Four days ago Team Covenant had the Lead Designer for Star Wars Destiny, Jeremy Zwirn, on their Youtube Live Stream and we got a sneak peek at some cards from Convergence, the 7th Star Wars Destiny which is set (guesstimated) to come out in late February / March. Are they chock full of UNLIMITED POWER!!!??? We share our thoughts and you can let us know if you agree or if you think that we are big bozos!

Note: If you’re wondering where NJCuenca is at and why you aren’t hearing from the ‘mad scientist’ it’s because he’s on his honeymoon. Congratulations to the happy newlyweds!

Palpatine

BobbySapphire: I think this guy is sweet, and I love anything that creates a cool deckbuilding puzzle. How many cheap, weak abilities do we throw on him? How many do we want to see overall? How are we paying for these upgrades? This card will make deckbuilders happy, but as a competitive player it worries me. There are too many ways to get rid of upgrades and it scares me that the health buff this guy so desperately needs could be ripped away from him for a blow-out kill. I do love being able to stick an ability on him to mess with the combat math in the pool, so it will give high-skill players some room to outmaneuver opponents.

HonestlySarcastc: If we ignore his ability and just look at everything else, he has some pretty nice die sides, but low overall health. I think about 12 health is where he’d need to be, and then he would need a good ability because he is VERY close to the die sides that Iden has and she has 12 health. For 3 more points but 2 less HP, I’ll be looking to gain quite a bit from the ability to make up for it, even though 2 shields is better than 1 discard (Iden’s die side that isn’t comparable).

So now that we’ve gotten a comparison in mind let’s look at the ability. He gains +1 Hp for each attached ability and those don’t count towards the upgrade limit. I’m not particularly sold on this ability. Sure, you can potentially great a ridiculous Super Suit and roll out a dozen dice all at once, but it’s going to boil down to the cost and usefulness of those abilities as to whether this part of his ability even does anything for you. We’ve got Force Speed and Sith Holocron rotating out which means less likelihood for the free health as well as the cheap way to get big abilities down. I’ll be wanting to see some abilities that cost 1-2 and are worth while in general. I have a feeling that there was far too much emphasis put on the +1 health and not counting towards the upgrade limit. Maybe a natural 12 HP was too much in their minds?? or they wanted to give people a chance to burst him off the table.

His Power Action, on the other hand, seems to be the bread and butter. Double usage of a die is a very strong ability, especially when it is “Free”. Getting doubles of terrible effects won’t really make a difference, but he is a solo Luke3 in that regard so it’ll be interesting to see what busted stuff we could potentially put on him and blow people out with. Force Wave being one of the scariest of options, but the pay side hurts immensely.

Force Storm

BobbySapphire: This is another in a long line of beastly four-cost upgrades that don’t have a blank side. These damage sides are yuge, and being able to deal damage and reroll this die into the pool could lead to some broken amounts of damage for our opponents. Being able to special chain will be big here, and something to keep an eye on if Villians get any more of the ability. There are few four cost upgrades that I find playable, but this may be one of them, especially on Palpatine where it provides an extra hit point in addition to how busted it is.

HonestlySarcastc: Whelp, this is likely to be his bread and butter card. I like to think of it kind of like a weaker Vader’s Fist (only when on Palpatine3) but it does have a lower overall cost due to the lack of paysides. In general, the die sides are at least high enough to merit the cost and they’ve avoided putting a pesky “blank” on it as well. Being able to hit and resolve the special multiple times is going to be what dictates if this ends up being a ridiculous card. You should hit the special 1 in 6 times, but if you pull off the 1 in 36 of hitting it twice in a row, then you’ll likely be off to the races after having done 3 damage and still getting to resolve another side after. The 3rd special of the game is going to be table flip inducing levels of frustration.

Palpatine’s Lightsaber

BobbySapphire: I love this card from a fluff standpoing; when Palpatine busted out his saber in Episode III I was so hyped, and whenever he had the chance to use it in The Clone Wars and the Maul comic I was equally excited. I love that this card is on theme with Palp and his abilities too; you get your money back when you play it, and it’s non unique when it’s on him. If you can stick two 1-cost abilities on him in round one, drawing into two of these round two is absolutely busted. This brokenness is tempered by it’s blue side, which won’t be too easy to match even with two melee sides on Palpatine. A well-rounded card that should be a must-include in any Palp3 deck.

HonestlySarcastc: Palaptine that mean bastard has taken up all 3 blue villain legend slots with pictures of himself, how selfish. I’m excited to finally see a villain unique 2 drop lightsaber so that we can finally try to build some Built To Last decks, but unfortunately they decided to do it after Lightsaber Pull rotates… the jerks!! It’s die sides are a throwback to the days of old with the 1/2/+2, but it gained the ability to potentially refund you the cost if you’ve mixed the deck with abilities and have them out first. It’ll be interesting to see what cheap abilities end up being good enough to play, since we’ll be losing Force Speed and Force Illusion which have been amazing with this. This will obviously go into a Palpatine 3 deck because it’ll often end up costing 0-1 in which case it is the nuts.

Sentinel Messenger

BobbySapphire: I love this guy; drawing extra cards is something that comes at a high cost in most Destiny decks, but his ability is essentially drawing an extra card even if it is very limiting when we can play it – to offset that we get to play it at Ambush speed essentially since it is tied to this activation trigger and not an action we have to take. I can see him being particularly strong in a deck like Palpatine or even with Asajj to help you find that upgrade or downgrade (respectively) that you may have whiffed on. We’ve all had rounds where we have to decide on holding an important card in our hand even though we really, really need to draw an upgrade; Sentinel Messenger gives us that extra chance to find what we need, and I like that, and I like his die enough that I think he’ll see play.

HonestlySarcastc: Whilst it isn’t a replacement for Nightsister, it does have some very valuable sides that we’d want to see on a support character. Snoke approves!!! Potentially getting free advantage is interesting, especially if you can make the deck cheap enough where you can hit some 0’s/1’s off the top. A free Hidden Motive or Doubt seems like a WIN!

Malice

BobbySapphire: This card, in a vacuum, is really rough. Obviously, this was made so that you could have cheap abilities to put on Palpatine, but as HonestlySarcastc writes below it probably doesn’t even make the cut. I could see this card being useful if there were other cards in the set that turn dice to blanks and are good enough to run. I’ve never thought Manipulate was good enough even in a deck that runs 2x Anger, so we’d have to have like a character, upgrade, or support that is good enough to include in a competitive deck but can also blank dice for me to start looking at this card.

HonestlySarcastc: What is this nonsense?? I wouldn’t even want to run this in Palpatine 3 and it’d give him a health and has Redeploy. Maybe it’ll be used in Villain Mill decks if they ever make a comeback. I hereby pronounce you Dead Before Arrival!!!

That’s it for today, hopefully we have more spoilers to look at over the course of the week!

Thanks for reading!