echo7:
Last weekend, the Entourage Gaming TTS Tournament V was won by a rather unusual looking deck: 3 Marauders and 1 Jawa with No Allegiance.

As we love unusual here, we reached out to the deck’s pilot and designer Danny McKnight aka L8 Night Gaming’s Poem, who kindly agreed to do a write-up.

Danny:
Three Marauders and one Jawa with No Allegiance, you start with 37 health and you get three hero and three villain cards. The deck building restrictions make you very purposeful in your card choices. I ended up going with BT-1, 0-0-0, Desperate Measures for villain and Mr. Bones, Easy Picking x2 for hero.

I chose those supports because of base melee sides to pair with the Marauders and the BT is pretty strong because you have so much health and they don’t, so that indirect is less of an issue for you. Same thing with 0-0-0, although there’s not very many ways to ping yourself but you can still play Dangerous Maneuver, the 1 Desperate Measures and if you get your BT-1 down. If you wanna play a janky card, you can include Under Attack [echo7: I actually quite like this card choice as it’s a great card to remove a lot of dice before they get focused, especially when you have a high health pool], which would get you the 0-0-0 ping as well.

The deck is pretty straight forward in what it is trying to do. You have 37 health and if you hit Entourage specials and they can’t mitigate, the game starts to shift in your favor. You can often one shot a droid with that special if they’ve taken 2-3 damage already. I don’t have a ton of experience with the deck, it’s based on the Mcbober 3x Marauder and Claudite deck.

I updated it to abuse the Jawa Cloud Car interaction where you play Cloud Car for free using its action, get value off the die then blow it up with your Jawa to make a dollar. If someone doesn’t know how to play against the deck and doesn’t target the Jawa first then they’re in trouble, which is one of the reasons I like playing surprise decks, since people don’t know who the target is.

I was able to beat 2 droid decks and a ReyLo during the tournament. The games are often pretty close. In one game I had 1 health remaining and in another I had 2 health. I also beat a Boba Fett deck and he was resetting Boba like crazy and I still was able to win. 37 health is pretty nuts to chew through, even for Boba Fett.

I haven’t tested the deck against the whole meta, so like Trandos and Kragan. If I had to guess, I’d say the deck would do well against Trandos because losing one of our guys is less of an issue than when the Trando deck loses a Trando. Kragan seems like he could present some challenges for us since we have a bazillion pay sides and are operating on a shoestring budget. A 3 wide Kragan deck would have a better chance than a 2 wide would be my guess because of the health differential.

The Marauder deck auto loses to mill because of the lack of focus, no action cheating to speak of, the need to play so many supports to build out a board state and the fact that our high health pool provides us no benefit.

You could consider a card like Hijack to get additional value out of the Jawa. You steal their vehicle for the round then blow it up and get a dollar. A controversial card in the deck is the Smuggling Ring. I like it because people will often try to disrupt you to prevent die resolves and if you’re sitting on a 2 melee for 1 resource die and like 2 modified 2 melee sides, they can lock you out of resolve with disrupt. You could swap that out with a Truce or a second Well-Connected and it would probably be fine. Just remember that the games go for 4 or 5 rounds because of the high health pool, so a card like Smuggling Ring generates more value than it usually would.

The biggest issue with the deck is a lack of focus. You could consider adding in cards like Bartering, Bucket or Escape Craft (would need to cut a hero card to make room for Bucket or Escape Craft) for additional focus, but in general, there is a lack of available focus in Yellow. We are using Reap and For A Price, so there is some focus already in the deck. Keep in mind that For A Price is only character dice. I made that mistake in one of my games and neither me nor my opponent noticed it till several rounds later. I was pretty far ahead so it didn’t really impact the game, but it’s something to keep in mind.

You can watch the final match of the Entourage Gaming tournament on our YouTube channel L8 Night Gaming. We also live stream weekly Destiny gameplay on Friday nights at 7pm PST.

echo7:
Thank you to Danny for the write-up. I’d recommend checking out the final; it’s an interesting match, and shows the strength of the deck: being able to absorb a huge amount of damage while still swinging at full power with all the supports.

Also, if you know the result from a TTS tournament which we don’t have on our Coronavirus Season page please submit it on our Results Submission page.

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