Potential deck for Scum and Villainy

By Budgernaut, in Star Wars: The Card Game

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Being inspired by dbmeboy's recent efforts to build his first deck, I decided to take my vague thoughts I've had on a deck and organize them into a coherent strategy. Additionally, I hoped that looking at the cards with the idea of actually building a deck would help me learn them better and understand the other decks that have been and will be posted.
This deck is all about making the most of the Scum and Villainy faction with the limited card pool. Obviously, this deck requires two core sets. (And please forgive me. I had almost all the cards I mention linked to cardgamedb.com, but then I hit the back button on my browser and lost all the links, so you'll just have to use the ones from the objectives.)
Affiliation: Scum and Villainy
The very first thing on my mind with this deck is resource management. With only two Scum and Villainy objectives, how will I make sure I have the resources I need to pay for those cards? The first choice was to set Scum and Villainy as my main affiliation. Second, I include two copies of the single Scum and Villainy objective set. Finally, I rely on "Looking for Droids." This objective allows you to ignore resource matching, making payment for various affiliations a non-issue. Plus, in case you can't get one of your two copies of this card on the table, you get four copies of "Dark Alliance," which allows you to ignore resource match requirements for one phase.
This deck began with two copies of the single Scum and Villainy objective set, "The Bespin Exchange" which deals a lot with capturing opponents, so I decided that "Take Them Prisoner" from the Imperial Navy would be a good one to include since it also has ways to capture opponents. Unfortunately, "Take Them Prisoner" does not synergize with "Bounty Collection" or "The Bespin Exchange" because these two only react to enemy units captured from play and "Take Them Prisoner" captures cards from an out-of-play state. However, "Detained" is still a good option for synergizing with "Bounty Collection" and "The Bespin Exchange".
Since I chose Imperial Navy as my second affiliation, I decided to stick with it and not include any Sith affiliation objective sets. The next objective set I selected was "Imperial Command." This set is a resource-generating monster and I just thought it would be neat to try it out. Not only does the objective generate two resources, but "Admiral Motti" and the "Duty Officer" also provide resources. Plus, the "Heavy Stormtrooper Squad" is neutral, so I don't have to worry about resource matches there.
Next I chose "Death and Despayre." At first I wasn't sure about this one, but the two resources looked nice, in case I need a resource boost to pull off something really cool, but the thing that really convinced me was "Defense Upgrade." This card gives +3 damage capacity to one of your objectives. This has two potential strategies for this deck. 1) Use it to protect the objective where you are keeping your captives to prevent your opponent from getting them back. 2) Protect "Looking for Droids" to make sure you can play cards at will without worrying about resource matches. Additionally, this set includes "Devastator" and "Heat of Battle" which are great for the edge battles.
Which brings me to my last set, one copy of "Reconnaisance Mission." I feel that this set is probably a very important addition to a deck and will be a staple for some time. The fact that it is limited to one-per-deck is a testament to me that the designers thought it is a powerful set. Being able to manipulate the edge battle is very important, if for no other reason than to keep the light side player from progressing. Of the 55 cards in my command deck, 5 are fate cards. I've also made sure to keep my force icons relatively high with two each of "Boba Fett," "Devastator," and "Admiral Motti." "Detained" is also worth 3 in the edge battle, but I plan on using that one for capturing enemies and perhaps getting the unopposed bonus in doing so.
Final thoughts, I'm really excited to see how these two work together. The Imperial Navy, as has been pointed out by others, has good resource acceleration because many of the objectives produce more than one resource and the cards associated with objectives often produce resources themselves. "The Bespin Exchange" and "Bounnty Collection" can both remove focus tokens from objectives, so if you play it right, these cards should combo to allow you to spend all your resources on your Imperial Navy objectives, and still be back to zero focus tokens after your next refresh phase. The one problem is that if you spend all those resources to keep playing cards, you may not have what you need for the edge battles. I don't have an answer for that at the moment other than saying temperance is the key.
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:-) It seemed like a much more fun way to sit around waiting for the game than twiddling my thumbs. Your deck looks interesting. In general, I'm not a big fan of Looking For Droids. Other than It's Worse, it just isn't very card efficient (though Dark Alliance having two force icons somewhat makes up for that). Still, to pull off a Scum deck right now I agree that it's absolutely necessary. I like the idea of a capture theme, it'll be interesting to see if it pays off in the game itself. It does seem like there isn't much in the way of recurrence, which is what would make capturing a card better than just killing it. On the other hand, Fett's capture ability effectively makes all LS units killed after 1 hit from him. Super-Fett with his armor and a couple of blaster pistols will be absolutely sick: if you win the edge battle he can strike first, deal 4 damage distributed to any 4 LS units (capturing them all) and toss out a focus token on something else to boot. Similar to my Sith deck, you don't have a lot of ability to go after LS objectives (except for Devastator), but hopefully the capturing gives enough board control to make up for that. Maybe I need to start making myself some proxies and testing these things…

