One of the first decks I made in Star Wars Destiny was an It’s a Trap deck. It was really good vs range decks but suffered vs the Vader Raiders of the world. We jump forward about a year and a half later and It’s a Trap has been almost forgotten mostly because of Friends and Low Places and a diverse metagame that has made it harder to trap people. The card is still incredibly powerful and with the Empire at War set we have even more power/payoff cards to pair with it which gives the deck consistency it lacked. Before we might not have drawn our Its a Trap and found our deck under powered but now we have greater redundancy with cards that serve a similar role.

There are a wide range of characters one could build a mono red budget Trap deck around but I favor this following line up because it has the best budget Hero red character(Poe) and a built in way to protect him. Poe’s special is incredible in this deck since it can let you resolve his Blaster’s special right away and can help you claim. What I mean by that is since his special can blank dice while helping you get a shield it will either save lots of damage or it will make opponents have to use rerolls in order to extract more value from their dice. Rebel Trooper essentially adds plus 7 health to Poe and with Dug and other mitigation Poe should be around for a long time. Other characters worth considering in your budget line-ups include: Leia Organa, Admiral Ackbar, Rebel Commando and Snap Wexley. I think the best 2 character set is probably Baze and Snap but for 3 characters I think this the best. Once plots are legal all bets are off, there will be so many possibilities your brain will literally explode!

More Power!

It’s a Trap is the lynchpin of your deck, the reason your deck exists and why you are restricting yourself to one color. Now there are other cards that support your strategy giving help to old Ackbar.

Fortuitous Strike only helps when you roll badly but I generally do and if you have good odds of hitting two to three range sides then it’s worth the gamble. I’d say rerolling 4 or 5 dice is where you want to be with this but the battlefield I have chosen makes the cost less of an issue so feel free to get aggressive with your rerolls.

Plenty of situations involving Hit and Run/WIngman with Heat of Battle are going to infuriate your opponent. This card is way better than I thought it was and its going to do some serious work in this deck. I’m going to test out Swiftness so I can make Strike and Heat automatiucally deadly. As of right now Heat of Battle can be a bit awkward when you don’t draw Hit and Run but having the added consistent punch albeit awkwardly is still great.

Battlefield

This deck is surprisingly expensive and we don’t want to waste actions unless they are going to be insanely impactful because we want to be going first every turn. I lament not having any 0 cost cards that can interact but I’ve chosen to be as proactive/impactful as possible and with that the cost of cards go up. Many of the top decks are slower than they have been and this takes advantage of that. If there’s a lot of Sabine and Cad Bane in your meta you might want to switch to something less impactful but you should be using something that will benefit you like this, Cargo Hold, Imperial Armory or Main Plaza. You’ll sometimes want the shields but in match ups where you know you’ll be claiming I think this will be better. Your opponent might be frightened by the possibility of letting you have an extra resource every round. Do they feel like they can let you have an extra resource a round? Do they feel lucky?

The deck is rounded out by a some mitigation, claim cards, All In(action cheating), bunch of solid red upgrades and Rearm to help red dice production which is essential to your deck’s synergy. You’ll have more dice generally than your opponent and if you can stay ahead you can usually finish first. We could consider more 3 cost weapons but the deck is already expensive enough.

A Not so Random Aside

This deck looks like a blast to play and you might take it to your local store and have a fun time until you face the worst designed card in all of Star Wars Destiny history.

I could write an entire article on this topic but I’ll try to keep this short. Hopefully something will happen to Kylo2. FN is bad but at least it feels like you are playing a game. Kylo just feels like you lose if you build your deck in a way that the designers wanted you to. And its not like mono colored decks were oppressive either. It would have been interesting, albeit still a bad design, if Kylo was wearing a Hawain shirt and his ability read “an opponent reveals two cards at random from hand and if they don’t match in color deal 2 damage.” This at least makes sense thematically, you got greedy by cross factioning and now you get punished. Now its like “Isn’t in cute you stayed to one color, good for you! Here’s Kylo, eat shit.” You get payoff cards for staying one color but those payoffs are barely worth it and on top of that Kylo exists making mono colored decks unplayable in the competitive arena. As a tournament player I don’t mind that, I swallow my dreams of playing mono colored decks and move on but as someone who’s concerned with the health and growth of the game this is infuriating. Casual players like to have fun but they also like to feel like they can win. When you’re playing a mono colored deck drawing a pairing against Kylo feels like you’ve already lost. Not exactly sure how you fix him either. If you could reprint it at 1 damage then its a much more reasonable card even though its still weird to have a card punishing in that way. You could increase his point cost to something like 20 and that would probably balance things. The biggest problem is that Kylo is in the starter deck. A new player starts with this card in their collection and to errata it would just be awful from a marketing perspective. Kylo and Phasma are probably the best cards in that set and to have one of them be randomly worst when you enter a casual game night is certainly a recipe for a feel bad scenario. I fear that Kylo might be with us for a while because of this fact. I hope I’m wrong though.

Bonus Decklist!

Last week I posted a five dice Planned Explosion deck which I thought was pretty good. One of our Patrons posted a list that looked even more fun and interesting.

If you click on the picture it will bring you Tybrid’s list. I changed it a bit by removing Chopper, adding a little more die control, Tech Team and Strike Team. Strike Team could also be Cheat just to be able to get another Planned Explosion or Vehicle with base range sides but I figured if there was a deck where Strike Team was remotely playable in it would be this one. I played this deck on our fundraising stream on Saturday and could have won a match where I forgot that none of my stuff had base damage sides, whoops! Prioritize playing those vehicles first and remember that Lando lets you start with an extra resource…

Thanks for reading and as always…

May the rolls be with you…unless you’re playing Kylo2…why does he have 3 damage sides?

-NJCuenca

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