The Star Wars Minis Clone Strike set ultimately gave inspiration to a lot of decks. This is one of the best of them but has remained kind of under the radar.
What does this deck do: Your hand changes frequently, with lots of discarding and re-drawing, but coming up with plenty of attack power, direct damage, movement and defense at nearly all times.
Updated 1/22/17: PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE damage reduced from 2 to 1.
PLO KOON
by Fooyong Foo & Geektopia, Tim Wutke (volleyballgy) created the PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE card as part of his Toph deck in his Avatar expansion.
Plo Koon
16 HP
Melee
22 cards
Blue Deck
2 Arc Troopers
5 HP Each
Blaster
9 cards
Strong+ Ranged Minor deck
Plo Koon – 12 Talent Cards
4x ROUGH JUSTICE
A7. For every point defended, Plo discards a card at random, up to 4. For each card discarded, draw a card.
2x PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE
D*. The attacking player takes the attack card back into his hand. Plo takes no damage and the attacking character takes 1 damage.
2x STORM
Plo does 2 damage to all adjacent characters. All affected character sets lose an action on their next turn.
2x ELECTRIC JUDGMENT
Do 3 damage to any character on the board. If character is adjacent, he loses an action on his next turn.
2x FROZEN LAKE
Move Plo Koon up to 6 spaces, ignoring terrain but not opponents. If Plo does not pass through otherwise impassable terrain, this card does not count as an action.
Themes: Direct damage, loss of action, changing hand
Path to Victory: STORM and ELECTRIC JUDGMENT early, ROUGH JUSTICE late
Strengths: High attacks, high direct damage, action-denial, strong minors, great movement card
Weaknesses: His hand changes randomly, mediocre defense
Strategy: Be aggressive, control the game
Test Level: High
Tier: 2
Inspiration: Plo Koon’s aggressive ways seemed to lend themselves to an Epic Duels deck. Koon, unlike other, more thoughtful Jedi, would spend little time determining who was right and wrong in a dispute. Instead he’d rely on his instincts and jump immediately into the fray. His flirtations with the dark side, including his controversial study of force lightning, further suggested a very cool deck.
Playing Plo: Plo has strong cards but ROUGH JUSTICE forces his hand to change unpredictably. The good news is that even if you lose good cards, you’re likely to get good cards in return. It’s best to play aggressively, and use Plo Koon’s action-loss ability as his defense with both STORM and ELECTRIC JUDGEMENT. When used together, these cards allow Plo to move aggressively into enemy territory and exert surprising control over the game, and do enough damage to set him up to finish with ROUGH JUSTICE.
Playing against: Plo has WHIRLWIND-type of abilities with STORM so be careful about bunching up. Plo doesn’t play a great stockpiling game so that might be your best strategy. Plo has a hard time getting a complete game out of the ARC Troopers, so consider concentrating on him and leaving the ARCs alone. Plo’s defense is just ok, he’ll go down if you stay on him.
Notes: 2 Strong Minors, and 2 Power Defense, and a Blue deck, is really tough. Plo Koon is really tough. He probably shouldn’t be, maybe we’ll downgrade the ARCs? Probably not though, it would weaken ROUGH JUSTICE to where I think Plo would kinda be bad overall, so just deal with a strong Plo Koon.
Love the new deck back!
Thanks! We like this deck a lot. He’s a tad strong IMO, but it’s more fun to play with decks that are on the strong side, hence our overall power creep…
True and funny I never realized that fact. Have it printed out ike forever…now definately have to play it at our next session.
As Rich Pizor put it one time: The heart of Epic Duels is the attack-and-defend process. I think his quote matches our experience, as that’s what we generally enjoy the most.
To have that, you have to have defense cards. I notice that MOST deck designs, both in and out of Geektopia, include power defense, even though only 5 of the original 12 decks include power defense. Well, defense cards are actually quite powerful, so just including 2 of them makes a deck pretty sturdy. Take Plo for example, with a mix of offense, defense and movement. Or Shaak Ti. Both are tough decks, in no small part because both have power defense but also strong minors. In the original game, nobody has power defense AND strong minors.
Seems as if the PDF for his deck has disappeared.
Sorry about that. Should be restored.