I've been thinking about Murne as an alternative to Hera. She has the Spy trait, and plays well with card drawing. In our current meta, you could reasonably take "Fool me Once" with Murne: it cycles a 0 point card for a chance at a better card, and Murne (unlike Mak) can eat the 2 damage without worrying about tempt/lightning/force choke death. Murne can use Intelligence Leak and even Comm Disruption as a secondary Negation (or Negation-block), and can Strategic Shift your Rule-by-Fear or Planning'd opponent back to two cards.

Hera's pretty efficient with her "take your pick of deadeye, positioning advantage, or blitz once per turn," along with a full squad "rank and file" after deployment, and her attack is significantly better. And Hera gives you a fallback character for Tools for the Job and On the Lam after Han got element-of-surprise/IG-sassinated on round one somehow. Hera's attacks are better, although Murne + Focus gets close, and she has a surge for range, which Hera lacks. False Orders is nothing to sneeze at in a meta with riot troopers, either: "Just march yourself right back off that box, young man!" Murne's command card is playable; Hera's is a weird blaze-of-glory combo sacking a smuggler to re-use Chewbacca when your opponent wasn't expecting it.

So it seems to me that the question is: where does the extra hide go?

Assuming you can beat your opponent's card count (planning, strategic shift, R2-D2), part of Murne's power seems to be her ability to hand out the hidden token. Dropping accuracy is always helpful -- you can drop hidden on a smuggler in round one and have -4 acc to it for the rest of the game -- but who in rebels benefits the most from the extra surge while attacking?

Jyn seems like the top candidate. Rolling GG (or GGG focused), she's not guaranteed 2 surges by any means (especially against Jets or 3P0 boxes in our meta), and her surges are both very valuable. The -acc is helpful if you encounter ERangers, I suppose, but doesn't help with fly-by (still a guaranteed hit).
Another place it seems likely to stay un-wasted is on ESabs: double-piercing with overload gets you that much closer to stunning Vader, and these units are still viable objective runners on Raining Freight, Spoils of Crime, and Concealed Treasures. Plus if you run ESabs and Murne, Comm Disruption just went A-list.
Lando has some decent surges, and you might want to "Gambit" his yellow die into a red.
Han, Drokatta, and Chewbacca all have useful surges, but none of them seems to have trouble coming up with them, especially if Han is focused.
Ahsoka and Jarrod have a wealth of surge abilities ... but you have to keep them alive until round 2 to get use of them.
Hera, ironically, can use the surge help, as it brings her double-surge pierce 2 into real contention.

I'm not sure I've even convinced myself, but Murne is such a unique figure, I'm tempted to look into this more.

I've never played with Murne(yet) and have been wracking my brain on how to fit him(her) in a list. You have some cool ideas and I'm very interested in what you're able to come up with.

I know you will keep us posted....and thanks

You can even Strategic Shift yourself if its your last card in-hand or you don't like your hand.

Yeah, I think with Strategic Shift, Intel Leak, and Comm Disruption, there's a real argument to be made for running even just one spy. Make it Mak with Shadow Ops and have him sit on a terminal, and the argument gets better. His Critical Hit ability is a solid late-round close, especially with focus/Hera support. Shadow Ops in Round One, followed by Strategic Shift in Round Two, can really annoy your opponent (although Zillo changes the dynamic a fair amount).

I had Mak in an Omaha Regionals tournament a month ago, and he survived a hit from an ERanger on Nal Hutta (rolled block/evade and survived at 1 hp), then stepped up and got a kill with Critical Hit, and opened the next round for a Priority Target kill on a Drokatta-wounded Gideon. Pretty serious work from a 3-cost figure.

Hidden is super useful, but rhe qualifier is what kills it for me. If i can get ahead in the command card race, i normally dont want to sit on them. You use or you lose. The quicker you can kill the enemy or draw them out to make poor shots the better chance you have of winning. If she passed out Hidden with an action like Gideon I'd use her, but most of the time I dont get my Hidden and her other ability is usually a way to get killed by getting too close. Hera or 2 smugglers or high command are better

I'm half-tempted to try this at the Toronto regional this Sunday.... Leia, Murne and Mak with a bunch of other things of course. 3 Spies to make use of those spy cards and I could theoretically Comm Disrupt an On the Lam or Assassinate if all 3 are alive when it happens~

And then use Leia's ability to reshuffle Comm Disrupt and hopefully draw it again!

I played around with Murne for a little bit (before Hera came out) in a Luke’s finest list but I never felt like I got enough value out of her. False orders was always kind of a gimmick, but now there’s fewer 3 point troopers running around. Like you said, Riots are the only decent attacking figures that will be on the board anymore, and they’ll be limited for that since they’re melee.

