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Meanwhile, Back on Tatooine...

A Preview of The Search for Skywalker for STAR WARS (TM): The Card Game

“Jabba’s put a price on your head, so large that every bounty hunter in the galaxy will be looking for you.”

    –Greedo, Star Wars: A New Hope

Over the last couple of weeks, Star Wars™: The Card Game players have started to explore the new strategies made possible by The Desolation of Hoth, the game’s first Force Pack. With its Hoth-traited objectives, The Desolation of Hoth sets the stage for location-driven battles inspired by the early scenes of The Empire Strikes Back. While the battles for control of Hoth will continue to intensify throughout the course of The Hoth Cycle, they aren’t the only events to which the cycle’s new cards allude.

Soon, players will have the chance to further expand their Star Wars: The Card Game universes with a second Force Pack, The Search for Skywalker, and with its arrival, they’ll find new options opening up for their Smugglers and Spies, as well as their Scum and Villainy decks.

Jabba’s Orders

In the game’s Core Set, the Scum and Villainy affiliation received just one objective set, but it stars the notorious bounty hunter, Boba Fett (Core Set, 19). Nonetheless, Fett has provided enough incentive that many players have already experimented with the objective set in their decks.

Still, because there’s only the one objective set, players have recognized that there’s a good chance they won’t draw their Scum and Villainy objective, The Bespin Exchange (Core Set, 135), during setup. Accordingly, the best way to ensure you have resources available to pay for Boba Fett and your other Scum and Villainy cards is to use the Scum and Villainy affiliation card. And if you’re playing the Scum and Villainy affiliation card, why not look more closely at the other Scum and Villainy objective sets to see if they’re worth including in your deck?

In The Search for Skywalker, dark side players find a second Scum and Villainy objective set, and those who are already using Boba Fett in their decks will certainly want to give it a close look.

While the Imperial Navy’s Probe Droids close in upon the Rebels’ secret base on the ice planet of Hoth, the galaxy’s bounty hunters and thugs pursue their objective, driven by Jabba’s Orders (The Search for Skywalker, 223). Thematically, the units of the Scum and Villainy affiliation pay great attention to their targets, or prey. Their ranks include not only bounty hunters, but assassins, scavengers, and spies, and this objective reflects their efforts at keeping tabs on their targets by giving you limited knowledge of your opponent’s hand. In a game where the bluffing and posturing that takes place in its edge battles have such a profound impact over the course of turns, even a limited knowledge of your opponent’s hand can be a great thing. Still, the objective’s ability is even more effective when the set’s synergies are exposed.

The objective’s most obvious combination is with the event, Get Me Solo! (The Search for Skywalker, 227), which reads, “Action: Name a unit, then reveal an opponent’s hand. Capture all copies of the named unit in that hand.” Yes, you can play the event blind, and you may even succeed, especially if you can calculate the odds that your opponent holds one of the units that would match one of his objectives in play. But why play it blind if you can look at your opponent’s hand and eliminate the guesswork? Alternatively, you could play the event after your opponent rescues a unit you had previously captured. If he’s taken the unit to his hand but not yet had a chance to play it, then you’ll know it’s there.

Then, once you’ve captured a unit (or any other card), the Weequay Elite (The Search for Skywalker, 224) becomes a highly efficient Mercenary guard. With two  icons and a   icon, none of which are edge-dependent, the Weequay Elite can shut down most units that would attack your objective, and if you have even a single card captured at any of your objectives, this elite defender costs a mere two resources to bring into play.

If for some reason you can’t capture a card, you can still build your resources with two of the other cards in the objective set. The first is Jabba’s Palace (The Search for Skywalker, 226), which not only provides one Scum and Villainy resource but grants each of your objectives an additional point of damage capacity. One extra point might not seem like much, but if the light side player ever finds himself in a position where he needs to destroy two or more of your objectives in a single turn, it’s not always easy to muster two extra blast damage, especially if you have a Weequay Elite watching attentively at the palace doors.

The second of the resource-providing cards in the objective set is the Jawa Trading Crawler (The Search for Skywalker, 225). Because its resources can only be used to pay for Vehicle or Droid units, this unit may prompt players to explore the effectiveness of hand-destruction decks that use objectives that capture light side cards, events like Get Me Solo!, and Droids like the Interrogation Droid (Core Set, 79) to deplete their opponents’ hands and render them vulnerable in key edge battles.

Taken Captive

Altogether, the cards from the Jabba’s Orders objective set offer plenty of support for capture decks and are worth strong consideration in any deck built around Boba Fett.

The Search for Skywalker is coming soon! While you wait, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for more updates and announcements.

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Source: Meanwhile, Back on Tatooine... (http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=4071)