Long-Term Rose Partisans Vehicles, with notes 1.0

• Wersje
• 1.0

First, big thanks to Krez for the original decklist. Secondly, thanks to my local gaming venue Covenant Games. You know them from their content -- I know them for their VERY friendly and helpful staff, and the active and VERY friendly scene of Destiny players.

I changed a few of the cards from Krez’s build when I played it in a Store Championship last week. I went 4-1, placing 5th out of 29. Now I’ve switched out ARC-170 Starfighter for C-3PO, which I believe boosts the list quite a bit.

Rationale for the deck:

I’ve been rethinking the “min-max for damage” style of play that’s so ubiquitous. Roll your dice. If anything other than damage comes up, discard to reroll. In my experience, I only see people pick up resources if they have something they need to pay for or if it’s the end the round and it’s not worth rerolling, and I only see people Disrupt if their opponent picked up a resource the previous turn (telegraphing that they need it to play something). Discard is also frequently done at the end of the turn when you don’t want to spend a card on rerolling it. Is this the ideal way to play, though? Let me posit some things:

1. The card (and action) you spend to reroll has value that you’re missing out on.
2. It’s an easy call to Disrupt when your opponent is telegraphing a need for resources, but shouldn’t we assume that they’re always planning to use their “2 free” resources a turn? So kill their resources and kill their plan! Don’t we run a good chance of neutering their turn (forcing them into less ideal lines) when we disrupt them early? Kill one of their two resources, and force them to pick up a resource off a die roll.
3. The same goes for Discard. The beginning of the round is the time when your opponent is most likely to be holding their best card(s). That is when your discard has the potential to do the most damage. And if you don’t hit their best card? They have one less card to reroll with. And they might have to think seriously about tossing a “better” card if they do end up having to reroll. As with mill, Destiny decks are so small that getting rid of a single card gives you at worst a 50% chance that you won’t have to deal with it, ever.

Long-Term Plan giving you a +2 to damage is cool, but wow! It’s so much more powerful when you make them Discard three, or Refocus all of your dice. My favorite play from the SC last week was using the +2 from Long-Term Plan on the 2 Refocus I had from Maz's Goggles. This let me refocus all four of my character dice. The opponent had no removal just then, so my next action was deal 8 Indirect, mill two off of the Partisans, and gain a resource off Scrap Heap.

(Here’s a thought experiment that might be applicable to all Plots: what if it was a character? Imagine Long-Term Plan as a 3-cost character with no die and no health, that starts giving you a +2 on turn three. Sounds incredible.)

What I’m saying is, play the “Control” role and set up blow-out plays OUTSIDE of the typical dice-removal cards. Slow your opponent’s development down – which is perfect for a super slow deck like Hero Vehicles. The longer the game, the more value you get – especially out of hallmark cards like Long-Term Plan and Rally Aid. The longer the game, the easier to mill out your opponent if it comes to that.

C-3PO This is also why C-3PO is so powerful in this deck. Your opponent will look at your board, with Long-Term Plan ticked up to two and a Discard showing in your pool, then look at their hand of three cards and dread what’s coming next. But with C-3PO you can turn all your 2 Indirect sides into 2 Discard. In a vehicle deck where you have a lot of dice out (in this case almost all cheap, 2-cost vehicles), wouldn’t you want to use two of those dice to guarantee your opponent only gets 3 cards a turn?

Or think about activating C-3PO and a Jedha Partisan for your first two actions, then threatening 2 Disrupt any time your opponent is building up to something. Remember the standard play of “Oh, you just picked up a resource? Disrupt you”? You just put them off the line of play where they drop their 3-cost upgrade or support, and now they’re on a different line where they use their resources on smaller things, or on removal. Now think about how limited their lines become when you Disrupt for more than just one.

C-3PO is great at doing the standard C-3PO things: turning any Y-Wing side into its Special, turning Indirect Damage into Direct Damage, etc. But I love him for enabling big control plays. Hit them for 2 Discard every turn. The two copies of Jedha Partisan sneakily creep you towards a Mill win, and being able to turn any dice into Discard lets you clear out their hand and seal the deal.

The Mill Plan I need more experience with the deck to write authoritatively, but I think the potential of this archetype to win by Mill is overstated. It really does require you to play the Control role. But here’s the thing: because it’s a Vehicles deck, you’re adding new dice to your board every turn, and you’re going to find the damage to get there before you’re close to milling them out.

So why bother playing with Jedha Partisan at all? Why go a little way in for Mill if it’s not how you win games? Partisan’s sides are a little better than the other options like Hired Gun, and you want a couple of yellow guys to enable Second Chance. But I think that, perhaps unintuitively, a little Mill in Destiny has more impact than it does in a game like Magic. Half-sized decks, and half as many copies of each card means that Mill has twice the impact. If we’re playing Magic and I mill away one of your four copies of a card, no big deal. But in Destiny I’m halving (at worst) your chances of ever getting to play that card. It’s much closer to the kind of cards in Magic that “Exile a card, then search their library for copies and exile them too”.

Rally Aid. I’ve really come around on Rally Aid. I didn’t like it in previous Vehicle decks I’ve played because of the uncertainty. It could have been that I played more 3-cost vehicles, and while the discount is the same as when you Rally Aid out a 2-cost vehicle, getting the 2-cost vehicle for free leaves you with that extra resource for playing cards you typically do not use Rally Aid on: removal.

Second Chance One way of looking at Second Chance is that it’s a three-cost card that heals 5 damage. An Event that did that would be less playable. What’s great about Second Chance is that it forces your opponent to deal that five damage before it gets healed. There’s a slight advantage to it being proactive rather than reactive, but I think there’s a psychological effect too. One of the decisions Destiny asks you to make each game is which character you want to prioritize as a target for your direct damage. When you load up a character with shields, many opponents will concentrate on the unshielded character first so they can get a character off the board as fast as possible. In that light, maybe we look at Second Chance less as healing for five and more like giving five “shields”. I like Second Chance so much in this deck that it’s the primary target for Rebel.

The end! Thanks for reading.