Hi folks,

I only have 1 core for now, and would like to get a sense of how to build decks. I tried this today, building a 5-Jedi 5-Rebel objective deck, with lots of the heavy hitters (Luke, Obi-Wan, Yoda, Leia, Ackbar). My wife played the out-of-the-box Imperial Navy deck with 2 neutral DS objectives added. All of our games to this point have been very close.

Today, though, I got ******* trounced. Like, no damage to any DS objectives trounced.

So, I suck at building decks.

Any tips? Any decent decklists just from mixing Objectives in 1 core set? My priority isn't having the most-uber deck, it's learning good deck building principles for this game.

Thanks!

Going 50/50 is a bad idea. I would go 60/40 and use the 40% faction as your affiliation to guarantee a resource match. There is also the neutral objective set that helps you ignore resource matches.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm trying to learn principles, though, so: why is 50/50 a bad idea?

Hans Chung-Otterson said:

5/5 is bad because it's too easy to end up with all of your objectives matching your affiliation card, making half of your deck unplayable. Even when you have 1 off-affiliation objective out you'll have a mismatch between the cards you want to play and the resources available. Even 6/4 can be problematic, but better.

Toqtamish said:

I was wondering about the split myself, and the best way to choose the affiliation. I was looking at a 70/30 split. I can now see that a 60/40 split seems to be a bit better.

What is is your take on using multiple (where applicable) Objective Sets in the split? Where should the multiple set come from?

SteveSpikes said:

Hey Steve, this is a good question, but please make another thread about deckbuilding. This thread is specifically for how to use only 1 core set to build decks. Thanks!

dbmeboy said:

I actually want to challenge this.

If you use a 5/5 split, the chance of you drawing no objectives of your secondary affiliation is 5/10 x 4/9 x 3/8 x 2/7, which is 120/5040, which simplifies to 1/42. You will, on average, be resource-screwed in 1 of 42 games, or about 2.4% of all games you play.

A 6/4 split gives you a chance of 4/10 x 3/9 x 2/8 x 1/7, which is 24/5040, or 1/210. One in over 200 games, less than one-half of one percent.

Even if you were to say be crazy and run a 4/6 split, your chance of being resource-screwed in the initial draw is 6/10 x 5/9 x 4/8 x 3/7, which is 360/5040 or 1/14, a less than 8% chance.

Even in the absolute worst circumstance, where you only have 1 objective out of 10 that produces resources of your secondary affiliation, you only have a 60% chance that you won't see it in your opening draw, meaning that you'll see that one objective in two out of every five games.The mechanics of selecting your starting resources make two-affiliation decks very stable in this game.

I will concede the point that resource matching makes it difficult to play multiple cards of a single affiliation in one turn, but the units you want to spam with (Vehicle units) tend to be neutral, and the Sith, Imperial Navy, and Rebel Alliance affiliations all have methods to generate more resources that match their affiliation - especially the Imperial Navy.

I submit that the strength of a 6/4 split comes more from the fact that it lets you run two copies of all of your objectives rather than the stability of its resource base, and that if an objective set is worth running one copy of, it's usually worth running both. But a 5 primary/4 secondary/1 neutral split is just as viable if you want to run one of the limited objectives.

Thanks, D.

Just as a note, I didn't lose the game because of resource-screw. I could play every card I drew. I just didn't have enough units, or enough good units.

Maybe the answer is just that, with only 1 core set, mixing Affiliations isn't a good idea? Or maybe I just built a crappy deck without much thought, too.

A basic problem you'll have building decks from a single core set is going to be consistency. You'll be much more subject to the luck of the draw with each objective set only once. That will also make it much harder to take advantage of any synergies available. I'm not sure if there's a good solution to that within a single core set though.

Hans Chung-Otterson said:

Could you describe the specifics of the game you got totally owned in, versus your other games? If I'm reading this right, you built your own deck, 50/50 Rebel/Jedi split on the objectives, and your wife used the Imperial Navy starter deck per the rulebook's suggestion.

Is this the first time either of you played the game, or have you both been playing before this particular match?

Has your wife, if she has played before, used that same Imperial deck?

I'm asking, because I find that this game's learning curve is pretty steep on some of the subtle aspects of card play. What I mean by that is that you may find you "improve" better using the same deck a few times before swapping it out, until you feel comfortable-ish with the gameplay, not the rules.

What I mean by THAT, is that you can learn how to play the game rules-wise, but the actual act of "playing" the game, deciding which objectives to lead with, what to put in an edge battle, when to play cards, knowing the action windows (or keeping the flowchart handy as a guide), etc, is a separate skill set that develops over time, with repeated play.

I think that we learn at different rates, but by keeping a constant in place (in this case, your deck construction), you can learn through repetition what is and isn't working in your deck, and what cards you just haven't learned to appreciate yet.

