I cannot tell a lie. My first reaction to Star Wars Destiny was during the Match Play Championship of Star Wars CCG in 2017. I saw Chris Twigg (owner of TopDeckTCG.com) playing a game, and I saw all of the giant dice on the table and scoffed at the game. Scoffing was my first reaction to Star Wars Destiny.

Forgive me!

A few days later I went home and looked up what the hell game he was playing, and this reaction is the one I want to focus on today. The first thing I thought when I looked up the rules is the reaction I want talk about today. Maybe it’s my foundation in the aforementioned SW:CCG, a game where the win condition is depleting your opponent’s deck (or life force), but I’ve always been somewhat drawn to mill in any card game I’ve played. I’m not really all about alternate win conditions, but I’ve long maintained this belief in the back of my mind that in every game where mill is a strategy there will come a time where it will become, even if briefly, the best winning strategy. It’s simply too difficult to balance perfectly; and, every so often there will come a tipping point, one or two cards that push the strategy over the edge. I think that’s where we are at in Star Wars Destiny and I’m honestly shocked it took this long. Before Way of the Force milling was a grind, Yoda/Rieekan or Yoda/Lando needed to work way too hard to stay alive and won more out of that longevity than its ability to discard cards. But, with Way of the Force dropping so much insane mitigation (Pacify, Beguile, Crosshairs, etc) in addition to Cassian Andor, and we’ve reached that tipping point.

Oh, that reaction I had about Destiny? “30 card decks? Are you effing serious? Mill is going to be busted.”

Thirty cards was bound to bite Lukas in the ass, and it finally did at Gen Con 2018. Now, a few games have 30 cards, most notable among them is Hearthstone, but Hearthstone has almost nil mill strategies and very few cards that burn cards from the opponent’s deck or hand. Magic uses 60 cards, but generally 22-27 of those are lands, leaving players with 30-ish spells (though the 15 card sideboard, which rarely holds lands, totally ups the spell count in comparison to Destiny). Further, anytime “Man Lands” are around in Magic they are heavily played as they let you cheat the amount of spells in your deck by letting lands double as creatures.

I think 30 card decks are a bad idea for a couple of important reasons that we’re seeing in the current meta, and I want to cover those today and explain why I think Destiny should switch to 40 card decks and a 40 minute round timer.

All The Decks Have The Same Cards

There are over 800 Star Wars Destiny cards in Standard, but the meta is continually defined by the same 20 or so that repeat themselves throughout the major decks. That ratio is terrible, and unless you’re a mad scientist like NJCuenca running Climate Fucking Disruption Array (actual card name) the instances of top players going super deep for big events are scarce. Let’s do a deep dive on the top 16 of Gen Con.

Kylo (KRAP/Snoke) 3 Yoda Cassian 3 Yoda Cassian Annie 3 DJ Snoke 1 Aphra Snoke BD 1 Talzin Commandos 1 Rose Wedge HG 1 Hera Yoda Maz 1 Drive By Shooting 1 PYW PYW 1

If you break down the Kylo decks (2 KRAP, 1 Snoke) and the two versions of Yoda/Cassian (2 Aggro, 1 Mill) we get twelve different decks in the top 16. Twelve!! That’s 75%!!! What a sick spread!!!!!!

No, dude. Not sick.

For one, that’s exactly one non-blue deck in the top 16. Props to Tacster, one of the best in the game, for being the only human in the top 16 that didn’t run 2x Force Illusion in the top 16 because he was the only non-blue player. Everyone else likely jammed two (I haven’t seen every list), meaning that 30/32 possible Force Illusions happened (Author’s note: Upon finding more decklists, two of the top 16 players ran only one Force Illusion, so we’re now assuming 28/32, which is still a monstrously high percentage, and I don’t think degrades my opinion here in any way; when it comes to this kind of argument I don’t think 88% and 94% are very far off). Force Illusion has been plaguing Destiny for almost a full year, and I’ve written about this lack of diversity before. The suits at FFG will tell you that diversity is an old, wooden ship, but we know better, it’s a figment of the imagination.

