As we draw nearer (hopefully) to heavy spoiler season, I thought I’d give my two cents on the characters we’ve seen so far. All the characters that have been spoiled are intriguing to some degree – I don’t think any of them are slam dunks, nor are any of them complete duds. Below are some of my initial thoughts:
As the current meta has moved more and more towards indirect damage, with Aphra’s murder droids and Planetary Bombardments hitting the table left and right, I’ve started to consider what cards might be good additions to decks. Cards that might be difficult to play or use effectively when your characters are being cut down quickly by direct damage, but that become more effective when your full cast of characters is surviving longer into the game. One of the first cards that came to mind was The Power of the Force.
This past weekend I took a relatively unknown deck to the US National tournament – eAphra/Executioner/Executioner, AKA “Curtain Call” (since those Executioners love coming back on stage). I went 7-1 in the swiss rounds, claiming the top spot from my day and proceeding to the round of 32. Unfortunately, I lost a close match in the round of 32, ending my tournament there. Below is the story of the deck and the story of my tournament. Hope you enjoy!
In this edition of Deck Building 101, I’m going to go in depth on removal cards, what makes them good or bad, and how to decide on removal for you deck. The inspiration for this article was some discussions with Jon about what kind of removal he likes vs what kind of removal I like. I prefer cards like Doubt and Hasty Exit, which he dislikes putting is his decks. On the flip side, he loves having cards like Flank is his deck, while I tend to shy away from those sorts of cards. So who’s right? The answer is, well, complicated. There are different characteristics that give value to removal cards, and depending on what you are trying to do with your deck you will value certain types of removal cards more than others. The goal of this article is to explain what those characteristics are, and to help give you some insight into choosing the right removal cards for your deck.
UPDATE: A rules interaction we had not considered affects how this deck plays. Because you cannot resolve a die more than once in the same action, you cannot use Fifth Brother’s special on an upgrade die and resolve that die in the same action. Additionally, you cannot use two Fifth Brother specials on the same die in the same action. This breaks up the All In play, and leaves the deck open to mitigation. Though Fifth Brother’s special still has a high upside, this likely pushes the deck out of any consideration for Tier 1 status.
We will leave the rest of the article up as a token to the importance of carefully considering rules interactions before publicly talking up a deck ;).
It’s early in the Way of the Force meta, and we have been exploring decks like crazy. One of the decks that has come up recently as a contender is Fifth Brother / Snoke, a deck with which Jon won a recent store championship (decklist found here). Today, we’re going to take some time to explain the theory behind the deck, why it works, and why we think it might be a contender for Tier 1 status. At the end, Jon answers the question we know you’re already asking: isn’t Kylo2 just better than Fifth Brother?
