For the first time in the nearly four years that I’ve been playing Fantasy Flight Star Wars games, I’ve finally attended my first Organized Play store championship. This event was one of the few events in the area for Star Wars: The Card Game (LCG).
My past experiences with FFG Star Wars games in a competitive environment have been very mixed bags. The good aspects have always been the people that I meet while playing. The bad aspect has been, reliably, my own inability to simply win. The last X-Wing event I attended, a very long time ago, I was destroyed. When I attended the LCG tournament at GenCon 2015, I was equally destroyed. However, through much training and testing, I’ve found my card game skills are steadily improving. So it was that I figured this would be the game for which I’d test myself at a store championship.
Arriving at The Game Preserve in Greenwood, IN, I hadn’t expected more than maybe two or three people to show up for this. According to the tournament organizer, that was about the expected number, as seen at past events. This time we had five people playing, counting myself. All the rest of the guys came from Muncie. I later found out that Muncie, IN is apparently the hub of SWLCG in the state.
Not knowing anybody else, I was left to tweeting my trepidations, but as things got rolling, introductions were quickly made and, once again, I was shown that really nice, patient people tend to play this game. We rolled off with Magic: The Gathering D20’s to see who would face off with whom in Round 1. I rolled the middle-most number, and thus got the first round Bye. The scoring system, thankfully, does not penalize you for getting a bye. Scoring works just like soccer: 3 points for a victory, 1 point to each player for a draw, and 0 points for a loss. Each round, it’s assumed to be a two game match even if you don’t make it to game two within the allotted time (70 minutes, give or take 10, based on the TO’s discretion). Finishing Round 1, I already had 4 points, as they count it as a win and a draw.
Round 2 started and I lost the roll to pick sides first. My opponent, Tony, chose to go Dark with the Scum and Villainy deck. I had my trusty Light Side Jedi deck, so I was only too happy to bring that to bare in the first game. Why should it matter which one you play first if you wind up playing two games? Unless someone manages to get a quick game 1 win, it’s very likely that game 2 will go to a draw, so, playing your strongest deck first might ensure you a 3-point victory, even if you wind up with a 1-point-each draw in game 2.
Tony quickly brought out core set Boba Fett and Edge of Darkness Slave 1. He very smartly got his capture strategy going early on, managing to get ahold of my characters, placing them beneath objectives, and then transferring them back and forth between objectives as I started to close in on their captive location using the objective Carbonite Transport. It was not going well, as he’d managed to capture Kyle Katarn already.
Fortunately for me, there are two Kyles in each of the two copies of his objective set, Heroes and Legends. The objective itself allows me to focus it and then reveal a unique Jedi character in my hand that has the same name as one in play, Kyle, in this case. This allows me to swap out Kyles if the one in play gets badly injured or if I want to get another attack in on another object.
Between getting better control of my own characters and bringing out new ones like Speeder Bike and Yoda from Between the Shadows, I was able to start locking down Slave 1 and Boba with multiple Tactics attacks. Basically, I was preventing those enemy units from ever fully refreshing, allowing my guys to attack and block with ease. Unable to muster any blockers, Yoda and Speeder Bike kept piling on the focus tokens. When things were starting to look slightly better for me, I finally drew Luke from Between the Shadows and the Moldy Crow. Luke is strong by himself, but using the combo with his lightsaber, as I’d mentioned on a recent podcast episode, is incredibly damaging. The Moldy Crow has four edge-enabled Blast damage, meaning, as long as you win the edge battle, you will score four objective damage, which nearly destroys an enemy objective in a single shot. With all this guys locked down and Luke and Moldy Crow clearly going for the kill, Tony conceded game 1.
Game 2 started exceedingly well for me. Turn 1, I was able to play Mara Jade from Echoes of the Force, along with her own lightsaber. The synergy in this combo is really kind of gross. She gets extra damage from the lightsaber and she’s considered committed to the Force, but not actually committed, via the Force commitment cards. When she’s committed she receives Shielding (like shields from X-Wing, they provide 1 hit point of protection), Targeted Strike (allows you to deal combat damage to enemy units who are not participating in the current conflict), and Elite (allows this character to clear two Focus tokens off during the Refresh phase, instead of one). Having such a powerful card in play immediately was both good and bad, as she became target number one immediately.
