I've been reading up on some decks (and on forums) recently and everyone keeps talking about making decks faster. That supports slow decks down and aren't typically wanted. Etc. I can see how a fast deck can allow a person to consistently claim and therefore, get some sort of an advantage on their opponent due to that extra ability.

Is there any advantage to having a slower deck with (say) more powerful cards and/or supports? If someone is claiming every turn, they are obviously getting the claim advantage on me. But, can that advantage be nullified by having a slower deck that can use the extra time/turns to good use?

I was sifting through cards the other night, trying to make some decks and I found myself putting aside almost every support because "they are slow."

Are there tournament competitive decks that use supports and other "slower" cards? Or, are they only used sparingly (if necessary)?

Let's say you use the new card prepare for war, you gained an extra resource. Then your opponent rolls in his character getting a disrupt and because he has fast hands he resolves it, what did you gain for going slower?

I played someone who tried to stall until I had nothing more to do but claim. It even looked like it may work until about turn 3 when his characters started dying off.

lol, this is what I was worried about. If the best decks are those which work fastest, there are a lot of useless cards in this game.

I have no idea what Ozmodon is talking about. But yes, slower decks can win. Speed can be an effective strategy, but it is not the only effective strategy. FN-2199 decks don't win based on speed, they leverage his ability to roll and resolve more dice than your opponent. Captain Phasma decks use guardian and control cards to win the war of attrition. Even Palpatine decks aren't always going for speed. They are usually going for unrelenting damage and a steady stream of control to stay alive.

Yes, look at Phasma, Bala, Trooper or Phasma, Guavian, Trooper. Both of these decks are t1 when build for value over speed. You gain value over fast decks by milking every turn and playing slow cards like Backup Muscle, Hunker Down, and Air Superiority. These cards have insane value and over the course of a game will put you ahead.

Speed is good, but if you're all done with your actions by your 3rd action and you've not advanced your win condition then it's utterly pointless.

The strongest decks are the ones that reliably advance your win condition quicker than the opponent can advance theirs.

Eg. Poe/Maz is reliable: roll poe, roll maz, resolve focus and poe special. Claim throne room and resolve other poe special.

That's before you even start looking at putting fast hands out or getting some guns on maz to close it out when Poe dies.

On the other hand, in a Rey deck one could get force speed on Rey, Vibroknife on Rey, roll in rey and utterly whiff her roll... happens a lot. You get plenty of Filthy Rey actions to no avail.

It's not that Rey is bad, it's that without building a strong deck around her and pairing her with other strong characters, all those free actions can go to waste.

Speed is never a bad thing, in my opinion, because you can always pass on actions if you need to.

Supports can still be completely viable though.

Any support that triggers for free off of another action is for real. Imperial Inspection, Planetary Uprising, and It Binds All Things are two of the best cards in the game (worth more on the second-hand market than many dice cards) and Outmaneuver, Salvage Stand, and Infamous are great cards.

Also, there are really good decks that slow themselves down and slow down their opponent. My FLGS has an unspoken tier-2 rule, where most of the decks seen at our weekly tournaments are good, but not the same old boring meta lists. I usually play a Rey deck of some sort (so, the second speediest and most powerful thing after Poe/Maz, but balanced out by the fact that I like to pair her with Luminara ), and I have been absolutely destroyed by an Unkar/Trooper/DeathTrooper deck that used Quadjumper to get Slave 1 out there on turn 2. I also lost quite handily to a SnapWexley/RebelTrooper/RebelCommando list that used plenty of supports, and I couldn't claim because I had no resources!

So, you still need speed. There's no benefit yet to slowing down in this game, because the faster you do damage, the less damage they get to do back. But don't write off supports just yet. They still seem pretty useful to me, and not just when Poe is dumping them in the garbage can to use their dice once.

A lot of the talk about decks on here is circumstantial, especially when it comes to Poe/maz. You don't always get the focus side every time you roll Maz, so therefore can't always use Poe' s ability. In a lot of instances speed is only good if you get the dice result you want in the first place. Regarding supports, I do feel that dice supports do slow a player's game down so they may not claim the battlefield often if at all, but there are a lot of supports now that activate when a specific symbol is rolled or condition met.

Something I expect to see in the future are upgrades and events that speed supports up. I have mentioned on other boards about upgrades that may allow you to resolve a vehicle support when a character is activated or events that let you activate all droid supports at once. There will be something lined up I'm sure, as the game has been future proofed with keywords such as 'droid' and 'vehicle' to allow for this.

