Let's Discuss: Separatist Base

By thesug1, in Star Wars: Destiny

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Thursday means tomorrow we should be getting a new article from FFG. And that means it a HYPE DAY!!! So in spirit of the hype...I want to discuss battlefield cards.

1) Separatist Base: when claimed each opponent targets a character and deals 1 unblockable damage. This battlefield is really good since it gets better with more players in the game. We will discuss that later, but the implications are too good to pass up. For those of you who don't know, as an action, you may claim a battlefield, resolve its effect and then end your turn. Sep Base creates a bit of a dilemma for players because it deals damage that cannot be stopped. Even if your opponent has a healthy team, taking this battlefield over and over will whittle down their HP. But you also do not want to leave yourself open to the opponent claiming this card either. So what can you do to use this card efficiently?
2) Run a aggro deck. This card I sincerely believe will thrive on decks with limited actions and high burst damage. You really don't want your opponent to take this card over and over, so you have to end your turns faster and grab this card. But if the game is based on actions, and you burn out your turn fast, isn't that a disadvantage? Well yes and no. On the yes side, you will be giving your opponent free reign to take all the actions they want once you claim this card. So that can be a bad thing depending on the matchup. On the no side, this can be advantageous because a lot of effects are based on removing dice or rerolling dice. And if you claim the battlefield, you have no dice to target from the opponent. This really disrupts decks that focus on messing up your dice or removing certain die faces. No strategy will be perfect to keep you from taking more damage or economic disruption than necessary, but I believe a fast damage deck can use Separatist Base the best of any specific theme.
3) You could also use this card as bait to get your opponent to claim the battlefield early to deal the free damage, but allow you to mess up their board state. This is the exact opposite idea of the pervious idea, but its sneaky. If you bring a big HP team or a team with recursion (endless ranks......) you could take you time and build up your board as well as gain resources and disrupt the opponent's hand and/or resources to give you a strong advantage at the cost of taking small plinks of damage. This isn't always the best strategy, but it can be used to entice an opponent to end their turn a little early in trade of damage. And with choke or control decks, this is a dream come true.
4) Multiplayer!! I know FFG has not announced anything other than the 1vs1 game. But the way these cards are worded, multiplayer has definitely been considered and will be available to us. So as a Magic player there are formats going all the way up to 5 in a comfortable game. So imagine playing with 4 opponents. Claim this card and boom, 4 unblockable damage has been dealt, spread among those players. :)
Overall Separatist Base is a very swingy card. It offers a very strong effect, but at the cost of cutting your turn short. Or it offers you the chance to bait the opponent a shorter turn, but losing life you can't stop. I will remind you of the yellow event that basically says, when attached character would die, instead give them +5HP and destroy this card.... So a yellow hero deck would not be afraid of this card and would most likely not care very much about losing characters because they will come back just fine. This card is dependent on a lot of factors, but brings a very healthy level of strategy and risk/reward to such a beautiful game. LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK. Will you play this card? IS it even good at all?
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Not much to add myself, I think you've hit the salient points for the moment. But I did want to tank you for being a new face in the forum with such an obvious enthusiasm for this game. There's so many nay-sayers about this being a collectable game and why did FFG have to go to the dark side. But obviously this style of game was enough to bring you out of the shadows if not you first foray into the FFG fold. Proving that they were right when they said there's a desire for this style game.

I look forward to your future rundowns of cards.

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Not much to add myself, I think you've hit the salient points for the moment. But I did want to tank you for being a new face in the forum with such an obvious enthusiasm for this game. There's so many nay-sayers about this being a collectable game and why did FFG have to go to the dark side. But obviously this style of game was enough to bring you out of the shadows if not you first foray into the FFG fold. Proving that they were right when they said there's a desire for this style game.

I look forward to your future rundowns of cards.

I am actually going to be doing a podcast with super in depth content as well as posting here on the forums. Ive been into CCG and TCGs for years now and I've bought and played every FFG card game. So I'm pretty experienced. I just really want to talk about this game and meet awesome people like you who care about the game and are super cool to talk to! So i hope you'll give us a listen later this weekend. I promise it will be worth your time.

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This card add a lot of pressure to a match. Being able to wound a character by ending your round can be pretty potent as they won't be able to shield it. Just having the option on the table adds a nice tension to the game. Battlefields already are going to be a very prominent mechanic that will take a great deal of evaluation skills from players to decide if and when to take it. This card really adds punch to that decision.

Edited by Decepticle
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RIGHT?!?! its a strain on every action. Do I end now and deal damage? Will they end and deal me damage? Its a really well balanced card, AND when multiplayer games are happening oh man.....Imagine a 4 player game. Whoever takes that battlefield deals damage and goes first next round. Thats intense!

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The big thing no-one's talking about here is that your opponent chooses who takes the damage. That's a huge difference from if you chose. I feel like one of the main strengths of aggro decks* would be the ability to remove a character from the game quickly; this doesn't actually help them do that since your opponent will direct damage to whoever their healthiest character is (by default of course). Now it's still probably he go to battleground if you want to kill your opponent fast but I don't think it'll cause a substantial change in how good agro decks are in the meta.

*I love that we've seen less than half (okay I haven't actually checked the numbers but it feels like it) of the cards in the first set and we're already trying to suss out the metagame.

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In a multiplayer game, this card would be huge. And still somewhat useful in heads up.

Trying to think my way through who this card would go well with. Ideally, this would be better suited to teams that require a lower number of turns, since they'd be able to get through their meaningful turns more quickly before claiming the battlefield. I think the following types would be more cohesive with it:

* Smaller teams (since you need a separate action to activate each character)

* Characters with abilities that allow them to take extra actions

* Decks that are more upgrade-heavy than support-heavy (since you can roll all of the dice in one turn with attachments versus multiple turns to roll support die).

* Sets of dice that are more focused on a more limited number of dice types, since you can activate all of the dice of a given type at the same time.

At first glance, this seems very Rey friendly. She gets some free actions with her ability and there a lot of weapon upgrades that can be attached to her.