Nerfing Rey

Two games of Star Wars Destiny with the wife tonight. She played Kylo Ren/Stormtrooper and I played Rey/Finn.

I had a few games under my belt, so I decided to tinker with the 20-card deck, swapping out some cards that didn't strike me as worth the resource cost in favor of cards that seemed more cost-efficient. I felt very clever.

Game 1, after advice the other day to concentrate fire on an individual character, she focused fire on Rey -- a sound enough decision. But as the game wore on, upgrades kept piling onto Finn, until he had two F-11D rifles and Jedi robes, and a Tie fighter swooping around in support.

By the time Rey died, I had brought Kylo down to about 4 health left, and it didn't seem like things were going that well, though I had managed to put damage through on the storm trooper due to some lucky 'special' roles on the rifle, which forced her to put 4 damage onto her characters, but let her allocate it however she wanted.

Then the ranged dice started piling up, with Finn, two rifles, and a tie fighter, plus focus actions (2 of the 6 sides) on the Jedi robes. For those counting at home, that's 4 dice that can bring up ranged damage, plus one that (if it comes up 'special') can modify a die to any side I want. Because you can resolve all similar dice at once, that equals four dice that can be resolved simultaneously to bring down (or maybe fling) the hammer. Before long Finn had shredded Kylo and mopped up the storm trooper.

Game 2, Ivy announces that she'll focus fire first on Finn, "because focusing on Rey didn't go so well."

Sound strategy, even if she hadn't quite intuited the reason for it. Of course, neither had I.

That game went pretty well at first, with me focusing on Kylo, and getting him to just a bit of health left before Finn went down. I managed to save him for a couple of rounds by redistributing damage using Heroism and Draw Attention, and he did some more damage.

Then came the end game. I was running out of cards, and I realized I was screwed. All I had left was one of Finn's rifles and BB8, and Kylo was undamaged. There was no way to do more than one damage per die, and across the board Kylo had a lightsaber and his assorted force tricks.

The end came swiftly.

It only occurred to me afterwards that I had gutted Rey's damage-dealing potential by leaving out her staff and the light saber when building the deck. I'd looked at each card and thought, 'meh, seems expensive,' and rotated something else in.

But I forgot the fundamental truth of deck building, which is synergy, and without a light saber or her staff (or ideally both) to bolster her melee damage rolls, there was very little she could do.

In the first game, Ivy fell for my clever (and completely unplanned) trap by focusing on Rey, who was nothing but a decoy.

I suppose it's a strategy, to create a powerful character as a decoy while loading up the other, but it relies on your opponent falling for it. If she doesn't, you're screwed.