Good Morning, Star Wars Destiny Fans. We are now less than a week away from the next In-Person UK Event and it’s one of the best on the calendar for multiple reasons. The first and main reason is that it’s a charity event for Cyclists Fighting Cancer . If you’d like to donate to this cause then send some funds to borisinuk@hotmail.com as I know he is happy to take donations and convert them into raffle tickets for you. Even if you can’t join us on the day you can still be with us in spirit. Secondly, it’s another real life event for Star Wars Destiny, a further reminder that we move away from the Lockdowns of Coronavirus and regain our social lives. This event was scheduled for 2020 so it has been a long time coming and David Payton has held the title for way too long. Third reason, is the raffle prize pool and attendance prizes that have been donated. The video from our host Boris Hardman showing the prizes is phenomenal, laid out across multiple rooms of his home. The final reason that makes this event awesome is that to make things interesting for everyone, it’s going to be a FFG Standard Format Highlander event which is explained lower this article. This is a deckbuilding challenge that none of us has faced before and may never again and it’s certainly got the brain doing overtime.

Let’s get to the important details of the event and then we can discuss the format itself.

Date and Time – Saturday the 30th April at 9am
Venue – Element Games, 1st Floor, Hallam Business Centre, Hallam St, Stockport, SK2 6PT
Entry Fee – £20 per ticket. paypal this to: borisinuk@hotmail.com (friends and family) as this is a charity event with the proceeds being donated to cyclists fighting cancer.
Format – Highlander FFG Standard (excluding Transformations). To clarify this means all sets from Legacies to Covert Missions produced by FFG with all errata and balance of the forces as per when the game ended. The only deviation from standard is that it is Highlander format so there can be only one of any card in your 30 card deck. You may repeat non-unique characters as you wish. Cards not in the spirit of the Highlander format, namely Solidarity, Armoured Reinforcement (newly added following feedback), Order 66, Lightsaber Mastery and Double Down are banned along with Fateful Companions. If we have forgotten any cards that let you bring extra cards then assume you can’t. There can be only one and 30 total in deck.
Rounds – Swiss rounds appropriate for the number of players and a cut to the top players appropriate for the number in attendance for the finals and eventual champion.
Prizes – These have always been insane for this event that has prizes for players and a huge raffle to hand out a whole bundle more.

Deckbuilding
This format leads to inefficient decks having only 1 of each card. You have to dig deep to substitute in lesser cards to replace those that you could have two of in the normal standard format. You have less chance of getting the right card at the right time. Deckbuilding becomes an interesting challenge of how can we get round this “problem” or minimise it’s impact. There are several ideas that have come to mind when deckbuilding. They are:

1. Ignore it. Ensure that your starting characters are strong enough and have powerful dice to get the job done on there own and whatever cards we draw will just support that.
2. See more cards. Cards with Draw effects and Search effects allow us to see more cards and try and get the right card at the right time.
3. Expand the card pool. Essentially this gives us more choice and options to find the better replacement cards. We could be rainbow with our character colours to give us full access or we can use a character that expands the deck building rules by allowing cards from another faction.

Ignore It

It doesn’t feel like a good idea to just ignore the downside but with opponent’s having an inefficient deck it could be possible to surge forward faster with a character that can hit hard and fast. i think the obvious choice here could be Darth Vader – A Terror to Behold with the classic Greedo or a Stormtrooper depending if you want yellow or red as a second colour. On the hero side Obi-Wan Kenobi – Jedi Master with R2-D2 could be a strong choice turning to a 3 melee every turn and getting some shield protection on activation as well. Bo-Katan Kryze could also do well with 3 strong damage sides and the ability to include villain upgrades hitting on option 3 and expanding our card pool choices. I’ve come up with a bit more of a meta choice to share as I think we might see quite a few rainbow three wide decks heading for option 3 and an expanded choice of cards. They would have 3 characters to achieve this which generally means characters with lower health that you could hit hard and fast to take dice away from your opponent early.

I’ve come up with a Maul and Arhinda Pryce character combination. he can hit hard with his 4 damage sides giving an element of consistency to what we roll and with his power action we can hit multiple characters at once. Turning one of his dice into a 2, 4, 4 or 6 damage side feels pretty handy in this format (to be honest it wasn’t bad before).

