It’s taken quite a while, but it finally looks like the Star Wars Destiny tournament scene is about to hit the jump. I, for one, couldn’t be more ecstatic about the expansion of the tournament scene. The Store Championship season was nice, but few SCs were more than a local night at the FLGS. I want more, and I think we finally have it.

About six months ago I feel in love with this game; A new, Star Wars Card Game with solid mechanics, how could I not? (Dice, probably). I felt super fortunate when I found a LGS just miles from my house, a store I was previously unaware of, was holding a Destiny tournament on an imminent weekend. I scoured SWDestinDB, I purchased and downloaded TTS, I ordered decks worth of singles on eBay and from the Facebook groups. When that Saturday arrived, there was a paltry attendance at the tournament. Half of the players were the store manager and his kids, and the $10 entry fee didn’t much cover the total packs given away at the event.

I was depressed. I wanted more and I couldn’t seem to find it. The local events never had more than a few people and it was much, much simpler to stay home and grind games on TTS. The TTS League seasons 1 & 2 went pretty smoothly, even if the most recent playoff tournament results have fallen off the face of the Earth. The first online tournament run by the Pac-West crew at Artificery.com was a total disaster, with entire rounds of the tournament eliminated to preserve the top players’ strength of schedule following drops, but the second “Pod” event seemed to have run much more smoothly.

Now, Artificery.com is running the first ever Online Store Championship tomorrow, August 12th. They are still taking signups until the end of the day, and you can sign up here. This is a monumental event for Star Wars Destiny’s tournament scene. I strongly believe that TTS is the best way to play this game – it’s very clean, with plenty of functionality, and a strong tournament system would be a massive boon for the game. Just this week B.Rody announced on Discord that he can no longer run the TTS League, so until someone steps up, Artificery is all we have in terms of online tournament organization, and that they’ve been able to pull off an online Store Championship is kind of amazing.

Artificery’s Online Store Championship event will feature 7 rounds of swiss, followed by a Top-16 cut where each match will be a best-of-three. More rounds and BO3 top cuts are everything the public has been clamoring for over the past few months. My chief complaint of FFG tournaments is that the structure is awful for both figuring out a top-cut and having a fun tournament. Strength of Schedule is an awful, terrible tiebreaker, and its irrelevance is magnified when there are only three or four rounds in a tournament. The structure of the online store championship is everything this community needs out of a tournament structure.

Not only is Artificery delivering on tournament structure, but they’ve gone HAM on their prizes. Each Top 8 competitor will receive a Phasma Store Championship play mat and deckbox, as well as The Best Defense promo card. Each player in the Top 4 will also earn an Acrylic Phasma Alt Art, while the Runner-Up will win all of that plus $75, and the winner will receive $150 and a Regional Bye! That’s quite a haul. Pearl Yeti and the Aritificery.com team has been working on getting storefront privileges for some time. Now that they have those privileges I hope we can expect even more from Artificery in the months to come. Did I mention every entrant will receive a Matt the Radar Technician Alt-Art?!

Side Events at GenCon

Online tournaments aren’t the only expansion of Star Wars Destiny Organized Play going on. We’re about to have the two largest Star Wars Destiny tournaments ever at the upcoming GenCon and NOVA conventions. With such large tournaments, the influx of Destiny players at these events will be massive. As such, a few parties have stepped up to launch additional Destiny tournaments at these cons.

XWingevents.com has stepped up big and is running win-a-box, cash events, and cash-event qualifiers at GenCon. You can get information on their entire circuit here. As of right now there are seats available for a bunch of these events, including a $250 Cash Tournament Friday night at 6pm, $1k qualifiers on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, Win-a-Box events on Thursday at Noon and 4pm, and Saturday at Noon and 4pm.

I’ll be playing in several of the 1K cash-qualifiers as warmups for the main event at GenCon, the North American Championship, as well as with the hopes of winning the cashola on Sunday in the $1k finals (the $500 prize-pool finals are Friday evening). Like Artificery, the GenCon Cash Events give us an elite tournament structure: three 48-player, 5-round tournaments where the top 8 at each will advance, followed by a 24-person tournament for the single-elimination “Day Two.” Even moreso than the strength of schedule tiebreakers in Destiny, the fact that you could have the second best record possible (only one loss) and not make the top cut is preposterous. Having a five round tournament with a cut to top 8 might leave an X-2 out, but going into the tournament knowing that giving up only one loss will get you to the finals is important to people investing their time, money, and effort into such an event.

A group called The Nerfherders are also running several more casual events at GenCon where each entrant will receive an Alt-Art Han Solo Card, and the Top 4 of each event will receive a playmat with the same, Han Solo art by Tattoo Bob Hepner:

The events are being run Thursday at 8am and 8pm, Friday at 8am and 8pm, and Saturday at 8am. The Nerfherders are also running a very interesting team tournament on Sunday at 8am.

For the Team tournament on Sunday we will be using the free for all rules in the Star Wars Destiny rules reference with the following changes:

1. Both players deck must be from the same faction.

2. The rules for unique cards shall apply across the whole team (ie. If player 1 is using Darth Vader Sith Lord player 2 may not play Darth Vader Dark Apprentice).

3. Each team will select one battlefield to be used by both players on the team.

4. At the beginning of the game all 4 players will roll for the battlefield using the teams combined total to determine the winner. The teammate who rolled the highest will be player 1.

5. Both players for the team who’s battlefield is not chosen may each assign 2 shields to their characters.

6. Play shall alternate between teams (ie. Player 1 team one takes an action then player 1 team 2 followed by player 2 team 1 and so on.)

7. Once the battlefield has been claimed by one teammate both players of that team may only pass on subsequent turns.

8. The teammate who actually claimed the battlefield takes the first action of the next round. 8. Players board state are considered to be separate in all ways other than the ways stated above.

9. In the event that all of one teammates characters are defeated or deck is empty but the other teammate has surviving characters or cards in their deck thst player may continue to play cards, gain resources and activate supports until both teammates have no remaining characters or cards in their deck.

All of these events, combined with the upcoming National Championships run by FFG, show me that it’s a great time to be playing Destiny. I wasn’t sure these times would ever come. I would’ve liked myself and the rest of TheHyperloops crew to have had a greater hand in their creation (we reached out to a few stores locally, but none were willing to pull the trigger on sponsoring a larger tournament scene), but I’ll settle for simply having a thriving tournament scene. From large conventions to gaming on TTS in our underoos, the tournament scene is thriving, and it’s everything I’ve always wanted out of this game.

What’s more is that this is all happening alongside the Organized Play FFG is giving us. The Kit prizes have been excellent thus far, and Store Championships were a huge success. I’m excited to see what Regionals, Worlds, and 2018 has in store for us!