I think speed is always a good thing. Is the question that it is absolutely to win needed or is it over powered? That depends on the deck. I do think it never a bad thing even if you finish up you actions early, this always helps you get you plays out before something can be done about them.

Thanks everyone. It is good to hear there are a lot of options, even with supports. Slave I is one of my more recent cards that I really wanted to put in a deck, because it looks insane...but, I kept doubting myself over it being a support. I'll try it out!

I guess when you are talking about speed in the meta, you are typically talking about Poe Maz, both resolving its dice as well as trying to mitigate it.

With Poe Maz typically the deck wants to be finished its damage dealing actions by action 3 of the turn, often that will mean rolling in poe and resolving a die with fast hands, the rolling in Maz and resolving a couple die, then as a 3rd action claiming or resolving any remaining die. At this point if they have removal they can pass if they haven't claimed.

By this point the deck has usually done between 4-7 damage on average. The key to the speed aspect is that starting rounds 2 or 3 usually the Poe Maz opponent has a character close to death and the speed of the deck means it will die before having an impact that turn or the rest of the game.

This is why Poe maz is so good, as simple as it sounds it kills you faster than you can kill it, and while that sounds like a stupidly obvious thing to say, the intricacies of how it kills you as well as the potential damage output it denies by killing characters early in round 2 through 4 is why the deck does so well.

Now considering that you want to use Slave 1 there is a fundamental meta evolution that makes Slave 1 currently underpowered, and that is that all the top level decks don’t leave very many dice on the table. The fact is the more dice you have on the table the more likely they are to be manipulated or removed. Again consider Poe Maz, at any given time they will have no more than 2 dice on the table unless they literally roll 3-4 blanks between poe and Maz. That makes the all powerful special on slave 1 a sad panda.

Vader Raider and Palpatine are very similar, and it seems to stem from the apparent meta of High impact Character die (Poe, Vader, Palp etc) paired with little or no upgrades so that you can spend all your resources on mitigation.

I think we can say that there is at least 3 speed of decks:

Fast, average and slow

And advantage would look like this:

-->Fast------->Average------->Slow⬇️

⬆️_________________________________⬅️

-Fast beats average because average waste card trying to be fast, only to be beaten by fast anyway.

-Average beats slow because they use little fast card to claim

-Slow beats fast because they waste no cards trying to be fast and fast use several cards to speed things up

Of course, this is general toughts, considering all other parameters stays the same, it doesnt mean 100% win, it is just a +x% to your win ratio when calculating it.

Anyone that played Battletech ccg 20 years ago will know what i mean!

Chakan

1 hour ago, Chakan99939 said:

I think we can say that there is at least 3 speed of decks:

Fast, average and slow

And advantage would look like this:

-->Fast------->Average------->Slow⬇️

⬆️_________________________________⬅️

-Fast beats average because average waste card trying to be fast, only to be beaten by fast anyway.

-Average beats slow because they use little fast card to claim

-Slow beats fast because they waste no cards trying to be fast and fast use several cards to speed things up

Of course, this is general toughts, considering all other parameters stays the same, it doesnt mean 100% win, it is just a +x% to your win ratio when calculating it.

Anyone that played Battletech ccg 20 years ago will know what i mean!

Chakan

I think what you just described is another way of calling it a rock/paper/scissors meta, the problem is that instead of paper beating rock 100% of the time its more like a 50/50 shot right now.

3 hours ago, Chakan99939 said:

-->Fast------->Average------->Slow⬇️

⬆️_________________________________⬅️

I remain unconvinced, Poe/Maz is most likely going to lose to Palpatine because all their tricks are often triggering deal x damage to all opponents characters, so they do less damage each turn after the first than another deck that plays a gun each turn for three turns. Then a Crime Lord could just end Palpatine's day because he has all his eggs in one basket.

While I am sure, understanding the meta and the decks hierarchy within it would be a useful bit of knowledge, I think that the speed of the deck isn't exactly the criteria to use.

I think a deck that goes off-tempo, one that goes slow through the turn would be hard to get right, you would have to ensure that dice and damage was kept to a manageable level during the early parts of the turn as to ensure you got turns of your own. Cards like Armour Plating, Personal Shield Generator and Force Illusion may feature highly, 4-8 supports and lots of Events that try and remove dice and keep your characters alive.

There are a couple of different aspects of 'speed'.

