Author’s Note: In between writing this and its publication the designer of Star Wars Destiny, Jeremy Zwirn, emailed out a ruling about drafting cards that require an additional die than normal, like Seventh Sister, Krennic, Training, etc. In the following email he also references that errata and Balance of the Force point costs are not applicable in Destiny limited formats. This doesn’t change anything written below, but I would like to add that FN-2199, Imperial Inspection, Vibroknife, and Unkar Plutt, Fast Hands, Heat of Battle, It’s a Trap (among others) get much, much stronger with this ruling. Some are downright busted… Anyways, here’s the image.

Now, on with the article…

Limited Resources!

I have always loved limited formats in CCGs. For those who don’t know, limited refers to the limited card pool of a sealed or draft format vs. the bring-whatever-legal-deck-you-want constructed formats. When I used to travel all over for Magic: The Gathering, I traveled mostly for limited. I’ve spent too many hours either cash-drafting with my friends and spent most of my twenties drafting for 6+ hours a night on Magic Online. I really, really like it, so I’m super thrilled to have it introduced to the only CCG I play at the moment in our new Star Wars Destiny product: Rivals. When Rivals first got previewed I wrote about it here, but now that we’ve actually seen all twenty cards, know the process, and even *GASP* have the Rivals RRG, I want to write a bit more practically about drafting and attending a draft.

Showing Up Prepared

While our target audience is competitive, this is a 101 article so I want it to be beneficial to intermediate and beginner players and drafters as well. It’s possible that many of the better Destiny players have never drafted in another card game, so being prepared is important for everyone and I think it’s worth touching upon it.

When you crack open the rivals set they give you one of those nifty dice trays that hold some dice. These trays can hold 18 dice, which is a solid amount if you decide to use it on draft day. If your first three picks of each draft pack is a die-card then this tray will be more than enough to hold the 15 dice you’ll have with you on draft day. The tray cover has a little indent in it to hold some cards, but it’s not nearly enough to hold all of the cards you draft, so I recommend finding some other deck carrying option. If you’ve ever seen me play Destiny you know that I use Star Wars CCG OTSD boxes for all of my decks.

Even when I played Magic I always kept one box exclusively for drafting. Because of how frequently I drafted it was important that I kept a box with about fifteen of each basic land, and a couple of 50 count packs of sleeves. I wouldn’t always want to unsleeve in between drafts (especially if I wanted to go back over my draft deck later) so I wanted extra. Destiny is a different animal, instead of having a bunch of different packs of sleeves we want to have a lot of one color of sleeves. It behooves us to keep our 20 Rivals cards in one color of sleeve with a bunch of extras for us to sleeve the rest of our draft with. I also always like keeping my character and Battlefield cards in a separate color of sleeve so that they never get mixed in with my decks. As you can see in the picture below I’m already prepared for my first draft, I’m actually using a Star Trek Box so as not to confuse my draft stuff with any of my constructed decks. (If you can’t tell, I like to be organized).

Another thing to keep in mind is that these Rivals sets do not come with tokens. Luckily for us, we all purchased two copies of the Two Player Sets, each of which came with a large punch-board of tokens, enough for two players. This is great because we can keep a set of tokens with our draft stuff without ever ever getting them mixed up with our constructed tokens (unless you are married to your acrylics, which I am not — cardboard life!!!).

This abundance of tokens from the two player set leads me to my next point, the rule of two.

Always Two Are Bought, No More, No Less

We are all suckers who buy two of everything Destiny offers us, and just like we bought two Two-Player Starter Sets so we could have two of each of the characters and exclusive cards, we are going to end up buying two Rivals boxes if we haven’t already. This is great for a number of reasons. For one, if we plan on drafting more than once in a day, we don’t have to unsleeve everything from our first draft to do our second. I plan on even having each of my Rivals sets in two different colored sleeves so that I don’t get anything mixed up. However, this is also huge because having two Rivals sets lets us bring a friend and try out drafting even if they don’t have a collection. Keeping two draft boxes in our collection for others to use makes a draft cost less and it’ll contain everything they need to participate in a draft contained in one deck box.

Let’s Get Physical

Drafting, Actually

Physically drafting Destiny isn’t super complicated, and was outlined in the Rivals announcement article, but covering it here briefly for the sake of having it all in one place seems logical. Unlike Magic there are only two passes, once left and once right. Destiny is also unique in that you actually open three packs, combine them, then pick a card, then pass. From the FFG Article:

An interesting thing about the rules is that you take the three dice from the packs you open and put them in the middle of the table. This lets each player see what other players have opened, may have picked, and what will likely get passed to them.

After the initial fifteen cards go around, we do one more pass: “The round continues until the last card from each hand is drafted. At this point, the players open their next three packs and repeat the process, this time passing their cards to their right. When all is said and done, each player will have thirty drafted cards, as well the twenty cards available to them in the Rivals Draft Set to construct a deck of twenty to thirty cards.”

