Losing sucks, but in most games there ends up being a winner and a loser. When we get to the tournament level the odds become much worse since there ends up being only ONE winner in the entire event. I don’t think i’ll ever be use to losing, but I do know that you can’t win everything and that you’ll have to take your lumps and move on; I just don’t have to like it and i never will!! I don’t even want to write a tournament report when I win, let alone when i lose.

Prologue

I own a couple of cell phone stores and as most of us know, employees come and go and it tends to be the hardest part to maintain for a small business. I’ve been on the unfortunate side as of recent and have found myself covering many shifts and haven’t been able to dedicate nearly as much time to getting in reps / testing out new Way of the Force cards, especially leading up to Gen Con and NA Champs I wasn’t even sure if i’d be able to go, and I honestly probably shouldn’t have gone but the employees that I did have left covered for me and I thank them for that. So anyways, I’ve been testing out a lot of Snoke and Built to Last decks but none of them with enough reps to even feel remotely comfortable trying to put them on display at Gen Con. Most of the team has been testing out the 3 wide mill deck and had pretty much locked it in unless something better magically came up that was unbeatable. If you’ve listened to my podcast or vlogs you’ll know that I don’t like where Mill is at in regards to the rules being inherently against them in tiebreakers when it comes to TIME being called. I was pretty sure that the team deck was the REAL DEAL, but I just didn’t have the time to get to play it so I felt it made the most sense to take something I was comfortable with and hopefully from there I could pull it out since I’d be less prone to making a mistake. I made some YOLO adjustments to my DBS (Yoda Rainbow vehicles) list and figured I could hope for the best and learn to play it during the event.

The formatting is a bit different than you are used to. I just wanted to remove some of the white space. I was increasing the overall cost by running Hailfire Droid Tanks so the counter point I decided on was to run Hidden Motive so that my mitigation costs went down and my vehicle cost went up. I’m still not quite sure if the test was a success or not overall, but there was some relevant info that i’ll mention throughout the report.

Day 1

The night before, I was on food shopping duty and bought 3 packages of bagels, peanut butter, cream cheese, 3 dozen eggs, and 3 packages of bacon (some other items as well); I was prepared for breakfast since we were short on supplies at Worlds. I made an attempt at making breakfast for the team since I woke up so early and B-Saph did it at Worlds. We didn’t have any items for baking unfortunately and i had to try to fry the bacon…. FML!!!! I will know better next time to check for that first. People ate the bagels i fried (had no toaster, so i “toasted” them in the pan), but most of the eggs got wasted (thrown away I think) and the bacon didn’t go well so there was some leftover which seems blasphemous. Whatever, their loss, but I ate well! We inquire about how Day 2 is going to work and all X-2’s are going to make Day 2 which is the Top Cut and Best of 3 Single Elimination.

Round 1: Jabba Snoke Profitable Connections – Al

So i believe I’ve actually had the pleasure of playing this gentleman before, but where is the question. It also might have been me watching him play a friend. Anyways, his BF is command center and I win the roll off and decide to give him the shields because I had a couple vehicles in hand and it is often best to get a good start if he’s going to rip my hand to shreds with a Snoked Jabba discard for 4. He doesn’t do much throughout the game but he has a fast hands on Jabba and never resolves the disrupt to eat my resources for the round when he finds it on activation so he gets both his disrupt dice mitigated by an easy pickings. I scruffy the crap out of his Dark Ritual and murder his board. WIN 1-0

Round 2: DJ 7th Fort Anaxes??

