LAW PQ Week One Recap: Part Two

After part 1 we asked the Porgs to focus and explain the importance of understanding the meta, to which they nodded in agreement and proceeded to eat the instructions and turned our couch into a nest. We tossed the porgs a lightsaber to kick around, redid all our notes and tried to see what we could learn from all the Luke & Boba Fett decks that did so well.

Boba Fett came out of the weekend possibly as the deck to beat.  Boba, as a leader, consisted of 25% of the Top cut players, with 8 out of 32.  One possible surprise is that 5 of those were Boba Fett Lake Country.  Going into a game with 34 health is such a huge advantage, but what is the sacrifice for that advantage.

Boba JTL Lake Country – PQ Fechamp

We can see the ground units are fairly standard.  Syril Karn gets added where other aspect combinations might use something like Interrogation Droid in that spot.  Most of the space units in a Boba Fett deck are aggression anyway, but they did have to dig a little deeper to fill out the deck.  

We can see the additions of Special Forces TIE, Vonreg’s TIE Interceptor and Prototype TIE Advanced.  In some respects, it doesn’t matter what ships you are playing, it’s just critical to have one to deploy Boba onto.  

If we look at a direct comparison between the 1st and 8th place lists, using Porg Depots Deck Delta tool, from Fecamp we can see a lot of similarities, but we can also see exactly where the compromises were made.

There are 21 cards unique to the Yellow list, 4 of which could be played in Lake Country.  So 17 cards were replaced for 4 extra life.  Clearly, the success of the Lake Country variant leads us to believe that those sacrifices are worth it.

The other deck to perform well was Luke Datavault.  Luke held 18.8% of the top players, so about 6% less than Boba, however Luke Datavault had the best performance of a single deck since all of the Lukes that did well used Datavault.

Luke was not able to take the crown in any of the 4 events, but its overall performance was on par with Boba.  

One of the better finishes was 3rd place at PQ Girona

We can see these decks curve out lower than Boba Fett does with an average cost of 3.18 resources. Boba Fett, for comparison, came in at 3.63, about 0.5 resources per card!  That’s quite a difference.  So not only do you need to compete in space vs a Luke deck, you need to maintain that pressure against a constant stream of fighters.

This deck has also been around, generally in the same form, for a while now, so we are not seeing the variety in deck choices that we do in other options.

Finally, we also saw some decks that were able to race against these space decks and win their PQs.

There was an interesting Yularen deck using a red splash base that was able to win PQ Turin.  This deck can be extremely fast and can leverage The Invisible Hand to fill the board with threats in the mid-game.  This was a great deck choice, and one that’s sure to be emulated this coming weekend.

Chewbacca was also able to roar himself to a win in PQ Nancy.  Chewbacca has the potential to hit real hard, real fast and it has access to a lot of tools in Cunning and Aggression.  

The main thing we can see in all these decks is they all have a very low curve.  This early meta seems to be dominated by aggro decks, and if your deck can’t deal with an early onslaught, you may be in for a long day.

Good luck in your local PQs.  If you see any of us out there, please say hi!