Covenant Masters - Trilogy Top 4 - Falcon and Little Boats

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sanhedrin 51

I made Top 4 with deck at the Covenant Masters Trilogy tournament. If you ever have the chance to make it to a Team Covenant event, you should. Great group of players and super helpful staff.

This started out as a very standard Shadow Caster deck with L3-37 and two Rebel Engineers. Then Strategic Planning was (rightfully) nerfed. It made me rethink the main concept of the deck, especially since it was to be one of the big archetypes of the Trilogy season and people would be playing countermeasures. I saw two big issues with the deck: Shadow Caster was vulnerable to Vandalize, and I may not be Readying it as often as I would pre-nerf.

The big Shadow Caster deck in Standard plays Shield Generator to protect their big boat from Vandalize, but it’s not legal in Trilogy. The solution I came up with for the Vandalize problem was to have a “plan B” of MillenniumFalcon3 and Escape Craft. Since it costs 6, the Falcon is immune to Vandalize. Falcon doesn’t deal quite as much damage as Shadow Caster, but I could fairly consistently generate 3~5 resources off it a turn. The resource generation also helped me come up with a solution for the “all eggs in Shadow Caster’s basket” problem: play more vehicles.

So I looked at the vehicles available in Trilogy (and that I owned) and saw that there were two cheap boats with good sides: Resistance Crait Speeder and Modified Hawk. Since I’m not going all-in on the “untap a big boat” plan, there’s not a lot of downside to putting mods on the little boats. They also both benefit from having Rose remove their damage, so that led to the current character configuration I’m running.

Here’s how that works: Roll in L3-37, then Anakin. Use Anakin to turn L3-37 to 2 Focus. Then focus Rose to her Specials, or Anakin to a resource. If nothing gets removed, you’re guaranteed to generated two resources off that line. Then you need to find one more resource off of Anakin (50% chance), Rose rolling at least one special (16%), you are able to power action the battlefield, or you drew one of your 4 resource generating cards (53%). That gets you to 5, which lets you pop Armored Reinforcements for Falcon and Escape Craft.

Because of all of Rose’s zero sides you’re going to lose all the Battlefield rolls. Put the two shields on Anakin if you have First Aid in your starting 5 so that she draws fire and you’re able to max them out.

Changes I would make:

During the tournament I never once played Shadow Caster off the Armored Reinforcements. I always got the Falcon, and I believe it was the right decision to do so. Thinking about what changes I would make after the tournament, I came to the unintuitive conclusion that because Shadow Caster was never my highest priority, I would be better off playing twice as many in my deck. Meaning, I wasn’t going to tutor it up with Armored Reinforcement, but I did want to draw it and play it eventually, so I better have two copies in my deck.

I didn’t own Karabast at the time, but I’d play two if I did. Over Crash Landing, most likely. It fulfills the same role as Crash Landing – moving damage over to L3-37 – but it makes them resolve the damage rather than you removing it. This is key against Vader decks. Getting the free Falcon ready from L3 is huge. With one weapon mod on the Falcon, you’re rolling in 4 dice for free.

I would also consider upping the Strategic Plannings to 2. Ironic, given that it was the Strategic Planning nerf that led to this deck, but like L3-37 it’s better with the Falcon than with Shadow Caster. You roll in the Falcon and Escape Craft, use them most likely for resources, then detach the Escape Craft and use it again. Strategic planning the Falcon, Power Action the Escape Craft back onto the Falcon, attach a mod with those resources you just made, and roll it all in again. Strategic Planning is also good on your Modified Hawk for additional damage or as a one-turn answer for an opposing vehicle like N-1 Starfighter.

If this deck became a big force in your local Standard meta I would also add a second N-1 to the list, for the mirror. You will also benefit from playing other vehicles, since all the other lists I’ve seen just play Shadow Caster.

There you go! I had a great time playing this deck. It’s more thinky than the straight Shadow Caster deck, which I enjoy. I’ve had such a fun time that I’ll be working on a Standard version for the weekly tournaments held at Team Covenant. Hope to see you there!

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