Speed by itself isn't that big a deal - it just lets you claim the battlefield faster, which is useful but isn't 'auto win'. And claiming too fast can be to your detriment in some cases

However, the other kind of speed is being able to do things before your opponent can stop them, and that IS a big deal. Fast Hands, ambush effects on Rey, being able to roll in a Red character with Hit and Run and shoot someone, even being able to roll in and resolve dice before your opponent can use control like He Doesn't Like You (granted, that one is reliant on claiming). In those cases, speed is a powerful tactical advantage; the issue at the moment is that it also often comes with large amount of damage.

That doesn't mean that slower cards/decks aren't viable (and accepting you're going to be slow and building around that is fine), but they are inherantly giving up something.

18 hours ago, Abyss said:

However, the other kind of speed is being able to do things before your opponent can stop them, and that IS a big deal. Fast Hands, ambush effects on Rey, being able to roll in a Red character with Hit and Run and shoot someone, even being able to roll in and resolve dice before your opponent can use control like He Doesn't Like You (granted, that one is reliant on claiming). In those cases, speed is a powerful tactical advantage; the issue at the moment is that it also often comes with large amount of damage.

This. So very, very much this.

Anyone who thinks that speed advantage is just about claiming first does not understand the game at all. I'm suspect that FFG's design team falls into this category.

^ Agreed. For all the talk about speed, I don't feel like people always "get" it.

Speeding to claim first gets you a few benefits. You get the claim ability, which is fine. You get to go first on the next round, which can be important when characters are on the verge of death. And, for Heroes, you can trigger cards like Planetary Uprising (which is very, very good). These are all advantages, but they're typically modest or wind up being circumstancial. Some games are decided by who rolls out first on a given round, and in those scenarios claiming is crucial! Slow decks pass up on these advantages, but it's not an insurmountable weakness.

Speeding to prevent opponent interaction is very, very good. It circumvents dice control, damage mitigation, and is powerful with low health characters (you can either kill your opponent's low health character before they can activate, or you can get one last gasp with your low health character). It also allows you to play into all the usual advantages to claiming.

So, what do slow decks gain over fast ones? They can have better card economy, since they aren't spending deck slots on speed fixers. Force Speed and Fast Hands are powerful, but some decks would rather trade out those upgrade slots for straight damage cards (like FN). By opting for a slow deck, you also allow yourself to take some powerful cards that aren't optimized for speed decks. Consider Backup Muscle: it slows you down by an activation each turn, but it gives you consistent unblockable damage for a very reasonable cost. Slow decks can also be more consistent: focus faces, discarding for rerolls, or playing into "fixer" cards (like Use the Force or We Have Them Now) help you get more out of your dice. Additionally, playing slow means a faster opponent will have worked through most of their dice/cards — you'll get a better sense of what they're able to do (or not do).

In the current meta, the advantages to slow decks don't outweigh the advantages of fast ones. Being able to minimize your opponent's interference in your turn is quite strong. Additionally, the popular speed decks (Poe/Maz, Palpatine, Vader/Raider) have access to plenty of consistency (Maz's focus, Palpatine's passive damage, events like Force Strike/Bait and Switch). I don't think that means that slow decks are inherently bad, but we could use some more powerful supports and other cards which incentivize *not* claiming. For instance, what if Director Krennic's extra Death Trooper dice depended on him *not* controlling the battlefield? Suddenly, you have a powerful ability which benefits slow decks instead of fast ones.

As examples of speed being incredibly useful vs capable of being worthless; last night i played with an eObi Wan/Rey deck for some casual games.

In one game i had an opening hand of 1 x vibroknife, 2 x force speed, and some others... i forget. Anyway, I won the roll and went first.

My turn went thusly:

Force speed on Rey, Force Speed on Rey, Vibroknife on Rey, Roll Rey,

Get:

Rey +2

Force speed special

Force speed focus

Vibroknife +2

Resolve 1x force speed special, roll obi wan

Get blank and 3 melee

Resolve force speed focus to turn obi wans blank to 3 melee.

Opponent gets a turn. They had no control.

Resolve 10 melee damage.

... now my opponent may go, having just swallowed 10 unblockable damage getting only one go.

That happened once. A far more likely outcome was that i got no ambush cards and/or no force speed in my opening hand, or i got force speed and vibroknife in my opening hand and blanked out or got bad rolls on everything.

Mostly Rey or Obiwan got killed quickly and i lost.

But the overarching point is that speed is good, but consistency is better.

38 minutes ago, Stu35 said:

But the overarching point is that speed is good, but consistency is better.

This is one of those "I don't think people get it" statements.

