THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN AGAIN 1.0

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Alt title: a particular group of young men have returned to the locale in which we reside. It didn't fit in SWDB's name field.

THE BOYS ARE BACK ON THE FRONT PAGE AGAIN, only this time it's actually a real deck and I'm going to break it down.

Upon realizing that the only yellow card I was going to miss from decks like Endless Swag was Backup Muscle, I decided to just double down on what it was best at and go mono-red. After some tweaking it ended up being a very different deck, but a very effective one with even-positive matchups against most popular decks.

CORE CONCEPT

This deck does two things. It shoots people slowly, and sometimes it shoots people very quickly. You can slow-roll each character individually like a traditional 4x list (Tie Pilots first) and just ping people down with unremovable dice, make loads of money, and pick up your dudes with Endless. But when that isn't enough you have blowout tricks.

Good tricks include: Squad Tactics to get all your Pilot dice into play and never give your opponent an opportunity to play removal. Battle Formation once your dice are in play for an unreactable chunk of damage. Playing E-Web, waiting for your opponent to claim, then following up with Lockdown. And my personal favorite, utilizing We Have Them Now to blast people back to the stone age.

UPGRADES

Not too many, and most of it redeploys. DH-17 could be Imperial Discipline for more consistency, but it's slightly less explosive with WHTN. Your call.

SUPPORTS

Few, but important. Aftermath makes this deck rich, which means you can always play your best cards and afford costed die sides. E-Web seems crappy, but even if you don't manage to claim or play Lockdown you can still reliably get it to sides that you're happy to see. It's better than Tie Fighter in this specific deck.

EVENTS

I refuse to format this.

Battle Formation is an unreactable reroll that kills people. Doubt is Doubt. Endless is a backbreaker and takes the deck from moderately tanky to ridiculously tough. Flank is the second best control in the game right now. Imperial War Machine (AKA Imperial Coupon) is an econ card. Ditto Logistics. Lockdown enables all your best shenanigans. Squad Tactics makes Tie Pilots disgusting. The Best Defense is what it says. Tactical Mastery is another means of action cheating. We Have Them Now is basically It's a Trap, but less conditional and it has a picture of THE BOYS storming Dino's Bar and Grill.

NOTABLE EXCLUSIONS

Attrition is not a good substitute for Backup Muscle.

MATCHUPS

2 character teams, especially with 1 big character, are your favorite matchups. Most of them are advantageous, except for Poe/Maz which is about even-slightly disadvantageous. Getting Thermal'd is not a big deal when Poe never survives past round 2, especially if you see Squad, WHTN, or both in your opening hand. Vader, Luke, Obi, and other characters with 3s on their dice die way before they can take out enough characters.

Palpatine is massively in your favor. You can easily distribute his damage, and unless he's rolling nothing but guns he will never do enough. Plus you have TBD.

Hero mill is not nearly as bad for you as it is for a normal 4x deck because you can just flatten characters each round. You don't need nearly as many rerolls as a normal 4x either.

FN weapon gachapon decks aren't too hard either, because they can't TBD you and FN dies surprisingly fast. You may hand Unkar some money, but that isn't nearly enough. That said, these decks occasionally just win if they see the right draws/rolls. FN's a bit silly that way.

CLOSING NOTES

So what does the deck lose to? Villain mill that punches your hand off. Villain control decks that form support Voltron (Dark Presence is the WORST). Particularly lucky Poe/Maz draws. Bad rolls. That's about it. It's really, really solid but it takes some getting used to. Play a couple games with it and let me know what you think.