Top 16 Fresno Regional 2.0

• Wersje
• 2.0
• 1.0

So I have been trying to make Luke work in this meta as best I can, and I believe this is the best I have been able to do. While I am proud of how well the deck did there were several miss plays I made during Regionals.

The deck is trying to do a mix of offense and defense, at the start of the game your opponent gives you a hint as to who they want to go for first. This can help you decide who you will need to defend and who you will need to attack with. The flexibility these 2 characters provide is also the deck's weakness as knowing when to use offense and defense can be hard, but the longer both characters are alive and you can use both their powerful character dice the more likely you are to win.

I am going to go over my matches as best I can so those that wish to play this character combination may learn from my wins and from my losses and may make the changes they need to possibly get to the Top 8.

First Match: Yoda/Han Double down.

I had played against this deck in my preparations and knew going in that I was going to be dealing with a lot of Hyperspace jumps. So getting the dice out quick was top priority and I teched in Loth-wolf bond specifically for this match up and any other high speed deck I may run into that would run Hyperspace jump. I decided to target Yoda first to try to lower the amount of jumps I had to deal with and ultimately had to burn through 2 Second Chances, ultimately after trading blows using fisto's dice to occasionally block damage until his death it came down to 3 health on Luke and my opponent getting a ranged damage and a special showing, both only capable of 2 damage. Luke rolled a focus on his die and on the force speed die while having a Rey's saber and a treasured on him and All-in won me that game allowing me to change 2 dice and deal the last 5 I needed in the same action. My opponent also could not find more than 1 of his jumps so a really unlucky turn of events for him, but in the end it was a Hard Fought and lucky Win.

Second Match: Vader/Greedo.

I placed in Makashi training specifically to help handle this match up as it's ability + 1 mitigation card in your hand can severely hamper darth vader. Unfortunately this card ended up at the bottom of my deck and vader drew Force Speed, Vader's Fist and a 0 cost mitigation in his opening hand as well as winning the battle field 8-6. While a lot of things went wrong for me this match, the match was not as close as I like to think it was. Greedo was down, but vader still had an illusion and 7 more health to go. This is another match I had practiced against, but had not run into this version or this problem before this day: Loss

Third Match: EAphra Executioner, a very good player but this was honestly a rough match up against my deck. I was able to put a lot of damage into aphra turn 1 and was able to easily kill her turn 2 and still have some damage into the other 2 characters. While this player was able to get 2 hail-fires and a BT down, this deck has no problem controlling the dice of a deck that is slower than it and balancing shield take, fisto damage block and the 2 health pools of my characters this was simply not the kind of deck that really threatens these characters. Win

Fourth Match: ESnoke, Bala, Cienna.

This game honestly frustrated me a little bit. I was able to kill Snoke by round 2 just as I would want, but unfortunately I was unsure of who to go for first with Cienna and Bala and ended up starting on bala and switching to Cienna as soon as a Vehicle hit the board. Even as it was I was still on my way to winning the game when he managed to Friends in High into a Vader's Fist. I believe there was a risky way to stop the friends in high, but it was not a guarantee. Even with this play I still held off the fist, and the hover tank long enough to drop cienna and put 5 damage into Bala-tik before going down. Any single roll or draw goes slightly different or simple play mistakes are not made and I honestly think i can win this game, but for that day: Loss

Lunch: At this time we took a lunch break and I noticed that my first 2 opponents had gone on to win every game they played after me, and my strength of schedule put me just out of the top 16 at this time, but good performances and I knew I could still get into the top 16 and better performances could get me into the top 8 with luck.

Match 5: 3 Mandalorians and Pre-emptive strike

I found this to be one of the most fun and interesting matches I ran into. Because of his plot and mine I started with a whopping 4 damage on my characters. At first I did not think anything of the little paper cuts his characters were giving me thanks to their abilities, but they added up much faster than I thought they would. Unfortunately for him I found both my ancient's this game as well as other weapons when I went to replace them for more health. In addition, I caught on very quickly to his game plan and started using Luke's shields for shields and the rest of my dice for the damage so it became a 2 way paper cut battle where I was simply recovering and blocking more damage than him. The only way he really threatened my characters was with armed to the teeth, but with both of them used by the end of the game I had 3 health on Luke and he had 3 health on his Mando and every defense card to try to stall it a little longer, but as with the aphra match this deck excels at swapping from turtle mode to hurt mode in an instant and 7 damage was not to difficult with All-in. Win.

