We have a double feature coming in from Matthew Ranks who is the Runner Up from the US Grand Championship at Nova 2019. I used the Horizontal Lines to separate the two and for the most part, left them AS IS.

It’s going to be a long time before I can watch a replay of my game one with Joe Colon in the NOVA finals. Have you seen Poltergeist? It’s an older movie about a ghost. There’s a clown doll which very predictably comes to life at some point and attacks a kid. Every time I watch that movie that clown fucks me up a little bit. I know about the clown. I know his role in this film. But sitting and watching the kid lean to look under the bed makes me unhappy. Game one is now Poltergeist for me. I know I play a card from hand with Treasured Lightsaber special die available. I know I wait too long to roll out Rey. I make bad decisions the whole time and can do nothing but scream at the screen. No thanks. I was there during the filming. I don’t need to watch it again.



Other than that I had a nice weekend. I want to talk about nice weekends instead, so I’m going to do that.



I’d never been to NOVA before. I knew it was where I would have to go if I wanted play in US Nationals, but a few months ago I could not come up with any reason which would have led me to making that trip. Because I was going to Gen Con this summer, and THAT is where I would sate my desire to play in a HIGH LEVEL EVENT!



I played Magic the Gathering a very long time ago. I played it at a professional level. I was a Bad Pro. I was a guy who played in HIGH LEVEL EVENTS, but Good Pros were never afraid to sit across the table from me. Because I was not great. I made a little bit of money, enough to pay for some cool trips around the world, but I eventually ran out of drive, energy, and ability. I hung it up. I started playing games with little metal men and dice instead.



Then my cousin picked up the two-player starter for Destiny and made me play it with him after we got off work. That was about a year and a half ago I think. That was when I decided I wanted to play more Star Wars Destiny.



I did the thing that you’re supposed to do. I played in some Store Championships(rip). I played in some Regional tournaments. I began to remember how much I enjoyed competitive gaming. I even had a tiny bit of success. I decided that I would go to Gen Con. Because Gen Con was where lots of competitive players would be, and they also had better play mats. I didn’t write about my Gen Con experience because I didn’t really feel that an article was necessary from a random guy who made top 16. Particularly when Grandpa Jake wrote a really good one here. But Gen Con was important for me. It was the big tournament that I would play in, get knocked around a bit, hang out with some guys from the Hyperloops discord who I had never met IRL before, and have a good time. All of those things actually happened, but in the process, I made top cut, and I learned a little about who I am as a player.



I held my own with a deck I really enjoyed. 6 of my 8 matches day one were versus people who made top 16, or were named Joe Colon. I held my own. I competed. I was no longer just “happy to be here”. In short, I had a really nice weekend.

So I got home and decided to go to NOVA. It had taken me a few months to plot the logistics for my Gen Con trip. For NOVA, I had like three weeks. I had to take time off work, book a hotel, drive ten hours(each way). I also had to prepare myself for a reality in which I would be extremely disappointed with myself if I did not have a nice weekend.



My trip to NOVA was about me placing a bet on myself. I don’t want to get existential about a card and dice game. I’m going to though, so hang in there.



It should be apparent that this report is not going to resemble most reports. I may talk about some of my games, I may not. What I want to show you is what this weekend felt like for me. Because I think a lot of people who might read this also look forward to feeling this way as well. You come to this site because you want to also have a nice weekend, and I can maybe point you towards how I managed to do that.



I played a Reylo deck that I think is still 8 to 10 cards short of being correct. It was the deck I had played at Gen Con, and I had changed probably 8 to 10 cards between events. I may write more about the deck later, and my choices, but more about that later.

Saturday I went 6-2, and made top cut. Two of my games(round 5 and 6) were featured on stream. They both go to time, but I think that both resolve in a way that is satisfying under the circumstances. My opponents were all incredible, and I felt really great going into day 2. I also felt that I deserved to be playing in Top 16. I had the highest strength of schedule, and with matches against both Warren brothers, Jon Ruland, and Moophisto under my belt, felt I had risen to the challenge I had presented to myself.