Other than the three Kylo decks, the other 13 decks in the top 16 contain yellow; and while three of those were villain decks, the other ten ran at least one copy of Easy Pickings. Vehicle decks with only one yellow character sometimes only run one, as Joe on DBS and Riggs on Hera Vehicles both did, but Tacster ran the full 2x. I have little doubt the villain yellow players ran their best mitigation card as well, He Doesn’t Like You, but the Hero/Villain exclusive cards will always skew the raw numbers. Neutral cards like Force Illusion are the ones to focus on that show us how little diversity we actually have.

Say what you will about competitive Magic, but if a card was repeatedly taking up such a massive percentage of top cut appearances like Force Illusion and Easy Pickings are, they would be banned. I think Force Illusion should’ve been banned during the R2P2 meta, but it’s too late now.

Force Illusion is just one problem, but we’re really seeing the strength of blue and yellow over red, something we’ve seen throughout the entirety of the game. Even if blue and yellow decks were to remain the most played color combination, as I assume they would be, adding ten deck slots to our decks means we have to fit in more cards that aren’t being played right now, and that provides interesting deckbuilding options. Do we play cards like Renewed Purpose and Rebel to increase our consistency? Do we play hate cards like Rend and Vandalize? Do we go deep with our technology and Heightened Awareness/Riposte Combo? The possibilities are endless, but at 30 cards, with no one-ofs we are playing 15 out of 800 possible cards. People are playing the same colors over and over. I admit, Jeremy needs to fix red ASAP, but expanding the deck size will certainly help diversify even the repetitive blue/yellow decks you can expect to face over and over again at a tournament.

I truly think that adding 10 cards to the deck size would be huge for diversifying the game. I think it would make interesting draw spells more playable, and not a huge liability in face of the rise in mill decks.

A Look at Consistency

I’ve always felt opening hand consistency was absurdly efficient in Star Wars Destiny. I’m not here to say whether or not that is a good thing for the game, but I think changing the deck size to 40 cards can make both camps happy. You may have seen this graphic before, originally put together by Rebel Grey, in what I think is the best video he’s ever made about Destiny.

He didn’t make this specific chart, but he made one of the first posts about the math behind mulligans. As we can see, the “free” mulligan in Star Wars Destiny is kind of insane. If we put eight two cost upgrades in our deck we have a 96.5% chance of hitting on if we mull aggressively for it, and we can ratchet that up to 99% if it’s the linchpin of our strategy. Even if we mulligan four cards our odds of drawing a card we really need, if we can get up to 6 copies of it (and of course I mean similar cards, like 2 cost upgrades/supports), we’re still looking at a 90% chance.

These odds are pretty great for casual players, as nobody wants to brick on an upgrade round one when they are there to take names and swing lightsabers, but for tournament play these numbers might be too good. In any event, adjusting decks to 40 cards don’t skew these numbers too much, but I think they make the mulligan in Destiny a little less easy. Take a look:

We probably don’t need to see what a 15 card target looks like, but what I find really interesting about this chart in comparison to the previous chart is that in a 40 card deck it takes 14 “copies” in your deck to reach 99% efficiency, whereas we only needed ten in a 30 card deck. There’s about an 11% disparity on these mulligans which makes them more challenging without making mulligans extremely difficult. We’re still almost 91% to hit one of eight two-cost upgrades in our deck with a full five card mulligan, that’s pretty great So, an expansion to 40 cards doesn’t make our opening hands considerably worse while also making the game slightly more challenging when it comes to deckbuilding, both while compiling the last ten cards of our deck and while planning our opening hands and mulligans. Seems like a win-win.

The last point I want to make about consistency is just how easy it is to draw 30 cards. We’ve seen the Launch Bae deck in various forms, and one even made top 32 at Gen Con, no small feat. There may be other decks that focus on drawing our entire decks out there (no comment publicly, but Patreon subscribers have access to an OTK deck I’ve developed that hasn’t been seen before) that wouldn’t be possible if decks were 40 cards. The draw spells available right now are so powerful that it only takes one or two missteps in powerful cards printed that make these combos possible. A 40 card deck would go a long way towards preventing future Negative Play Experiences via decks that draw themselves entirely in one round.

