I often hear about as well as get asked about my thoughts on alternative formats or building restrictions and quite frankly as a competitive person, I just don’t bother thinking about those. If support picks up for something like that then sure, I’ll start to look into it, but I seldom try to dream about how things could be as opposed to how they actually are. Recently I’ve been asked about the Meta of old and what the top tier decks were by players that are newer to the game. I failed to realize that not every Star Wars Destiny player is a grizzled veteran who survived the times of Poe Maz and Rainbow Nines. They didn’t get to play the game in it’s infancy and it seems like people want to feel what it was like at the time as well as play old formats, so Voila!, we have a new segment where I’ll go through the releases of the game and talk about the initial strong decks from the onset as well as where things ended. I’ll do my best to be impartial, but we all know that my heart lies with Skittles and all that we’ll taste are Rainbows. Today we start with Awakenings, the very first set of Star Wars Destiny. In case you need to brush up on the rules of old, here are Rules Reference 1.0 and then RRG 1.3 (which is technically when set two came out, but 1.0 was littered with flaws, so just in case). One relevant rule from back then was that you could “overwrite” upgrades as many times as you wanted. This allowed Rey to stack additional actions via playing multiple ambush upgrades.

Awakenings

I started in February, a few months after it came out (December 2016?) and trying to get your hands on cards before then was apparently nearly impossible unless you were emptying out your wallet. I don’t remember a single rare being worth less than $5 – $8 and the Legendary cards went as high as $70 for just ONE Vader. I had some free time and wanted to play a card game after having been retired from them for a while, not to mention wanting a mutual hobby for my significant other and I to do, so after checking out a local event, where it seemed like nobody had every card, I had some fun and decided to jump in.

It was a new game so making decks and figuring things out was quite a mess. There was a website called SWDestiny.db that had decklists and the cards to look through and read and I fell in love with Jango. I thought that I could activate him multiple times per round and quickly found out that it wasn’t how he worked. Anyways, there were three decks that were widely settled on as being very good early on: Jango Veers, Han Rey, and Vader (Tusken) Raider.

Those were the big bad boogie monsters in the hey day. Gathering all of the pieces to any actual list was hard so most of the time, people played whatever they wanted. BROKEN was the cry of many when Jango Fett got to be fully loaded with upgrades and then roll out and heave damage unmitigated. People also started to realize just how good Redeploy was on the guns package and wanting the additional health so that you didn’t just get rolled off the table. We started to see more decks with 3 characters and the format had a new pain in the butt as people wanted to kill Jango before the late game, but he had 10 health and only 1 die as well as redeploy guns, so we saw the birth of Jango Bala Trooper which was supposed to be a less brittle version of Jango Veers.

For many, this new kid on the block was the bees knees late in to the format, but it ended up having it’s own problems after people realized to just destroy Bala-Tik and the decks damage would quickly fall behind. A newer variant became more popular just before Worlds that had completely replaced Jango and his pitfalls and gained additional Focus sides. Phasma Bala Trooper:

Phasma’s ability really only worked with FOST to give it guardian, but it caused some issues trying to knock down the 11 health elite character whilst a 7 health scum bag was throwing your damage into his own face. The Best Defense also helped to protect and shift damage due to having 2 red characters and Bala-Tik loaded up could take down decks with 3 characters well via all the extra dice from being readied. Phasma looked ready to take over Worlds, but *SPOILER* Vader Raider ended up winning oddly enough. There were some massive complaints about FFG’s release system for Worlds tickets as well as the overall small quantity of available tickets. We (TheHyperloops) had originally planned to go, but we didn’t buy tickets and then they were completely sold out, I was actually streaming at the time and forgot to hop off and buy mine. I had decided to play a couple more games and they were already gone. At that point, I had decided to unveil my Worlds deck which I had been testing for a very long time via 3 articles and was hoping that others would go take Worlds by Storm : Rainbow Troopers! 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. I reread some of my writeup and I think I wrote much better and in depth back then with things that are still applicable to the current times, so go check it out.

It is still unknown what the “best” deck in the format was back then. It’s easy to say that Vader won and therefore is the best, but many believe that the restriction on attendance didn’t allow every one to show their mettle. I think that it doesn’t matter what the best deck was, because the only thing that matters is who won the trophy during that event. Rainbow Troopers will always be the best in my heart.

The Awakenings meta was over right after Worlds finished if I’m not mistaken. Spirit of Rebellion launched around the same time and we all wanted to put our new toys on the table. There were some notable mentions at various times throughout the Awakening meta though. Poe Rey, Jabba Dooku, Grievous Dooku, Quigon Rey, Rey 2x Padawan, and the deck / annoying combo that we our breakfast cereal website was named after (TheHyperloops) which was Poe and 2x Hired Gun that used the original Millenium Falcon to play Hyperspace Jump every round and have you die of frustration. Poe Rey was actually good though, so I went and found a list for those of you looking to relive the past.

Next week I’ll be delving into the Spirit of Rebellion meta and where many felt the game went down hill. Nightsister is forever in my heart, see you next week! (Below is the story of how we started if you want to know)

~HonestlySarcastc

Speaking of the old times, I completely forgot to talk about how this all started. I was going to events and I had already known NJCuenca through a mutual friend back during Magic the Gathering. We had met up to test a few times and talked strategy as well as working on decks and jamming games. BobbySapphire I hadn’t actually known at all before Destiny and we had ended up meeting in the finals of a local. He was on Dooku Grievous and I was playing Rainbow Troopers and we were playing on Mos Eisley. I ran out of deck and hand and he thought he had won right then and there, but I claimed the Battlefield to bounce one of my upgrades to hand and not die and then killed him during the next round. The poor guy believed in his friends to tell him the proper game end situation and their choice of words weren’t fully reflective of it so he was misled and paid the ultimate price for it. He lost and gets to feel bad about it forever! He was very butt hurt and I don’t even remember how we started talking after, but I know that we had played on TTS and didn’t realize it was each other and eventually were talking a lot about strategy and the game and how pitiful it felt to watch people’s strategy or lack there of in the game (yeah, i’m a harsh critic, I’d expect you to know this by now). Cuenca wrote a blog post about math and probability in determining how many dice to reroll when looking to pair up your mods and that got the old BobbySapphire gears turning in his head and he wanted to write articles and gathered us together to be what we are today. If you love us, you have to thank Bobo, but if you hate us, then you have to blame him and also wonder why you are here still reading this. Anyways, it’s been a pleasure (and horror) writing for you all. That’s not a good bye, but who knows when that will happen. Here are some old ass TTS games and deck techs if you wanted to check out the Awakenings meta and our shabby old play skill from back then.

We didn’t have many videos from back then, but i examined my old list at some point when looking at new sets and it might give some insight.