This week's Empire list was played by Joey Galeziewski at Adepticon 2022 to a top 4 finish.
IACP cards are linked, FFG versions can be looked up easily at https://classic.tabletopadmiral.com/imperialassault/
10 Royal Guard Champion (IACP)
07 elite Riot Trooper x2
04 0-0-0
02 Imperial Officer x2
00 Advanced Com Systems (IACP)
01 Zillo Technique
01 Rule By Fear
Command Cards
2 Flurry of Blades
2 Reinforcements x2
2 Dying Lunge
1 Bodyguard x2
1 Face to Face
1 Deathblow
1 Negation
0 Urgency
0 To the Limit
0 Looking for a Fight
0 Celebration
Joey's list plays upon the extreme efficiency of the unchanged elite Riot Troopers combined with new tools for the Guardian trait provided by IACP and a cool interaction between the Royal Guard Champion and Mara Jade that involves the Champion's Command card, Flurry of Blades.
While the Champion has a good attack in his own right, Mara's raw dice pool and surge abilities are arguably superior. This is normally offset by the fact that Mara is mostly just a vanilla melee figure while the Royal Guard Champion has the ability to perform multiple attacks in a round with Brutality, but Mara's ability to use other figure's Command cards allows her to take advantage of the Champion's Flurry of Blades card to multiply the power of her powerful attack for an all out offensive. Because Flurry costs 2 actions to perform, setting this play up takes careful planning and positioning, often utilizing the last/first strategy to move Mara into position at the end of a round and then activate her at the start of the next round.
The Riot Troopers then act as the clean up crew for the Champion and Mara, but more importantly are able to pull attacks away from these figures by using the cards Get Behind Me and Bodyguard to force the opponent's attacks to hit the Riot Troopers instead, who give up a miniscule amount of VPs when they die and can keep coming back with Reinforcements.
I'm going to have to let Joey comment on how he uses 0-0-0 to full effect, the only thing I have to say is it's important to remember that Invasive Procedure can be used to Focus 0-0-0 even when there's no other figures adjacent to him, but make sure he's not adjacent to any of your figures when you do this or they will suffer the damage and Bleeding from the ability.
See the list in action: https://youtu.be/i-0ydcYMr9U
