Command cards: getting the most out of Endless Reserves

Ever since I started playing Imperial Assault, I’ve loved General Weiss. He’s expensive to be sure – second only to Darth Vader – but he’s fantastic. General Weiss has the ability to choose his attack pool based on the situation he needs: with a little automatic accuracy, you can often use a Red-Red-Green attack pool if you want straight-up damage at close range OR you can run a Blue-Blue-Green if you need to reach out and touch someone really, REALLY far away (automatic hit at 7 spaces away, reliably 9-10 spaces away). If you want to Blast 3 (which is AWESOME!), you can do that pretty well with a Green-Green-Yellow – you get the picture: flexibility!

One of the other advantages of taking Weiss in your army is that you can keep your figures on the board longer via his Command card Endless Reserves. This Command Card is one of my favorites – from a collector’s point of view, it helps you keep the Trooper models you bring to the fight on the table longer. Unlike the Reinforcements Command cards, there isn’t a figure cost associated with this card – you just need to have a figure from the group still alive.

Requirements For Candidates – Endless Reserves

The Empire has many Trooper choices in its arsenal, but there are a few that stand out more than the others. When choosing good candidates to accompany Weiss, there are a few requirements for “the best” figures to include:

·         High health – your last figure in the group needs to be able to last until General Weiss’ next activation;

·         Multiple figures – while having high health is great, having two or three figures in the squad is required to use Endless Reserves. Having three figures allows you to leave one figure behind and have two in the field – which is basically the same as having both figures in a two-man squad in the field but without the need to keep either of them alive;

·         Synergies with Weiss – let’s face it: if you’re going to have General Weiss along, it wouldn’t hurt to bring Troopers where were also Heavy Weapons, Vehicles, or Leaders.

With all this said, let’s look at our finalists…

Bronze Medal: Elite Stormtrooper

Since the Core game was released, we’ve all had our fair share of loathing for Elite Stormtroopers (and in early missions, regular Stormtroopers can be a pain too). Elite Stormtroopers not only have the ability to reroll an attack die, but they can become Focused if you kill off one of their friends. While they don’t share any synergies with General Weiss, they do provide numbers to your army, great firepower, and can be regrown easily with Reinforcements OR Endless Reserves, which allows the surviving Stormtroopers to become Focused AND you get one of their fallen comrades back. It’s awesome.

Gold Medal: Elite Heavy Stormtrooper

I have to say, I’ve always liked these guys. Both Regular and Elite Heavy Stormtroopers are amazing – Heavy Weapon upgrades are excellent, these guys have lots of health, a Red-Blue attack combo, bonus defense when being shot at from far away, and are only marginally slower than other infantry figures. While these guys only have two figures in their group, they work better with General Weiss and any non-vehicle units you choose to synergize with him. Want to include some E-Web Engineers and make it a Heavy Weapon list? Don’t forget your Heavy Stormtrooper to support them. Want to use regular (or even Elite) Stormtroopers? Don’t forget their heavier cousins. These guys are fantastic AND are some of the only infantry figures available to the Empire to have Blast – cheap Blast shouldn’t be overlooked (especially when you have options like Explosive Weaponry to add to your list). While Heavy Stormtroopers are fantastic, they only get the silver today because they were eclipsed by…

Gold Medal: Elite Jet Trooper

Perhaps the thing I like the most about the Jabba’s Realm expansion is that it gave us Jet Troopers. Vehicles on the whole in Imperial Assault are expensive – you can spend almost all your cash on General Weiss, an AT-ST, and an AT-DP. Jet Troopers provide us with cheap Vehicle options – and since Vehicle cards tend to be defensive in nature, it gives you the ability to do wonders with them. If you purchase the General Weiss Villain pack, you also get the amazing Command card Overrun, which is not that great for Massive figures (as you need to end your movement when you step on someone), but it’s great for Jet Troopers (we'll talk about this more in a bit). Elite Jet Troopers also have the ability to attack with 3 dice when shooting at someone close by (and gain some extra movement afterwards).

