Game Night!

Each and every Tuesday, I have been gaming at a friends house for the past 10 years. It initially started out as Tekken Tues, then progressed to other console games. It then moved to Rockband 2, then 3 for a couple years. It has since then become tabletop and CCG gaming for the past year and a half.

Currently, there's about 6 of us regulars. We usually make dinner, have some drinks and then play for several hours until everyone goes home.

Our current hot game for the past year has been Star Wars Destiny. For those of you who don't know what this is, it's a Collectible Card Game (CCG) that also includes dice with some of the cards, all in the Star Wars universe. Matches are usually played out in under 30 mins. We then rotate who plays who based on who won/lost.
 
If you like card games, and you like rolling dice, and you like Star Wars, you may like this game.  It's very easy to pickup and learn.

Quite a few of us enjoy the art of deck building, so we try to come up with new ideas each week to keep it fresh and interesting. I will probably start having a weekly or bi-weekly deck profile of what I am building to play to share with you all.

If you would like more information on this game, or how to play it, please let me know and I can point you to a few great resources with some quick how-to-play videos. Starter Packs are available and very affordable ($12 range). There's even an older 2 player starter bundle available often for under $10.

So, what to build this week? Last week the latest set, Convergence, just released. I was able to get a complete Common/Uncommon/Rare play set for about $100 on eBay, so I have a lot to work with. I don't care much for Standard or Trilogy formats, so I prefer to build using my entire card pool in the Infinite format.

New Deck Time!

I started with the characters, Mace has always excited me, too bad his previous card was too expensive to pair with. This one was much easier to find a pairing with the lower character cost. I wanted a multi color deck, so I chose red, and found K-2SO filled out the 30 points nicely, and was also melee!

I wanted to use Electro Staffs for K-2SO, and Mace's Master of the Council. For the rest of my dice cards, I broke away from my traditional hero lightsaber package and went with only what was left in my binder. I did not want to rob any cards from other decks.

Most of my weapons are cheap 2-cost upgrades, so I am hoping with Mace's power action, I can pull some weapons out quickly if I focus on only getting resources the first couple of rounds.

K-2SO discard side is kind of a bummer, but he meets the other requirements, so long as I can get an electro-staff on him.

Here's what I came up with:



The Riot Shields with Force Illusion should be annoying to chew through, as well as two dice lost to Honor Guard.



The pair of Hampered should be extremely annoying for my opponent. I am excited to try out some of these new downgrades in various decks when appropriate.


Attunement and Hold Off are two new cards I put one of each in to see how they play. They seem to be good low cost mitigation with extra benefits


And finally, Twin Strike looks nasty for a 0 cost card for what it does. I realize this is not as useful in this match up with a red character, but I am curious how they play in general. Being Neutral, they will be seeing play in several of my blue aggro decks.


I chose Dry Fields as my battlefield for no other reason than I just didn't want to use any of the meta cards.

I will update this post tonight with my wins and losses and what I played against.


Results:
I played against only one buddy tonight.

Game1:
He had his newly upgraded Standard Grievous/Aphra/Commando Droid that did very well against me. I couldn't draw anything good, and he had a good mitigation package going. I also rolled garbage the entire game. I did take out grievous, but that was way too late. All his droids got me. 

Game 2:
I played against one of the new starter decks, Obi-Wan/Satine, completely vanilla out of the box. I was able to get my cards out this time and had a couple of god rolls. I know if he would have had an upgraded deck, most of my dice would have been mitigated away, so I can't say too much about the slaughter I did to his team.

What I learned was:
Twin Strike is awesome! It will do well in my mono blue builds, not so much in a multi colored build where you only half half the opportunity to use it. The one instance I got to use it, my opponent just shielded up to max shields to thwart the showing 4 damage coming to him. I was able to play Twin Strike and slide all that damage in under those shields. It's a really powerful card, and one I would save for finishing a character off when they are shielded up.

The Riot Shields acted almost as a 2nd pair of Force Illusions and was a pain for my opponent to chew through. With force illusion, the 4 cards add roughly 8-12+ more life to your team.

I didn't get to play Attunement or Hold Off, both got mitigated or discarded for rerolls.

Hampered was a great card. I got it out both times and placed it on the stronger of the opponents characters. While he could still reroll, he couldn't manipulate them with refocuses or card effects. Totally worth playing that card!

We didn't play any further matches. We ended up moving to a couple other games. We got a round of GUBS in, which is a great little filler card game for all ages, and then played a game of Monolith Arena, which was an excellent game.