Taste the Rainbow (FN): Store Championship Top 4 Report

This past weekend, I battled through 8 rounds of Swiss and a Top 16, Top 8 and Top 4 best of three with Rainbow FN, the undisputed best deck in Star Wars: Destiny. Today, I’ll be digging in to my thoughts behind the deck, its performance in the event, and the multitude of options present for tuning it to your heart’s desire, whether its for GenCon or your weekly event. Even if you don’t play Rainbow FN, you’re going to want to know how to beat it. Good luck.

The Core

Rainbow FN is structured in a similar fashion to Funkar, the four die/three character pairing that utilizes elite Unkar Plutt to generate advantages in a midrange shell. Where Unkar is focused on generating a material advantage and controlling dice thanks to First Order Storm Trooper and a bevy of mitigation events, Rainbow FN seeks to play a much more aggressive game, pushing as much damage as possible as early as possible while seeking to trigger Bala’s reactivation ability early and often.

Rainbow FN can be built a few different ways, but the biggest change involves the blue character choice, traditionally either Nightsister or Royal Guard. Both have merits, but which character you choose influences how games play out and how our deck should be constructed, so while they main seem similar, choosing one over the other results in significant changes to our deck and our strategy.

Royal Guard versions of Rainbow FN sacrifice the burst and consistency provided by Nightsister in exchange for a bit more survivability thanks to Guard’s extra health and guardian ability. Both characters have comparable dice, but Royal Guard’s melee sides make Bala-Tik’s ranged sides (specifically the +2 side) much less reliable. As far as upgrades go, Royal Guard provides more base melee for the Vibroknife +2 modified side, but this comes at a cost regarding F-11D and Holdout Blaster’s modifieds. This tradeoff is significantly worse, which tends to make Royal Guard versions bias their upgrades towards the melee side, usually at the cost of F-11D as a result.

Nightsister versions of Rainbow FN tend to boast stronger individually powerful upgrades, and can claim more power and consistency thanks to Nightsister’s reroll ability. F-11D Blaster Rifle, when ‘turned on’ has some of the most consistent dice in the game, with four sides dealing damage and the resource being potentially ‘better’. As we’re taking damage to deal more damage, Rainbow FN decks with Nightsister tend to be more aggressive, and slightly more reliant on good rolls in the early game. Taking down a character by the end of the second round is desirable with either version, but it can be argued that it’s a necessity when playing Nightsister.

The Upgrades

Most Rainbow decks play between 14 and 16 upgrades, though the exact mix is still up for debate. Z6 Riot Control Baton, Rocket Launcher and Holdout Blaster are present in every list, but depending on playstyle (and deckbuilding bias) all other upgrades have been tweaked in various builds. Some Nightsister players contend that Vibroknife isn’t necessary, while some Royal Guard players bias away from F-11D and towards Flame Thrower and Gaffi Stick. Regardless, all of these upgrades are considered ‘normal’ for play in most Rainbow FN lists:

F-11D Rifle

Vibroknife

Holdout Blaster

Gaffi Stick

Z6 Riot Control Baton

Rocket Launcher

Lightsaber

Flame Thrower

IQA-11 Blaster Rifle

Events

Rainbow FN decks tend to play around 4 ‘resource’ events, such as Logistics, Enrage, and “Fair Trade”, alongside 2-3 ‘draw’ events like Boundless Ambition and Award Ceremony, with 6-8 mitigation events to round things out. Based on the numbers, this can leave a few ‘swing’ slots for things like Aftermath, Backup Muscle, or even Armor Plating.

Boundless Ambition is probably the most important single card in the entire deck, as it can provide incredible amounts of ‘free’ burst damage for just one resource. With a solid board position (at least one three cost upgrade on FN), Boundless Ambition can refill our depleted hand, loading up on more upgrades to overwrite on FN, or other cards to pitch for rerolls. FN-2199 deck’s primary weaknesses is a tendency to ‘fix’ poor rolls due to a tendency to burn through our cards in hand generating resources and playing/overwriting upgrades, and Boundless Ambition works to ramp up our draws, giving us more cards to work with. Award Ceremony has seen play as a ‘mini’ Boundless Ambition, and can really supercharge our draws in the right circumstances.

