By Noxm September 5th, 2025 | 10 min read
Hello Readers and fellow competitors,
Today, I had the chance to interview one of the greatest players and my favorite content creator Ophir Maron (aka Wooooo)
Ophir Marom - Winner at Regional Qualifier Minneapolis May 2025
Wooooo : I’m 35 and I live in New Jersey. I’m a Physical Therapist.
Wooooo : As a kid I played a lot of the well known TCGs casually. I played a lot of MTG locally and on MTG Arena and I played a lot of limited (draft) there, but I didn’t travel to events. I didn’t get into competitive grinding until SWU..
Wooooo : I started playing during the 1st spoiler season, so very early! I’m not entirely sure what hooked me on it - I very much enjoyed the back and forth nature action sequence in the game, and as someone who has always enjoyed TCGs, it was fun to explore a new one. I didn’t think I’d end up investing so much time into the game though!
Wooooo : I don’t really play locally, but there are a few stores near me that host PQs and pre-releases that I attend sometimes (Rogue State Games and Red Seal Gaming in NJ, Hex in New York).
Wooooo : No big story here. I used to play DotA in college and thought it was a funny name to have pop on screen.
Wooooo : Leaders: Chirrut, Qi’ra
Bases: N/A
Cards: During Set 1 it was probably Force Throw! That enabled the Chirrut deck that launched my YouTube channel and it was definitely more “balanced” back then. Now, I’d say it’s pretty far down on the list because of how game-warping it is. Overall, I don’t have that much sentimental attachment to specific cards. I explore a lot of different builds.
Wooooo : Well, there’s the cliche answers like practice more, find play groups, find communities with good players, follow well regarded content creators.
I think something important is really trying to separate results from your testing - you can win a lot of games where you misplay and lose games where you play perfectly, and you need to be able to identify what went right and wrong regardless of outcome. It’s very difficult to get there since we are generally competitive in nature and the result is what we’re chasing, but if you want to be consistent you have to separate results from the process.
Wooooo : This goes a bit with the previous answer. In reality, you can’t always win, so if you’re able to enjoy striving for the goal, rather than achieving it, then I think you can have more fun with the game and not burn out.
Wooooo : I had a few pretty memorable moments. Early in set 2 I took down a GenCon event with Qi’ra, and at the time I was really pushing Qi’ra as a fantastic leader, so it was rewarding to be able to win an event with her so early in the season. This also culminated with me winning the MN Regional Qualifier with her in set 4.
There was also a game in the later rounds of Day 1 in the MN event where I was playing a Rey DV (my now teammate Mikael), and we played a really grindy game. He played his 2nd Timely Reinforcements and made infinite tokens and I had already lost my Snoke and my 2 Superlaser Blasts, so I thought I was 100% dead. But I had a Restock in my hand, so I just went for it - played Restock, bottomed the Snoke/2x SLB / 1x Restock (in hindsight I should have done just the Snoke). I then played a Darth Vader which took the 10 cards on top and put them on the bottom (before the Restock I had 11 cards left in my deck). When I drew for the next turn I drew the last unknown card and then one of the cards that I bottomed with Restock (it was Snoke). I wiped all the tokens and won the game.
Wooooo : Yes
Wooooo : Overall I think it’s solid. Since PQs vary pretty wildly in attendance, they might need to change it a bit so that larger PQs give more points.
Wooooo : Larger events, more interesting prizing (Galactics was a big step forward), potentially support for an Eternal format later on.
Wooooo : Sure thing!
I have two tiers on my patreon.
The base Tier (Deck List Tier) gives members access to all my deck lists, which are also updated in real time (you get live-links so you never need to wonder what the current state of the deck is). There’s a few other perks like a curated Testing Gauntlet Spoiler Season Testing Theory-Crafts, access to teasers from my streams (the higher tier), and occasional other small form content.
This tier also now has access to my private Discord, which previously was just for the 2nd tier members.
The higher tier (STREAM+) gives you access to three monthly live streams that I like to describe as “light coaching.” I answer questions, discuss strategy, and stream gameplay with play-by-play analysis.
I occasionally also do some unscheduled streams in addition to the three monthly scheduled streams.
All these streams are also recorded so anyone who can’t attend them live still has access to the entire archive of content.
Finally, I also feature some STREAM+ exclusive content for this tier (short videos/write ups, etc.).
My patreon has a full description of both tiers in the membership section.