Star Wars LCG - Desperate Circumstances

Star Wars LCG - Desperate Circumstances

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“Hey! We don’t serve their kind in here!”
   –Wuher, Star Wars: A New Hope

The droids of the Star Wars galaxy have long been denied the privileges and rights granted without hesitation to the organic beings of the galaxy. Some are willing to serve or suffer without surcease, but for other droids, this ignominy is an insult—an incentive to push against the tide, capturing whoever stands in their way for the cause of droids across the galaxy. Now, you’ll have your chance to stand beside them—Desperate Circumstances is now available for Star Wars™: The Card Game at your local retailer!

The Force Packs of the Alliances cycle form a pattern of bringing the factions together, beginning with new affiliation cards and continuing through objective sets that reward you for bringing multiple affiliations together into a single deck. Desperate Circumstances is the latest installment in that cycle, and here, you’ll find a resurgence of Night cards with the Nightsisters, a collection of the strange beings seen in the cantina in A New Hope, and iconic characters like Captain Rex.

Today, we’ll take a closer look at the Scum and Villainy objective set from Desperate Circumstances!

Automated Assassins

From the days of the Core Set, capturing your opponent’s cards has been a theme for the Scum and Villainy of the galaxy—holding enemy cards facedown at Scum and Villainy objectives. Still, although the potential to capture cards was always there, the perfect union between ways to capture cards and ways to benefits for captured cards has been elusive for many decks. Now, in Desperate Circumstances, you’ll find another objective set that helps to marry these two ideals into a single potent deck.

It begins with ways to capture your opponent’s cards. You may simply post a Bounty Listing (Desperate Circumstances, 2136) for your opponent’s units. This enhancement can provide a resource in a pinch, but more often, you’ll be focusing it to trigger its ability—after any enemy unit enters play, you can focus Bounty Listing to capture that unit! You’ll undoubtedly find that your opponent is a little less likely to invest significant resources into a hard-hitting unit if there’s a good chance that the unit will simply be captured as soon as it enters play.

Of course, you don’t necessarily need to wait for your opponent to play a unit in order to capture it. Security Protocols (Desperate Circumstances, 2114) is a new fate card that allows you to look at the top three cards of your opponent’s deck. Then, you can capture any one of those cards that you choose, place one card on the bottom of your opponent’s deck, and place the final card back on top of the deck. Of course, this lets you potentially capture another card, but it also gives you a slight ability to search for the unit that you need to capture—something that comes into play with IG-88D!

IG-88D (Desperate Circumstances, 2134) provides you with an outlet for all of the cards that you capture at your objectives. The multiple versions of IG-88 have entered the game one by one, each offering different tools to the Scum and Villainy faction, and each bringing different abilities to the table. Like previous versions, IG-88D is no slouch in combat, whether or not you’re able to win the edge. More important, perhaps, is his ability to simply remove an enemy unit from the game—as an Action, you can discard any captured unit to destroy a target copy of that unit.

In many circumstances, your opponent won’t know exactly which units you have captured at your objectives. Because of this, he may have no idea what’s coming when he declares an attack with his most powerful units. In the face of having units destroyed without warning by IG-88D, even the most stalwart attackers will be forced to reconsider their battle plans.

It’s also worth noting that IG-88D is a Droid unit—and one who’s more than willing to fight for the rights of Droids across the galaxy. The secondary theme of this objective set empowers your Droids and makes them even more dangerous than they already are. In addition to IG-88D, you’ll find another Droid unit in this objective set: the Rogue B1 Battle Droid (Desperate Circumstances, 2135). Though this Droid features no special abilities, it has the combat icons to pose a threat, whether it’s attacking or defending. And what’s more, the final cards of this objective set can make all of your Droids surpass the inhibitions of their programming.

The objective of this set, Automated Assassin (Desperate Circumstances, 2133), allows you to pump out more damage, simply by having your Droids participating in engagements. With this objective in play, whenever an engagement with one of your participating Droid units ends, you can deal one damage to any other participating unit. One damage might not seem like much when considered on its own merits, but it can quickly stack up when you combine it with the damage that’s already being poured out by IG-88D and the Rogue B1 Battle Droids.

Finally, you can help your Droids reach their full potential by staging a Droid Uprising (Desperate Circumstances, 2137). This one-cost event has a simple effect—it simply gives the elite keyword to all of your Droids for the refresh phase, letting them clear their focus tokens without inhibition. Holding the Force may be difficult for a deck built entirely around Droids, especially when they’re pitted against powerful Force Users. Giving your Droid units the elite keyword can help to mitigate the effects of being committed to the Force.

Droid Uprising

Will you fight for the rights of droids in the galaxy? Will you do whatever it takes to defeat those who stand in your way, fighting alongside Scum and Villainy?