I am pretty much in total agreement with Roman here. As much as I love this game and want to hold it up on a pedestal and try to argue and defend every deck as being great, I just can't do it. I've designed too many decks and critiqued too many more to be blinded by my love of the game and say "Oh what's the big problem?, Vader's deck is fine...".

Like Roman, I am done arguing here. I want to thank Fish, Tim and Remote for forcing me to think through everything so clearly and to solidify my arguments. This has been a very enlightening discussion and my opinions on Vader's deck being poorly designed are even stronger now than they were before.

To close, I'll present what I believe to be the positives of Vader's design, and the negatives. At the end of the day, there are too many negatives and not enough positives to outweigh them.

Positives:
1. Vader can hit you anywhere on the board for damage.
2. Vader can take down minors quickly
3. Vader can whittle an opponent down, then move in for the kill with his Red deck
4. Potentially, Vader can heal up to 6 damage, thereby giving him the largest combined HP+Healing set in the game
5. Vader can discard specials and use his two minors to help keep opponents away from him while he draws.

Negatives:
1. Killing minors quickly allows the major to heal and counter his hit you anywhere game.
2. While he can take down minors quickly, doing so usually leaves him with dead cards in 1 vs 1 games.
3. His power attacks rarely do what they were designed to do, because they are dependent on doing damage. An A3 will hardly ever do any damage, because the average defense value (all possible defense cards in the game) is 2.48 (I challenge someone to prove that number wrong ).
4. There are too many built-in design weaknesses, so that his "Path to Defeat" is too guaranteed. His lack of: movement, power attacks of 4 or greater, card draws, power defense, strong minors and basic deck defense are too many missing elements. No other Hasbro deck is missing that many elements or has that many designed-in weaknesses all at the same time.
5. The combination of (Choke x3) + (Wrath x3) + (DSD x2) is counterproductive in 1 vs 1 games, and those cards work against each other.
6. His overall win/loss record means the deck is one of the weakest in the game, and this contributes to it being not fun to play
7. DSD is further weakened by the presence of ATE and a Red deck. In other words, characters will always defend against Vader if they are able, meaning this card hardly ever works as support for yet another reason.

So, feel free to argue about my list of negatives or present more positives. But, this is how I see the deck design. My opinion is that the deck is poorly designed and in need of tweaks.

Darth Trumpetus...trumpeter of fury.