Recommended music: Nine Inch Nails – Sanctified
On this #StarWarsSaturday, we’re looking ahead to the 10th anniversary of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in December and checking out trading cards from Topps Star Wars Rogue One: Mission Briefing. Today, I’m sharing base card number 110 – DESTRUCTION AND THE DEATH TROOPER!
Since my action figures are still packed away, waiting for a new display, the cards keep coming out to play.
Topps released the Rogue One: Mission Briefing trading card set in September 2016 to help build excitement for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The main set includes 100 cards covering stories from Episodes I to VI and that era’s animated series. The set also includes 10 cards featuring characters and scenes from the Rogue One Teaser Trailer, released a few months earlier.
In the marketing campaign for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Death Troopers served as visuals to set a darker, grittier tone than the Stormtroopers in the Original Trilogy films. Their all-black armor, taller build, and green-tinted visors quickly showed that this movie was a high-stakes, military-style war film.
Disney and Lucasfilm put these elite Imperial soldiers front and center in trailers, posters, and merchandise. By making them a main focus in the campaign, they created a sense of elite menace. This signaled to audiences that the Rebellion faced a tougher, professional military threat, not just regular stormtroopers. Though Obi-Wan said Stormtroopers were accurate, we didn’t see much of that during the OT, as our heroes usually escaped skirmishes pretty unscathed.
What the trailer and other pre-release promotions didn’t reveal is that Death Trooper communications rely on encrypted, metallic clatter rather than normal speech. Sound designers created their chilling vocalizations by mixing scrambled radio transmissions, animal screeches, and compressed static. The effect worked well on screen, as Rebels, standard Imperials, and the audience cannot understand this distorted chatter, adding to the elite troopers’ terrifying nature as they took out Lyra Erso, the Kyber crystal research team, and many heroes during the Battle of Scarif.
With that, we’ve gone through all the base cards from this Rogue One set; we’ll be “back” next week with something unexpected.
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#RogueOneAStarWarsStory
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