2nd place Italian National Championship (with write-up) 1.0

• Versionen
• 1.0

This is the deck I played at the Italian Grand Championship. About a week before the tournament I was still set on going there with Jabba supports but later I changed my mind. I was sure that there would be a lot of Jabba decks and I was not really interested in playing mirrors. First I switched to Palpatine/Motti Admiral deck. It was good but I was not happy with slow(er) upgrade ramp compared to Palpatine/Watto.

Deck composition

Upgrade suite is pretty standard. I cut Niman Mastery since Soresu Mastery has so much value in a Palpatine deck. Instead of Niman I considered Formidable but in the end I picked Force Wave just to give deck a bit more power. Sith Teachings is a great card in this deck. Most of the time I held it back and played it just to remove a pesky die that managed to roll a blank (i.e. Entourage, Fickle, ...). Palpatine's Lightsaber is probably the best card value wise. You are getting an insane die for what is basically 0 cost!

Event suite was the hardest part. I always had a few events extra that I wanted to swap in or out. Ancient Wisdom is really good when you are flush with resources and don't have anything good to play (or have played most of your stuff and still have resources left) or when you really want to dig for that life saving Bacta Therapy. At first I had two copies of it in the deck but cut one a few days prior to the tournament. Dangerous Maneuver was included for games against upgrade decks (Han Droids, Chopper Droids, Reylo, ...). When there is no Bacta in sight, Dangerous Maneuver came to the rescue. Desperate Measures is self explanatory. Electromagnetic Pulse was performing amazing. Fatal Blow straight up wins games. Hidden Motive could have been swapped for Forsaken but in the end I opted for Hidden Motive.

Day 1

1. Chopper droids. First half of the game was pretty lax. We exchanged some damage here and there. Then I played Fatal Blow on one of his droids (R2 probably) and heavily turned the game in my favor. 1-0
2. Satine Droids. It went pretty smoothly. I DMed his supports, played FB to end R2 and then felt pretty confident up until the very end. 2-0
3. Reylo. This was probably the hardest matchup I had. In the end the game went to time, but at that point Rey only had 1 health left and Kylo was dead. I took about 7dmg to Palp turn 1. I had to play both Bactas and at least one Dangerous Maneuver. I would also like to say that the opponent was extremely good! He was still a kid but a great Destiny player. 3-0
4. Aphra/Sentinel/Wat/GD. Another hard game. I didn't pull DM the whole game. My opponent had like 6 or 7 supports out at the end. Luckily due to GD and Aphra's card draw ability he almost milled himself. I helped him with my Force Storm double discards and won by mill. 4-0
5. Plo Koon/Ewoks. Now this is a matchup I totally did not expect. Ewoks. Palpatine can't win against Ewoks (well, he can, but is actually very hard as we will see). I think I lost turn two. Damage output was just insane. At least 13 damage turn 1. 4-1
6. Plo Koon/Ewoks. Again? Seriously? This game went almost the same way as previous one. Too much damage at once. 4-2
7. Han Droids. I knew I had to win this. This was played against the father of the Reylo player (round 3). He came for revenge! Luckily I managed to pull it off. I proceeded to defeat his R2, after that, then game swung in my favor. I used one or maybe even two Fatal Blows to secure a win. 5-2

Day 2

1. Top 8 - Satine Droids. This was played against the same player that I played against in round 2 of day 1. Both games, first two rounds he Ewok Ambushed and disrupted me for two. The early rounds were extremely difficult. Luckily, he opted for supports strategy. I DMed them every game and came back with full power on Palpatine. 2-0
2. Top 4 - Jabba supports. This was my first and only match against Jabba in the whole tournament. I knew that his strategy would be to Embargo DMs ASAP. First game he did not draw them so I could DM his supports. Later he embargoed Bacta which was pretty nasty. The second game he Embargoed DMs early. This was a very tight match. He had 4 supports in the end (Fist, Megblaster, Fickle and Hired if I remember correctly, I bought one Fickle off of him). Last round was insane. The only way he could win was to roll 6 damage to finish of Palp. I think he rolled 4 on his Megablasters. Phew. I activated Palpatine, fully equiped and rolled NUTS. 2-0
3. Finals - Plo Koon/Ewoks. What I was afraid of came to be. I had to play against Ewoks in the finals. I changed my strategy a bit and somehow won the first game. My take is: the only way for Palp to win against Ewoks is to ramp INSANELY HARD AND FAST (at least 3 upgrades each round until he has 6, 7 of them). Then he can shield up, Bacta for 5 and FB anything he wants. This was how it went the first game. Second and third game the dice just weren't with me. Watto got Easy Picked or just rolled trash. I could not ramp with my upgrades, got almost no access to shields etc. Also Watto always dies at the start of turn 2. So if he doesn't make enough resources turn 1, it is an uphill battle from there. 1-2

Final tally - 2nd place

Thoughts

All in all I was EXTREMELY happy with the final result. I basically only lost against Ewok match-ups. Should have packed another Force Wave! This was my first bigger event (apart from GQ) and I said to myself that I would be ecstatic to finish in top 8. Also, our player base in Slovenia is VERY small, so we really can't test as much as we would like to. Coming this far with such limited testing really makes me happy.

I would also like to congratulate and thank my teammates (from Slovenia and from Croatia) for their performance. We performed very well (two teammates missed top 8 by the skin of their teeth). Now onto those Primes!