The world of Star Wars: Destiny is a complex one. A collectable card game, players build their decks out of a set number of points of heroes, made out of four different colours – red, blue, yellow and grey. Those colours determine the cards a player can build their deck from, and those cards can be upgrades, vehicles, equipment, support, or events.

Released in 2016 by Fantasy Flight, Star Wars: Destiny is fast and furious and good fun to play.

Today, the card we are going to be looking at was released as a yellow card, available from the very first set of the game (titled Awakenings). It is a hero card, meaning it can only be played in hero decks with at least one yellow hero in them. I personally used to play this card in a pretty rad elite Lando Calrissian/elite Padme Amidala deck back in early 2018.

Although it has recently been announced that Star Wars: Destiny will be drawing to a close, I wanted to write about this card anyway due to how fantastic it is. Today we are going to be looking at Second Chance.

Which, given how that last paragraph started, is pretty ironic.

Second Chance from Star Wars: Destiny

To understand why Second Chance is such an amazing card, we first need to understand what it does. For the cost of three resources:

Upgrade – Ability
Yellow character only.

Before attached character would be defeated, instead heal 5 damage from it and discard this upgrade from play.

[Second Chance, Star Wars: Destiny, Awakenings, Card 137]

Now, that may not seem completely amazing and note worthy at first; however, there are a couple of things to explore.

Firstly, being able to stop a character from dying, to bring them back with five health, is enough to give some characters a serious boost. To put this in context, Lando has 11 health and Padme has 10. This means that it is bringing 50% of Padme’s health back, whilst healing Lando by 45% (or 45.454545% if you want to be specific).

Secondly, Second Chance really made the mill deck a possibility.

Second Chance and the Mill Deck

In Star Wars: Destiny there are essentially two core ways of winning the game. The first is the attacking approach – you can go headstrong and aim to aggressively attack your opponent as with everything at your disposal. Although commonly a strategy with an aggro deck (a well known idea in card game terminology), this can be done with any number of play styles. Essentially, you kill your opponent, reducing their health to zero, before they kill you.

The second approach is through milling the deck. Milling is a method of winning a whole host of card games wherein the decks are limited (ie. you don’t reshuffle your deck once you have made your way through it). To put it simply, milling involves getting your opponent to use all their cards before you do. If your opponent can no longer play cards, then you win.

Milling, typically speaking, isn’t for everyone, and in Destiny it was never really a strong option in the early days (until a couple of characters got released later on) but it was still a fun method to try.

Second Chance made that more feasible. There is no doubt that winning through dealing damage was the most popular method of winning in Star Wars: Destiny back in 2018 (when I was still actively doing tournaments); however, there were always a few mill decks out there, being played by players such as myself.

When playing competitively, staying alive and in the game was incredibly difficult. Milling characters, such as Padme, were never the strongest, and so, by using Second Chance it was possible to keep your character in play for a lot longer. Since you could have two copies of the card in the deck, this made Second Chance even more powerful. Although they couldn’t be stacked, they could be played one after the other. This meant a character like Padme could gain the effective use of 100% of her health again through the course of the match.  

The Power of Second Chance

What this means is that Second Chance really acted as a second lifeline. In those games where you often just need a couple more turns to be able to win, Second Chance allowed that to be possible. It could scupper the strategies of many a damage dealing player, all in the hope to keep the millers alive long enough to finish your opponent’s deck.

I’m getting all nostalgic thinking about it.

All in all, Second Chance is an awesome card, and one that helped make alternative modes of play possible for all kinds of players. Whether in a vehicle deck, an aggro deck, a control deck, or whatever kind, it has always been useful. I guess for me though, the mill deck is where it really shone through.

This article is part of our series “Game Changers” in which we look closer at very specific cards and components from various different games, especially those that helped change or revolutionise the game. If you would like us to look at any components in particular, or if you have any thoughts about Star Wars: Destiny or Second Chance, please let me know in the comments below.

Other Game Changers:
Recover the Magister’s Orb – Lords of Waterdeep
Pan – Santorini

Published by Luke

Board game nerd, comic book geek, Rubik's Cube solver, Splendor player, and Blogger. View all posts by Luke