There’s also the conundrum of choosing which packs to use. We don’t know what kind of draft tournaments there will be. It’s possible that everyone will use six legacies packs and it’s possible that each player will bring three of three different kinds of packs. Our plan is to draft 2 AWK, 2 SOR, 2 EAW, but when Legacies comes out things get complicated. Obviously we want to draft with Legacies, so you could run 4 LEG, 2 of another set, or 4/1/1 with the first pass being LEG/LEG/AWK and the second leg being LEG/LEG/SOR, but having more packs of the same set is dangerous because of possible elite pairings – eObi-Wan/Ketus seems pretty busted!

Strategy

To start off If we use the cards in the image above as an example and we see the person to our right slide those three dice in the middle, I think it’s a safe assumption that the player will take Aayla Secura. She has a better die than Aurra despite costing five less squad points!!! Doing some quick math we know that if we want to take Aurra with our second pick we won’t be able to use Ketsu Onyo if we want a three-die team, and taking Anakin or Lobot means we have to also take a Jawa (unless we open a Battle Droid). If our packs contain a baller 8 point character like Guavian Enforcer, it would behoove us to take it over a strong weapon if it means that we can have a really strong, range-based squad with Aurra if we can find one more 8-point character in the rest of our picks.

Choosing Colors and Numbers

Taking a look at the Rivals characters it’s easy to see how strong Anakin and Ketsu are. Ketsu gives any weapon Redeploy so long as you move the weapon to her, and Anakin has two 2 Melee sides as well as a third side that can do damage or heal depending on the situation and the cards in hand. This brings up another important point about drafting in Destiny – there is no Hero/Villain restriction! You can have an all Hero team and still feature Villian cards in your deck. However the color restriction to deckbuilding still exists, you can only use cards that share a color with one of your starting characters. This makes drafting cards in specific colors very important.

There’s a lot of benefit to being three-color (Rainbow) since it allows you the most options when deckbuilding, but a lot of cards in Star Wars Destiny have synergy within their colors, so a single color or a two player deck could end up being stronger than a Rainbow one depending on the situation. Not all colors are created equal as you can see by the disparity in our Rivals characters: Anakin and Ketsu are pretty awesome, whereas Lobot will likely only get used in an emergency, like we opened two Z6 Riot Batons but didn’t get a playable red character. If we’re all in on the Anakin/Ketsu build, making sure we find a really strong 8 or 9 point character in either blue or yellow and then avoiding red cards throughout the draft is the way to go. At the same time this could lead to us passing really, really strong red cards to our left and right, allowing our opponents to capitalize on that synergy that red offers, especially if they can pick up a decent red character to take advantage of. This is the toughest decision for us to make and one that I plan on figuring out in my first few drafts: Stay two color or always draft rainbow. In Magic there were formats where drafting five color was the no-brainer best play, but there were many more where sticking two colors, or even one color was the way to go. Because there’s no “set” format for Rivals drafting in terms of which packs and how many of each, this question will likely be in flux throughout our drafting careers.

My gut says that going Rainbow will be the way to go, but it’ll certainly depend on what characters we open. There aren’t a lot of red characters I’d love to take early in a draft though FOST, Admiral Ackbar and Ciena Ree jump out at me as ones that I wouldn’t mind taking, especially if I’d gambled early on a strong red card like Z6. There are actually a bunch of great red weapons to take in each of the sets, especially ranged weapons. Red support cards like Imperial HQ could also be absolute bombs, financing our pay sides throughout the game. I like Ciena the most out of all of the red characters, she’s got 9 health for 8 points and two resource sides; she’s very similar to Guavian Enforcer who I also really like. It’ll be very important to be able to make these decisions on the fly. If you open Ciena Ree you could take her early in hopes of seeing some great red cards, but if you don’t and forget to take another 8 or 9 point yellow or blue character to take her place you won’t be punished or anything, since she’s still so solid.

One thing that I think warrants trying is a four character deck. We start with the ability to sleeve up Jawa, who isn’t amazing, but we would only need three 8 point characters to make four characters happen. Otherwise we need to somehow draft two sevens and two eights, which could be difficult, but with the amount of 7 cost characters quadrupling in Empire at War it’s certainly a possibility. Four Characters offer us a four dice start which is otherwise very difficult to accomplish with the unlikelihood of any elite pairings as well as the ability to get over 30HP, which is a lot to chew through in a three-dice-start meta. Conversely I would never recommend a two-dice start, as you’re severely limiting both your HP and potential damage output throughout the course of the game, which leads to my next point.

