If you are a regular visitor here you know that Doctor Aphra is one of my favorite characters in the game. Not only does she have a bunch of text that affects gameplay and deckbuilding but her die is heavy for her cost making it likely that you will win the roll. I put a great deal of value on that since being able to start with the choice of battlefield or shields is powerful. Way of the Force has introduced two cards that make Aphra even better! I’m of course talking about these two bad droids:

I need to formally apologize to Halfire Droid Tank. I was initially put off by the fact that it costs 4 resources which I thought was going to keep it from being competitive but the one little thing that makes it extra good is that it’s also a Vehicle which means that if you are playing Weapons Factory Alpha and Aphra you can play it for 2 resources on round 1! I challenge you to find a grosser card for two resources. These cards are windmill slam auto includes for Aphra decks which means we have to be playing red. From there the strategy needs to revolve around playing these cards. BT-1 is still the team captain but only because he’s the veteran. These cards are solid on their own but together their synergy is just awesome.

I want to first take a look at someone’s list. Bigdanorama took the following Aphra supports deck to the finals of an SC.

Now that’s some spice right there! They have the obligatory Droid all star line up but on top of that they also have the Planetary Bombardment /Delve wombo combo. That’s obviously very powerful but I feel it has some issues that you don’t need to expose yourself too. In Big’s write up they explain that in the finals they got bombardment out only have the die get canceled by a Force Illusion. That’s the sort of tempo loss that you don’t need to expose yourself if you play Aphra. The deck will just kill you with paper cuts from indirect triggers “Nice Force Illusion brah, would you like to cancel a 1 or 2 indirect?”

The only way I can see the combo being effective is to plan it out for round 2 after you have done some droid and vehicle spamming. That will set you up nicely for a bombardment trigger for at least one and you can probably go into the next round with a resource. Hound’s Tooth seems like the perfect card for this approach. If they do have something like a Force Illusion for the bomb that will hurt less since you will at least have some droid aggression from the previous round. That sounds good but you are kind of hoping to draw those two cards by round two or maybe three. By round 4 its probably too slow. You can go heavier with more big supports like AT-ST but then your deck gets clunkier albeit your Delves will be a bit more live.

This deck does do some interesting things like play Imperial Academy and By Any Means. If you aren’t planning on playing vehicles then I think it is a fine choice for a droid deck. This list only has 4 vehicles so perhaps its reasonable to play it? How many rerolls do you have to have for it to be worth it? By the time you have enough supports on the table are you really going to have the battlefield? I will admit that it is pretty hilarious with Ark Angel and if you Partnership while controling the battlefield and have Ark Angel out it’s going to be pretty filthy. Still, I almost never get the battlefield and starting the game with a two cost Hailfire Droid Tank is too juicy to pass up. If I find myself with the battlefield more often than not I will consider it since our cheap droid dice are very solid and getting the most out of them is nice. By Any Means has some positive and negatives. Its worth testing but I dislike doing damage to myself although drawing cards is good.

I’d like to get back to the question: How many rerolls is worth a resource? This is kind of hard question to answer. A card that flips a die to a side of your choice is worth a resource like Use the Force. With that in mind we’d need to reroll a die so many times where statistically you are likely to hit a desirable side. I’m not a statistician but here goes: lets assume most supports have two desirable sides (0-0-0 has 2 melee and a resource and BT-1 has the 2 indirect and the 3 melee for 1) if we roll those dice twice we are likely to hit one of those sides 56% of the time. By roll 3 its 70 percent, by reroll 4 its 80 percent and by roll 5 its 87 percent. I know I’ve made a lot of assumptions here and this isn’t perfect but I just wanted think we are getting good value by roll 4. I’ve used the term roll here interchangeably with reroll and that’s not fair because if you hit something meager like 1 melee you might opt to keep it since its “good enough” for the situation or you just naturally roll the best side then the battelfield didn’t do anything. And there is something to be said for the tempo of the reroll speed which doesn’t require an action. Since you can normally discard a card to reroll, a reroll is actually not as valuable as say getting a free resource at the beginning of the game since cards can always be rerolls but cards can’t always be resources. If you have any additional thoughts on this please let me know since the battelfield is at least interesting (or maybe its not and the coffee I’m drinking is making it more interesting than it has any right to be.)

Now onto my takes on Aphra decks. The first one is the one I have tested the most and I can say it’s fine but not busted. Some games were blowouts while others I was inches from winning and made a key mistake that cost me the game.

I just met this deck, and this is crazy, but it might be good, call it a maybe? It tested pretty well although I did lose one game vs Force Speed and great rolls and won one game where I hit runner + runner and had no business actually winning. The other games I won were well earned and blow outs. This deck is pretty much a 22 health+ Aphra deck. The droids do kind of stink but those damages can add up and sometimes you activate two in one action for maximum adorableness. One of the things I like to do in decks besides winning is doing “cool” things and this does that in spades- it’s like if James Dean and Marilyn Monroe had a baby! Mobilizing on turn one to get up to 4 resources and playing a couple of awesome droids into a Best Defense will make you go, oh yeah! Once you’ve killed off your droids you can bring them back for the low price of 3 resources via Endless Ranks which is pretty solid and being able to In the Crosshairs for 2 or 1 resource can be pretty powerful. Let’s not forget the awesome Ark Angel into Partnership play that has always been a favorite of mine – it’s important for me to clarify that you have to decide on whether you want to take another action before you can roll in the other two supports from Ark Angel. And nothing is more ice cold than playing Relentless Pursuit on a character that was thought be long for the world.

I do question if Calling in Favors is actually worth it, how many resources do you need to get in order for it to be worth it? I’d say for sure 3 but even bringing back a Battle Droid for 3 and using mobilize for 2 isn’t insanely above curve, only slightly. Calling in Favors makes you play cards that are expensive and you have to live with the fact that on some turns you might not even get to use it since you’d rather be doing other things… like playing Hailfire Droid Tanks! Calling in favors does play really well with Delve and I think I’ll be looking into that with Planatery Bombardment for the round 1 set up into round 2 Delve Bomb.

I’ll let you imagine what that clunky masterpiece would look like and will instead share something more fair and consistent.

This is modeled from the previous list but instead of some explosive discounts we get more health, better starting dice and more consistent gameplan. Endless Ranks for five might be bit ambitious but bringing back a Veteran Stormtrooper sounds reasonable enough to me. I’ve removed Partnership because its unnecessary in most match ups although we will miss it vs mill – it might prove better to go lower to the ground and remove Endless Ranks for Partnership since they are kind of at odds with each other. Conversely speaking you could play two Executioners instead of the Stormtroopers but Endless Ranks get worse, you increase the number of pay sides in your deck, you get worse at the roll off but you do get a two sweet abilities that may be worth it, a card like Imperial HQ might be worth it if you decide to go in that direction.

Thanks for reading and let us know if you have any questions or comments on social media or in the comment section. I know there’s a good Aphra deck out there and I might do another article on her because there are plenty of more ideas to go through. Take care and as always…

-NJCuenca

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