Today’s guest post is by GrandpaJake, one of the looper eldermen. He’s performed well with various decks and today he’s like to discuss Indirect damage and Padme Amidala, Resolute Senator. If you’d like to be a guest poster on The Hyperloops feel free to pitch us your ideas at thehyperloops@gmail.com. -NJCuenca

When we look for decks to help us go far in a competitive tournament, we usually look for something that feels “broken”. We want something with an engine that, when firing, will quickly and efficiently defeat our opponent. To do this, we usually have to break the “curve” of typical cards. While things like 2 damage for a resource and resolving 2 sides are great, in order to compete with the likes of Snoke, Captain Phasma, or Palpatine, we need to go higher.

Beginning with Legacies, FFG gave us a type of damage that breaks from the traditional curve almost every time. Indirect damage, while often overlooked due to its inability to focus a character down, tends to be ahead of curve wherever it shows up. Events that deal indirect often deal more than their direct damage counterparts, and tend to have lower ceilings.

Dice help illustrate this curve breaking even further. Take a look at any die that’s sporting an indirect side, and it’s likely that side represents some of the highest damage it does. Cards like Dorsal Turret, Arc Caster, and E-11 illustrate this point, as they all sport indirect as their highest unmodified side. If we sacrifice some of the focused kills of direct damage, we can resolve higher sides and make our opponent’s health pool shrink faster. And, once our opponent has only one character left, the big sides turn into direct damage, losing their downside and just powering through that last character.

In order to break the curve, most decks have opted for the consistency of focus sides to help ensure that ramp and maximum damage are as easy as possible. The rise of focus sides and dice fixing in virtually every deck means you need to either consistently loop Vigilance or hop on the bandwagon, lest you get left discarding and praying. Luckily, FFG has given us so many characters and other dice with focus sides that you can generally fit them into any deck you’re looking to build. These focus sides get even better with age, making your high value dice killers in later rounds.

So, if we know that indirect damage tends to be above curve, and that focus sides are the name of the metagame at the moment, we ought to try a deck that lets us maximize those ideas. Enter Padmé Amidala, Resolute Senator.

Padmé’s ability allows us to resolve our focus sides as if they were showing indirect damage. If you look at her dice, you can see that means she’s sporting 1/2/3 indirect OR focus sides. We’re getting the best of both worlds as long as she’s on the table, and we have solid damage sides on her dice on their own. Pair her with her ship, and you’re looking at consistent focus or damage as long as she’s around. Thanks to the healing cards available to hero red, she can usually stick around for a while, making the value of all those focus and indirect damage sides rise as the game goes on.

To pair with Padmé for the Denver GQ, I chose Saw Gerrera, Extremist Leader. I had played a Saw/Rose/AR deck in pre-Convergence trilogy, and fell in love with what Saw could bring to the table. His special side lets us discard a card from either player’s hand and deal indirect equal to the cost of that card. In a meta filled with high-cost supports and solid 2-cost events, there are a number of great targets available in our opponents’ hands to both mess with their gameplan and deal big damage.

More often though, I found myself discarding from the last card or two in my hand, which was usually the expensive support I couldn’t afford to play during that round. I’d deal a nice 3-5 indirect, or my opponent would get scared and spend removal on that special, freeing up my other dice to slowly focus to max damage. The fact that Saw’s dice also sports 2 and 3 indirect sides make them powerhouses for just getting damage on the board. Combined with Padmé’s 2 or 3 focus and Impulsive, you can deal a cool 9 damage with just character dice and nothing more than a mildly solid roll or a Salt Flats.

You can see some of the big supports I included for the Saw ability in the list above. In general I was throwing the Pirate Speeder Tanks and Starvipers, but if I had ramped money and was able to play them, I loved being able to resolve their large damage sides and reset them with my N-1s.

Speaking of the N-1 Starfighter, the reason I included these was two-fold: First, I didn’t want to lose any vehicle matchups, but I valued my character dice to highly to play vandalize. Second, I was happy to reset my own, larger ships, or Padmé’s ship, as a way to generate value from those very solid dice.

In general, the deck was just trying to resolve sides for their maximum value, using focus to help get us to those high value sides but otherwise just resolving indirect when it showed up. A couple of opponents ran Vigilance, but I would just reroll and resolve focus sides as damage in those cases, so they didn’t slow us down too much. The biggest issue is decks that are able to spike a character round 1, especially if they make that character Saw. You can see that in the Artificery stream of my 5-0 round, as a hot Vader’s Fist blows poor Saw off the table in round 1.

Saw/Padmé plays like most of the aggro decks we have today. Play your big threats when you can ramp to them, and deal damage fast and furiously. With the above curve sides and great mitigation out of Red/Yellow hero, the deck is a great call against the low health pools out there in standard today. While it struggles against a hard hitting Snoke deck, I think this can be mitigated by adjusting the list to help kill those big non-vehicles and streamline our own support package. You can even try out other action cheating cards to get more of those surprise focus kills. There’s plenty of tinkering to be done with Padmé, so let me know what you come up with!

-GrandpaJake