Gone are the good old days when there were only 24 characters we could choose from, and we were lucky to have ten playable cards in our respective affiliation/color combination. Just about every character combination was playable because almost every strategy was midrange : be a little controlling, be able to spike a little damage. Some decks were perfectly midrange (Phasma decks, Han/Rey), but some skewed aggro (Vader/Raider, Jango/Veers), and some skewed control (Jabba/Dooku, 4-Wide), but even these decks did plenty to balance between attack and defense. And, with only 140 cards to choose from and serious deckbuilding restrictions, there was a ton of overlap in the cards played in any of the competitive decks (especially considering most were villain yellow).

Enough about the past, what does this have to do with deckbuilding now ? For one, no longer should we build our decks based on character combinations; they must be built around specific strategery.

Author’s note: In my last article, some people were miffed I claimed that 3-dice Thrawn decks were contemptable. When I write these Destiny Theory articles, I’m writing from an exclusively competitive point of view. If you want to build Ahsoka/Kanan because you love Rebels, go for it. I love Rebels too, so have a blast. However, if you want to build a competitive deck with those characters you should have a good strategic reason: Dice Saturation combined with Action Cheating.

Now that there are 76 characters to choose from and a little over 400 deckable cards, the ways in which we can construct our decks is myriad, and doing more than simply playing the best 30 cards is paramount. I truly believe that outside of a couple of corner cases where a character actually presents its own unique strategy, like FN-2199 who needs an exorbitance of weapons to function properly, we have to decide what kind of deck we want to play, and think will win most of its matches, before determining the characters to facilitate these strategies.

As always, these lists are not exhaustive; I can’t cover every single strategy in under 2,000 words. For example, I didn’t talk about Mill because that’s always been a strategy one builds around.

Dice Saturation

Dice Saturation is one of the strongest strategies we build around when making a Star Wars Destiny Deck. Dice Saturation is maximizing the amount of dice we roll per round, and there are several ways we can accomplish this, but here are some considerations.

Four and Five Dice Starts

It is a simple advantage, but starting with four or five dice instead of three dice means more than simply resolving more dice than our opponents, we can diversify the dice we resolve as well; we can take shields and resources without wholly eliminating our ability to do damage in a given round. Outside of Maz Kanata, the characters who facilitate 5 dice starts: Hera, Ezra, Rookie Pilot, First Order Stormtrooper, Ciena Ree, Bala Tik, and Rey, each come with a 2 damage side, most of whom are modified damage, but damage nonetheless. And, Maz, along with Hera, Rey, Bala and Ciena, all bring incredibly strong game texts to the table. There are plenty of 8-point options to add on the villain side to create truly powerful 5-dice decks. eCiena/eBala/Nightsister is capable of 10 damage round 1 without a single additional die added to the board nor the need to pay a resource (though Heat of Battle certainly helps).

There are other ways to saturate the table with dice. One of the most popular since the release of Spirit of Rebellion has been with our boy, FN-2199

FN gives us Dice Saturation by increasing the number of dice resolves we get via his gametext. We saw this used to great success at Gen Con, when TinyLoops put three players in the top 8, as well as just this past weekend at Canadian Nationals when the entire top 4 were FN decks. Every time we put a weapon on FN, overwrite or otherwise, we’re adding a die we’re most likely to resolve into the pool. Over the course of the game we could resolve more than 15 additional dice; three entire rounds worth of a three-character, five-dice start. There’s a reason FN has dominated over the past few months, and Dice Saturation, combined with slight action cheating, is that reason.

Extra Dice Via Vehicles

Right now there are a bunch of ways to utilize vehicles, between playing them cheaper with cards like Hera, Rally Aid, Weapons Factory Alpha, and Friends in High Places, etc., and resource generating strategies based around Unkar Plutt, Thrawn, and Mobilize to name a few, decks are able to spit out upwards of four vehicles in the early rounds of the game. Adding vehicles adds dice, oftentimes powerful dice, more powerful than you could possibly imagine. For example there are several cards that allow you to utilize your vehicle dice multiple times per turn. Strategic Planning, Reckless Reentry, and Ciena Ree each let you roll a vehicle die into the pool an additional time.

What we sacrifice by putting out all of these vehicles is expediency. In my many games playing with and against heavy vehicle strategies I’ve witnessed decks fall before all of their vehicle dice resolved, and in some cases before they’re even rolled. Vehicles are both novel and fun, but the lack of speed can certainly be a detriment; use at your own risk.

Readying a Character

Readying a character is also a form of dice saturation, but one less prevalent in the game, though it usually comes at great cost. The ahforementioned Ahsoka Tano is a great new example of readying a character, as is Master of the Council. The Price of Failure has seen some success (though Coercion, as bad as it is being ruled right now, is still very good against TPoF). Bala-Tik is our go-to character to stand up; his cost is anything but steep, but his low health and propensity to be targeted first makes him a liability in some cases.

Action Cheating

Action cheating is another very strong strategy that you might consider when trying to ‘break the game’ at your next tournament. Action cheating has been competitive since the inception of the game, as the starter deck Rey might be the best action cheater in the game still. In SOR, Heroes got Maz to help action cheating, and now with Empire at War we have Sabine Wren to cheat us to victory.

Ambush Shenanigans

Rey’s action cheating is based off of ambush upgrades, allowing you to stack an absurd amount of actions in a row before your opponent can respond in any way. Sabine lets you play weapons on her from the discard pile (utilizing the Discard pile is one of the most powerful mechanics you can take advantage of in any CCG), and when those weapons have ambush, you’re able to take the next action after rolling her, allowing you to resolve her powerful dice, or set your dice up to do max damage with Heat of Battle or Never Tell Me The Odds, the latter of which you can combine with Infamous to chain massive amounts of damage at your opponent’s face without fear of mitigation.