We play on his battlefield and I”m not overly concerned because my pacing can usually avoid that effect and i have no problem when Yoda rolls out. I remember not being in a great place due to his mitigation being a pain in the butt and I think i lost ezra relatively early. The game had a really odd spot where he had 2 force speeds and a force throw on his 7th and when i killed DJ he apparently removed his Force Throw die that was on DJ for some reason and put away in his box. The next round he activated 7th and rolled out 5 dice and at the end of the round it came up that he was missing a die. He stacks upgrades directly on top of each other and under the character which doesn’t help either of us to realize the game state error. Definitely very unfortunate because that could’ve been a difference maker. WIN 2-0

Round 3: Thrawn Snoke – Paul from Arrowbrook Gaming

So he’s on another friends list (Manten) who has been doing very well at Store Champs with the list. If i’m not mistaken, a Podracer blank comes up immediately and rebounds to his hand. He tries to rip my hand of removal but like every hand had 2 pieces of mitigation so he didn’t have an easy time trying to resource gen through Ezra being a douche and stealing. I don’t recall the game being super close, but it did take a while and a couple good / bad rolls can be a deciding factor at times and he jammed in double Hailfire Droid Tanks so it got kind of scary. WIN 3-0

Round 4: DriveByShooting / Yoda 5’s Rainbow Vehicles – Team French Canadian (from PAX EAST)

We bash up each other’s Ezra’s but my Ezra has his Lightsaber and hatefully tries to keep him poor. We both end up doing Cautions and Force Illusion on Ezra to keep him alive, but I end up being able to bash his Yoda instead of trying to get through to the Ezra. I’ve played way too much of this deck and am familiar with the odd spots that the deck gets put into and when to timely go and threaten lethal. He ended up having to Yoda for shields to prevent me from taking him off the table, but I just take my time after that instead of hastily grabbing the kill and get to mess with his dice more by leaving it there. Ezra’s saber puts in a decent amount of work at keeping him poor in combination with Ezra’s own dice and then getting way ahead in the damage race pretty much puts a nail in the coffin. WIN 4-0

Lunch BREAK! – 330pm start and need to be back at 5pm

So we have an hour?? for lunch break and we decide to go out to the food trucks. All of the food trucks were closed and we didn’t know why. There is one stand selling noodles (wasn’t a truck) and had a 40 person line. Their name was something like Lonely Island Noodles (only 2 of the 3 words but which, I can not remember) and Reflex gets in line, but I want no part of it. I talked to one of the people manning the food truck and she said that they weren’t allowed to sell any more food or they’ll get fined and they’ll be swapping out with other food trucks (pretty much they do it in shifts). I ask what time they’ll do it and she quotes me 4pm. I talk TheoGrizz and Alvis (might be Alves) into waiting it out because he was going to go to the Mall food court and food truck food always seems so great. 4pm arrives, trucks pulling out of the area so things look great, 4:05 trucks drive by in opposite direction which is likely to pull into the area correctly, 4:10 trucks come back and it’s GO TIME…. or so we thought. 4:15 no one’s opened the windows to take our money in trade for delicious food so I inquire as to why that is. Turns out that they don’t start selling until guess what?? FIVE PM!!!! I give up and get in the damnable Noodle line with TheoGrizz and whilst the food was servicable, it was not what I wanted in the slightest. We hustle back to the tournament area with time to spare and pairings were posted shortly after.

Round 5: NJCuenca eSnoke/Aphra/BD – Team Hyperloops

So I’m already familiar with his deck and how it operates so I plan to go quickly kill his Snoke, but I don’t anticipate him drawing both copies each of He Doesn’t Like You and Crash Landing in his top 12 cards and I get a lot of my damage blown out when I have 4 damage showing and he doesn’t touch it until i had 6 damage showing post Rookie Pilot roll out. Ezra ends up dying and I respond by killing his Battle Droid. I’m behind about 2-4 damage in total health but it isn’t a big issue and I bide my time with Cautions and Illusions. He dropped the ball by not jamming down 0-0-0 prior to his Ark activation which also activated his hailfire droid and BT-1. I ended up narrowly threatening lethal on both of his guys via a 3 indirect and a 4 direct, but i had to resolve the 4 direct first to put Aphra in range to die with Snoke together on the 3 indirect and he counters with a Bubble Shield to make me sad. He pushes in a bunch of damage on my guys, but I roll out next round and threaten lethal on both guys at the same time again with ranged and he ends up running out of juice to stay alive and I take it. He definitely out “leveled” me in the early rounds, but a couple mistakes let me claw back. WIN 5-0

Round 6: DJ Snoke – David

We know that 6 wins is an auto in for Day 2 top cut, so I just have to win 1 of these 3 rounds.