Compare Murne to Hera, and Hera is going to give you so much more utility with those 4 points. If I were running a spy list, I’d probably bring Mak over Murne as the cheap spy to use actions for the good command cards (strategic shift, Shadow Ops, etc) just because he’s a point cheaper

None of the Bespin stuff is quite efficient enough or costed quite right honestly. It feels kind of rushed or like they're afraid of something being too powerful, like the clawdites in HotE. Everything else JR and HotE feel better balanced

On 3/2/2018 at 11:49 PM, Fightwookies said:

there’s fewer 3 point troopers running around. Like you said, Riots are the only decent attacking figures that will be on the board anymore, and they’ll be limited for that since they’re melee.

Ah, but have you considered how well this will help your opponent to remember to spread out their melee figures before Drokatta shoots at th--

... oh.

I have a new found respect for Murne. My buddy ran her against me the other night. I didn't even know what her CC was. She ends up playing her CC and commanding a focused, hidden eQuay to shoot at the other focused, hidden eQuay in the group. Tough Luck was the only thing that saved the eQuay from being wiped out, but even then was left with 5 damage on it. To recap, I lost: a hidden & focus token, functionally lost another focused & hidden eQuay who had to do a snipe then hide in a corner the rest of the game, waste gideon/3po's first turn, and made me burn tough luck.

So yeah, she hit above her weight class that game.

16 minutes ago, Averagejo3gam3r said:

I have a new found respect for Murne. My buddy ran her against me the other night. I didn't even know what her CC was. She ends up playing her CC and commanding a focused, hidden eQuay to shoot at the other focused, hidden eQuay in the group. Tough Luck was the only thing that saved the eQuay from being wiped out, but even then was left with 5 damage on it. To recap, I lost: a hidden & focus token, functionally lost another focused & hidden eQuay who had to do a snipe then hide in a corner the rest of the game, waste gideon/3po's first turn, and made me burn tough luck.

So yeah, she hit above her weight class that game.

Definitely something to ruin someone's plan (:

Works great on a Shared Experience focus eJet too, 4 dice into his nearby buddy~

On 3/2/2018 at 12:36 PM, Shadowmax said:

I've never played with Murne(yet) and have been wracking my brain on how to fit him(her) in a list. You have some cool ideas and I'm very interested in what you're able to come up with.

I know you will keep us posted....and thanks

You fit Murne into a list by finding a number of deployment cards + Murne equal to 40 and play a game and see what happens. Unless you bet large sums of money on every game there is no need to wrack one's brain about how to fit anything into a list. If you own the figure and have never used it despite wanting to, because it might cause a battle in pretend-land to go awry, that is not the way to go. Trying a figure out in a couple actual games is going to be the best way to find your footing with it.

Of all the skirmish deployments that have come out before Jabba's Realm, Murne's is the most puzzling. False Orders is a strong and unique ability -- no other figure has a Special Action ability that takes control of a hostile figure's attack. I think at that time (mid 2016) the Trooper swarms were at the top of the metagame. (Feel free to correct me; I didn't start paying attention to the meta until 2017). But even then, Murne was limited to triggering Troopers. Hardly any other figure of cost 3 that could be played at that time would be worth running Murne up into the thick of battle to give False Orders. I wonder what was seen in playtesting that prevented the designers from letting Murne use False Orders on cost-4 figures.

If Murne could do False Orders on figure cost 4 figures now, she would be very playable. She would have been a counter to eWeequays, Greedo, Hera (since Hera is likely to be near other higher-cost figures) & Alliance Rangers. She would make an interesting combo from the Data Theft card: Another Spy plays Data Theft to pull out Assassinate, then Murne forces an eWeequay to attack IG-88 with the +3 DMG from Assassinate!

It's interesting that the designers also added Field Report instead of a standard Special Action ability to Hide one nearby figure. I wonder what happened in playtesting that led to Field Report being implemented with the restriction on command card counts. Maybe it was their attempt at increasing Murne's survivability without forcing Murne into the Gideon support mold.

Finally tried the list tonight with Murne and other spies.
Never managed to have a good opportunity to False Orders and NEVER had Murne's Fatal Deception card when I needed it most, ugh. Just bad luck on that but the potential is there.
Regardless, the Hiding Murne + Another nearby figure is really good, saved me a lot and helped to attack a C3PO box, negating the extra evade with the bonus surge.

First game I lost by 4 pts, it could've gone either way on the last round.

Second game though.. my opponent starts by rolling an X on C3PO then proceeds to roll almost exclusively 3 Blocks on all defense rolls and I still managed to pull through and win it. I used Comm Disruption to negate New Orders, Leia picks it back and places it in the deck again, draw it and negate Tools for the Job - pretty amazing thing to do. Ruins an opponents plans quite well