It’s been a few weeks since the event, but good things come to those who wait and any time you are hiding in the bushes waiting to strike, then you must have patience. This is the tournament story of STEALTHMOOSE, Greg Pike, the reigning UK Nationals Champion.

The Deck (taken from YourDestiny’s Website)

Day 1

Matches 1-4 alternated Kylo Snoke/Pryce all kind of blurred into one.

Match 1 Kylo Snoke. Despite keeping a good mix of colours in my hand in all these matchups, in the first game, Kylo hit his first 3 activations. All the other games I managed to dodge most of them though. Everyone killed Bazine first, but match 2 Bazine died round one which panicked me. Ultimately none of these decks could deal enough damage to keep up with the ramp. Bazine discard with Snoke was clutch. Especially in match 3 against Kylo Snoke where round 1 I took an ancient lightsaber, force speed and all in. He just couldn’t come back after that.

Match 5 – TaCos (no-Holocron variant) – Loss. I played against Oli Coles in a Store Champ a few weeks ago and we were both running the same decks (my build was slightly different but it didn’t seem to matter), he beat me then and he beat me again here. Death by a thousand cuts. Removal feels bad. Force Illusion feels bad. Just couldn’t ramp fast enough to get there. Still, he’s such a great player (and nice guy), if I was going to take a first loss of the day, I’m glad it was to him.

Match 6 – GenCon Mill – Loss. This was against the 11 year old Thomas Harvey who ended up going 7-1 on the day. He played the deck well, stifled my ramp and boxed me into a hyperspace jump finish. He’s one to watch out for.

Match 7 – 3 Mandos – Win. Interesting deck, played well by my opponent but without Talzin’s consistency and the blue cards for keeping characters alive this just struggles to keep up with my ramp. Played a Force Illusion at the right time to stop him killing Snoke with a fight dirty or armed to the teeth (can’t remember which), which kept his focus in the pool to get the damage to close out.

Match 8 – Sabine Hired Gun – Win. I sat down knowing I had to win to go through to day 2 and saw Sabine. I had flashbacks to Euros where again, I was 5-2, playing vehicles (heroes that time), needing a win to progress to day 2 and lost to Sabine Ezra. My opponent rolled a resource on hired gun, grabbed it, discarded a hidden blaster, and when he came to activate Sabine with joked “and now I just need to roll 8 damage”. He rolled out and hit 3, 3, +2 and put it into Snoke. I thought that was it to be honest, but over the next round or two I got both force illusions on Snoke and AT-DP specialed his infamous which slowed him down (after we were done he said this actually won me the game). His Sabine wouldn’t play ball after the hot round 1, and I discarded 3 from his hand using snoke+bazine and hit the never tell me the odds he was going to infamous. Was basically game after that.

Unfortunantely I had plans on the Saturday so pretty much only stuck around the convention centre for the games I had to play. but I wish I could have had the whole weekend at the tournament to get involved with the side-events and spend more time with some of the other players, and will definitely try and attend all three days next time. Birmingham was pretty uneventful, except for lunch when I was walking out of Burger King and saw a guy screaming down the high street “I’ll smash your f*cking face in for you Trish!” and then pull a (field) hockey stick out of his trousers. Seemed like a nice bloke – I hope those guys work it out.

Day 2

Top 16 – Gencon Mill (eYoda Ani2 Cass) – 2-1. Lost the first game, wasn’t very close. His Yoda rolled fairly well and I couldn’t find the removal I needed when it mattered. He whittled down my deck and controlled my dice effectively. I hung on for a while but ultimately couldn’t get the engine going. Game 2 went much better for me, got my chance cubes out and killed his Yoda early on. He couldn’t deal with all the damage, but held on for a while. May have been a mistake on his part because we went into game 3 with just over 20 mins on the clock. This was similar to game 2 but a bit closer… ended up getting enough damage to seal the win with 3 mins remaining, although we didn’t go to tiebreaker, we definitely sped up our play towards the end which could have meant less than optimal plays on both sides.

Top 8 – TaCos (Talzin 2 Commandos – holocron variant) – 2-1. Lost the first game. I think I spent too much time/money trying to deal with his dice and it kept me off my game plan. The second game I decided to basically ignore him and focus on building my board state and overwhelming him with damage. Got so much money that I could play everything I had in my hand pretty easily. This seemed to work better so did the same in the third game. This ended up going to tiebreaker and I got there on damage after he claimed with a couple of cards for rerolls to spare.

Semifinal – Crotch Rocket (eSnoke Ciena Sebulba) – 2-0. Both games I had my chance cubes early, was able to control his Cienna/Sebulba dice and kill off Snoke fairly early. First game I was comfortably ahead but miscounted the amount of damage he had on the board and let him kill my ready FOST with Natural Pilot, almost cost me the game. Second game, went similarly. I controlled his hand with Bazine and dice to stop him ramping. He got more out this time, (including 2 AT-STs!!) and Snoke survived a little longer but I had the removal I needed when I needed it and won the damage race.

Final – Cad Snoke – 2-1. Game 1, I won the roll and took the shields. I ramped super fast, Bazine’d his hand / resources, and his Cad rolled cold. Killed Cad early round 3 and closed out quickly from there. This was probably my easiest game all day.