He is a very nice guy playing a deck that his wife made for him. He Holocron’d out a Force Throw and we were on Frozen Wastes so I was all sorts of messed up. It had been so long since I had to play on that stuff and I walked into a Mind Trick that made me pile 5 dice (2 and 3) because he had 2 resources and I had ezra showing double disrupt and some bad side on Ezra lightsaber and i refused to disrupt him. Mistakes were made. I ended up focusing down Snoke like an IDIOT because I was so afraid of Force Throw. I end up in a situation where if he Frozen Wastes my Ezra die, then I will lose so i can’t activate and I get a shield off of T-47 then I find 2 resources on Ezra, but his Force Throw is on single disrupt. I take my 2 resources and I know I have a Hailfire Droid in my last 6 cards. He disrupts and I claim, then I roll out, but he rolls out and kills me off of Fast Hands so none of it matters. LOSS 5-1

Round 7: eYoda, Ani2, Cass Mill – Reflex Team Hyperloops

I get my battlefield and jam down a Y-wing and it was the only thing i used for damage for like 4 rounds. Round 2 and 3 or 3 and 4 i have him screwed on removal via FiLP and Scruffy and can’t make anything from my dice on rerolls. The love was missing but I have to be on that side of probability at some point. LOSS 5-2

The pressure is on at this point, but it’s no big deal, I just need to pull out a win and none of the mill team is on X-2 besides maybe Biggy so I feel pretty good about beating w/e i line up against. I’m on the bubble folks, win and I’m in, lose and i’m a bum!

Round 8: eBala / eTalzin / FOST – Ice Cream Lando – Looper but I didn’t know until after

So funny story, back during Round 3 i sit down at the wrong table and scared this guy (can’t remember if the scared part is true, but it’s a “fact” in my mind so I’m going with it) and joke about trying to match up 5 rounds too early. He pulls out his team and all I can think is “REALLY!!!! FML at seeing a Bala Tik when I have TWO guys with 7 HP each. Things didn’t look super pretty but he was going out of his way to play around Easy pickings and Ezra dies around the same time that Bala does so I don’t have to worry about it. He had a pretty large misplay where he focused into big damage with only 1 base and I was in control of Fort Anaxes so Rookie pilot took a small hit for the team and he whiffed out on the damage. He ended up being too far behind since he doesn’t really get more damage dice as his guys die off because the deck just doesn’t operate that way. WIN 6-2 We did it FAM!!!

So we get standings and I’m #19 and look at the bracket and it looks pretty solid except that I’ll have to play Ira in Top 32 which is amusing because I played him Gen Con last year for Top 16. Standings were wrong and they reprinted and instead I get to play against my Round 6 opponent who was on DJ Snoke. Inception ends up making the 32 player bracket for us and we try to guess and what we’ll be playing against if we are planning to win. We notice that just about every Looper is in the bottom half of the bracket with only NJCuenca being in the other bracket. The road to the top will be fraught with Looper blood shed every where and for me to win, I’d have to make it through a whole lot of 3 wide mill which is my arch nemesis!!! We celebrate at a random food place we found on the way through the mall parking lot then get home (airbnb) pretty late and I think I go to bed around Midnight.

The Next Day…..

I wake up at 5AM like a maniac and can’t go back to bed so I rationalize my Top 32 match and what would potentially be my Top 16 match. I decide that I’ll choke the life out of DJ Snoke’s resources and just jam damage straight through DJ and hope that the opponent doesn’t holocron out a bunch of abilities to ruin me with and I should be okay for the most part. Mill on the other hand is a much harder thing to overcome and I decide that i’ll choke his resources too while trying to generate a bunch of resources and just try to jam Hailfire’s in and try to win 1 of the 2 games because we should easily go to time on the 3rd due to the loss of 5 minutes per game and then i’ll win by damage since I don’t really see myself being able to squeeze two real wins in.

