It seems like the designers created royal guard to be paired with a single die Emperor. So, what do you think? would u rather have two dice Palp or single die with a guardian?

Guardian like Palp. That die with mixed damage and a modifier does not. One would have to add at least upgrades to remove the number of functional blanks on the Guard. This would decrease the efficiency of Palp, reducing his trigger to once per turn. It would also make him more susceptible to mitigation at one die. This is just my opinion, however, and hope someone disagrees with me so I can learn more about the game.

4 minutes ago, HaphazardNinja said:

Guardian like Palp. That die with mixed damage and a modifier does not. One would have to add at least upgrades to remove the number of functional blanks on the Guard. This would decrease the efficiency of Palp, reducing his trigger to once per turn. It would also make him more susceptible to mitigation at one die. This is just my opinion, however, and hope someone disagrees with me so I can learn more about the game.

You are right, there are trade offs. 1 dice is easier to mitigate than 2. And with a 30 card deck, im sure you could throw some cards to make Guardian more effective. But the guardian ability, and 8 more health, the deck became a whole lot beefier. And with 6 upgrade slots instead of 3, you could get more value out of running 2 holocrons.

Actually, this just led me to an important question. Can holocron put blue abilities on Guard? The holocron text says ignore play restrictions, but i guess that might be just on the upgrade itself, the guard restriction is on his character?

With holocron you can put blue abilities upgrades on a yellow character, so I don't see why holocron wouldn't work on the guard.

Being that the Royal Guard shows 3 Melee face (one being a mod) and Palpatine is range, I think the Royal Guard will be better with Elite Vader. It will be easier to pick upgrades that are good for both.... And it will be a little less vulnerable to the Carbonite Chamber too.

10 minutes ago, Ywingscum said:

With holocron you can put blue abilities upgrades on a yellow character, so I don't see why holocron wouldn't work on the guard.

The difference here is that Holocron ignores the ability's play restriction, not the character's.

In this case though I think since the card is getting switched into play and not "played" on the character it will work.

There's some debate on it though.

I have found Night Sister to be a better partner for Palpatine. She is Ranged, she can take all blue upgrades and doesn't need a Holocron, and her ability gives you a few extra dice rolls. If your opponent ignores the Sister (happens more often than I would have thought) it takes so long to kill Palpatine that she will be fully loaded once he is gone. I will try the guard and ePalp too. I'd also like to try TIE Pilot for Ranged lock, but if you use any Red cards (Training) you start devaluing No Mercy.

I would rather have Nightsister. Matches damage type, and can get you out of rolling a blank on the Emperor.

9 minutes ago, GooeyChewie said:

I would rather have Nightsister. Matches damage type, and can get you out of rolling a blank on the Emperor.

The problem being, you have just taken away one of the emperor dice, and lost the ability to deflect damage off of him. The whole point of taking away one of his die is to deflect attacks on him

I will be pairing Palp with a Tie Pilot and Cargo Hold. Play Training on Tie Pilot then use Cargo Hold to move Training to Palp making him elite. Then use Tie Pilot die to protect your Palp damage dice from being mitigated.

The real question is, can you generate enough resources to play endless ranks? If so, it would make the pairing rather difficult to deal with.

2 hours ago, pstalker said:

I will be pairing Palp with a Tie Pilot and Cargo Hold. Play Training on Tie Pilot then use Cargo Hold to move Training to Palp making him elite. Then use Tie Pilot die to protect your Palp damage dice from being mitigated.

Problem with cargo hold is your opponent can either just move it back by claiming or move something else off the TIE Pilot potentially making you overwrite a better ability. I'm not sold on Cargo Hold being this great Training cheat.

I played a night sister and Palp yesterday. Worked okay for the most part. Had rise again in hand but just couldn't generate resources. The night sister was good for the extra health but personally felt a and Palp die would have been preffereable. Saying that with so few die no matter if it is ePalp or teamed up with another I was doing A LOT of passing!

Yeah, a Palp deck would need a few supports to make it good. He may be good in December when there are more cards to choose from.

On 4/7/2017 at 5:43 PM, Thrindal said:

Problem with cargo hold is your opponent can either just move it back by claiming or move something else off the TIE Pilot potentially making you overwrite a better ability. I'm not sold on Cargo Hold being this great Training cheat.

You should be claiming way faster than your opponent. Really all you care about is resolving your Palp dice. And if they claim early in the round just to move it to your TIE pilot then you have a full round of damage you can dish out. You shouldnt be putting to many upgrades in the deck for TIE Pilot so I dont think there is an issue of you needing to overwrite something.

I actually drew both Palpatine and Royal Guard at the prerelease, and I've been using them a lot - the mixed damage is annoying, but I'm still usually claiming the battlefield and doing a lot of damage. The only problem is that, yes, Royal Guard greatly increases Palpatine's survivability, but Palpatine just doesn't do enough damage early enough.

And the other reason for this is that there's just too many abilities that remove dice! Palpatine's dice are nasty, but if your opponent keeps removing them, you can't use his special ability.

So I think that elite Palpatine is probably better than Palpatine with guard, but if you only have one Palpatine dice, the guard is probably the better choice. Also, Palpatine is nasty, but I still think other characters are better. Royal Guard really synergises with Vader, if you're ok with only having blue and grey cards.