I realized that we haven’t covered the Across the Galaxy spoilers from the US Nationals at NOVA two weeks ago, and then I realized I haven’t done a spoilers hot-takes article since I proclaimed K2SO sucked and all of the jabronis on facebook raged at me (good call, jabronis!). To be fair, I was only 1/3 on my hot-takes, but that K-2SO call was a layup; that guy sucks, and I hope we get a better once since he was actually solid in Rogue One.

Hot takes are meant to be polarizing and outlandish, so if you don’t agree with anything said below, feel free to tell me how wrong you think I am and in 15 months we can check back in and see what’s what!

Jyn Erso 2 Sucks

Look, nobody wants Jyn to be *a thing* in Star Wars Destiny any more than I do, but this Jyn sucks. I can count on one stump how many characters without a resource-generating die-side or mechanic have been tier one in this game, and that’s not my only problem with her.

Obviously her 12 health is nice at a cost of 13/16 but that’s becoming more and more normal in the Legacies block. Jyn has three 2-danmage ranged sides, which seems nice at first glance, and equipped with any of the two cost guns available to heroes is going to be able to string together 4+ damage a fair amount of the time, and makes for a nice Hit and Run target as a result. But, when you don’t have Hit and Run or a similar mechanic, she’s going to run headlong into one of the most popular mitigation cards in the game: Easy Pickings. While heroes have dipped out of the meta a little bit in this period of time when Snoke is practically everywhere, if he’s balanced like many people expect he will be, I fully expect heroes to come back into the meta in Blue Yellow form.

Looking at Jyn from a mill perspective and it’s clear she fits perfectly with Cassian, but that lack of a resource might be even more troublesome in a control deck. While her two discard sides lend themselves nicely to Commando Raid, Jyn isn’t any better in a Mill setup than Leia is, in fact she’s just straight up worse. I’m not a big fan of hedging and this Jyn feels like a big old hedge. It’s nice to have Discard sides floating around in your deck, but in a Jyn Cassian deck how many discard sides are you going to resolve in a round when your main strategy is killing a character? I struggle to find a matchup where you might be able to mill an opponent before they kill a two character mid-range deck. The only positive I see is possibly being able to run Commando Raid for value in a damage deck since it replaces itself and increases the die by two, which is big.

Jyn Erso’s Blaster will see play outside of Jyn Decks.

While Obi-Wan’s Lightsaber has floated around as a one-of in a few decks over the past few months, we haven’t seen a unique weapon do a ton of work since Maul’s Saber was a linchpin in Seventh Sister Reset decks at the beginning of the Legacies Meta. Jyn’s Blaster joins Rex’s Blaster Pistol as a solid Red Weapon that can go in any deck and still give an effect.

A free-reroll for itself is powerful, and is probably on par with Rex’s Blaster Pistol as value town in a Red Guns Deck that runs Hit and Run. The 3 cost is rough, but it’s the only 3-cost redeploy upgrade that has two 3-damage sides (Canto Bight Pistol is close, but one is conditional and the other costs a resource to boot). This card is beastly on Jyn, and could have some Sabine+Grand Entrance like situations with Hit and Run and Force Speed in the deck with them. However, it’s the Redeploy on those high damage sides that make this card next level. Too often our three-cost upgrades have severe downsides or something else that keeps them from being truly next level.

Between this gun and DH-17 I’d love to see Rearm make a comeback. I loved Rearm back in the Awakenings days when we didn’t have a ton of good cards to jam in our decks. But, with so many decks fitting in some form of economics cards in and recursion being such a solid mechanic, I could see rearm do some serious work with a three-cost redeploy upgrade suite. With enough good red weapons we could see cards like X-8 Night Sniper and Holdout Blaster fall by the wayside for this kind of package.

The X-Wing won’t tip the scales (or even make the cut) for Hero Vehicles

The X-Wing is far inferior to the TIE Fighter, and needing three or four of these supports on the table to achieve value means we not only have to draw them, but get them on the table before activating and resolving the others. Instead of being able to draw the additional copies like their Villain counterpart, the X-Wing gets 50% damage sides where the value is X (get it?) where X is equal to the number of copies of the ship are in play.

My issue with this card in hero vehicles is that they just don’t fit anywhere. For one we have to fit four of them in our list, and until rotation these won’t make the cut. They’re not going to push out T-47s and Crait Speeders, in the two cost slot, and hero vehicle decks still want some upside on their three and four cost supports like Hailfire Droid Tank and Y-Wing, both of which are capable of doing 4 damage without needing additional copies in play.

The only way these could show up in the meta pre-rotation is if there’s also a card that helps you get them out consistently, maybe a character or an even that pulls them. Otherwise I just see this card as a cash grab for FFG to try and get us to buy more packs so we can get four of these and four TIEs.

Improvised Defense is the card we thought Suppressive Fire would be, and it’s the new “Best Mitigation in the Game.”

Let’s face it, Suppressive Fire kind of sucks. I mean, it’s great in that it’s the only reactive card in the game (for now) that removes dice, but it’s super limiting and it forces us to keep a resource available at all times if we want to use it. Improvised Defense lets us spend the resource when we have it, and even though it has a pretty steep trigger condition, focus and turning dice is so ubiquitous right now that we should be able to trigger it, even after we claim.

**EDIT**

Lol, I grabbed the wrong card image and never read the text just thought it was the right card. I mean Improvised Defense

**Fuckup corrected**

Whenever I build a Red Hero deck with Docking bay I only run one but still run multiple Honor Guards because getting the value from the free recursion is too strong even if we can’t use it until the following round. Improvised Defense becomes even stronger than Honor Guard because with Docking Bay we can claim, bring back Improvised Defense for free, then still use the Improvised Defense if our opponent turns a die even after we’ve claimed; that’s pretty sick. We can even Hyperspace Jump to the Finalizer if we want to take the shields at the beginning of the game or otherwise don’t end up with our battlefield.

None of these cards are changing the game

We have to hope that the 23 point Darth Vader that was stupidly leaked on Reddit is real, because the sixteen spoiled Across the Galaxy cards pretty much suck so far. Sure, Improvised Defense is a game changer and Jyn’s Blaster is pretty good, but none of these are blowing up the power level of decks we have right now. Kit Fisto could be okay, and Han is nifty, but not overpowered. And, of course we have like 200 cards left to be spoiled, this is very early not, but if FFG was trying to get me excited about an early look, they didn’t get it done. We should be getting a bunch of Solo-themed cards which means Tobias Beckett, a new Lando, and L337 should be on the horizon along with Q’ira and maybe Maul, among others. I’m not sure what is going to break the three-wide + supports meta wide open, but I hope we see it, because I’ll be disappointed if the majority of the decks stay that way.

And, to that point, let’s hope we actually get some new soon. I know I’m not the only person bored with Destiny right now.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to tell me how wrong I am about all this on Facebook or wherever!

BobbySapphire