoughts are winding down and it’s becoming harder to put the words on paper, I’m not sure where your inspiration is or what you’re doing, but there are many a people actually playing on Tabletop Simulator now and it’s been nice. At this point I’ve realized that I haven’t checked back in on the whole Player’s committee thing and how that’s been going, but with Corona likely in our future for a while, there definitely won’t be a Worlds event any time soon to “put an end” to the FFG organized play of Destiny.

Thinking about Worlds, I just want to eat some quesadillas and mozzarella sticks, which are my favorite at the Worlds Dinner. I did say that I was just going to rant and write so now that you are likely reading this around Lunch time, does that also make you want the beauty that is a chicken and cheese filled tortilla. YUM!!! Is Kragan going to be life for a lot of the new hot decks or will he fade away into obscurity? Will Krennic ever find his path or does he just cost “too much”. Where are the aliens that visit with the cure so that I can go to the grocery store and not have to worry about if I came home and will be sick 2 weeks later. We probably won’t get these answers any time soon, but I’ll call it a day for now. I’d like to believe that I can only ramble and be coherent for so long, but honestly it’s just that I want to get up and walk around after hitting the Publish button. Best of luck to all of you and stay safe and healthy!

~HonestlySarcastc