Speaking of no fear of mitigation, this is the main reason we action cheat, so we can resolve our dice before our opponent can respond to them. Heroes got a new card in that regard:

Not even going into the infinite damage loop explained here, Rey and Sabine do a fine job of utilizing Running Interference simply to prevent further mitigation from our opponents. You can exhaust RI after playing your weapon on Rey to prevent the “play a card” action. You can’t do this with Sabine’s ability, since the action you’re declaring is “activate a character or support,” which can stop a Guardian ability. However, if you simply use your extra action from Sabine’s ability to play Never Tell Me The Odds or Heat of Battle to turn those dice, simply exhaust RI after that and prevent any mitigation from hand.

Cad Bane provides Ambush Shenanigans for the Villains, but doesn’t have as many nifty tricks to resolve his damage. He can always play an Ambush weapon just to resolve his dice immediately after activating, but like any character with only two damage sides, his rolls can be extremely frustrating. Cad does have access to Heat of Battle and We Have Them Now if he’s paired with red, which also allows for some old school Tactical Mastery shenanigans, but this kind of talk is getting expensive even if Imperial HQ is doing work for us.

Instant Resolve

If you think resolving your dice automatically is the way to win games look no further than Maz. Maz has been tormenting people for ages and her ability combines spectacularly with both vehicles, and of course, her boyfriend Poe Dameron.

At Maz’s low cost of 8/11, she can go in just about any deck where you would want to utilize an instant focus into an instant resolve (soooo any deck?). But, if you want to further build your deck around this ability, Partnership is great too. Parternship slots excellently into Poe/Maz, allowing us to Roll C-3P0 and Poe Simultaneously then paying one to take another action and use C-3P0’s ability to turn one of Poe’s Dice to a special (if you didn’t already roll double special, which you probably did). Partnership is a great include in vehicle decks as well; even without the instantaneous focus/resolve of Maz, simply rolling and resolving an AT-ST or LR1K Sonic Canon before your opponent can deflect them back in your face has tremendous value, especially if the character you activated has some blue ranged sides on their dice.

Plain and Simple Extra Actions

Two of the most common ways to take 2 additional actions is via Force Speed and Tactical Mastery. Both have, at times, shown their strength in the competitive meta and are fan favorites as well. One card from Empire at War that has really outshone initial reactions is erstwhile jedi Kanan Jarrus.

Kanan’s low elite cost of 13 gives us a bunch of build options if we’re think blue hero cards are strong right now. One of the things blue hero has going for it is freeness, another strategy we might consider building around (though I’m running out of room to include it in this article [damn these parenthetical tangents!]). Heroes have all kinds of free stuff: free mitigation in Guard, free shields in Caution, free cards in Destiny, as well as free lightsaber pulls. Kanan’s let’s us do all kinds of tricky shit, like cashing in for a resource before playing a card that costs one when our opponents thought we were broke, or focusing his other die to either the 1R or 1X side followed by a Force Misdirection to blow our opponent out in savage fashion.

Shields Up!!

I wanted to do a separate section on combining strategies, but since I’m running out of room I’m going to include the topic in this section, as there isn’t really one amazing way to start dropping shields on your characters. There are very good cards in each color, but some are better than others, and the best way to utilize all of them is playing a rainbow deck. Playing rainbow can give you access to Dug In, Force Illusion, and Hunker Down regardless of where your Hero/Villain affiliation lies.

For Heroes we also get Caution, Luke’s Protection which can be combined with Fearless for true shenanigans, Rey’s Lightsaber, among others if we want to stay in blue. If you really want to shield up in Hero you could consider running Han Solo or Poe Dameron for that extra protection.

In Villain yellow gives us Personal Shield and Armor Plating as well as cards like The Hound’s Tooth. Blue gets us the new card Indomitable which works great with Palpatine or in a Big/Little deck with Price of Failure which lets us do some strategy combination.

Right now it seems like the initial EAW meta is skewing towards ranged damage because of the inclusion of vehicles and the strength of Cad Bane, Sabine Wren, and PhasmaDeuce. Because of this you might want to consider taking a hard line against melee damage. I started packing Block in my Thrawnkar deck because it is easily afforded there and our regular shields and Personal Shield do so much work against ranged damage that having an out to Melee seemed like a great call. So far I’ve loved it and a few others have reported success back as well. Speaking of melee…

Anti Shields

As strong as shields are right now against a lot of decks, we might consider taking answers to shield with us to the battlefield. When it comes to ignoring shields, nothing does it as well as Vibroknife. If you think shields are going to be a big thing, I would strongly consider figuring out what you think the best Vibroknife deck is and keeping it holstered for the right weekend. I’m not sure the answer, but there are enough strong melee characters that we can all come up with a few ideas. Vibroknife also got a new best friend in VibroAxe. This card is a beating, and while it doesn’t combo super well with Vibroknife, it’s shield-busting ability combined with 50% Damage sides, none of which are blue, make this card an easy include in any deck that can afford it, melee or ranged.

That’s all I’ve got for today. 2300 words is too many and I feel like I only scratched the surface of deckbuilding in a 400 card pool (excluding battlefields and characters). I hope that the next time you’re deckbuilding you consider focusing on strategy before what characters you think are good. There are enough good characters now that we can find the ones that fit the winning strategies we’d like to employ.

As always, feedback is encouraged and welcomed. I’d love to hear what you think, as well as what other strategies we could consider when deckbuilding.

Thanks for Reading,

BobbySapphire



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