Hey everybody,
I’ve been thinking about talking more in depth about my Star Wars LCG decks that I’m currently playing, so thought I’d do a bit of a write-up here today to showcase what I’m playing with, just because I really like this game and I really want to show that off! I started getting back into the game in April, when my wife agreed (somewhat reluctantly, perhaps!) to join me, so I put six decks together (one for each faction), and we started with Rebels vs Empire. We’ve basically stuck with those decks since, although I have tweaked them a bit since we first played, in an effort to try and make them play better.
Both the Rebels and Imperial decks are faction-pure, so there are no off-faction cards (or neutral cards, for that matter) included here. I’ve talked about this a little before, but I’m also limiting my deck-building options to the core set and first cycle for the time being, although both decks do have one objective set each from later in the game, mainly for flavour than for any other reason.
Briefly, deck-building in Star Wars LCG takes the form of objective sets (or “pods”) that are six-card sets you bring as a unit. Rather than building your deck in the traditional manner, therefore, you select ten (or more) objective sets and this creates your deck for you. You can only include a max of two copies of each set in the deck, although this does mean the usual restrictions around individual cards might be exceeded, and you end up with six copies of a certain card because it appeared in multiple sets. If this is confusing now, all will become clear when I come to talk about the decks!
Today, I’m going to talk about the Rebels deck.
Evacuation Procedure x2
The Rebel Fleet
Draw Their Fire
Mobilize the Squadrons
Decoy at Dantooine
Fleeing the Empire
Mission Briefing
Planning the Attack
The Defense of Yavin 4
It’s a very broad deck, and to some extent it does lack a certain consistency when being played.
Evacuation Procedure is the only set to be included twice, and that’s mainly for Han Solo, I’m not going to lie! However, there are some really useful unit-leaves-play effects on the cards in this set, and the objective itself allows you to sacrifice units to remove focus tokens from stuff, so you can really make the most of those leaving play effects. You don’t just have to sacrifice the cards from this set of course, and there are plenty of chump cards throughout the deck that could also be used to trigger it.
The Rebel Fleet is one of my favourite objective sets, as it includes Home One which is a great attacking unit that doesn’t require the edge to be effective. The objective itself can only be attacked by vehicles, giving it some evasion that can be useful. There’s a Y-Wing in here, which I enjoy, and the repair droid that can heal up Home One if needed. Target of Opportunity is possibly my favourite Fate card as well, as it allows you to get one point of damage on the objective you’re attacking, whether you win or lose the edge. Very nice, all-round useful cards in here.
Draw Their Fire is the Ackbar set, but it’s not included here for the Admiral. Rather, there are a number of other cards that work well within the deck, such as X-Wing Escort that forces the enemy to discard a vehicle when it leaves play (meaning there’s one less to target The Rebel Fleet). I have a chump X-Wing that could be sacrificed to Evacuation Procedure, and there’s a Fleet Command Centre which gives me 3 resources, plus a shield token when I refresh. Heroic Sacrifice allows me to sacrifice a vehicle to destroy an enemy vehicle, again clearing the field for The Rebel Fleet, as well as triggering Evacuation Procedure.
Mobilize the Squadrons is here for two reasons: Rebel Assault and Trench Run. There are a couple of chump cards I can sacrifice to trigger the effects mentioned earlier, and a copy of Covering Fire which provides another sacrifice outlet, but Trench Run is the card that turns the Death Star Dial into an objective whose destruction can win me the game, and Rebel Assault just deals a flat two damage to either a unit or an objective. The objective itself is nice as well, because it allows me to clear an additional focus token from an objective or enhancement when I refresh; having 2 resources itself, this means I can always get the maximum efficiency from the card. Pretty much an auto-include for a Rebel deck, I think.
Decoy at Dantooine is an interesting set, because it’s quite sneaky. The objective itself has the effect of decreasing the Death Star Dial by 1 when an objective I control leaves play, which goes some way to negating the advance of the Dark Side. There is also an enhancement in here that has the same effect, meaning that if both cards are out together, there is going to be some Dark Side stagnation when my objectives are blowing up. There are a couple of events that allow me to return units to my hand, which can be quite tricksy, and the Wookiee Navigator unit allows for the same objective to be targeted twice in a combat, if he survives. That’s some fairly interesting stuff going on there, though interestingly I find myself thinking it might be a good target to swap out when it comes to refining the deck, despite how good the ability to decrease the Death Star dial can be.
Fleeing the Empire is a bit of a flavour include, really, as it’s the original Princess Leia objective which in itself is quite funny. Leia never really leaves play – if she does, she is captured by the Dark Side player at an objective of his choice. So when that objective is destroyed, she comes back to my hand, and can be played again, and so on. You’re My Only Hope allows me to sacrifice a unit (again, feeding into the Evacuation Procedure objective from earlier) to draw cards, and force my opponent to discard a card, so that’s useful here. Stolen Plans enhances an enemy objective and allows me to draw cards when the objective generates a resource, which can be quite useful (though I did come unstuck once when I was so focused on getting the value from that card that I left the objective in play with 1 hit point remaining, and lost the game in the next round!) It also has Twist of Fate, which is my least favourite Fate card, simply because I don’t like those kind of “gotcha!” moments.
Mission Briefing is included in the deck, but I don’t really know why anymore. It has Mon Mothma, though, and the objective allows me to draw cards when my opponent’s turn begins, so it works well in some respects, but I would say this is definitely ripe for being rotated out.
Planning the Attack increases my reserve value by 1 while it is undamaged, so works well with the Leia objective set which can get me a load of Shield tokens. Jan Dodonna lets me draw cards whenever a Yavin 4 card generates resources, limited to once per turn, but there are a lot of these cards in the deck so that should give me some value there. I’ve got two chumps for sacrificing purposes, another Twist of Fate, and an enhancement that gets me more resources, which is always useful.
Finally, I have The Defense of Yavin 4, which includes a few more vehicles and another Rebel Assault card. The objective itself can reduce the cost of vehicles by discarding cards, which might be useful for getting rid of cards like Twist of Fate, which I don’t like using! But there aren’t very many expensive vehicle cards in the deck – but I suppose I could use this alternate cost to free up resources to pay for other stuff.
So all in all, it’s quite a flexible deck that has a variety of things going on. I don’t think there’s really one massive strategy in here that all the cards are working towards; rather, there are just many different things that I can do to enable me (hopefully!) to win! It’s the kind of hodge-podge deck that I like to play, which has a large variety of cards to do a large variety of things with. It definitely needs some refinement, and I think it could do with some more play before I make any further changes. But the important thing is the fun factor. It doesn’t have a Luke in here yet, as the Rebel Luke didn’t come until further in the game, but there is a nice combination of big names and some cannon fodder – which is really what playing Star Wars games is all about, isn’t it?
I’ll be looking at the Imperial deck in a similar way soon, so stay tuned for that!!
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