I had some difficulty getting the guys I needed after that, and Tony had 1 capital ship, two X-Wings, and two A-Wings on the board. I was able to lock down the capital ship and one of the X-Wing cards, but his A-Wings, although each only having 1 unit damage icon, drew a card each time they attacked, giving him massive card advantage. I was able to hold off until I got Palpatine from the core set into play, and by that time I was on my way to winning, but we ran out of time. I finished round 2 with a win and a draw, giving me another four point. I was up to 8 points now and leading the pack. I was kind of dumbfounded, as I almost never do that well in organized play for any game.
My luck was not to last, unfortunately.
My next opponent, Todd, actually had not been playing for nearly as long as I had, but had obviously taken to it very quickly, especially with the solid group of competitive players that all came down from Muncie together. He’s also quite the rules expert and made sure that neither Tony nor I forgot our steps during the previous match. At this point in the day, I was at 8 points and Todd was at 7. I certainly wasn’t counting my victory as assured, but I was feeling very confident with my Jedi deck. I won the roll-off and selected Light Side first, hoping, again, for a game 1 win and a potential game 2 draw.
Turn 1 I brought Kyle back out immediately, which made me quite happy, even though I didn’t have a lot to combo it off of in my hand. Still, not a bad start. Todd managed a turn 1 Grand Admiral Thrawn from the Rogue Squadron cycle. At first glance, he’s not that imposing as he only has two Tactics and one edge-enabled Objective damage. However, his ability is ridiculous: once per turn, during an engagement, focus this unit to place a focus token on any enemy participating unit. Basically, if I attack, he does not have to declare blockers, but just focuses Thrawn to put a focus token on my attacker, essentially ending my attack before it happens. Thrawn is also Elite, which allows him to pull double-duty as an attacker when the time is right, but then also using his ability to shut down my attacks. I really couldn’t get much going early on, and didn’t get more Kyles, Yoda, Luke, or the Crow out until towards the end. Todd pulled a turn 3 Executor from the new Forest Moon force pack. As Leo and I had discussed on the last episode, all Executor has to do is show up and you will almost certainly destroy an enemy objective on that turn.
With all my units locked down by Thrawn, including Yoda, I had no resistance to offer the Executor and no removal cards to get it off the field. At 6 health, you need multiple units or another capital-sized ship to bring it down. The Shadows Luke combo might’ve been able to do it, but that never showed up once in the course of the evening. I was left to concede that one, giving me a game 1 loss.
Game two was not much better for me. Todd pulled a turn 1 Obi-Wan from Between the Shadows, which also managed to keep focusing my units, and not much later, core set Luke also turned up. He had the objective Following Fate in play, the pod from which this Obi-Wan comes, which makes all the opponent’s Event cards cost 1 extra. Sith happens to be big on Event cards. This was a serious problem for me, when even 0-cost cards became 1-cost cards. This one was even more lopsided than game 1 as my Imperial Shadow Guard and Dark Side Apprentice were not enough to even hold off his advances until I was able to, eventually, get Palpatine out again. By this time, though, it was really over. I hadn’t taken a single Light Side objective, my Death Star dial was only at 5, I never had the balance of the Force on my side, and his Luke and Obi-Wan were slicing through all my defenses. I had to concede another loss, leaving our totals at round 3, 0-2, a whole six points going to Todd and no points coming my way.
I finished third overall, with a record of 1-2-1, not counting the bye as any literal victories. As discouraging as getting trounced was, I really couldn’t complain with a 3rd place finish out of five. Sure, the pool of players wasn’t huge, but, for me, holding my own against a seasoned group was quite the bolster to my desire to keep participating in FFG Organized Play. I can’t say enough good about that group of guys from Atomic Comics in Muncie. They invited me to join their group and we’re planning to meet up at Family Time Games in the northwest side of town for the Regionals in May. Also, big thanks to Game Preserve-Greenwood for putting on this LCG tournament when there are so few stores willing to.
Oh, yeah, and I got some cool swag, too! It’s the featured image at the top.