Elite Jet Troopers have good health (regular Jet Troopers have decent health) and share Vehicle synergies with Weiss, but there are only two of them (and the Elite versions can’t be regrown with Reinforcements). Still, they pack a punch on offense and can more adeptly use the cards available to Vehicle units. And you can have a lot of them…

Sample List: The General’s Cohort

Deployment Cards:

·         General Weiss

·         Heavy Stormtrooper

·         Sentry Droid

·         Elite Jet Trooper

·         Jet Trooper

Command Cards:

·         Cruel Strike (0)

·         Deadeye (0)

·         Endless Ranks (2)

·         Heavy Ordnance (0)

·         Maximum Firepower (3)

·         Overcharged Weapons (0)

·         Overrun (2)

·         Planning (0)

·         Ready Weapons (0)

·         Reinforcements x2 (4)

·         Repair x2 (4)

·         Take Cover (0)

·         Urgency (0)

Some of the Command cards we’ve added here are intended to supplement Endless Ranks and regrow your Troopers. Reinforcements can be used on all troopers EXCEPT the Elite Jet Troopers (though you could substitute them for Elite Riot Troopers if you want to be able to use Reinforcements on all your Troopers). Endless Ranks can of course be used to regrow all of them – and it gets re-shuffled into your deck after you use it!

Since we’re running two squads of Jet Troopers and Weiss as Vehicles – as well as a squad of Droids – the addition of Repair is obvious: use some Trooper unit near any of these figures to keep the damage from accumulating too quickly. Only your Heavy Stormtroopers are unable to benefit from these cards, though you could replace Take Cover with Recover if you needed.

Some of your figures are Heavy Weapons (Weiss and Heavy Stormtroopers) – these figures are able to use Heavy Ordnance (great free card that gives you bonus damage) and Maximum Firepower (which prevents you from moving, but also helps you do a TON of damage). Generally speaking, I like Heavy Weapon cards better than Vehicle cards – they make your Heavy Weapons do even more damage.

The troopers you brought benefit from Ready Weapons, which passes out a Damage Power token to each figure in a deployment group. While this has obvious benefits for the Heavy Stormtroopers or Elite Jet Troopers, it also can compensate for the damage penalty that might be suffered during one of the two attacks by a Sentry Droid. Either way, it's a little extra damage for a 0-cost Command card.

Your Vehicles (Weiss and the Jet Troopers) benefit from both Overcharged Weapons and Overrun. Overcharged Weapons is a little tricky to use - you basically get to interrupt and perform a devastating attack at the price of exhausting your deployment card (aka you can't do anything else this turn) and you become Weakened. I highly recommend that you use Command card with a Jet Trooper team (Elite preferably) that has only one figure in it - if you are close to your target, you not only get extra movement (and an extra attack die if you're Elite), but the Weaken is not that painful since you're rolling a Black die (not that likely to get Evades as it is). 
But then you have Overrun, which is much less tricky to use. This upgrade got a HUGE boost when Jabba's Realm came out and Jet Troopers became a thing: prior to the release of Jet Troopers, all Vehicles were Massive and Massive units (according to the rules) need to stop their movement as soon as they enter a space containing a hostile figure. Overrun back then only allowed a vehicle to plunge into 1-2 figures and deal 2 Damage to each of them. The key difference with Jet Troopers is this:

Jet Troopers aren't Massive - they're Mobile.

If a Jet Trooper squad (ideally two of them are active) plays Overrun at the start of their activation, they can perform a move (Speed 4 Mobile) and perform an attack against a figure within 2 spaces, which gives them 2 additional movement points. This allows them to move over 6 spaces with up to 4 of them being over hostile figures. While you can't deal more than 2 Damage to a figure via Overrun in a given activation, you have two guys - so you can potentially run over 4 hostile figures and deal 4 Damage to each of them AND SHOOT TWICE (ideally with 3 attack die if you're using Elite Jet Troopers). I will say that this becomes even more painful if you use Urgency as well (which ups your speed by 2).
For your other units, we've included other niche upgrades - Planning (which we've talked about a lot - it's best used by General Weiss), Cruel Strike (great way to get more of your surge translated into damage of a kind - best used by Jet Troopers), Deadeye (great way to add a little Accuracy to an attack - especially if you can't surge for Accuracy, best used by General Weiss and Heavy Stormtroopers), and Take Cover (good little pip of defense to keep your soldiers alive - best on Jet Troopers who can convert that free Block to an Evade if necessary). All told, this is a powerful deck with lots of survivability and firepower - I like it a lot. :)

In our next post, we’ll be wrapping up our series on Command cards and look at Force User options – specifically within the context of the Channel The Force Skirmish Upgrade. But it’ll be good. Until then, happy gaming!