Coming up with the character combination of Tarkin and the 7th Sister isn’t something that anyone had to try very hard to do. That said there were plenty of different ways to take the 30 card list. In this article I will attempt to take you through my thought process as I constructed my original list. In addition to that and perhaps more importantly, I will try and explain the evolution of the list and the goals of those changes. My hope is that by reading this anyone who is interested in playing this character combination can take what I think I have learned and apply it to their own deck. I may make changes and have opinions on cards included that you may not agree with but that’s a good thing. Diversity in thought will allow for this deck to go down many more avenues and hopefully that same diversity in thought will allow our game’s meta to continue to flourish and be diverse. My partner for constructing the deck Joe, often disagrees with inclusions in the deck and that leads to us normally using a much different list. This has been a great thing for us though since we always question choices and are forced to really think about them and not just accept a card’s inclusion without solid reasoning.

A starting point:

Mos Eisley Spaceport

Character (2)

Seventh Sister

Tarkin

Upgrade (16 14 )

x2 Chance Cube

x2 Dark Counsel

x2 Force Illusion

x2 Force Lightning

x2 Force Speed

x2 Force Throw

x2 ID9 Seeker Droid

x2 Sith Holocron

Event (14 )

x2 Anger

x2 Doubt

x2 Feel Your Anger

x2 Intimidate

x2 Overconfidence

x2 Scorched Earth

x2 Tactical Mastery

For the first list the game plan was simple, build a deck that can put a ton of dice on the board for a low cost so that we could maximize our ability to trigger Tarkin’s power action. Hopefully, we could turn the heat up high enough to kill the majority of the opponent’s characters in one turn and we would almost always resolve the 2 discard side on Tarkin’s dice. Seems like a no-brainer. We included all of the zero cost upgrades in the game as well as one and two cost upgrades to keep cost down. The force powers are there to be cheated in with the holocron or played in the late game after accumulating resources with the chance cubes and our abundance of focus sides. Defensively we went pretty straight forward with illusions and standard removal cards. Intimidate was there because relying on indirect for our primary source of damage means that shields are extremely valuable for the opponent.

In actual play the deck worked fine but was definitely no world beater. We found many cards giving us less than optimal value for the slot dedicated to them. After 20 or so games with the deck I came to the conclusion that there was a problem with the upgrades in the deck. I felt as though we were so focused on matching sides that quite often we would have many dice with almost no value left in the pool at the later stages of each round. Sure, we had tons of focus sides but not a lot of great options to focus those sides to. This led us to try many combinations of upgrades but we settled in similar places with these two thoughts in mind; add upgrades that could naturally do damage, and keep our cost curve down so that we had the ability to play the majority of the upgrades on the first turn.

After adjusting our upgrades I began to see a lot of decks added to the meta. This was great and stressful since we needed to test what we had built against these decks. After extensive testing I decided to adjust my removal package to try and have the best defensive options against decks like Hondo/Yoda/Poe2 decks, hero mill, and hero vehicles.

Boonton Regional list:

Ewok Village

Character (2)

Seventh Sister

Tarkin

Upgrade (14 12 )

x2 Ancient Lightsaber

x2 Chance Cube

x2 Force Illusion

x2 Force Lightning

x2 Force Speed

x2 Sith Holocron

x2 Vibroknife

Event (16 )

x1 Anger

x2 Doubt

x2 Feel Your Anger

x2 Intimidate

x2 Overconfidence

x2 Scorched Earth

x2 Stronger You Have Become

x2 Tactical Mastery

x1 The Best Defense…

With this deck I had considerable success play testing and was really able to apply the strategy of turning the heat up so quick that my opponents could not retaliate effectively in time. My game plan going into most games was to spend actions early to get out as many upgrades as possible and to try and trigger the power action every turn. I would prioritize max damage over direct damage as well. Meaning that if I had 2 dice showing 1 melee damage I would rather power action if I had no other dice to power action with. From the 3rd round of the game on I would attempt to speed the deck up so that I would be able to claim more often. This would give me the ability to hit people with scorched earth (or just bluff if they were onto that card) once they had a considerable amount of dice on the table. The swap to Ewok Village was great in any match-up where I knew I would be able to claim the battlefield and especially great in the hero mill and hero vehicles matchups. Cards like vibroknife, tactical mastery and force speed gave me the ability to really speed up my turns and get to the claim.

This is by no means a combo deck but there were some powerful combos that often helped cripple an opponent during a game. As my opponents would spread damage among their characters and each of them would come closer to death, I would look to strike one down to get the dice off of the table and make it more difficult for them to deal their own damage. The vibroknife was probably the best for this but the ancient lightsaber was awesome too. Using the focus sides on Tarkin’s character dice in conjunction with a force speed special or a tactical mastery we were able to turn melee sides up and deal chunks of 4, 5, or 6 damage all at once. Quite often this damage would be unblockable due to the vibroknife so playing around shields or force illusion was very possible.

Hopefully this article has given some useful information to you that you may be able to apply while playing the deck or perhaps even playing against it. What we have gone over is just the basics of the deck really though. There will be a follow up article going more in depth on matchups and how I attempt to play around them. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and I hope it helps. Stay tuned for part two!

Tommy AKA Jack’s scrub co-host