It stinks that there aren’t any more high level events from here to NOVA because I am running hotter than a thousand suns right now. The run hots don’t last forever and I would like to juice them for whatever its worth. My wife seriously asked me if I was considering going to a different country for nationals since I seemed so upset that I don’t get to play at another high level event for a while. I honestly didn’t even consider it but its just funny for her to be seriously worried that I would (not even sure I can).

If I could play at a nationals these five decks are the ones I would consider. First off I’ll talk about the Aphra list that I almost played at US Nationals.

My list didn’t change much as the engine is pretty important to the way the deck operates. I had spoken to a few people about the change to Docking Bay as it would be way better vs mill and Tacos than Weapons Factory Alpha. At most I was playing 5 vehicles in my list which isn’t close to guaranteed value on the first turn and that one extra resource might not be as important in future turns. I wasn’t mulliganing for vehicles which made Weapons Factory Kind of bad. Anyone who playtested would know that giving me my battlefield wouldn’t always be a bad thing. Docking Bay is very insane against mill since they are slow which lets you claim sometimes and because there plan is based on filling your discard pile with goodies. It also has the added benefit of making your opponents Snoke’d discard sides worse. Even though you will still discard three cards the potential of getting back discarded cards makes Snoking a discard less appealing.

If you look closely you’ll notice a super cute New Orders in there. If you read BobbySapphire’s article on weaponizing your battlefield you can see how important it is to have an insanely powerful battlefield in certain match ups. With the one New Orders you will be playing on your battlefield and denying them their battlefield a good number of times. The match up percentages might sway very differently depending on the battlefield which might make it worth it. The inclusion of two Ark Angel are in large part due to the battlefield – against the three wide Support/Tacos decks it should save you enough actions to let you claim consistently.

My pre Nats list did include Friends in Low Places over Probes but now I realize that Snoking a resource in round 1 isn’t that important and Probe is more powerful card later in the game. I did have the 1 Relentless Pursuit like the cool kids which made it even more embarrassing when it got played against me in swiss, woops! I’m not 100% convinced that Podracer is better than Back-up Muscle but I’ll take Drew and Manten’s word on it being great and I would consider making that swap. If you are playing Podracer then Weapons Factory can give you some really strong starts. However, if you roll two blanks in a row in the first couple of rounds don’t make me say I told you so.

To round out the list I re-introduced Invigorate back into the list as my spot blue card d’jour although Deflect is real good right now. However, the timing of Invigorate is much friendlier and the card is more hateful to an indirect meta and also synergieses with your plan.

I didn’t end up playing the list mostly due to wanting to play something different that I thought was good. It was hard to get away from Aphra but logically it made sense. I had focused my attention on Dooku Talzin and liked where it was at vs the match ups I was expecting but these changes to the Aphra list also made me feel pretty good. This list seems like it would be good vs the field and with the removal of a Climate Disruption Array, the addition of an extra Ark Angel for tempo and the addition of Invigorate makes me think that it would be slightly ahead in the mirror.

But Tacos I still think is a problem.

I played this in my local and I easily went 3-0. Granted the field wasn’t super stacked but I did have to play against two of my friends playing 3-wide Snoke decks. The biggest innovation is the use of Coercion and Rift Valley. Valley is slightly more questionable in this list just because this deck takes a million actions. It might be best suited in a list that cuts Sith Holocrons, Force Powers and focuses on Hunting Rifles and LL-30s. However, if you are on Rift Valey you can just claim out of position a lot of times to save some damage or to just mess with your opponents development. Counting your actions is super important in this deck and if you are playing on Rift Valley against a 3 wide deck you have to be thinking about the claim the entire round. That’s pretty taxing although the benefit is worth it.

The two Coercion have been solid so far. The most common thing is being able to use it against an opponent’s mitigation to make them pass a bunch so you can get all of the paper cuts in. Many times your opponent will just keep passing and then you can decide to end the turn. That essentially gives you two free damage (or more if you have Back-Up Muscle out) or you can run some of your dice into the mitigation if you think it will be profitable. Cards like Beguile and Mind Trick are great to Coercion since people start the round with that much money (Even if you have no dice out they are still forced to play it or they can pass). All those passes can help you towards claiming and the information you get from Coercion is really valuable when you are playing Sith Holocron, Chance Cube and want to figure out what you want to focus into with Mother Talzin. I will say that you have to be a bit restrained with it when you play it since it can be bad. You also need to know the rules regarding how it works, what cards they can and can’t play and what kind of cards your opponents are likely to be playing. It’s a high skill card for sure.