Backup Muscle, while not an event, is another common inclusion, as it works to sneak in extra damage to get that all-important first character kill to trigger Bala-Tik’s ability. For more on this card and my thoughts regarding it, I’ll point you to my prior deck writeup here.

Depending on your chosen build, Rainbow FN can be tweaked to fit any specific playstyle or metagame bias, thanks to a strong core strategy and multiple variations of similar effects. Before highlighting the various cards you ‘could’ play in your own Rainbow FN build, here is a starting point, a basic ‘core’ of cards I think should be in any Rainbow FN list.

Upgrades – (14-16)

2x Holdout Blaster

2x Vibroknife

2x Rocket Launcher

2x Z6 Riot Control Baton

-at least two more ‘two cost’ upgrades

-at least five more ‘three cost’ upgrades

Events (11-15)

2x Boundless Ambition

2x Enrage

2x Logistics

2x Flank

2x He Doesn’t Like You

-at least two more mitigation events

While you can of course play less than the fifteen suggested upgrades (by playing four instead of five ‘three cost’ choices) I would suggest sticking as close to that range as possible. This means that on the low end, the deck has room for three ‘swing cards’ (if you play 15 upgrades and six mitigation events) and five ‘swing cards’ on the high end (14 upgrades, 5 mitigation events). While not as black and white as it seems, more upgrades tends to lead to more consistent damage, and more mitigation events tends to lead to more consistent survivability. For my Artificery list, I chose to play 15 and 7, respectively.

For the rest of your deck, you can fill out the upgrades will all melee or all ranged if you plan on biasing your deck towards a specific damage type. I would only suggest doing so in Royal Guard versions, and if you do, do so with the knowledge that you are leaving some power on the table. F-11D is definitely stronger than Gaffi Stick in the abstract, but in Royal Guard versions I understand wanting to push consistent damage.

For mitigation, we have access to basically everything, so play the mitigation you feel comfortable with, and the ones that best fit your playstyle. I don’t like Feel Your Anger personally, as it tends to be unreliable and I want guaranteed value out of the mitigation I play, especially if it costs a resource. I’m a big fan of Doubt (I consider it the strongest mitigation event in the game when factoring out constraints) so I tend to play two in all my villain decks. Anger has been seeing play here and there, and Isolation is close enough to Electroshock that I could see playing that one as well, but probably only in Nightsister versions.

As for the random spice, here is a shortlist of cards that are all great, depending on what you are looking to achieve:

Armor Plating

DH-17 Blaster Pistol

Hunker Down

Promotion

Aftermath

Backup Muscle

Drudge Work

“Fair” Trade

Bait and Switch

Award Ceremony

Disarm

Friends in Low Places

Probe

The Price of Failure

Each of these have their own merits and drawbacks, and I would encourage you to experiment with these (and others) to find what fits your playstyle best. For me, I chose to play Bait and Switch to increase the consistency of my damage output by essentially turning the resource sides on all my dice into their best side. Every card choice has minor impacts on other card choices and the matchups, so make sure to keep that in mind. For example, Bait and Switch discouraged me from playing Vibroknucklers (as I am both trading potential resources for damage and require resources sides, both of which are bad for Knucklers), which led to me playing upgrades like Flame Thrower and IQA-Blaster Rifle instead. This worked as intended, but losing out on the potential discard made matchups against the mirror and Vader/Guard…different. Not necessarily bad, but when my dice rolled a little under average at some points, the discard could have potentially helped my reduce the consistency of my opponent’s rolls in a few situations.

Take this same concept and apply it across the list of ‘random’ cards, and you can see how just changing three cards can change the rest of our deck, and shift some important matchups one way or another. How good is Backup Muscle against Four Wide, for example? What about Aftermath? Think of things like that, and always tweak your deck to beat the metagame you expect to face, rather than just playing the same decklist week after week. I wish you success with the best deck in Destiny, but take advantage of its power and make it your own! Thanks for reading.

Trevor Holmes

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