I started Sunday playing Anthony from L8 Night gaming. His deck was the real star of day two in my honest opinion. I immediately really, really liked Anthony. We were in each other’s corner, and both genuinely happy that regardless of how this match went, one of us was top 8 bound. Playing against a deck like his which was a really interesting Aphra/Jabba blend, presented a host of problems for me, most prominently the fact that I just didn’t have experience against it. I want to talk about how our match ended, because I think it’s important. Anthony made an error by focusing into a pay side on a FOST die rather than a free side. He discovered it about two actions later, and went a bit on tilt. He managed to come back strongly and nearly claim the game, but was just short, with those two damage he missed being the difference. His frustration at his mistake could have very easily overshadowed a great match, which would have been heartbreaking. But just a few minutes after we had picked up and moved on, he went out of his way to track me down and apologize for being salty in the moment. It was an amazingly classy act on his part, and it will always stand out as an example of what a genuinely good guy he is. He was my biggest cheerleader for the rest of the day, and I’m incredibly grateful for him having my back going forward.



I played Kyle from ABG in the top 8, and the real key to our match was my loss to him in round 6 of the first day. I learned so much from that match in defeat, that I felt extremely confident that I could put together a game plan for this match. I won in two, and certainly caught some breaks, particularly in the second game where he came up short with regards to damage, but I also think the match up can just work that way if he isn’t able to burn down Kylo early enough.



Now I’m in Top 4, and what I want to do more than anything is talk about my awesome match with Jonathon Ruland. But I really can’t. I could talk about our match on Saturday, where I put his Palp/Motti deck on the back foot for long enough to manage a win in extra time, but I can’t talk about our Top 4 match, because it didn’t really happen. Jonathon learned his own lessons on Saturday, and absolutely demolished me in our first game. The best play I made was conceding as soon as I fell behind enough to allow for enough time to win games 2 and 3, which I felt was extremely plausible, based upon how yesterday’s game went. But I didn’t get to try, because Jonathon had a flight to catch, and had to concede.

It isn’t easy talking about how I felt when this happened, and there was a lot of frustration at the time over how unfortunate it was that it was timed the way it was. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Jonathon and how well he played over the course of the day, knowing he probably would have no shot at the title. That had to be a frustrating ending to a brilliant tourney for him. I’m frustrated with a 12pm launch time on get-out day, and I wish we would have had time to play out the match. I saw comments in some of the chats referencing how I didn’t really deserve to be in the finals under those circumstances, and those folks can eat shit as far as I’m concerned. I played as well as I ever had in my life that weekend. I caught breaks, and made good decisions. On to game one of the finals versus Joe Colon.



Apparently there was a game one. I don’t remember playing it, I’m sure it went great.



Our match is on the Chance Cube stream, check it out, the coverage is great. At the end of the stream, after shaking hands and congratulating Joe, you can see me getting my stuff together and putting away my tokens and deck. What you can’t see is my phone blowing up a bit with feedback from friends and family watching the stream from home. It is my single favorite memory of the weekend, and the thing that drives me to do my best to do it again at worlds.



I made sure to thank everyone in person that I could remember, so I won’t do it again here. Except for some guy named Tony that gave me a cigarette before the finals. Thanks Tony, I smoke about once a week, and that was enough to get me through Sunday. I will leave this text from my mom here though, because it makes me extremely happy.

Have a nice weekend,

Matt





When I got home from Gen Con this year, I told GrandpaJake that we hadn’t really put together the ideal list for Reylo yet, despite our success. I’ll refer again to his wonderful analysis here. I made a handful of small changes to my Gen Con list, liberally stealing ideas from Jake and Jordan McClure’s lists, and added a few new cards here and there. This is what I ended up with for NOVA.





Listen, I’m as surprised as you are that I finished second. But I learned a ton over the course of the weekend, and these are the relevant things to take into account when running this deck.