For instance, in X-Wing, when it first came out, a lot of people I spoke with swore by Vader for Imperials, and so did I. After playing for a while and getting into the actual gameplay vs rules, I would suggest in the current Wave 1 format that you don't take Vader, and run 6 TIE Fighters. It may not be universally "right", but that's what I've discovered through my own play experiences.

People will tell you different opinions on what is most optimal, and you can throw a lot of math at it (probability on card draws, etc), but the best thing you can work on is really digging into the game itself, and getting into the subtler playing of your hand, regardless of what its made up of. From there, deck building may come a lot easier, as you'll see the forest for the trees in the card selection, rather than focusing on a couple of specific cards that you think are winners.

Even if, for the sake of a hypothetical example, Darth Vader was the most broken, over-powered card in the game, in a bare-bones tournament legal deck of 10 Objectives (50 cards in your deck), Vader would only make up 4% of your total cards (assuming the maximum two copies of Vader are included). There's no real guarantee you'll even see him in a game, unless you're really flying through your deck, but even then, he could be the bottom two cards.

To paraphrase TragicTheBlathering's YouTube vids on the subject, the real crux of the game comes down to your own individual piloting skill with your cards. So, if your wife has been using the same Imperial deck this whole time, and you're switching things out all over the place, she might be beating you just because she's gotten good with the options in that deck, whether she is aware of it or not, where you are basically having to master a new set of options each time.

If you really feel that your piloting skill is adequate (maybe not "top tier", but let's say "average"), then try searching for decks online that use one Core Set. It might be hard to find, as most people would agree that 2 is necessary for "next level" play at this point, but you could always just proxy stuff in. If you sleeve your cards, just toss in a piece of paper on the one side with the card information you want to duplicate, and it'll play fine, though it won't be pretty.

Personally, if your drive is to go make decks, I would recommend taking the hit on a second Core Set, and you'll be well placed to make some fun decks out of it. Even if you only play Light Side, there's a good enough mix to make a couple of Rebel or Jedi-affiliated decks. Pro tip: if you want to run Han, choose Smugglers as your affiliation. Splash in Han's cards, and then keep the rest of the cards associated with either Rebel or Jedi and you should be able to get Solo out every so often without being screwed on resources. He's quite handy in a fight, and that might be a better introduction to mixing affiliations.

If you're building with only 1 Core Set and you don't mix affiliations, you have precisely 1 deck per affiliation available. Your 7 sets from your affiliation, Rumors at the Cantina/Looking for Droids (which is useless without mixing), Tribal Support/Corporate Exploitation, and Hit and Run/Reconaissance Mission.

But if you're going to mix affiliations, you should try to look for synergies where you can.

As an example for the Light Side:
Mission Briefing and In You Must Go both really like Enhancements, though for different reasons.

Jedi cards tend to care about Character units, and Mission Briefing, Fleeing the Empire, Draw Their Fire, and Questionable Contacts all contain powerful Characters.

Similarly, Rebel Alliance cards really like Vehicle units, and A Journey to Dagobah and Last Minute Rescue both offer powerful Vehicles, though sadly Redemption is another card that cares about Character units, and Last Minute Rescue is honestly mostly Character focused.

If I were to try to build with just one Core Set, my Light Side deck might look something like this.

Affiliation: Smugglers and Spies

Objective Sets (10):
1 A Hero's Journey
1 In You Must Go
1 Forgotten Heroes
1 The Secret of Yavin 4
1 Last Minute Rescue
1 Mission Briefing
1 Fleeing the Empire
1 Draw Their Fire
1 Questionable Contacts
1 Rumors at the Cantina

Unless I horribly messed up my math, you should have access to all of your cards in roughly 23 out of 25 games. The idea is to gather powerful Character units and protect them through cards like Lightsaber Deflection, C-3PO, Redemption, and Guardian of Peace, and augment them with Enhancements and Events like Trust Your Feelings, Double Strike, and Force Rejuvenation. You also have a number of units with Tactics combat icons, which if you can win the edge to use them, lets you manipulate combats and even entire Dark Side turns in your favor. It's not as straightforward as either of the starter decks, but seems like it could be very potent.

@Cleardave: Oh, I'm definitely going to be getting a 2nd core set--I just can't right now, and I want to play around with what I have until I can pick a second one up. I didn't buy the first core set thinking, "I'm going to be getting hardcore into an LCG". We mostly bought it for my wife because she's a big SW fan.

I don't remember all the details of the game I lost, but it was my wife's first time playing the Imperial Navy (her third time playing the game), and my fifth time playing the game. She just had a lot more card draw and useful units. I started the game drawing into Leia and Ackbar. Both of those cards seem very good situationally, but Leia especially doesn't want to be out there on the first turn.

Anyway. It could've just been bad luck.

@D.Knight: Thanks! I'll give it a shot.

The Secret of Yavin 4 also tastes great with Decoy At Dantooine.