Star Wars Destiny - First Tournament Experience

I went to my first Star Wars Destiny tournament recently. I had originally pledged not to get into another pricey game, especially another Star Wars one. I already focus pretty heavily on X-wing and have a basic Armada collection. Those all double as nice room decorations because I love spaceships so it’s a two for one. Destiny wouldn’t do that and would just be a money sink as most CCG’s are.

But then most of the guys I play X-wing with started raving about it. They are getting into it full steam. So peer pressure, a game store owner I like offering a very nice discount and my love of Star Wars all coalesced into a perfect storm. I bought a box and went over to the dark side.

The game translates well into a tournament setting. Games are quick. X-wing tournaments can feel a little long sometimes and the game length for Armada is one thing that kept me from getting into that. But four games at 35min each is not too bad. That’s like two rounds of X-wing.

I decided to bring a pretty simple deck; two First Order Stormtroopers and two Nightsisters. A fair amount of health without much to think about combo wise. I loaded the deck up with cheap cards and two copies of Endless Ranks with the goal of saving up resources to always be able to resurrect one of the stormtroopers. The only upgrades I included were ones with Redploy so that they were never wasted. I could put a F-11D, Holdout Blaster or Lightsaber on anyone and not worry about them dying because the weapon would just go to someone else.

Ended up playing four games and losing three of them. Two games I lost were pretty close though. I had one character left alive and if I had managed to make it to the next round I would have been able to play Endless Ranks and keep fighting. But both times my opponent got lucky on his dice rolls and pulled just enough damage to finish me.

Even though I lost more than I won it was still a lot of fun. The card nature of the game allows for a lot of variety in games. Though this can be frustrating sometimes. For example, I faced off against two shield heavy decks (Han Solo in one and Qui-Gon in another). In neither of those games did I get my Intimidate card which would have allowed me to punch through their shields. But in the other two games where they didn’t have a lot of shields I drew both Intimidates. It wasn’t a useless card but would have been much nicer in the other games.

While frustrating it is one thing I like about the game. Much of it comes down to how you respond to what you have in front of you. Both X-wing and Destiny can come down to dice rolls but in X-wing it’s easier to be in a position where there is nothing you can do to help yourself. You can end up facing the wrong way due to stress, rocks, ion, etc. and be unable to shoot. In Destiny, you can always discard a card and reroll your dice.

I enjoyed my game enough to decide to go ahead and preorder some packs for the next expansion. There is nothing (*crosses fingers*) on the release schedule for X-wing or Armada for the next few months so I can spread my gaming funds around.