All of the days have blended in now but I eat some scrambled eggs, bagels with peanut butter and some left over buffalo / bbq chicken from the night before. As I’m eating, i realize I took way too much food, but I dislike throwing it away and polish it all off, which may be a mistake as far as keeping your body “right”. It doesn’t have any sort of effect by the times that top cut will commence, but feeling stuffed for a few hours isn’t the greatest either so it can effect one mentally while you’re trying to get into the proper mindset for what is to come instead of catching the Itis and wanting to take a nap. I had apparently learned nothing from The Boondocks.

Surprising news, they didn’t deck check us AND opponent’s will not be seeing decklists. I think i’d rather know my opponent’s list since better players tend to gain more from it, but there is also a fatal drawback in not showing lists and that is for the people who are in small squads. There were a CRAP TON of loopers at the event and in top cut, so sharing information would definitely put the group ahead of the curve. I don’t think we bothered taking this advantage and I just hung around since I already know my 1st two opponents (assuming i won Top 32).

Top 32 – Return of the DJ … Snoke

I was well aware of how I fumbled back in Round 6 and that there is a pretty large skill gap between me and my opponent even though he is playing relatively well. He wins the die roll and picks his field again, but this time around, I don’t walk into foolish removal and keep him off resources as much as possible whilst furthering my board state. He didn’t start with Holocron and I kill off DJ 1st after a couple of rounds and then Snoke has the worst time trying to get damage in through all of my single target removal since he keeps trying to Holocron, but I continue to eat the die before he can swap into a Force power. He refused to hard cast the Force Power so even though I was letting him cast removal and mess up my damage, he wasn’t furthering his plan at all and I was getting in solid chunks of damage. Game 2 pretty much went down the same way. WIN, on to Top 16!

In one or both games, he had gotten a fast hands onto DJ and continually used it to fast resolve a die, but then I would cast mitigation on this other die and it would shut down Snoke’s ability. That was a grave error and I mentioned it to him after the match because it isn’t something that most people would recognize or remember as an issue for Poe Maz players back in the heyday pre-nerf of Fast Hands. Another gentleman came up to me and after some congratulations he inquired as to what I meant about him using Fast Hands being bad, so here is the explanation for those that aren’t in the know:

With both Poe1 and any of Snoke’s Partners, you want to be able to resolve Poe’s Special to throw something or “Snoke” a character die for the +2 since that gets you the most “value” out of any of your other options. Poe1 throwing a thermal detonator is pretty disgusting, as is Snoking for 3 discard, 4 damage, or 3 resources. By Fast Handing a Poe die that isn’t on Special (only hits 30% of the time on roll out), you make it easy for the opponent to cast mitigation on the leftover die and pretty much screwing over your damage output. The same applies to DJ in this situation; If you resolve 2 ranged or resource, then you got minimal gains, but this is fine once one of his dice has been Snoked because you don’t have any other added benefits to gain. If for instance you roll out 2 ranged and 1 resource, then the opponent has to choose which die to get rid of and let you Snoke the other one, assuming you only had single die removal mitigation (which is the most likely scenario) so then even though the opponent gets to decide which of the two you Snoke, you still got the additional value from it. The decision gets even scarier when we are looking at a discard side since if you remove the other die, there goes most of your hand for the round, so leaving up a “consolation” die to Snoke makes the most sense instead of resolving it via Fast Hands, which allowed me to gum up his game plan when I would Flank or Pinned Down his leftover die and shut down the Snoke ability. If he hits two of the same side, then he may decide to play around Easy Pickings or potentially Into the Garbage Chute if he hits double 2 ranged, but that is very different. Anyways, this is some stuff to take into constant consideration and part of what makes the game so great.

Top 16 – Return of the Mill Overlord

So he’s aware of all of the stuff that I say about going to time and potentially needing to win 2-0 since if he drops a game, things can get really ugly. He wins the die roll and decided to pick his field this time around and give me useless shields. Back in Round 7, I had used Y-wing so many times and probably left some questionable feelings about letting me get my expensive vehicles down cheaply. I get things going well and overall it’s a close game, but I end up using his Imperial Palace frequently to rip parts of his removal and know what is in his hand for future rounds. It was kind of close and we went long but I end up winning.