Win Condish

Obviously the most common win condition in Destiny is by defeating all of our opponent’s characters, usually via damage. However, we’re used to doing this with constructed decks built to push out that amount of damage, most of the time starting with four or even five dice. The majority of draft decks will be three character and three dice, with around 30 health, which is a lot to ask for from a three dice start and a sub-optimal upgrades suite. Our upgrades will likely be a mish-mash of the best playable ones we see in our packs and the marginal ones that come in the Rivals pack. Right now, many constructed decks are capable of pushing out 6-10 damage a turn no problem, but that’ll be a lot to ask from these draft decks. It’s entirely possible that with a bad start or a bad draft we won’t be able to kill all of our opponent’s characters in 35 short minutes. If that’s the case it’s important to understand how the tiebreakers work.

Winning via tiebreakers has a negative connotation in constructed formats because it is sometimes done in a way that one player would consider “slow-playing.” Most Destiny games have no problems sending in 35 minutes because of the efficiency and damage output of constructed decks. I’m obviously not advocating slow play in the limited format, I just think it’s important to know the end game procedures if the game does go to time. If you are behind in damage you might have to make sure your opponent isn’t stalling as this will make it harder for you to win. If you have more damage on your characters than your opponent when time is called, cashing in your dice for resources when you could try and reroll them for damage is a terrible move. Understanding that if all damage is equal, cards in deck and hand is the second tiebreaker is also paramount. These will help dictate your decisions as the game progresses to those final turns if neither player is close to winning via damage.

This theory that it’ll be tough to chew through 30 HP plus shield and heal effects in 30 minutes with an anemic draft deck is just a theory and I hope to have someone of an answer by the time this gets posted (I’m writing this on Saturday night while watching the NFL games, and am amped to do our first two Hyperloops Drafts on Sunday, so I’ll probably edit this with an answer). Answer: There are some savage stories floating around about Force Protection and Coordination doing bonkers things. Shields are definitely going to be huge in the draft formats.

The other advantage to high HP and low damage output is that a mill victory is more possible both in the drafting/deckbuilding process as well as playing out over the course of a game. Some people will be invariably hesitant to draft a mill strategy because of how impotent it has been in competitive play. One of the reasons mill has struggled in the competitive scene is because good players know to cash in resources early and flood the board with dice via upgrades setting up massive turns that are difficult to mitigate outside of Block and Dodge. While I’m sure that people will still be packing quite a few dice upgrades in their draft decks, they won’t be running nothing but powerhouse cards like we have in our constructed decks, lowering the damage output per turn and buying us more time to achieve our goal of decking our opponent. Every format we’ve had I’ve spent time trying to make mill decks work, and each time I end up disappointed. For one, you can never god-roll to victory, and for two, it’s very hard to mitigate two extra dice each round, especially while your characters are getting picked off left and right. I’m excited to try some mill strategies in draft if I see the right cards.

Rivals Card Selection

I’m not super impressed with most of the Rivals cards, I don’t think anything other than Aanakin Skywalker will be a competitive staple though Ketsu might show up a bit. None of the upgrades blow me away but I don’t think too many people will be leaving Vibrosword on the bench (I know I won’t). Another card I think might see some play is Tinker, as it’s the perfect card to ensure that you get a resource whenever you want one as it’s unlikely your opponent will mitigate that die, but if the coast is clear you might use this card to turn a die to a 1-damage side to link up with some modifiers. One card that I think will go in every blue deck (every deck??) is Hidden Motive. This card is really solid for 0-cost mitigation. It’s awesome against the game’s strongest characters and weapons, and you’ll often be able to take a 50/50 shot at removing a die that would otherwise be dealing you damage, which are odds I like to take whenever I can. It’s a little worse than doubt in that it doesn’t force the die to get used even if you miss on your call, but for a card we get to include “for free” I’m happy to take it.

One thing that’s really wild about draft is that you can change your deck in between games. I’m not sure what the time restriction is for this, but I’m certain that if you’re changing things once you’ve sat down for your match it shouldn’t/won’t be allowed. However, it isn’t unreasonable if you know that the entire six people at your table are playing Anakin Skywalker that you go and shove Emulate into your deck in between games. Otherwise I don’t see any other advantage to this rule unless you misunderstand how a card works or you realize that you’re not as defensive/offensive as you’d like to be and you can make adjustments. You also might see someone use a card to great effect against you and want to run it yourself. Either way these drafts will lead to a lot of experimentation, which is a blast.

Conclusion

I’m really excited about Rivals and drafting Star Wars Destiny. It’s something I’ve always wanted, and I’ve been hyped for since they announced Rivals way back when. Now that I have six of them sitting on my dining room table it’s killing me that I can’t just pick up and draft with people online. I hope there is a way for draft to port to TTS, because that’s where I play most of my Destiny, but even more so I hope that Rivals helps the Massachusetts Destiny scene take off so that I’m not only playing Destiny alone at my computer late at night.

I forsee us doing a lot of draft content in the coming months, so if there are things you want to see, please let us know!

Thanks for reading, and GLHF in your Rivals Drafts!

BobbySapphire

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