The Elephant in the Convention Hall

Okay, so what really got me thinking about 40 card decks, which I alluded to at the beginning of the article, is mill and how good it is right now. For what it’s worth, I never liked the 30 card deck size, it just feels too small for a competitive game, but I think I have some numbers that will back it up okay and hopefully change some minds, build some steam, and change the straight game.

Let’s talk about ramping. Ramping has always been a great way to battle mill; get a lot of dice out there, they can’t mitigate everything, and push some damage through. One thing that gets overlooked when discussing how to combat mill is how many cards get put on the table matters a LOT (again, this is a tenet I learned in SW:CCG; I hated decks that played lots and lots of effects to the table because they deplete your life force, give me a good recyclable 5 any day). This is why mill is so good against vehicles, to do their damage they really need to get three to five vehicles out over the first few rounds; their character dice are more supportive, with focuses and resource generation, so the damage potential really comes from cards on table. Throw in things like Rally Aid and Tech Team and you’re costing yourself an entire round of the game.

Mill decks right now are able to remove 6-7 cards from an opponents deck and/or hand each round. Over the course of three rounds that leaves a mill opponent with about 9-12 cards TOTAL to win the game with; that’s re-rolls, upgrades and supports, and events. What makes this so brutal is how fast this happens. If we can’t kill one of their characters by the end of round two the game is almost certainly lost if we can’t finish someone off with the first actions of round three.

Here’s what a game looks like if our opponents get off to a hot start and lose no characters by round three. That may be asking a lot, but this is how these decks operate; I don’t think these estimates are unreasonable at all. Obviously our mill opponents will sometimes brick their opening hand while keeping mitigation, but this estimate assumes an Anakin’s Podracer, Force Meditation, or Ascension Gun. There will also be rounds where the mill player will get an additional card with Friends in Low Places or Scruffy Looking Nerf Herder, or maybe the battlefield claim.

Round 1 Round 2 Round 3 Play an Upgrade 1 1 1 Play an Event 1 1 1 ReRoll 1 1 1 Discarded by Opponents 6 6 6 Total Cards Remaining 21 12 3

If we play one upgrade, one event, and re-roll once, what’s our expected damage output? Vehicle decks need to get a couple vehicles down to do damage. Aggro decks need to get a couple weapons down to push damage through beyond mitigation.

Winning these games is incredibly difficult to do, and every choice is difficult; is this Friends in Low Places worth one point of my rapidly declining life? What happens if I brick and they have all two cost mitigation? These decisions become painstaking because the clock is so fast. We only have four rounds to win the game against mill, and that’s if we’re lucky, in one test game before Gen Con Outrun had my deck completely milled and I had four cards in hand GOING INTO ROUND 3. Let’s look at how a turn might progress:

Let’s take a look at what three rounds looks like if we’re running 40 card decks:

Round 1 Round 2 Round 3 Round 4 Play an Upgrade 1 1 1 1 Play an Event 1 1 1 1 ReRoll 1 1 1 1 Discarded by Opponents 6 6 6 6 Total Cards Remaining 31 22 13 4

10 cards certainly buys us one more round even if things are going amazingly for the mill player. What these numbers don’t account for, is having an extra round to take a character off the table. If we’re able to kill someone before the end of round three and stem the bleeding, we could get six rounds out of our decks.

Round 1 Round 2 Round 3 Round 4 Play an Upgrade 1 1 1 1 Play an Event 1 1 1 1 ReRoll 1 1 1 1 Discarded by Opponents 6 6 3 3 Total Cards Remaining 31 22 16 10

Tying this into the consistency section previously, forcing mill decks to play with ten more cards makes their mitigation slightly less inefficient. Having to add cards like Krayt Dragon Howl which still let us push damage through, or Mind Trick and Overconfidence which put a heavy straight on the color-spot requirements, will make decks fare better against the Menace of Mill. Mill will be forced to play a few more upgrades in their deck to make their mulligans better at turning their mill engines on. These slight inefficiencies will stack up, making mill just a little less omnipotent without having to nerf awesome characters we love like Yoda and Cassian.

