Skirmish Upgrades: Heroic Effort

Good morning gamers,

In the past few Rebel posts, we’ve focused on attachment Rebel skirmish upgrades (namely, On A Diplomatic Mission and Smuggler’sRun), but today’s post will be a little different (and more in line with our Black Market, Under Duress, and Zillo Technique posts): we’ll be looking at the Heroic Effort skirmish upgrade and one of the possible lists you can run with it.

Heroic Effort: Getting More Use Out Of Your Characters

Heroic Effort is simple: you must run deployment cards that are unique (all of them) and whenever someone dies, you can draw a Command card and place a Command card beneath your Command deck. This is a great way to get rid of a unique Command card (temporarily) that you can’t use anymore (because the guy who it belongs to has been defeated) OR a great way to get a better card now and delay use of a different card until later. Since this upgrade is only triggered when figures are killed, you’ll be better served by having a large team versus a small team. To maximize the utilities of this card, I propose the following list:

Heroic Effort: Sample List

• Gideon Argus with On A Diplomatic Mission
• Jarrod Kelvin with J4X-7 “Jax”
• Leia Organa
• Loku Kanoloa
• Mak Eshkarey
• MHD-19
• R2-D2
• Verena Talos
• Heroic Effort

Command Cards:

• Collect Intel x2 (2)
• Coordinated Attack (2)
• Deadeye
• Droid Mastery
• Heart of Freedom (2)
• Master Operative (2)
• Miracle Worker (2)
• Take Cover
• Take It Down (3)
• Terminal Network (2)
• To The Limit
• Recovery
• Fleet Footed
• Planning

There are three basic parts to this list:

• Card management characters,
• Augmenting characters, and 
• Offensive characters

On the card management side, we have the incredible team of Leia Organa and R2-D2. We’ve talked about Leia and R2-D2 in a previous post – R2 is a self-healer who lets you draw an extra Command card each turn (and turns into mega-Command-card-drawing-mode since we included Terminal Network). Leia lets you take Command cards from your discard pile and put them back in your deck, expanding the life of your Command deck dramatically. Taken with Heroic Effort, it allows you to find these cards faster (since you're placing a card you don't want from your hand at the bottom of your Command deck and picking a replacement card). I will admit I was tempted to drop Verena Talos, Mak Eshkarey, and the On a Diplomatic Mission upgrade to include Saska Teft and Jabba the Hutt (see our post on the Black Market upgrade for more info on the power of drawing cards with Jabba AND R2 AND Leia). Thematically, I’ve left him out to focus on the Rebel commander feel (though I love Jabba), but note that you could push the card-drawing envelope more by including him. You also get good card drawing from Planning - best used with one of the many leaders in the list (Gideon, Jarrod, or Leia).

On the augment side, you’ve got the powerful trio of Gideon Argus, MHD-19, and Jax – the companion droid of Jarrod Kelvin. We’ve talked about Gideon a lot in the On A Diplomatic Mission post in this series and gave some other ideas in our Strength inNumbers post. Gideon’s greatest contribution to this team is that he can Focus your figures, but don’t underestimate the power of giving 2 movement points to some of your figures. MHD-19 is a team healer who can self-heal and Focus himself when he attacks. While MHD is best employed running behind your power hitters, don’t underestimate his ability to deal damage to his foes (either with his gun or by performing an Improper Procedure). As we mentioned with Jabba in the To The Limit post, both MHD-19 and Gideon Argus can benefit phenomenally from the To The Limit Command card, as they can both enter "trance mode" and still use their special abilities to assist their team. MHD's ability to do this is much more limited (as Improper Procedure requires adjacent foes), but it's still there (and would allow you to heal yourself, perform an Improper Procedure, and then attack (hopefully while Focused?) before becoming Stunned.
Jax has problems killing figures due to a single Blue die (though the automatic Pierce 1 helps), so if he’s going to shoot at people, you want him to target White die figures (where he’s not that likely to mess up). The primary benefit he brings your team is an automatic Pierce 1 to one attack results against hostile figures adjacent to Jax each activation. This can turn a mediocre attack (even from figures like MHD or Gideon) into a decent attack OR turn a good attack (like Verena’s Close Quarters attack or the Fighting Knife special ability). You also get great augments from some of your command cards: healing cards like Recovery, Heart of Freedom, and Miracle Worker are fantastic, as well as movement cards (Fleet Footed and Heart of Freedom) and defense cards (Take Cover).

Then we have our damage team: Jarrod, Loku, Mak, and Verena. Jarrod and Verena are up-close-and-personal killers, while Loku and Mak provide fire from further away. Jarrod Kelvin’s Yellow-Yellow attack pool triggers some amazing surge abilities (Damage 2 and Pierce 2 is awesome), supported by a static Damage 1. Jarrod on defense is also great: a black die with an automatic Evade result – great at stopping most regular deployment cards from doing any damage at all! Verena Talos has a decent attack pool with decent surge abilities (she basically has a better version of the E-11 from campaign mode), but she really shines from borrowing other people’s weapons and using them against her foes (my favorites are Probe Droids and Elite Clawdite Shapeshifters). Loku Kanoloa has the Set Your Sights special ability that gives him bonus accuracy, ignoring figures in the way (so protect him!), and the ability to become Focused after he defeats a figure. Loku can’t perform any other actions when he uses this ability, so consider pushing him with Gideon to get the movement you need OR using Fleet Footed if you need just a little nudge in the right direction. Mak Eshkarey on the other hand can also ignore figures, but can move and shoot in a turn (and can clean out your opponent’s Command deck if he kills someone). Mak is probably the least reliable for damage out of the group, but if he can get a surge result, he's pretty good. Between these four guys, you can put a lot of fire on the board.

Supplementing the raw offense of these characters are some excellent Command cards: cards like Coordinated Attack and Take It Down increase the damage output of your turn. Master Operative relies on Verena's innate killing ability, but the addition of the Focus die as well as the free surge (guaranteeing the free Fighting Knife attack unless your opponent gets an Evade) makes her particularly deadly. While not as grand as the previous Command cards, Deadeye is very useful for characters like Verena (in case your Close Quarters attack doesn't get the range you wanted) or Loku (who gets only one Blue die to determine his range). 

This post closes out (at least for now) our series on skirmish upgrades. With this series ending, we’re going to turn our attention to the Campaign game and review Imperial Class Decks and different things you can do with them (and favored Imperial/Mercenary deployment cards to go along with them). Until then, happy gaming!