I’ve gone with the battlefield of Bendu’s Lair as I would like to choose my own battlefield for Arhinda‘s special. I ended on Bendu’s Lair to give me the more “traditional 4 dice start” at the beginning of the game. Upgrades are fairly straight forward with a bundle of weapons and a few utility cards. I particularly like the Untamed Power to go on Maul allowing us some repeatable removal with the special. There is a huge, now glaringly obvious, omission in this list and that is the fact we are missing the form, Niman Mastery. This needs to go in as this is a tremendous card to special chain into the Arhinda Special and the Untamed Power special. Can probably lose the Director or Darth Vader Meditation Chamber for this. We really want to get to a point where we can Maul Power Action his own saber or Darth Vader’s. Supports and Events are largely removal cards and cards that potentially deal damage out of hand. I think the notable cards here are Tactical Mastery and Fear and Dead Men. If we can get a good play of either of these we should be in a good place to take some wins away.

See More Cards

In this section, we are looking at the ability to draw or search for extra cards giving us more chance of getting the right card when we need it most. A popular character for this in the past was always Sentinel Messenger who allows you to look at your top card and play it essentially allowing you to see 6 cards a turn. Anytime I think of a Sentinel Messenger, I think of a deck Gameslayer came up with where he would have two of them and a yellow accompanying character to try and play an ambush card off the top of the deck with the Sentinel activation. The clever thing about the deck was that the Messenger was to be armed with a Pulse Cannon allowing you to activate and hopefully hit an ambush card you could play and then with the ambush action Power Action the immensely powerful Pulse Cannon. However, this isn’t the deck I put together here but it did make me think of pairing with yellow characters that have strong dice. Enter Stage Left – The Trandoshan Hunter. I’m not sure there are many people out there with enough Trandoshan dice to make this deck a reality. I know I don’t have enough but you can see a few elements that fit our see more cards idea. Here’s the list.

You would think that only having one of each card might hamper the Trandoshans in activating their Power Action but as you can see this is not the case. We can get 6 bounties into the deck and acting as a seventh is the Bounty Board. Getting the Bounty Board early really helps this deck along as you can pull another card out of your deck each turn on top of the Messenger activation ability. There are quite a few more cards of all types that have a way to let you draw cards if you play into them like Dr. Aphra, Grand Design or Respite. In the above deck we only have the Death Mark to draw three cards when we defeat the character with that bounty, but I was surprised to see how many potential options are available. The majority do need a blue character. Definitely something you should explore even if you only have the odd one like this deck. In the search function on the database use the search x: draw and x: search to see if their is something that fits into your preferred line up.

Expand the Card Pool

I mentioned earlier that the easiest way to do this would be by having a character line up that features a character from each colour giving you about two thirds to choose from. You can certainly couple this option with the second option of see more cards very easily. The aforementioned Sentinel Messenger is a mere 8 points giving you 22 more character points to spend on a red and yellow character. There are other ways to expand your card pool as certain characters let you include cards from a different faction. We already mentioned Bo-Katan Kryze but there is also Enfys Nest and her Marauder, Qi’ra and Leia Organa (Boush) that do similar. It is one of these characters I have decided to use for a sample deck for this section by bringing back the quite popular and sometimes very successful Qi’ra, Han Solo and No Allegiance deck.

A classic Middle/Middle deck which boasts strong upgrades and supports. The ideal is to get the Entourage down as the special will then be worth at least 3 if we can keep both characters alive. Likely to end up being worth 4 though as the Entourage will search for another Scoundrel card when played which will then boost itself. Both characters have very solid dice as well with. Han’s special to disrupt and gain resources by showing a villain or hero card respectively will hopefully allow us to ramp while doing some damage. We have 8 hero cards and 3 villain cards in the deck looking to ramp more than affect the opponent’s resources and get some of our powerful cards on the table.

Final Thoughts

After all this theory-crafting I’m still unsure of what deck I’d like to take to this unique event. There is an argument to just ignore all of these ideas and take a character line up you have never played before or to bring back one of your favourite line ups from back in the day. Play your favourite character or do something crazy like trying to Destroy or Build the Death Star. We look forward to seeing what 30 cards make it onto your deck list, if you want to fill this out ahead of the event find the old deck list sheet from FFG here. I’d certainly love to see what everyone comes up. You can always print the text file from the deckbuilding database instead of writing out a full 30 cards by hand.

Can’t wait to see you all there.

LandoWonka