Welcome to a Card Profiles — a new feature on Jank It Up, Fuzzball! The purpose of the series is to take a look at a janky card that hasn’t seen much use in competitive play but can nevertheless still bring some excitement to casual decks. Today I’m featuring Battle of Wills from the Empire at War set.
Yes, It’s from the first block, so don’t fall in love with it too much as it will rotate out once Convergence lands in Q1 of 2019. But we can still have some fun with it until then! As you can see above, it’s a 1-cost neutral event that offers instant – albeit uncertain – dice mitigation. It can go great for you, resulting in an opponent’s die or dice being removed, or it can go horribly wrong, resulting in your own dice getting removed from the pool immediately upon being rolled in, while your opponent’s dice stay. Or, there’s a third possible outcome in which everyone’s involved character dice are returned to their cards. So do you like gambling? If so, this card is for you!
You Could Already be a Winner!
I, for one, am fine with a little gambling. In the Destiny world, there are a few cards I can think of that create head-to-head, in-game duels between opponents. I’m going to skip past Overconfidence for the purposes of this conversation, as that card doesn’t require that the two dice to be from different players. Face Off, from Legacies, requires the two-player interaction, and the stakes there are damage: two characters reroll a single character die, and the lowest value gets punished with 2 damage being dealt to that losing character. If the values are the same, both characters get hit. I’ve never played Face Off, because I don’t like the thought of spending one of my turns to inadvertently hit one of my own characters with 2 damage. I may like gambling, but I still don’t like losing.
The other card is Battle of Wills. There’s no damage at stake; it impacts character dice instead. Two ready characters get rolled in –upgrades and all, if applicable – and whichever has the lowest dice total must remove ALL of their character dice. So if you have an elite character, you get two dice to try and maximize your value total. Unlike Face Off, however, you don’t get a say in what the opponent does. He or she chooses which available character they want to roll in for the duel, and they don’t have to make that choice until after you’ve activated your character first.
So it’s possible they might throw a ready non-elite character under the bus if you roll out well. That way they only lose a single character die, which may not feel as good for you. But if you’re in a match against two elite characters, the stakes are heightened immensely!
Let’s Do This!
I recently found a pair of Battle to Wills in my collection. I don’t remember ordering them, but maybe I did, or perhaps they showed up in a blue card lot I bought on eBay a while ago. Either way, I decided I wanted to give the card a go. I just needed to find a character with a high dice total on its card. Enter Maul – Vengeful One. He’s not great to play with (certified jank!), but I’m a fan of the character brought back from certain death in Episode I to thrive in Clone Wars and Rebels, and I try pretty often to make him work in Destiny. He has an above-average value count of 8 on his die, which should give me an advantage in Battle of Wills duels. So I put one copy of the card in an eMaul/Darth Vader deck I threw together. Not that Vader, of course — Lava Vader.
My buddy Greg came over one evening shortly thereafter, and I rolled out the Maul/Vader build against his Boba/Phasma. Battle of Wills didn’t show up in our first match, and his deck showed little mercy against mine. I finally drew the card late in the second match, with Vader already dead and Maul heavily wounded. But this was my chance! I played the card as my first action of the round, and Greg opted to activate Boba Fett as a response. Both characters had a pair of upgrades on them, and here’s the resulting roll-off:
Maul came through! The moment I saw a Boba special on the table I knew I had won the Battle of Wills. See ya, Boba dice!
Pretty awesome, right? Well, here’s one thing to keep in mind about Battle of Wills that I fully didn’t appreciate until playing it. Your opponent gets to activate one of their characters – upgrades and all – on your turn. So now it was Greg’s first turn of the round, and he already had dice in the pool. Can you guess what happened next?
Yep. Poor Maul died the very next action, and the game was over. So — pay attention to the board state. I wanted to play the card so badly that I didn’t think through the possibilities of the next action, regardless of the outcome of Battle of Wills.
For the next game, Greg switched to his Farmboy Luke and Poe2 deck. I wanted to give Maul/Lava Vader one more try (because I like banging my head on the wall, apparently), and Battle of Wills showed up in my initial draw. I kept the card before mulliganing, and proceeded to drop down Battle of Wills on my first action. I activated Maul, who gave me the big 3-for-1 melee side but then whiffed with a blank on the other die. Greg had another choice to make. Both Luke Skywalker – Unlikely Hero and Poe Dameron – More than a Pilot have only 6 total on each of their dice, but Poe has two 2-sides to Luke’s one. Despite his two zero sides (blank and special), Greg activated Poe:
He hit a 2 Focus and 1 Resource, equalizing Maul’s dice total. (Stupid blank!) So now, given the rules of Battle of Wills, both characters’ dice had to be removed, since both shared the lowest value.
And that was that. Kind of a non-event to start the game. While I did knock Poe’s dice out of the pool, it cost me the dice of my only elite character for that turn. I went on to lose the game, albeit much closer than my games against Boba/Phasma. For the night, I went 1-0-1 on Battle of Wills activations, with the one “win” resulting in a next-action defeat while the “tie” felt as bad as a loss, since I had to remove my dice as well. Sigh.
Other Characters Possibilities
I ended up going 0-4 against Greg that night, but it wasn’t all bad. I actually really enjoyed the suspense created by playing Battle of Wills. Wanting to play it again, I went to my collection of cards and looked for characters that had a higher die total value than Maul’s 8, and I found two:
Bad news is I only have one die of each, so those will have to wait. (Editor’s note: I may or may not have purchased a second K-2S0 this past week. I mean, this site’s not called Jank It Up, Fuzzball for nothing…) I don’t have any Across the Galaxy characters yet (I know, I’m lame), but I decided to glance through SWDestinyDB to see if any of those fit the bill. There were three: Qi’Ra (a total of 9), Lando Calrissian (a total of 10 thanks to a 4 side), and — to absolutely no one’s surprise —
The Heavyweight Champion of the Galaxy
With an astounding total of 13(!!!), new Darth Vader’s die is truly a terror to behold. (See what I did there?) Yes, of course there’s a chance you roll a blank, but if you’re running him elite and play Battle of Wills, you only have the usual 1-in-36 chance of rolling double blanks. You have a 69% chance of not rolling ANY blanks between the two dice, and in that scenario your worst possible dice total is 4, which is the highest baseline for any character in the game.
Is it still a gamble to play Battle of Wills on Vader? Sure, but it’s a lower risk for a much high reward. Vader’s dice are already some of the most feared in the game, and with a little courage on your part, you can use them to also mitigate your opponent and wreck their turn.
“You don’t know the power of the Dark Side.”
Just imagine activating Vader with Battle of Wills and watching your opponent whimper at the thought of losing one or maybe two character dice on top of the already threatening prospects of Vader’s dice rolling into the pool. Vehicle decks may not care as much, but I imagine Snoke/Thrawn or Yoda/Boushh players will be sweating out the prospect of losing a pair of their dice off a duel with the Biggest of the Bad.
So if there are any Vader players out there, I’d love for you to put a copy or two of Battle of Wills in your deck for your next casual Destiny play night. Let me know what your opponent’s face looks like at the exact moment they understand what’s about to happen. I also want to hear about any back-breaking plays as a result of the card. It can happen — it WILL happen! Hit me up at jankitupfuzzball at gmail dot com and tell me all about it.
Until next time – play some jank, sling some dice, and have some fun.
