Star Wars

Strategies

Star Wars varies from Lord of the Rings rather drastically. First, decks are not mixed: players choose to play either Light Side or Dark Side, and must play the opposite. Second, the Star Wars CCG is far less storylined that the Lord of the Rings game. The universe is more open for players to do unusual or tactically different things, which is of great value to the game as a whole. This open ended playstyle allows for much greater variety of decks within the game, and also improves the overall game lifespan. Unfortunately, the advent of power cards and the shortsightedness of a few of the Star Wars rules tended to prevent all but a very few of these archetypes from being truly viable in play towards the last few expansions of the game. Despite that, Star Wars has the potential to, if these rules and cards are slightly reworked to prevent their abuse, last a while longer before being played out.

The current main power strategy (I will not degrade myself to discussing podracing or senate decks in this article) is Mains and Toys combined with some kind of drain boosting. Basically a deck is created that will do significant Force Drain damage to the opponent, and that uses heavy hitting main characters in large numbers to capture and maintain the sites needed to do the drains. This strategy is frustrating to play against, as the mains in Star Wars have been placed, power wise, so far above the average character that it is a significant risk to play smaller characters, thereby eliminating many different deck types. One possibility to correct this would be to make a house rule that lists Mains and power characters (see a possible idea here), and says that no player, upon losing a battle, has to lose more than 4 Force from his or her Reserve Deck unless they had one of those main characters participating in a battle. This would drastically limit the incurred risks from playing smaller characters, and reopen many other deck types. It would, I think, be worth the time to come up with some basic house rules that would limit the abusive power of the strongest deck types in order to rejuvenate the game within our play group.

Deck Listings

Here is a brief list of my decks that I either play or have played and enjoyed. Click on each deck for a further description. Note that these are now just a short description of the deck type/playstyle and a list of the cards in the deck. Later on, I plan to add more detailed strategies within each deck to these articles.

Light Side:
•Hidden Base
•Quiet Mining Colony
•Dagobah Drain

Dark Side:
•My Kind of Scum
•Dark Deal