And this is my biggest point. Are Jeremy and the “playtesters” going to continue to nerf all of the good characters out of competition, or can we change one rule and balance the game perfectly between damage and mill. I think the latter is true, and I hope people will get on board with this change.

Put 40 Minutes on the Clock

Thirty-five minutes is a minuscule amount of time. I’ve written about this several times, and spoken about it on various podcasts, most recently on The Golden Dice Podcast. At Gen Con I set my phone timer to 20 minutes (there was no clock visible from the play area) to give me a heads up about the round time. I was fortunate enough to not need it, but I was playing so fast I was making plenty of mistakes. This was my gameplan: Play as fast as possible and rely on the brokenness of the mill deck we built to bail me out of bad plays. How shitty is that? I had to alter my play to accommodate what I consider to be arguably the best strategy in the game.

Like NFL teams will do before a trick play, I let all the judges at Gen Con know that a bunch of us were on mill and that in a large tournament like this it can take time for people to get from the pairings board to their seats. We were told we could get about five minutes of shuffle time to resolve mulligans and roll for the battlefield. As the tournament went on this grace period got shorter and shorter, and at most tournaments, worlds included, we’ve gotten far less than five minutes. Gen Con 2017 was especially bad; 400 people and the rounds started within two minutes of pairings going up. This was the land before mill, but even for a methodical player playing aggro losing five minutes of round time could be a disaster.

In addition to changing the deck size to 40 I think round time at premier level events should be increased to 40 minutes. I don’t think FFG really cares about putting out the best possible product for their tournaments (don’t get me started on the prizes), but they have an opportunity to be taken seriously as a competitive game, and 30 card decks and 35 minute timers feels like amateur hour. If they give people five extra minutes I don’t think it’ll be used all that often. Events are already super short, usually just a few hours long. This game and its tournament structure can absolutely spare five extra minutes per round, and I hope the community agrees with me.

A Quick Thought On Sideboarding

While we’re talking about changing the very structure of the game we spend so much time on, I also wanted to reiterate my pitch for sideboarding. I think it’s pretty ingenious and I kind of wish I’d banged the drum a little louder over the past year since I originally came up with it. It’s sort of a take on banning cards before a match, but they’re self imposed. I love the idea of adding two cards to our decklists, so we’d be registering 32 cards, and then before each game we select two of our own cards to remove from our deck. What I love about this is that it doesn’t change the configuration of your deck much, it’s just two cards, and there are a couple of ways we can play it. Maybe we want to tech for specific matchups, like mill and we can sideboard out dead cards like Force Illusion. Or, if we’re playing against Aggro we might want some additional mitigation and slot in two Pacify. If we’re facing action-cheaty Force Speed Decks we might want to bring in Rend or Vandalize to blow up our opponent’s speeds and we can shave 1x of two different cards. I wish Destiny had anything like this; sideboards are tough when our decks are so small, if we’re given a 10 card sideboard we can switch up our entire strategy in between rounds. With an expansion to 40 card decks we could maybe look at 44 cards with four out before each match, but I kind of just like two no matter what; it’s kind of perfect.

There are, of course, plenty of ways we could implement sideboarding, but that’s just one I really like.

Conclusion

That’s it for today. I really hope this concept gains some volition and I’d be happy to go on any podcast and talk about it. Ask your favorite content creators about it. Destiny is a pretty good game. It could be great. That starts with changing rules that feel arbitrarily placed. Starter decks don’t come with 30 cards anyway, so I can’t think of a reason why the game needs to remain at 30. Jeremy and his team have developed excellent mill characters that would be very good if decks were 40 cards deep. As is, these characters are too broken and I’m sick of all the good characters getting nerfed.

Let’s change the fundamentals of this game to account for more competitive play and bolster all of the strategies rather than hamper them all with nerfs, bans, and errata.

Thanks for reading,

BobbySapphire

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