Today we investigate what the new card pool can do for baddest dude in the galaxy. This is not currently a tier one deck and I won’t pretend it is. It is, however, something powerful that has really exercised my deck building skill. I think its a good example of my thought process when trying to make a team/concept work.

This is an ongoing series of revisiting old characters with new cards. If you missed the previous entries you can check them out here: 1, 2.

Darth Vader, Sith Lord

Big Daddy Vader, OG Vader, Dark Helmet, whatever you like to call him, is arguably the most iconic character in Star Wars. It is somewhat sad that he isn’t played anymore, it just doesn’t feel like Star Wars without him, ya know? I tried my best to make him the most powerful force user in the Destiny universe but my results have been mixed. I worked tirelessly for hours trying to make Vader and his old pal Battle Droid aka Roger a team to reckon with. Here is the fruit of my labor.

According to the DB this is my 9th draft and that’s not counting random swaps I did on TTS. This version of One Punch Vader is a two trick pony. First trick is to ready Vader by sacrificing roger to the cause with The Price of Failure and the 2nd trick is to Rise Again after you’ve gathered a bunch of resources from the ready unless you happen to murder all of your opponent’s Younglings, that works too.

The biggest draw to this deck is being able to play a turn one Maul’s Lightsaber pretty reliably because of Profitable Connections. Between the two copies of Maul’s Saber and two Lightsaber Pull you should reliably hit it. Another one of the good draws that this deck can have is playing two 2 cost upgrades on turn 1 from Respite.

Aside from enabling strong turn 1s Respite might need some further explanation as its a “bad card”. Cards like The Price of Failure and Rise Again are so important to the deck’s power level that its helpful to draw a card and turn Roger’s die into an auto resource. Respite is a card I’m totally happy keeping in my opening hand even when I have no other cards since you’ll be drawing a new card and you’ll get the resource benefit. A card that is of a similar role is It Binds All Things. That card is similar in that its good early for resource production but bad late. They both fall into late game “dead draws”. In order for you to get the benefit of Binds you’ll have to play upgrades into it which is generally fine but sometimes you want to play for a Rise Again which will want you keeping your resources.

I had this desire to get more from Roger by leveraging cards like The Best Defense and/or Crash Landing to make his health an extension of Vader’s. The problem you run into is the order in which you draw your cards, drawing cards like that after you have used The Price of Failure will make it so you end up drawing dead cards. Of those cards I prefer Crash Landing as its free but in addition to the problems stated above using those cards will occasionally get your opponent to go after roger first. This might not necessarily be a bad thing and when I play this deck again I’ll test Crash Landing some more.

You could forego the Rise Again plan and go for something more aggressive with cards like Tactical Mastery, but that has the same problem of it being a blank when Roger dies. In a more aggressive deck the savings of It Binds All Things could be worth it, it would allow you to play more expensive offensive events like Endurance and Lightsaber Throw. I’ve been talking to one of our Patron’s JT-Money about this deck and he’s abandoned the Rise plan. He’s playing a spicy one in As You Command which works really well with Vader’s 2 disrupt which certainly would give you some consistency in the later part of the game. He’s also playing Trust Your Instincts a card I’ve tried. That card is great in theory especially in the early turns but I didn’t like its since its bad later on, at that point in the game you’ll have enough cards to reroll with. I don’t you can afford too many value cards like that but I could be wrong. Vibroknife is something he’s been rocking but I tried it and didn’t love it.

I chose B’ Omarr Monastery as my battlefield because sometimes you get mitigated to hell and you can claim to get some value from Maul’s Saber, Ancient Lightsaber and even Roger’s modifier. In reality this deck is incredibly slow and you probably want a battlefield that isn’t of a high impact, this one is pretty good for you and generally low impact for your opponent. Another option can be Secluded Beach which is really only going to be live vs 5 die Villain but its very good there.

Not everything is roses for this deck. It’s bad vs the best mitigation. If your Vader dice ever get Easy Pickings you’ll cry yourself to sleep. The best thing that came from playing this deck is the discovery that Probe is the absolute nuts in this format. With Vader’s ability you can often get two cards from your opponent’s hand. I found this deck is also bad vs big indirect damage decks since you only have a total of 19 health.

Is this deck going to win a Regional? Probably not. Is it really fun to play and has a great surprise factor? You are damn right! It’s possible that someone with a perfect 30 card decklist with a greater understanding of how to play the deck in every match up can make this work. If you god roll with this deck it has an amazing ceiling that can make your opponents tilt harder than a… Tilt a Whirl(I got nothing). I think something like 14 damage is possible when you hit the nuts. In reality any reasonable opponent will mitigate the first Vader die. I’ve moved on for now but if I ever play against something janky on TTS and am bored I’ll bust this out for the lolz.

Thanks for reading and as always,

THAT FEELING WHEN YOUR OPPONENT PLAYS EASY PICKINGS

-NJCuenca

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