Joe’s First Destiny Tournament

Last week I attended my first organized play event for Star Wars Destiny. One of the local game stores near me got one of the quarterly prize kits and was hosting a tournament. Since I’ve been enjoying Destiny since it came out, I had no reason not to attend the tournament. I was curious how many people would be there, what level of competetion I’d encounter, and how fun the game would be in a tournament setting as opposed to the casual games I’d had up to that point.

First of all, here’s a look at the prizes that were on the line at this tournament.

Some alternate art cards, with some sweet Aurebesh and two sets of acrylic resource tokens.

I’m a sucker for anything with aurebesh, but I wasn’t setting my sights very high going into the tournament. I haven’t even purched a booster box for Destiny yet so my deckbuilding is still limited to the two starters and roughly 30 boosters I’ve got in my burgeoning collection. Also at this point in my gaming “career,” so to speak, I have a “I’ll take what I can get” attitude towards these promo items, and don’t get to worked up about them if I miss out. (The exception being alternate art cards for Imperial Assault. Also I reeeealy need a blue and black regionals dice for IA too if you have any to spare…)

So with no aspirations of glory, I took my modest deck to the game store.

Also, if you weren’t going to figure it out already, if you mouse over the card names in this article, the card will pop up for you to reference.

My Deck:

2x General Grievous
1x Jango Fett

1x Rebel War Room

1x First Order Tie Fighter
2x F-11D Rifle
2x Infantry Grenades
2x Speeder Bike Scout
2x Flame Thrower
1x On The Hunt
1x IQA-11 Blaster Rifle
1x Cunning
1x Probe
1x Tactical Mastery
1x Nowhere To Run
1x Go For The Kill
2x He Doesn’t Like You
2x Backup Muscle
1x My Kind of Scum
1x Underworld Connections
1x Block
1x Close Quarters Assault
1x Dodge
2x Take Cover
1x Reversal
1x Unpredictable
1x Hunker Down

As we were all waiting for the tournament to start, we ended up getting so many people we had to be moved itno the back of the store, onto the wargaming tables, which was cool and lame.

Cool, because we had such a great turnout. Lame because now we had to play cards on these big wargaming tables where we had to stand the whole time, and there was a lot of space between you and your opponent.

In total, there were 19 players for this low-stakes tournament. That’s how many players turned out to the Imperial Assault Regionals I went to at the beginning of the month!

The tournament was going to be three rounds.

But then the Fire Nation attacked. Just kidding.

Round 1

My first match was against Jeremey, who had 2x Count Dooku and 2x Kylo Ren; a mono-blue deck. He referred to his deck as “Garbage Day” since he cobbled it together with the rejected and fogotten cards of other players who had made better decks for the tournament.

It was time to see if Jango and Grievous had what it took to take out the trash. Or something.

I started off focusing all of my damage onto Cout Dooku. I figured since his ability was defensive in nature, he would be a pain if he survived into the late game. So he had to go.

With a Backup Muscle, and General Grievous hitting his boss like a truck, Dooku fell apart surprisingly fast. Much to Grievous’s dissapointment, he did not have a weapon equipped that Grevious could add to his collection.

But while I was concentrating my efforts on decapitating the Sith Lord, Lil’ Kylo was biding his time busting out Sith Holocrons and converting them into scary stuff like Force Throws and Mind Probes and the like.

Before I knew it, Jango Fett was dead and gone, but my Grievous still had more health left than the wounded Kylo. Though Kylo had the upper hand by a mile when it came to his dice pool.

With Power of the Dark Side rolling blanks more than a couple times, and his superior dice economy, Grievous eventually succumed to Kylo’s Force-powered onslaught. Though it was a cvery close game, with Kylo surviving with only a few health remaining.

Wins: 0 Losses: 1

Round 2

This match I was paired against Phil, who was running 2x Jango Fett and 2x General Veers. Both of us had a General and a Jango. Whose odd-couple would come out on top?

I pegged Jango as the bigger threat and started going after him first. Once again Grievous was rolling hot damage and Jango was getting some dent’s in his Mando armor pretty quickly, even as he tried to stock up on upgrades.

Like I said, we had to play on the war gaming tables…

It wasn’t very long until Phil’s Jango fell. It was actually rather surprising how fast he died. Grievous suffered an uncivilized death immediately after.

With my full health Jango packed with upgrades and two loaded Backup Muscles, Veers didn’t have long to live.

In a last ditch attempt to survive, Veers managed to put around 6 damage in one dice resolution onto Jango, but at that point his fate was sealed. The Backup Muscle did their duty and Veers fell.

Wins: 1 Losses: 1

Round 3

The last round of the night was against Michael, who was running 2x Leia Organa and 2x Admiral Ackbar; a mono Red deck. This was my first match against a Hero team.

It seems to me, that the first decision you have to make in Destiny once the dice start rolling, is to pick an enemy character to focus all of your agression on until their gone. Splitting up your damage is a bad idea.

This time around I chose to go for Ackbar first, which was a big mistake.

Ackbar was taking a beating, but as I focused on Ackbar, Leia started building up guns. Lots of guns.

I didn’t want to switch my focus off of Ackbar until before he was fried calamari, but Leia was clearly the larger threat and she was dumping damage onto Grievous.

Beflore long, Leia was running around with two IQA Blaster Rifles and a Holdout Blaster.

Although a stroke of riduclous fortune kept Grievous alive.

At one point, Grievous needed exactly 6 damage to die. My opponent discarded a card to reroll all of his dice, and ended up with 5 damage and a blank as seen below.

Easy enough to reroll the blank again to get one damage out of the Blaster Rifle right? Rerolls into another blank.

Ok one more time.

Another blank.

Grievous survived the round with one health left thanks to the die that wouldn’t roll off of blank. I was relieved but also felt pretty bad for my opponent. That was rotten luck.

Though with only one health left, Grievous couldn’t live long. I managed to dump enough damage onto Ackbar with Grievous to end the Admiral, but Grievous was gone in the next instant.

Thanks to some more blanks being rerolled into blanks over and over again (it was getting pretty ridiculous at that point), Jango managed to hang on a bit longer.

Though in the end, Jango just didn’t have what it took to finish off Leia.

It was a good game and my opponent deserved the win after putting up with all of those blanks he was rolling.

Final: Wins: 1 Losses: 2

Final Thoughts

Well my first Destiny tournament is in the bag.

Surprisingly enough, I didn’t feel at a disadvantage for having such a limited collection. I enjoyed my deck and thought I performed well against all my opponents.

After playing through three games in quick succession in a competetive environment however, the game did start to feel sort of ‘grindy.’ so to speak.

Pick a target. Focus him down.

Pick a target. Focus him down.

The necessity of bearing down on one character at a time made the game feel like a bit of a grind, with less strategy than it should have. Which is odd, because obviously this game has loads of strategy.

Maybe I’m more used to X-Wing or Imperial Assault where the state of the game fluxuates much more and throws more curveballs at you with possible targets running for cover, something that can’t happen in this game.

I look forward to attending more Destiny tournaments, but this certainly won’t be a game where I “go for the gold” each time.

All of my opponents were good sports and fun to play against. I enjoyed just bringing what I had and rolling some dice with people. That’s probably going to be the limit of my dedication to this game. My competetive energies will have to stay with other games for now.