Today on echobase we are going to be dropping a few deck ideas that we have been having some fun with since the Unlikely Heroes release. Disclaimer – These are not your top tier meta decks, just some solid decks to drop on the table, you never know, someone might see a bag of potential in a few of these line-ups and take it to the top.

First up let’s start with my personal favourite deck I’ve been running this Destiny season – Pre Vizsla & Asajj Ventress.

The deck’s premise is relatively simple: hard mulligan for the Ginivex-Class Starfighter and drop this as your first action. This support is effectively a card with 2 dice: the vehicle’s die and Asajj’s character die. Round 1 you are looking at the resolution of 7 dice, and there are very few 2-wide aggro decks that can get you to this state with just your opening 2 drop die.

The deck also features the Nightsister Assassins as a spot requirement to turn Asajj’s Power Action on to get even more resolution of dice going, this time weapon dice. The Modified Relby V-10 is there as another die that can come back in; if you have a stranded die on a blank, PA the Relby, remove it, and get the Relby back in. In summary this deck has an onslaught of dice constantly recurring and has quite a high damage ceiling.

Moving onto deck number 2…

This one you might be thinking is slightly out of left field with a couple of curious includes and an initial lack of general upgrades. Well, for this build we are here to maximise on area of effect damage with IG-88’s Power Action and we are putting a lot of our value into ‘Bounty Hunter’ dice.

Elite Mercenary earns a slot here as it has the Bounty Hunter subtype and can be resolved with IG-88’s Power Action. The round you play the Elite Mercenary, if you have no cash you are unlikely to even bother activating this, with the exception of it acting as a base side to any modifiers you have in your pool. As the game goes on this card is actually very much above curve for a 2 drop. Sequencing is key – If I’m starting a round with 3 or more resources, my first action is to activate the Elite Merc. I typically resolve whatever it gives me. Quick note: the 3 shield side is a nice little bonus for a faction that generates very little additional health.

With 6 die start Unlikely Heroes support decks on the rise, I’ve included 2 copies of Lawless for potential mass removal. For Mandalore! has a slot to get a removed IG-88 die back into the pool, or the Pulse Cannon, which is always an opponent’s priority to remove once it hits the table. There’s space for Chemical Strike if you really wanted to go completely in on AoE.

Let’s try our hand at a Ren deck…

For this deck we are working on a simple premise and that is to build around Witch Magick. Ren has some big damage side’s on his dice, but they come at a cost of self inflicted indirect. The synergy between the indirect cost on his die and Dark Rage is through the roof, don’t forget this also triggers his passive ability to roll in the Servant of the Dark-side. We are missing an Unending Hate here; I found Vader going down relatively early so wanted to cut the spot Sith requirement. The only even costed card we have here is Beguile as it’s just quite frankly exceptional removal. Pulling off a Rise Again and grabbing any of the upgrades feels good. This deck has a few tricks but I feel it’s missing the final push to be the top villain blue deck right now.

Here’s a low res full size art piece I did for Ren. I didn’t finish his feet as I knew it wouldn’t fit the template. Might finish it one day..

Next up, moving on to a hero build albeit with a villain character…

For this deck, we are pairing Iden Versio with The Bastion of the Republic – Rex. Outside of Veers, the other most consistent method of taking control of the battlefield is with Rex’s passive ability. We have several tricks to give the battlefield away with Tactical Retreat, Maintain Position, Defensive Effort, 501st Assault Team and of course with our choice of battlefield, Perimeter Outpost. If you start your sequencing by Power Actioning the battlefield, first action activate Iden piloting a vehicle (or play an Outland TIE with ambush first, take back the battlefield thanks to Rex, put a damage on Relentless Advance, ping with Cruel Methods, then activate Iden, piloting the Outland and maybe pinging with a Westar and still taking another action). The battlefield gives protection for getting a boosted resolution from that vehicle die if you go on to resolve dice as your second action.

Relentless Advance ticks up pretty quickly with this build, I’m genuinely surprised to have not seen this deck hit more tables. We genuinely believe this lineup (though not necessarily this build of it) to be the best Iden deck currently available in standard. Try it out…

Finally to round out the article we have a No Allegiance build..

A 27 health, 5 die starting deck is no joke. Fortunately, the Yellow neutral suite is not as limiting as other neutral factions within Destiny right now. I’ve seen countless games of player’s forgetting about Fennec’s passive ability: after playing a yellow event you can re-roll one of your dice, I’ve not included any cards with the ambush keyword to try and cheat in an extra die resolution, but I’m sure someone’s cooking that up. I’ve not really got much more to say on this one – draw cards, play upgrades, roll dice, re-roll dice with Fennec’s passive and Power Action, mitigate, grimace and apologize profusely to your opponent when you pull off Black Market Connection, and fundamentally and most importantly, cross your fingers you roll more damage than your opponent.

That’s all for our article today – we hope to have inspired a few builds for you guys to try over the coming holidays. In parting, our final comment is that the tier 1.5/2 decks of this Unlikely Heroes meta are insanely fun.

Enjoy the holidays,
echobase out

Oli, Mark & Mark