Destiny Musings and a Store Championship Winning Report!

Hello readers!  I apologize for not being around since the release of Spirit of the Rebellion, but I traveled overseas for a family visit and haven't been able to play or keep up with the game very much.

During the early release of Spirit of the Rebellion, I was playtesting a Palpatine deck.  The original build started with the build I had posted a while back, but after seeing a version with Rise Again floating around, I decided to give it a shot.  Rise Again seems like an extremely powerful swing, but I was very skeptical of the 5 resource cost, which on paper, seemed pretty steep for a deck that only started with 2 dice and only had a maximum of 5, but it tested quite well, and I was pleasantly surprised with how impactful Rise Again was in this deck and wanted to try it in other decks.

I settled on the following Palpatine list before leaving the country:
http://swdestinydb.com/deck/view/275489

The event lineup consisted of multiple low cost events, and Holocron provides a way to get upgrades on Palpatine while allowing for resource accumulation to pay for Rise Again.  Rise Again proved to be a big tempo swing when used to get any expensive blue upgrade along with the heal, and was instrumental into gaining many wins.

I felt pretty good about the Palpatine deck, it was well positioned in a meta with Poe/Maz being the dominant deck, and was happy sitting on it for a while, but when I came back from my overseas trip, FFG released the Fast Hands Errata, neutering top decks like Poe/Maz and Vader/Raider.  The Poe/Maz decks that Palpatine was well positioned against were less prevalent, and the local meta here featured a lot of 3+ character decks, all of which matched up very well against Palpatine.

Looking through my somewhat limited card collection in preparation for the store championships, I only really had the cards to run blue villains, so my choices were already limited to Palpatine, Vader/Kylo, Vader/Raider, and Vader/Royal Guard.  The fast hands change made Vader/Royal Guard a bit more appealing, so I tried testing a preliminary list for several games before a local tournament:
http://swdestinydb.com/deck/view/206960

Again, this list featured two copies of Rise Again, since I saw a lot of success with it in Palpatine.  Against unprepared opponents, Rise Again is a game winning  card and presents a lot of value if you are somehow able to front the 5 resource  cost.  After playing the list, however, I felt that I missed the damage potential of the Tusken Raider, and the fact that the Royal Guard cannot generate resources to set up potential Rise Again plays was enough to make me switch back to the following:
http://swdestinydb.com/deck/view/209316

This version of Vader/Raider eschews No Mercy to fit more non-blue removal and utility cards, with Bait and Switch becoming a very key card that fills some of the space of No Mercy in that it can provide some sort of "unexpected damage".  Bait and switch ended up being very useful in ways outside of simply turning a resource side into "3 melee", and it can often be used on cards like Sith Holocron to turn into special or focus sides to set up high damage plays without the need for additional rerolls.  The battlefield choice of Secluded Beach is to help shore up the Palpatine matchup and matchups against lists featuring multiple stormtroopers, as your win condition in those matchups tends to be keeping Vader alive long enough to play Rise Again to gain an overwhelming advantage.  The fact that Secluded Beach's effect does very little against Vader/Raider also helps and gives you the flexibility in not being forced into feeling like you have to win the claim race all the time.

The removal suite was a nod to how I felt the meta would shift.  Even with the fast hands change, I still fully expected a lot of Poe/Maz, Vader decks, and Palpatine, so I opted to max out on my copies of Isolation and cut down on Electroshocks.  I opted for only one copy of Deflect since I felt that the meta is mostly melee oriented at the moment and I predicted that Vader decks would be very prevalent. 

Moving forward, I don't believe that this removal suite is optimal, but I'm not quite sure how to approach the topic of removal with where I believe the meta is going (more on this later).

Other cards that made this list differ from old Awakenings meta Vader/Raider are the lack of backup muscle and Rise Again.  I felt backup muscle to be very slow in the current meta and Rise Again was a win condition against many decks, especially against players who did not expect it.

