“Simplify, then add lightness” – Colin Chapman
Hello everyone! I’m Rebel Traitor. You may know me for being a part of Destiny Junior, organizing the annual “destiny awards,” writing that Destiny history test a while ago(there’s another one coming soon), or more recently you may know me for winning the Seeking Answers release party. That last thing is what I’m here to write about.
Before we get into the exciting stuff, I want to talk about the event. It was incredibly well organized by the86, who does a ton for the Destiny community. As a west coaster, I’m not a big fan of waking up at 7am for a tournament, and I’m not a big fan of having lunch break at 10 either, but we had a break between swiss and top cut where I was able to get some actual lunch. The event ran smoothly, there were no huge delays. Overall I had a really good time playing!
So, what you probably came for: The Deck
You might look at this and think: “what the hell?” You might also notice the distinct lack of cards from Seeking Answers. This is actually a deck from the previous format, initially designed by my Destiny Junior teammate MalaciousMawloc, that I simply adapted for what I thought the meta would be.
Anyway, the main point of this deck is to use Cassian’s power action to ready The Bad Batch or Outrider every round. Senator and Greef are high value characters with the leader subtype which is important for Cassian and Bad Batch. Greef also guarantees you a yellow card for Cassian in the first 2 rounds, because he lets you bring two extra bounties and a bounty board to find them.
The deck is built on one principle: consistency. Every game you want to have Bad Batch down as soon as possible, and then reset it a bunch to knock down your opponents characters. If everything goes right, you should be able to kill a character on round 2 almost every game. To maximize the probability of that happening, there are several cards in the deck that let you draw cards. Contraband seizure, lavish cape, and moisture farm(the only Seeking Answers card in the deck) all let you draw cards for no cost. BB-8 and Outrider also have draw effects attached to them, and Abandoned Refinery can also draw you a card if you get it.
I’ve said for a long time that Contraband Seizure effectively lets you run a 28 card deck. People think I’m joking when I say this, but I’m not. Because contraband seizure lets you draw a card, it essentially represents the next card in your deck, which makes it so you can use 28 instead of 30 when calculating the probability of drawing a certain card. Lavish Cape and Moisture Farm effectively extend this down to 24 cards, although it’s really 25 because of the extra card that Greef puts in your deck(technically he puts in two, but you search one right away). Reducing the deck size is important because it allows us to see only our absolute best cards, and to see them more often.
Going into this tournament, I expected to see a lot of Rey – All the Jedi. To myself and a lot of the players that I talk with on discord, she seemed easily like the most powerful character in the set. I would’ve played her myself, except I just hate that style of deck. I don’t like just rolling out big dice and hoping they don’t get removed. I like going slow, gaining resources, and taking as many actions as the game will allow. So, when picking a deck, my heart gravitated towards Cassian. I had fallen in love with the deck during the previous format, running it at the Galactic Open, the Mid-Cycle event, and the Portland Regional (which only had 2 people, so barely a regional, but whatever). I was also out of practice, and Cassian was one of the only decks I knew. Plus, I figured that Cassian would have a good matchup against Rey assuming I could dodge Greed can be A Powerful Ally(Greed, for short), so I went with Cassian. I thought about adding more cards from Seeking Answers, particularly Tusken Camp and Venator, but they just didn’t feel strong enough. To tech for Rey, I threw in 2 copies of Block and 2 copies of Roll in the Mud(which stops Rey’s after ability from going off).
It turns out Cassian was a good choice. My first three Swiss matchups were Zorri/Benthic, Luke/Garsa, and Sabine/Finn, which all struggle with Cassian because they don’t really have a way to deal with supports and are weak to my removal. Round 4, I played against my first Rey, and I was able to dodge Greed and win the game handily. I then won a very close match with a Rako/Kallus deck which also struggles to deal with supports. At this point I was 5-0 and guaranteed a spot in top cut, so my round 6 didn’t matter that much. I got paired against Vizsla/Death Watch Mandalorian/Underworld and I lost. That deck is incredible and I’m surprised more people didn’t bring it. I finished 5-1, which made me the number 3 seed going into the top cut.
My top 8 and top 4 matches were both against Rey, and they went how I expected them to. I won both matches 2-1, with both losses being the games they found Greed. In the other 4, I dodged it and was able to overwhelm Rey with supports and play my multi die removal to shut her down. Block removing 3 or 4 dice helped a lot. Almost every time I started with the battlefield, I opened with a Roll in the Mud, which just shuts Rey down. Rey comes from a long line of decks that focus on throwing as many big dice at your opponent until they can’t handle it anymore. Decks like this have existed forever, Vader, Maul, and Mando are all particularly good examples. These decks have two ways to beat ramp decks: kill their characters early and stop them from ramping or force them to play removal early to stop them from ramping. Cassian is resistant to both of these conditions because it only really needs a single 4 cost support to win the game, and roll in the mud allows you to remove a lot of dice without setting back your ramp significantly.
In the finals, I played against Vika who was running Boba/Royal Guard/No Room for Failure. Vika is a great player who really makes me play better. I really think the two finals games are some of the tightest Destiny I’ve ever played, right up there with my top 8 match against Vika in the Redemption mid-cycle event. Basically, he’s a great player and I was glad to get to play against him. I was initially worried about the matchup, because his deck seemed really strong, and I still think it is, but Cassian was able to overwhelm it. Vika wasn’t able to find resource sides, which made it so he couldn’t ramp into anything. While I lost characters early, I was able to put a lot of supports on the board which eventually took down the Daimyo of Tatooine.
Where this meta will go from this point I’m not sure. I think the overall power level of the majority of Seeking Answers is lower than previous sets, with some notable exceptions. Rey is obviously very good, No Room for Failure has proven to be really good as well, in multiple pairings. I also think that something with Black Stall Station is going to be top tier, be it the Vizsla/DWM deck or something else. Padme/Leia mill is also really strong, and I think it’ll take its place in the meta. I was surprised by Rako/Kallus, I wonder what might’ve happened differently had GVBlue been able to stay for top cut. As for Cassian, I think he’s still top tier and will continue to be for a while.
Please don’t bring Desperate Measures back to the reprint list!
-Rebel Traitor
