Going Rogue refers to playing a deck that isn’t part of the established metagame. The idea being that innovation that is on par with the top decks will have a huge advantage since people won’t have practiced against that strategy. I always try to bring something different for tournaments but I’ve kind of been in a rut lately. I think its a product of the format being somewhat fleshed out – the best cards are somewhat obvious. What I mean is that i could test out a 5 Jawa deck but I kind of already know that it won’t be good enough so why waste the time? The answer is that it’s real sweet to beat people with a “bad” deck. AND sometimes you might just be wrong about what you thought was bad in the first place. This latter point is something I have tried to avoid – me trying to use that excuse just to try out some pile that if I’m being honest with myself I already know won’t be good.

Why Write About This?

Many who I spoke with at Worlds praised my attention to detail when explaining my plays and rationale during my videos. Anyone who said anything like that is incredibly sweet and the idea that anyone likes to hear this old pile of bones talk about anything in painful detail is just amazing. Some people had asked me about some of the decks I had tested and if I would recommend them. I had said no but didn’t want to get into to too much detail mostly for the sake of time. Since worlds is over I have more time to get into the specifics. I wanted to write about these rogue experiments, not just decklists that were played once and discarded but ones that I thought…maybe there’s a chance?

For those disappointing that I didn’t write about the prime meta: the good folks at I Rebel have the numbers and our buddies at ABG did a wonderful analyses of the Worlds decks (If there was an article from YOUR Destiny I would link it but I think Claus was kidnapped by a Colombian cartel because he was wearing the wrong colors or something). If you want meta info you can get it at one of those places. My quick take is that honestly nothing much has changed.

Rogue Experiment #1: eAayla/Plo Koon/Youngling aka APY

Sometimes people show me decklists and I ask “why play this over something else that is similar?” The meta is pretty defined and most decks are just slightly different from previously established archetypes. Sometimes its a variant on an existing strategy but its always important to ask yourself “why am I doing this to myself?”

Looking a this it compares to two established archetypes: Reylo and Chopper. Below I’m going to go into detail as to what this deck does better and worse than Reylo and Chopper.

Reylo & Chopper

First I’m going to discuss what applies to both.

What’s Better?

Resource generation is better for this deck than it is for both decks although C-3PO makes it close when comparing it to Droids. You essentially start off with 4 resources and while the cards you get to play are limited due to color the upgrade suit I found to be more threatening in general. HOT TAKE: Sacred Jedi Texts is one of the big reasons to run this deck as it can occasionally create an insane resource advantage in the first round – occasionally the card can represent plus 3 resource in round 1 and end on Aayla allowing you to overwrite it into a more powerful upgrade in later turns. This gives the deck a 0 cost pseudo redeploy that adds one for a further overwrite with an insane upside. Ending the game with Aayla with a bunch of upgrades is on par with most characters. The rogue deck advantage is strong with this one and if your opponent chooses poorly on their first target they will be in a world of hurt.

What’s Worse?

The event suit is generally worse – here Chopper outclasses everyone. This deck doesn’t have a consistent way of fixing it’s dice like both decks do. Sure it has Plo’s focus and Aayla’s special but using those can greatly diminish its total offensive power. This deck I also found to be difficult to pilot and in combination with that there are a bevy of potential builds and cards I didn’t get to try. I was on my 22nd draft of this deck according to SWDestinyDB and I still feel I could test a bunch more cards that could belong. A lot of people were working on Chopper and Reylo and I could get plenty of feedback from all of them regarding what were the best cards they had found but with this deck I was swimming in jizz on my own. This deck is also slower than both of the decks – Its roll and draw dependent with Reylo but not close at all VS Chopper.

Reylo – Specifically

What’s Better?

Having access to Electromagnetic Pulse is the biggest gain for this deck. In this metagame that’s certainly something. On top of that Defend is a card that people should be considering if they can afford it with Dax’s Diner being a dark horse pick that I have considered. This deck can certainly afford these as it creates a lot more resources than Reylo. It has a better roll off than Reylo. It has better mitigation cards specifically which allows it to get ahead on the board and then stop all of its opponents dice.

What’s Worse?

Having access to guaranteed shield hate is really excellent when you lose the die roll. This is pretty huge against Palpatine as his main way of living is through shield spamming. While APY has better mitigation the synergy cards are just insane for Reylo. Having the ability to do damage without the need of dice is quite excellent and while APY has steadfast Reylo has additional tools like Kylo’s Power Action.

Chopper – Specifically

What’s Better?

Besides the things I mentioned there isn’t much that is better. When playing it the deck felt like a worst version of Chopper. Its ability to spam dice in the first and second round makes it better in certain spots against decks like Aphra that can only answer dice on a 1 for 1 bases. The deck is slower but it can take more actions to play around Forsaken.

What’s Worse?

The deck has a 4 health character and when he dies the deck loses a lot of its robust resource generation. Droids is a synergy deck that gets much worse when a character dies but at least that character has 8 health and has better tools to keep that character alive longer. Oh and those tools? Easy Pickings, Flee the Scene and now Entangle give the deck a much more powerful event package. Its arguable that the upgrades are better for APY but its not even close on the events. The other big benefit of droids is their ability to play around mitigation with their action cheating, APY has to do everything slowly and fight through all of the mitigation and sometimes the spam plan just doesn’t get there.

I found the deck to not be good enough but who knows, maybe some combination of cards can bring it to top tier status. The link to the DB has a list of cards I wanted to try or re-try, feel free to play around with them.

I hope you enjoyed this and let me know what you thought in the comments or on social media.

And as Always…

MAY THE ROLLS BE WITH YOU!

-NJCuenca