I proceeded to sleeve up and enter the aforementioned Vader/Raider list for the store championship at Gamer's Armory:

First Round was against a player running eAurra/FN, a deck that a friend had been testing and posted recently.  The deck is very aggressive, but also features the weapon override shenanigans that FN is known to do.  My opponent opted to go for the Raider here first, who quickly went down to a 6 damage roll.  In hindsight, I felt this was a mistake since I ended up setting up a Rise Again on Vader after killing Aurra and a damaged FN faced off against a very healthy Vader sporting a mind probe.  I ended up taking the win on a bait and switch'ed holocron focus into lethal melee damage.

Second Round was against a player running eJango/eFN, a deck much in the same vein as my first round opponent, but was much harder to control.  I opted to attack Jango first, leaving my opponent with the freedom to override weapons constantly on FN and putting Vader in the 10 damage range.  Fortunately, I was able to roll the two resources I needed to set up a Rise Again on Vader, and opted to place a Force Illusion on him off of the Rise Again, allowing Vader to overtake both Jango and FN.  In hindsight, I may have played this matchup wrongly by not killing FN first, but I felt that Jango with Redeployed weapons would have been more difficult to interact with.

Third Round was against a player running ePalpatine, a matchup I was not completely familiar with.  Unfortunately for me, he ended up taking his own battlefield, so I was unable to use my Secluded Beach to gain the upper hand.  I rolled fairly aggressively in this matchup and ended up rolling the 3 melee side on the Tusken for three consecutive rounds, so I played to that start and just resolved a lot of melee and disrupt sides to keep the Rise Again from being set up.

Fourth Round was also against ePalpatine, but this time, I won initiative and took my battlefield.  I played similarly to the previous round, but didn't roll as aggressively, so I tried to make up for it by just racing for the battlefield whenever I had situational removal like "He Doesn't Like You" in hand.  This game was much closer, and ended up with me edging out the win due to being able to bring my battlefield.  The battlefield alone provided about 8 damage  worth of mitigation throughout the game.

With a 4-0 score in Swiss, I ended up first in Swiss and had secured a seat in the top 4 cut. 

My top 4 game was against an eUnkar/FN/Trooper List.  Since I haven't played in a long time, I wasn't sure how to approach this matchup, but after experiencing what FN was capable of in my previous games, I opted to attack FN first.  Some very explosive rolls allowed me to take down FN very early, and my opponent was not able to capitalize on his investment to FN and did not have any redeploy weapons when he went down.  Unkar and the Stormtrooper have very poor damage output without any weapons and by the time Unkar was able to fully kit up, too much damage had already been dealt.

The finals game was against ePalpatine, the same player from the fourth round.  Again, I was able to take the battlefield, but this time, the game was much closer.  My opponent and I traded damage constantly, leaving me with an almost dead Raider and a 7 damage Vader during the midgame, facing a 8 damage Palpatine.  I started the next round with 5 resources and felt pretty good about my chances since my hand had plenty of removal and a Rise Again would just turn this game to my favor, but my opponent played "Abandon All Hope" and I was forced to either lose 5 resources or discard my  entire hand.  After contemplating it, I opted to discard my hand and hope that I could roll force throw special and shields to keep Vader alive for another two turns so I could draw Rise Again from the 12 cards left in my deck.  After the raider died, I stalled out until I was able to play Rise Again and would eventually start a round rolling Vader to double force throw special to finish the game.

Ultimately, while I was happy with my performance, I felt like I made some poor deckbuilding and play choices for the tournament.  One of these was underestimating the power of FN, and going forward, I believe FN based decks could become meta defining in the light of the Fast Hands change.  FN is a very flexible character and synergizes with cards in both blue and yellow to really put down some damage right out of hand.  Due to the fact that his ability is so flexible with weapons from all color splashes and there is no counterplay for FN outside of "bad rolling", I expect FN to be a big meta threat for the rest of the SoR meta.  I was not prepared for this in my removal suite, as isolation is a pretty poor choice against FN, and in the future I would definitely consider running cards that can interact with dice from powerful equipment such as Rocket Launchers and Z6 Riot Baton to ease the damage from FN's effect.  I believe going forward, FN and Poe/Maz will  continue to be big meta threats, and I predict FN will start to pick up going into the next set release.  Along with FN variants and Poe/Maz, blue villains will likely continue to be a mainstay in the meta due the prevalence of Holocron and an excellent event suite, so any deck going forward will have to find ways to handle those types of decks.