Well here we are again looking at cards we have that could probably use an update in the upcoming card pack, so let's just get right into it first up Engineering Team.
Engineering teams I see from time to time really all it is good at is taking a ship with odd Engineering to even, and the only time I saw it actually do something meaningful was in a interdictor list that abused objective play and used it to harvest two tokens off the station or 3 off a dust field in the Abandoned Mining Facility objective. Honestly I think making this card read “When you resolve an engineering command you may exhaust this card if you do gain 2 additional engineering points.” would make this card much more competitive, make it so you have to spend a token to ready it and it's a one time super engineering , sure it can be abused with with dial+token with this to get 10 Engineering on an Interdictor, or a MC-80 with Mon Cal Exodus Fleet, but really those are 2 things that could probably use a buff anyway.
Most other ships will at most get ether 3 shields or 2 damage cards discarded, and really that seems pretty fair to me for taking an engineering focused upgrade in what tends to be a fairly competitive slot. In addition make the un-exhaust cost an engineering token it becomes harder to get the dial+token+ Engineering Teams mega engineering off more than once a game. Maybe I am missing something or taking crazy pills, but this seems like a good fix even with token generation commanders like Garm and Tarkin. I think Leia might be able to abuse this hypothetical fix of engineering teams in a Mon Cal exodus fleet, but she will need ways to generate the tokens to un-exhaust for extra abuse, but we are dealing with hypotheticals here so either way I hope Engineering team got looked at.
Next up are title we will be looking at is Devastator.
Let's be honest the title is okay as is but if it really wants to be competitive in my opinion it either needs to have a cost reduction to around 5ish points or get rid of the once per round bit and have it so you can only use this ability while attacking ships. Another solution might be to not limit it to your front hull zone. The card is just so restrictive and so expensive it's hard to really make work, so something's gotta give to really make it work. In most games you will probably only be adding 2 dice into your shots the majority of the time. You can use the rather cute Intel Officer Vader Commander combo where you Intel Officer your own token while attacking (yes you can do that) use Commander Vader to get a re-roll and the token is discarded because of Intel Officer, but you are giving up a lot to do that. This leads us into our commander we will look at and well that is Vader.
Okay so I really like Vader ability and I have his beautiful alt art card that sadly does not see the table as much as it should.
why is this well its cost. Vader ability is actually pretty good, but it's the price point it comes in at that makes him difficult to work in a competitive environment, let me explain. Base commander tax is 20 points Vader is 16 more points than a commander like Romodi now how much do you need to spend on re-roll tech to have reliable damage well in nearly all cases its less than 16 points, (in most list I run I found that I spend only 6-15 points on dice fixing upgrades) so you get the re-rolls you need from upgrades plus Romodi's ability on top of that for cheaper than taking Vader. People might say well Vader lets you take other upgrades other than dice fixing tech, but again we come back to him costing a rather exorbitant amount of points, and most non dice fixing tech like adding dice or crit effects generally cost more than the dice fixing counterparts. Vader's cost need to be brought down somewhere between 26-30 points is where Vader should sit to really see play.
What cards do you think will be updated in the clone wars? How would you update Engineering Teams, Devastator, and Commander Vader? Until next time have a great week!
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