I think this deck is really good, it can be slightly hard to play and I don’t think its forgiving to bad play. I haven’t gotten around to testing the heavy guns version but Force Wave and Holocron are hard for me to get away from.

Oh, you didn’t think I was going to leave without showing something I was brewing from scratch. Well…maybe not from scratch but this is the true leftover casserole of decks.

Mama gonna cook you up a nice casserole from all decks in the format. I’ve taken all the good parts of Dooku/Talzin, Snoke Vehicles and Kylo/Snoke and jammed them into one deck.

I think most of the card choices are pretty self explanatory although I will talk about some of the things that me and my buddy Duncan have tried (shout out to Duncan for also playtesting TaCos and winning with a similar list to the one above). We tried Force Speeds and Rocket Launchers. Force speeds didn’t seem like they did much and were also slightly awkward because of the way you want to activate. Under normal situations having two blue characters makes force speed almost a slam dunk but because we are momming those slots need to be heavily scrutinized. I think we opted for Dark Council because it produces resources, helps snoke focus chains and you can overwrite it with a bunch of different cards in this deck making it a pretty good fit. Rocket Launcher was mostly a OMG I WANT TO BLOW SHIPS UP! sort of thing but its really expensive and its not a great card to Rise Again because you might not have enough money to activate it.

We have yet to try a few cards like Dark Ritual, Z6 Riot Baton/Heirloom Lightsaber, Holocron Package, Natural Pilot, and I even considered playing Rift Valley. Of those things the Holocron Package seems like the most appealing since it synergises really well with Force Wave and as of right now we have some space for evens. My biggest beef is besides Wave none of the odd options are terribly exciting – I do like Force Push but the fall after that is pretty steep. Playing Rise again to get Natural Pilot makes me really excited and if that somehow is good then Snoke definitely needs a nerf. That’s like falling asleep and waking up in Christmas land only to find out that you’re actually in Christmas land it wasn’t a dream! The Baton and Heirloom are just more offenisve considerations since it works with Rise Again and has many solid sides although they are melee which doesn’t make them auto includes. Even though we have a lot of money we still want to be frugal and a card like AT-DP might not be good enough because the 3 is a pay side and one of the 2s is a modified it is however good at blowing up supports which is a real consideration.

I would have to consider this deck because it served me well but since its inherently bad vs Aphra I think it would be my last choice. If you want a more detailed breakdown of this list check out the decktech from last week. I’d add two things: one The Force is With Me and one New Orders. The Force is with Me has the potential to save a lot of damage vs all the cards with large range and indirect sides running around – I’m looking at you Hailfire Droid Tank and Planetary Bombardment. I don’t add New Orders lightly but I think 5 is the max amount of evens we could ever play. In this deck I would consider keeping it in my opener so its another card to hard mull for. This idea is untested and it might require cutting one of the other evens for it but that certainly would be hard to do. As of now I’d cut an All In and the Spell of removal for those other cards.

And Finally…the last deck. The one I’ve only played a couple of times but perhaps its the hero this format needs and not the one it deserves. With all these trash villain decks running around a new hero needs to emerge. This is definitely going off the deep end but it has a ton of potential and will definitely get the WTF face from your opponent’s which I obviously value and love.

Lets break it down by how this works in this metagame. Force Wave is obviously insane in the meta and Yoda makes it very consistent. Against mill you also have the added Luke’s Training which acts like 2 more copies because if they mill them you get them, that’s pretty baller. Against Tacos and Snoke vehicles your battlefield is a one sided die removal spell and because we have Force Speed and Yoda special chains we can claim often. Against Aphra Makashi Training and Caution do a lot of work. Makashi removes the droid dice and Caution will soak up a lot of health making racing fairly easy. Makashi can cost 1 often because of Luke’s training as well and pairs well with Vibroknife. Ezra’s ability is really freaking good since drawing into Luke’s Training, Force Speed and Aftermath essentially gives you more resource or dice. Drawing Suppressive fire will give you more options as well which can give your deck plenty of gas to operate. We also have the patented Vibroknife/Yoda/All in wombo combo which is the trick that Pew Pew does so well. The biggest consideration is to just play a mono blue version of this deck but this is the only 5 dice two blue character line up we can have. We could play Aayla over Yoda but that seems silly. The deck needs some tuning for sure but the concept is pretty sound.

That’s it for today, or rather, you are champion for reading all of that but I’m still pretty pumped up and want my decks to keep winning if I can’t. Good luck to all the Belgians that are playing this weekend at their nationals. Take Care and as always…

Moma gonna brew you up a storm!

-NJCuenca

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