Game 2, polar opposite. I couldn’t get any vehicles out and he chucked a bunch of damage onto Snoke round 1+2, plus a bit of indirect. Round 3 he FILP’d, took my cheap removal so I threw a Force Illusion on Snoke to try and keep him alive. Turned out to be a bad idea, he rolled decent damage, but knowing I had nothing in hand to stop it, rolled out Snoke, hit focus and turned to enough damage to kill Bazine and FOST. With just 1 fang fighter out and only 5-6 damage on Cad, there was nothing I could do to get back into that game. Probably the worst game for me all day.

Game 3, controversially I decided to go with my battlefield, thinking I could use the discount to get the ramp going enough to negate the shields, and it would be easier for me to keep him starved of resources without the battlefield. This seemed to work. Not as clear cut as game 1 but again, once Cad fell, it was pretty much over.

Deck thoughts.

Snoke is broke. Basically if you can Snoke Bazine’s die twice in the first two rounds before she dies (usually for money or discard but sometimes disrupt depending on matchups and board state), you’re going to be really far ahead and they will struggle to get their own game plan going. The ramp is insane. One game I got Chance Cube turn 1, got the 3 resources, snoked bazine’s resource, got Dooku’s Sailer out (for 2), hit the 2 resource, drew a natural pilot, played it on FOST, and got to roll in the sailer and draw a second time. Just felt unfair. I didn’t play the Hound’s Tooth very often. It was good when it was out and I didn’t have any other resource gen, but I managed to find at least 1 Chance Cube most games which felt more effective. Quad Jumper felt like I played it for the sake of it.

Although only 1 of my games ended up being decided on tie-breaker, I found myself finishing almost every game in the 30+ minute area. I’m definitely methodical but I don’t consider myself to be a slow player, the deck has a huge number of decision points, as well as actions to take each round – especially late game. It is probably not going to be something you just pick up and do well with.

Your opponent will (almost) always focus on Bazine first. I think this is the right decision, because if you can Power Action her dice twice (resource, disrupt or discard depending on the situation), you will be so far ahead, and your opponent so far behind that it will be hard for them to catch up. One of my favourite plays was turn 1 – FILP to clear the way, then get a Bazine 3 discard off. Not only did that take away most/all of the opponent’s precious mulliganed-for cards, as well as denying re-rolls, but the psychological factor of having so many of their choices taken away would put them in a negative frame of mind for the rest of the match, leading to sub-optimal plays.

Touching on the video in which Joe (Honestly Sarcastc) spoke about resource value, snoking a resource side is basically the same as playing a logistics and an enrage, but saving an action and two cards. I would also say that the ability to play 7+ resources worth of cards round one is difficult to value, because every support / upgrade you get out will be active for every round of the game (barring some anti-support tech) – giving some of the less efficient vehicles like Fang Fighter / Arc Starfighter more opportunity to recoup their cost. And with the amount of focus this deck has, you really don’t feel that bad about turning to that Fang’s 3 direct side. This level of consistency with the readying aspect of natural pilot leads to some truly disgusting plays, where the Fang is doing 6 direct per round, plus serving as a base to match up the modified sides on the NP – that’s basically a dead character.

Thanks

Shoutout to Sam Grimwade for getting me into the game back in Awakenings and being my long-standing gaming buddy! He also drove us up on the Friday, I think I still owe him petrol money… Sorry Sam! Also, to the Wycombe Gaming Club where I get most of my games in these days. Those guys are great players and it was a shame none of them could make it to the tournament! Arturo Martínez-Insua gets an honourable mention too – he’s super-involved in the community (great player and a really nice guy – gave a spot-gloss trooper to Oli Coles after he finished 17th narrowly missing out on day 2). Three Man Meta did a great job of covering the event. It’s a shame neither of my opponents wanted the games to stream – obviously the community would have felt more involved and, although I wasn’t exactly thrilled when they said my match was going to be on, I would have liked to look back over the semi-finals and finals to analyse my plays etc, but I can’t blame anyone for feeling like it would have added even more pressure to an already high-stakes game!

I also have to give a special thanks to the Hyperloops, and Joe in particular for sharing his evolving Bald Tyres lists with the Hyperloops patreons (I wasn’t expecting to get anywhere near as far as I did and really hope this hasn’t spoiled the deck before he gets a chance to use it properly!). I don’t have as much time as I’d like to play the number of games needed to make proper, informed decisions about what is good to keep/cut/add in a deck, and without their videos showing gameplay with and against current meta decks and talking through his reasoning for making decisions, I wouldn’t have been able to go as far as I did. On top of that, the members are all great players in their own right, full of useful information and ideas. It was also great to be able to dip into the Discord chat between games and see messages of support and advice. If you want to up your game – get involved!

~Greg of the House Pike, Stealthiest of Moose, Snoker of Discards, Successor of DDanBlack, Crusher of Souls, Blocker of Cad Snoke, and Champion of the UK.

Editor HS: Okay, so I’m the one who added all of the titles there, but my man Greg here deserves it. Bullwinkle beating up Rocky seems justifiable here since Cad Snoke came out the cut and was wrecking lives and the Moose gave him the mean right cross. I’m always proud when any one from the Looper community does well at big events. As always, leave any comments or questions and we’ll be sure to send them over. If you or anyone you know wants to write a guest article, feel free to reach out to us on here, social media, or thehyperloops@gmail.com

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