Audacious Smuggling

If you ever played with Han Solo - Audacious Smuggler, you are already familiar with the concept of adding and discarding resources. It is a game mechanic that requires some time to master, but opens up for additional capabilities. The first Star Wars Unlimited set, Spark of Rebellion, saw its share of Han Solo decks, the most popular being one focusing on racing to 7 resources to play U-Wing Reinforcement and flood the board with units or even play some out of aspect 7-cost cards for true gamblers (as U-Wing skips the cost penalty for its deployments).
The most natural combo with this Han leader is to pay the Millennium Falcon - Piece of Junk  1-cost maintenance during the regroup phase with a resource to be discarded right after at the beginning of the next action phase. 

Shadows of the Galaxy brought us Smuggle, a new keyword that allows to play a card directly from a resource instead of your hand, but with usually a small cost penalty. It opens up a new dimension for resourcing and playing cards.

Tech's ability grants a smuggle ability to all your resources for the card cost + 2 (aspects are part of the card's cost). That's handy for cards without a smuggle keyword, but more importantly it effectively adds a second smuggle ability to cards that already have one. 

7.5.15 B: Each Smuggle ability on a unit is considered an independent ability. A unit can have multiple Smuggle abilities.

The following cards will gain a smuggle ability with Tech that positively differ from the original smuggle cost penalty: 
Privateer Crew which usually deploys for 6 Command using smuggle, can deploy for 4 Command with Tech.

In the case of Hotshot DL-44 Blaster, its smuggle cost has a different aspect from his regular cost. With Tech you can choose which smuggle cost to pay 3 Aggression or 3 Cunning


DJ is the third card to be positively impacted by Tech smuggle bonus. Instead of its expensive 7 Cunning Cunning smuggle cost, DJ can deploy for 5 Cunning using Tech ability. It makes its When played using smuggle ability, which takes control of an enemy resource, quite powerful as it can be played as soon as you have 5 resources available to choke the opponent by stealing one of its resource.  Decreasing the enemy resources by one is likely to delay the opponent leader deployment by a turn and give you a significant 2 resource advantage over them.

Moreover, if you happen to have Han Solo - Audacious Smuggler as a leader, it is also the opportunity to use Han's ability to get a temporary extra resource to smuggle deploy DJ for 5 Cunning on the 4th resource turn and take control of an opponent's resource. At the beginning of the next action phase, you can choose to defeat the stolen resource, so even if DJ leaves play, you will have nothing to return to the opponent. 

On what should be the 5th resource turn, you will now have 6 while your opponent will have 4! Han's ability could then quickly get you an additional resource to reach the magic 7 number. You can even push this further by deploying your Han leader and attack with him to reach a whopping total of 8 resources! The choice of impactful cards to play with such a high resource count at this early stage of the game is quite powerful. Here are a few suggestions:

The Han, Tech and DJ smuggling synergy is complete.

Let me illustrate this whole scenario:




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