Match 6: Han/ Q'ira

I had never played this match before this game and was a little lost as to which I should target first. In addition, the first turn could not have gone more wrong for me. First losing the battle field with a 1 for the roll off and then following up with fisto not wanting to roll damage the whole match, especially the first round where I only managed to get 4 damage on my opponents han, 2 of which came from steadfast, and he managed to put 7 into fisto. Even with this I managed to stabilize and force my opponent to take another 3 rounds to finish off Fisto, by the time he got fist I had also gotten his han. Unfortunately, he killed Fisto with Q'ira and with my vain attempt to save as much damage on Luke as possible I gave my opponent the perfect time to jump. Doing so put Luke on the back foot against Q'ira and I never really recovered. Looking back on this game I should have targeted Q'ira first as she has the higher damage and the better resource sides. In addition, once I knew I could not save Kit I should have rolled Luke out to not risk getting jumped and getting behind. Another play was when Fisto had 1 health left and I had a 2 shield on Luke and a 2 Melee on fisto I decided to resolve the 2 shields as damage and leave the 2 melee and claim to defend fisto against the 2 Han damage. Doing this just caused my opponent to remove the shields from Luke and leave me with 2 damage sitting on fisto doing nothing. My opponent simply out played me and made better choices: Loss

Match 7: Qui-gon/Yoda Solidarity

I felt a little bad about this match as everything just went wrong for my opponent. I won the roll off started with Steadfast in my opening and 2 force speeds. I also had beguile. The first round I used the steadfast, played the force speed on Luke, then rolled Fisto after he had Yoda on the field and my opponent started passing, so i took my time power actioning the battle field getting the other force speed out and doing 2 damage with fisto before also passing as my opponent was sitting on a lot of resources after special chaining and was waiting for me to roll out Luke. I had already done damage this turn and I did not want to risk qui-gon's damage so I simply moved on to the next round. From here it just got worse for my opponent as I found my Treasured sabers and Synchronicity and had enough resources to also beguile Quigon's dice. My opponent also could not find weapons to save his life so removing his dice was very easy. In addition, I elected to also start taking shields with Luke's dice rather than use them to fight against my opponents shields since I had enough unblockable damage and I knew wasting my shields on his just made more of his dice useful which meant that the little bit of damage he was doing was getting eaten up by shields while my unblockable wasn't. He did eventually manage to get a lot of weapons on Quigon, but by this time I had put 5 unblocable damage into him 3 from the treasured and 2 from the first turn Steadfast. With 4 shields on quigon I just needed 11 damage and with a fully loaded Luke and Fisto and a Lucky roll, and All-in was all that was needed to do that damage all at once and clench the game. Win.

Ultimately an amazing day filled with fun game after fun game. My first 2 opponents doing super well helped propel me into the top 16 and a couple of my losses were to just pure bad play by me, good play by my opponents and a little bit of luck thrown in there as well, but my first win was also just pure luck. I am not sure this deck can honestly be pushed much further than this, but I am always open to ideas.

The good cards:

All-in was a life saver multiple times and so was treasured lightsaber and force speed.

The Meh cards:

Guard was surprisingly uneffective in most conditions, most of the decks I played either played way faster or way slower than I did, and telegraphing a guard was never good and when they were faster I obviously could not have the dice on the field when I needed them so was force to use other mitigation cards. Loth-wolf bond was useful a couple times but for the most part was still kind of lacking. I did not see dagger of Mortis all day, so can not say anything for or against it.

The Elephant in the room:

Why no shoto's I honestly tried this deck with shoto's but I found that they were just to slow for this deck. The decks that are threatening to this one either want to ramp up super hard, and thus need to have a character die as fast as possible, or try to kill me super fast, which means I need to be able to get my defenses up as fast as possible, and shoto's shield ability takes to long to bring on line when other upgrades just have raw better sides. Ultimately I found it takes more rounds and more work to get Shoto to the level of some of my other upgrades, and I simply did not have that kind of time against the decks that threatened me.