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Tyler Parrott: Vader’s Legion
I’ve always had a fondness for assembling armies in my games. When playing previous Star Wars games, I would often design a deck filled with Trooper units (usually stormtroopers, since the Empire has so many) and give it a shot. How effective could my army of soldiers be? So, once it was my turn to make a game, I wanted that deck archetype to at least have some meaningful strength behind it. To that end, here is my Trooper deck, using multiple trait-based payoffs to try to pile damage on the opponent’s base as fast as possible.
The Darth Vader (Spark of Rebellion, 10) leader takes command of a Trooper legion in this aggressive midrange deck. The primary plan is to maximize General Tagge (Spark of Rebellion, 80) as an aggressive source of stats; you do this by playing some low-cost Trooper units and then deploying Tagge to make them all stronger and harder to kill. Because some of the strongest aggressive units available in the first set are payoffs for being Imperial or Rebel, the aggressive Imperial payoffs—General Veers (Spark of Rebellion, 230) and TIE Advanced (Spark of Rebellion, 231)—are also included. Several cards in the deck are somewhat interchangeable as low-cost Imperial and Trooper units, and the plan is to put as many on the board as fast as possible so they can be larger than the enemy units as they attack the base.
This deck has a few memorable quirks. One of them is thematic: Benthic "Two Tubes" (Spark of Rebellion, 156) and Partisan Insurgent (Spark of Rebellion, 159) are low-cost Trooper units that are super on-strategy for the deck, but since they’re also Rebel units they often get funny looks from opponents when they fight alongside the Dark Lord of the Sith. Another quirk is mechanical: it’s an aggressive swarm deck that also wants to get to 7 resources to deploy its leader. This actually required some deckbuilding adjustments, as the need to keep resourcing (to deploy Vader) works against the gameplan of playing a swarm of cheap units. This is specifically why the deck plays I Am Your Father (Spark of Rebellion, 233) and a single Grand Moff Tarkin (Spark of Rebellion, 84) as ways to refill the hand when it runs out in the mid-game.
While other decks might play this deck with Grand Moff Tarkin (Spark of Rebellion, 7) as its leader, I’ve found Vader to be more effective (as well as a more fun theme for me, personally). Heroic aggressive decks often play Sabine Wren (Spark of Rebellion, 14) to make sure the opponent can’t stabilize thanks to her consistent direct damage. Darth Vader does the same thing in this deck. Since so many of the cards are cheap, you can often use Vader to add damage to the enemy base and put them on a clock that forces the game to end (usually in your favor). Additionally, the damage Vader deals to units means that when your opponent takes out your units, you can finish their attackers off and prevent them from building a board presence while you deploy your next wave. Having a 5-power unit that enters ready on round 6 means that very often the opponent is able to stabilize and take out all of my Trooper units…just for Vader to march in at the very end and finish them off with one big attack.
The non-unit cards in the deck are mostly focused on getting damage through or turning the tide of a race. Force Choke (Spark of Rebellion, 139) and Imperial Interceptor (Spark of Rebellion, 132) help defend against the opponent’s board presence; Keep Fighting (Spark of Rebellion, 169) can get an unexpected attack in; and Precision Fire (Spark of Rebellion, 168)—a card I put a lot of effort into designing both for the ironic title and the effective power level—allows a Trooper to efficiently deal a lot of damage very fast, even through a Sentinel defender. This deck may not be the strongest deck in the metagame, but it’s thematic, very effective with a good pilot, and it’s entirely made of commons and uncommons!