BuraddoRun 17
So the premise of this deck is that your opponent will not roll perfectly, and will therefore need to reroll dice by ditching cards. There are some interesting new cards coming up in Sprit of Rebellion, and having gotten Asajj Ventress, I really wanted to try her out, as well as some other cards I have from the set. So pairing her with Vader, I came up with a tri-part plan.
First, as always with Vader, try to build him up strong as quickly as possible. This is especially important since this deck starts with only 2 character dice. So of course we have the Holocrons and some solid, standard upgrades. Some of the cards are there just to test out, like Lure of Power and Lightsaber Pike. I may keep the Pike but I'm pretty sure I'll drop the former in favor of something like Force Speed once I get the card. There will likely be other edits as well,
Second, I want my opponent to have to discard a lot. Vader will do his thing, but if they need to reroll then that's where Ventress' power will kick in hard. My Battlefield, if successfully Claimed, causes another discard. And I have 2 Abandon All Hope that can be a pain as well. And of course there's Force Choke. That doesn't seem like a whole lot of discards, but combined with the next part of this deck...
Thirdly, this deck tries to make your opponent get a lot of blanks on their dice. So if I can change enough solid base damage dice to a blanks, then my opponent will be forced to change them back, or risk being ineffective. If my characters don't take damage, they'll be able to become strong enough to damage you greatly. If you choose to reroll and have to resort to discarding cards, you'll lose even more cards and as such, options.
So, as usual when I post my decks, I've only played this once so far, against an Elite Han Solo and an Elite Rey. I destroyed Rey quickly but Han kept shielding up. At first, this wasn't so bad, but he was able to whittle down Vader before Rey went out, and finish him with Han shortly after. Of course by then Ventress had 3 upgrades and full health, so I felt pretty good. Unfortunately, Han kept getting plenty of shields and while I was able to successfully remove or change his dice to avoid damage, he shielded so much that I didn't really hit him too hard. I was able to get 2 Chokes on Ventress which let me start bypassing his shields, but it wasn't as fast as it needed to be because he beat what I said was the premise of this deck. On a turn after he had claimed, he rolled perfectly with a fully upgraded Han. I didn't have any cards in my hand to save me so all I could do was Activate, and then he 1-shot me. It was a sad, sad end for my Force Assassin.
***Version 2.0 Notes: Kylo's Lightsabers are expensive, so I dropped them in favor of Makashi Training, which also works for added defense. I also dropped Lure of Power for a 2nd Pike, because it's just such a strong card. I replaced Abandon All Hope with Overconfidence because it's cheaper and is a more certain removal. I only have 1 of each of Manipulate and Force Push but I decided to give them a try. I still don't have any Force Speed so I can't try those yet unfortunately, but I'm determined to hone this deck into the best it can be! I did beat an eHan/Chewie deck handily with this version, though. My opponent was very cautious about rerolling, which is exactly what I wanted him to be.It meant he didn't get to deal a lot of damage,especially when I blanked him out quite a bit. He even got out the Millennium Falcon early in the game, but I was able to deal with it due to dice control.