Speed enables consistency . Every deck is going to be at the mercy of the dice, to some extent. The thing that makes the game interesting is the ability to manipulate and mitigate those dice. Poe/Maz doesn't work just because Maz grants focus - Luke/Ackbar has the same focus, arguably more of it. So why was one a sorta-fun Tier 2 and one is tearing up the meta? Because focus just begs to be mitigated, usually after it gets used, and you watch multiple dice accomplish nothing. Maz's ability resolves focus for anything, with no chance to be mitigated. She's a free, every turn, Force Strike. Poe being able to consistently turn a single die into 4 to 9 damage doesn't hurt either, but Maz is the enabler.

Say you roll elite Vader. With no speed, then 2 bad dice are bad, one good die usually gets mitigated, (so bad) and two good dice will get one through (good). If you add Fast Hands, though, then that middle case means the good die gets through before it's mitigated. People talk about Fast Hands like it's some burdensome opportunity cost, but Fast Hands is a damage card.

It also makes things far more dependent on the actual rolls - if we both have Vader with Fast Hands, then whoever rolls more naturally good dice on the first pass gets more damage through before it can get mitigated, and the game becomes far more about luck than skilled play.

4 hours ago, Buhallin said:

This is one of those "I don't think people get it" statements.

You're right. You don't.

8 hours ago, Stu35 said:

Get:
Rey +2
Force speed special
Force speed focus
Vibroknife +2
Resolve 1x force speed special, roll obi wan
Get blank and 3 melee
Resolve force speed focus to turn obi wans blank to 3 melee.
Opponent gets a turn. They had no control.
Resolve 10 melee damage.

This is an awful example and a misplay on your part, IMHO, which is why I don't think you really understand what we're saying, because it's an irrelevant anecdote. What if they did have control? Say, an Overconfidence? Block would have ruined you. Or even Scramble? What happens?

Your god roll turns into nothing. Or if it's not turn one, maybe they kill off Obi-Wan before you resolve that damage.

So what if they have control, but instead of resolving that last focus you just take the damage you've got? You land 7 damage that is completely immune to everything. You give your opponent an opportunity to respond here, give them any number of ways to neutralize your damage. Your speed gave you the opportunity to bypass that, but you didn't take it, and got lucky that your opponent had no mitigation.

But even with that misplay, the speed matters. How many mitigation options do you neutralize here because all that happened at once? No He Doesn't Like You, or Guard, or Manipulate. At standard pace the control options open up. You put all that sitting out there before your opponent has what they need to use their mitigation.

Yes, sure - if your opponent has no way to interact with you, then speed doesn't really matter. And yes, there are rolls that will come up that are so good the speed doesn't matter because there's nothing they could do to stop it anyway. But there are

Consistency is not just "How lucky do I get on my rolls?" It's whether or not you can land the results of those roles. Removing the opportunity for your opponent to do anything dramatically increases the consistency of landing those results.

5 hours ago, Buhallin said:

This is an awful example and a misplay on your part, IMHO, which is why I don't think you really understand what we're saying, because it's an irrelevant anecdote. What if they did have control? Say, an Overconfidence? Block would have ruined you. Or even Scramble? What happens?

Your god roll turns into nothing. Or if it's not turn one, maybe they kill off Obi-Wan before you resolve that damage.

So what if they have control, but instead of resolving that last focus you just take the damage you've got? You land 7 damage that is completely immune to everything. You give your opponent an opportunity to respond here, give them any number of ways to neutralize your damage. Your speed gave you the opportunity to bypass that, but you didn't take it, and got lucky that your opponent had no mitigation.

But even with that misplay, the speed matters. How many mitigation options do you neutralize here because all that happened at once? No He Doesn't Like You, or Guard, or Manipulate. At standard pace the control options open up. You put all that sitting out there before your opponent has what they need to use their mitigation.

Yes, sure - if your opponent has no way to interact with you, then speed doesn't really matter. And yes, there are rolls that will come up that are so good the speed doesn't matter because there's nothing they could do to stop it anyway. But there are

Consistency is not just "How lucky do I get on my rolls?" It's whether or not you can land the results of those roles. Removing the opportunity for your opponent to do anything dramatically increases the consistency of landing those results.

I noted the same thing. I also thought that it was a false argument to suggest that Speed and Consistency are independent of each other or mutually exclusive.

I think it's worth noting and telling that, with SoR, it is a much more important strategy to remove strong dice (for example: Vader, Poe) that are currently showing bad dice sides because of an opponent's ability to use speed to correct and resolve them before you can react. This was not necessarily a good use of resources in Awakenings but is considered a misplay now to leave them.