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Interesting concept. I tried something similar with Smugglers and Spies this weekend and it went horribaly.

Though I don't think Iput as much thought into it. It was an on the fly build and I just couldn't get any traction.

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dbmeboy said:

Super-Fett with his armor and a couple of blaster pistols will be absolutely sick: if you win the edge battle he can strike first, deal 4 damage distributed to any 4 LS units (capturing them all) and toss out a focus token on something else to boot.

I don't think this is possible. Unless I'm missing some part of your combo, unit damage has to be deal to one participating unit, you can't split it up.

Unit Damage: The striking player chooses one participating enemy unit and deals an amount of damage to that unit equal to the [unit Damage] strength of the striking unit.

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Entropy42 said:

dbmeboy said:

Super-Fett with his armor and a couple of blaster pistols will be absolutely sick: if you win the edge battle he can strike first, deal 4 damage distributed to any 4 LS units (capturing them all) and toss out a focus token on something else to boot.

I don't think this is possible. Unless I'm missing some part of your combo, unit damage has to be deal to one participating unit, you can't split it up.

Unit Damage: The striking player chooses one participating enemy unit and deals an amount of damage to that unit equal to the [unit Damage] strength of the striking unit.

You are correct as even with his armor giving him Targeted Strike damage still needs to be dealt to one unit.

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My bad, still learning the rules. So blaster pistols aren't needed at all, just give him his armor and he can immediately capture someone no matter how much health they have… still pretty nice.

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This deck looks better than mine, which I just posted in a different thread. I may have to give yours a spin. I would like to point out that there is a LS card that allows you to split your damage (lightsaber maybe?) but I haven't seen anything DS to do that yet. EDIT: Did you intend to have 11 objectives?

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Thanks!

Yeah, I knew there were 11 when I posted, but I've been going back and forth over whether to keep it that way or go for 10. Considering I haven't played the game yet, and even when I do, it'll be a while before I can get my hands on a second core set (unless a miracle happens and my blog wins the team covenant contest), I won't be able to build this deck for a while.

My reason for including the 11th deck is because a) I feel like control over the edge battle will be really important, and b) it may seem counter-intuitive, but if I'm trying to pull off a combo and I need specific card, this game lets me blow cards on the edge battle to cycle through my deck, even though including more cards dilutes the deck. But by using that strategy, you run the risk of decking-out.

But I've since changed my mind. I realized that if I leave Reconnaissance Mission out, I will never have a combination of objectives that will prevent me from playing a card in my hand. If I get both copies of The Bespin Exchange, the third objective will have to be Looking For Droids (allowing me to play cards from any affiliation) or an Imperial Navy objective. Conversely, if I get three Imperial Navy objectives, my afiiliation card still lets me purchase those few Scum & Villainy cards floating in my deck (there are only 8 of them and two are free). I think that will work a lot better for me. It's too much of a gamble that Reconnaissance Mission will throw a hydrospanner in things.

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Mestrahd said:

This deck looks better than mine, which I just posted in a different thread. I may have to give yours a spin. I would like to point out that there is a LS card that allows you to split your damage (lightsaber maybe?) but I haven't seen anything DS to do that yet. EDIT: Did you intend to have 11 objectives?

The LS card you're thinking of is Shii-Cho Training, though it doesn't combo well with targeted strike as it only lets you split damage among participating units.