Bendu is Love, Bendu is Life

I get A LOT of questions about Bendu’s Lair. Obi-wan’s hut has always been the ‘default’ battlefield for Reylo. But is has a huge problem, and serves to highlight the biggest dilemma that you will encounter playing this deck. More than any deck I’ve ever played, you want to win the dice roll in order to take the shields. But your dice are not big, and your chances are doing this are not great. What you want more than ANYTHING is a battlefield that is scary enough that your opponent will at least consider giving you the shields. I looked at every battlefield in the game. Obi’s doesn’t scare anyone, and doesn’t do nearly enough work. My dream was that Bendu would at least give an opponent pause when deciding what to do. He has a 2 indirect side that sometimes will offset the two shields the opponent gets, as well as a 2 shield which kick-starts the Reylo shield engine. He also gives you a single die roll-out for Forsaken. He isn’t perfect, but I wanted to give him a shot. In reality, he was demonstrably average at the job I had designed for him. The reality is that the problem of overcoming this issue shouldn’t be solved with the Battlefield. It needs to be solved within the decklist itself.



Things that (mostly) worked

There are a bunch of cards that I consider largely untouchable in the list. Foraken, Pacify, and Hidden Motive are all you’re going to get for removal. Polarity and Steadfast give you a nice bit of extra reach and allow that nice finishing blow out of hand that the opponent has to play around. Conflicted was above average, but every time I played it I felt I just wanted more damage, and Rey and Kylo’s dice give that just a 1 in 3.



I was also fairly happy with the upgrades. Early Crossguards are part of the recipe for killing a character turn one. Niman’s gives a ton of dice fixing and some emergency removal as well. Yoda’s Lightsaber was absolutely my MVP of the weekend, and I’ve considered running two. Ezra’s saber was…ok. On the surface, Ezra’s is exactly what you want . A solid 2 cost die, redeploy, and a special to chain into with Niman’s. But the problem lies in the fact that all this deck wants to do is overwrite like crazy. Treasured and Crossguard fit this mold perfectly, giving you essentially free damage and cards each turn. Ezra’s felt too situational. Once or twice I was able to overwrite a Crossguard and get a free use out of it, but the times I had it early and felt bad overwriting it far outweighed the redeploy.



The three-cost sabers also felt the same way. With desperate measures as huge a part of the meta right now, running out Binds All Things feels bad, and there just weren’t enough times when I could reliably run out a three cost saber on its own. That extra resource you pay for the big sabers is really important, and I’m not positive they are worth the resource above the plethora of good 2 cost upgrades.

What I think was ultimately missing were key pieces that offset the fact that it is incredibly difficult to win the initial roll-off. It will happen so reliably that I believe it to be a huge mistake to fail to compensate for it in deck construction. To this end I envision that Jedi Lightsaber may soon make an appearance in my list, along with Knighthood. The combo between these cards is cute, but each on their own let you grab some free early shields, turning on the Rey special on turn one, and making up for the inability to grab two shields at the outset.



Going Forward

Jonathan Magnuson had what I felt was a breakthrough in the evolution of this deck by implementing a number of 1 cost upgrades. He liked Crystal Ball and Dark Counsel, but I think Force Jump may also have some value. Cheap focus dice that can be used with Theeds, in addition to providing a nice down payment towards another upgrade seem really strong, and I plan on working this angle a bit more. I love everything about this deck right now, and I think it’s pretty unlikely that I don’t give it one last run at Worlds next month. Until then, good luck with your testing. May your Bendu’s always be loyal.

Many thanks to Matthew Ranks for writing those for us. Here’s a Venn diagram of the JMag and Ranks Reylo lists.

So my Venn diagram was not pretty and I chopped it to make it look better… it doesn’t look better but it’ll do the job at least. I’ll work on making it prettier like Grandpa Jakes. In pink, we have the cards unique to the Jonathon Magnuson list from Top 16 of US Nova, the Yellow indicates cards in both list, and Blue are the cards unique to the Matthew Rank’s 2nd Place list. If you have any comments or questions for Matthew, feel free to let us know and we’ll try to pass them along. As a bonus, here is Matthew Ranks playing Magic the Gathering at Grand Prix Atlanta. You’d have to add a beard to him nowadays if you want to recognize him more easily.

~HonestlySarcastc