Now the hard part for him, he knows that going to time is not an option and I think all of 5 seconds while gathering my cards and shuffling to ask the judge for how much time is left in the round to which he responds with 55 minutes. You might think that I ask this question so that I can slow play my opponent, but I actually do it for his sake and to try to teach him the proper ways to do stuff. What i mean by that is that I don’t have to worry about how much time is left, I just need to have time called, but he absolutely needs to know how much time there is and that it is imperative for him to move and decide on things much faster. We went 35 minutes in the 1st game and if we did it again in the 2nd that would be 70 minutes and only leave him with 20 for game 3. As much as BobbySapphire says that I’d douche him out and stall him to time, losing to a teammate isn’t a big thing in my mind and I do my best to maintain our #SquadLyf so as the veteran, I make sure he is aware of the time. He played at double speed and I increased my pacing to match (which may have actually had me make errors but no point crying about the milk on the ground). I made some fatal misplays involved around Force Jump and not looking at my hand to mitigate it because I was on the “don’t mitigate anything and make him discard my hand” plan and I let it stop something silly like 6-8 damage in a round and that was the difference between victory and defeat. LOSS

Another huge mistake was me not taking his Battlefield in game 3.He clearly didn’t have enough reps on his own field in the match and I could abuse him on it since he was going to try to mitigate late into the round instead of early, or he’d claim and notify me that I could do what I wanted now which means I always left Yoda as the last thing to do so he couldn’t easily claim and take a card or face impending doom off of specials and double focus sides.

It doesn’t matter whether i chalk it up to lack of reps in the match, playing faster, not purposely taking my time to win on tiebreakers, or anything else. A loss is a loss and i’ll have to dig deep and examine where I can improve. Luck isn’t a factor that I think about since we’re going to get those nut max damage rolls and we’re going to get those 6 blanks at the same time rolls; What we do from there / how we got to that stage is what actually matters and trying to fix where we went wrong.

Post Loss

Everyone else has won, and some of the other non top cut guys want to grab food. We go to steak and shake and i try to take some orders before I go so I can bring back some grub for them since I don’t think they’ll get a lunch break but can try to scarf down some mini burgers and have access to the Milkshake during the match. I make it back during the Top 4 matches and B-Saph is doing some shoutcasting with Zach Bunn (Team Covenant) on stream. Some of the food gets wasted because the guys didn’t want it and one of them is Lactose intolerant. Nick loses his match and eats so I’m glad all of the food didn’t go to waste. People want to go check out transformers, but I stop the group from leaving, since #SquadLyf dictates that Nick gives the skinny on the deck he lost to to the rest of the team (both of the other Top 4 Match were our team). Reflex beats Outrun and then Nick gives him the skinny on what he saw and we run off to do other things for a bit.

All in all, i love the big events and seeing the Looper community as well as everyone else whether they be competitors at the top tables or even people who just read the site and wanted to say their thanks and give us some verbal support. The community has really kept me going in regards to Star Wars Destiny and for the most part, I hope you all never change from being the good-natured people that you are! Almost isn’t good enough for me, so I’ll hopefully find some time to actually go back to the drawing board and try to bust up the meta. 4,000+ word count is a lot so I’ll stop here and call it a wrap. I’ll be at US Nationals at Nova so come say Hi!

~HonestlySarcastc

For those looking to be ahead of the competitive curve, do consider signing up for our Patreon. We’ve got a 300+ person discord channel that boasts a near constant discussion of competitive Star Wars Destiny playing. In addition to that we release dozens of extra videos to our $10 tournament prep tier, as well as exclusive articles, deck lists, and primers. It’s a wealth of information, and I challenge you to ask around among our subscribers to see if they think it’s worth it. I have an idea of what they’ll say. Not only do you get all of that, but you also get this dope playmat after 2 months of being on the Tournament Prep Tier OR instead you can receive a set of our OVERWRITE and POWER ACTION tokens (pictured below the mat).