Begun, the Initiative Wars Have

Ooh, I’m in a funk about X-Wing.

I like my blog to be positive and optimistic so usually when I’m in a funk about X-Wing (which does happen from time to time) I’ll just not write a blog about it.  In this case I really want to just get it out of my system and hopefully there’ll be some catharsis in this, I’ll shake it off and be right back to feeling chipper about the game.

So, my last blog saw me navel-gazing about the prospect of going to the UK Games Expo regional national world championship qualifier whatever event under the old points regime.  Fortunately my problem was solved moments after I wrote that blog because we got the new points update, and so I was able to swiftly switch gears and start looking at what new nastiness I could brew up in a short space of time.

I’m one of those people who LOVES it when something new lands and shakes a game up.  I always have been, right back in playing Magic: The Gathering in the 1990s the new blocks, new expansions, new formats were always where I got to stretch my deckbuilding/squadbuilding wings and try to get out ahead of the competition for a brief period.  So the new points landed for X-Wing and I was like…

But then pretty soon I was like…

And now I’m like…

I like almost everything about X-Wing 2.5.  I like ROAD, I like bumping with focus, I like objectives, I like the split points squadbuilding, I like the asteroid rules… to varying degrees I think Atomic Mass have done an excellent job in putting their mark on the game with a clear vision of how different the game could be and still be basically the same.  I’ve stood up and championed AMG in various places around the internet, not because I need to support them but because I think they’ve been getting things right.  

But I worry a lot about the impact these new points are having.

GAME FUNDAMENTALS

X-Wing is a game that has survived for a decade and proven very popular and successful.  For most of that time the most commonly played format of game has been within pretty well-defined and unchanging parameters: a 3x3 game area, played with squads of 100pts of ships (that then became 200pts of ships, but ships cost twice as much as they used to).  I would suggest that some of the fundamental game mechanics are balanced around situations that occur on a 3x3 table with 100/200pts of ships, by which I mean things like how fast ships move, how long a range ruler is, how wide firing arcs are, how many turns ships survive can incoming shots and their points cost relative to that.  Those are the situations the game was balanced around.

At the start of the year we were already playing lists that were probably more like 250-270pts in old money.  I felt like the game system was starting to stretch at the seams, but at the same time the move to objectives had meant those 250 points actually tended to be spread around the table a little bit more widely, so often it was more like you were playing two 125pt games at the same time and the effect of that points inflation wasn’t being felt too badly.  At the same time, though, I was very clear on what I thought the next round of points change should be – the good stuff like Vader, Scorch, Boba etc needed to get a bit more expensive, so that the rest of the game could close the gap and be considered worth playing.  

What we actually got was the opposite.  Instead of a deflationary points change we actually saw points inflation turbo-charged to the extent that very few of the things that were good in March could still keep up with the pace that was being set in May.  From being a ~250pts game it was now pretty reasonable to be fielding around ~300pts of value on the table.

I think that’s right at the red line limit of breaking the game.  

When the opponent can field ~300pts of efficient damage-dealing ships, especially when they can do it at a high Initiative, it becomes almost impossible to cost a lot of ships where they’re playable.  There’s 50% more lasers sitting across the table now than there was in 2020, but your ships don’t have 50% more Hull and Shields, they just melt faster.  And when that fire is all coming in at I5-I6 your ships could well be melting before they even get to attack.  What’s an attractive cost for a ship that will never fire and just gives the opponent 20% of their win condition when you put it into the table?  There isn’t one.

This has been a very theoretical fear that I’ve held ever since I saw how aggressively the points were being pushed, and to be honest I was a bit surprised that we didn’t already hit this problem in the last points iteration.  Potentially we actually did start to hit it and I didn’t notice it personally because I was playing the good stuff – if you look back at the old points there was a lot of stuff that was simply pushed out of the game.  But I also think that the way the efficiency point seemed to pivot around I4 ships that were primarily jousters meant the game retained a decent amount of balance and flexibility.  There was still room for I5 and I6 ships to ace their way around the table against the I4 jousting blocks.

In the new points it seems like the efficiency of I4 has gone and there’s no longer any real brakes on the Initiative inflation – you can bring ship-melting firepower at I5 and I6, you don’t have to play I4 at all.  And that seems to be shrinking the available pool of options exponentially vs what we had just a few months ago.  I think the initial response of players was to go “oh wow, everything got cheaper, I can add an extra ship!” but that has quickly turned into “oh wow, everything got cheaper, now I can just play higher initiatives!”.  The reality of using those extra points to buy more ships turned out to be that you were just feeding points to the guys who used them to buy high initiative sledgehammers instead.

Personal opinion, which may be wrong and you are free to disagree with – I find it difficult to justify playing any ships of Initiative 1-4 at present (aside from obvious stuff like the TIE Bombers), because they’re just going to get initiative-killed.  As players increasingly move towards big Initiative numbers it feels like in the majority of games it seems like an I4 pilot may as well be I1.

And I think the problems start to compound each other very rapidly once it becomes too easy to bring a lot of I5+ firepower.  

• You degrade the effectiveness of another massive chunk of pilots at I4, who used to be able to trade shots but now are quite likely to die without firing.  
  
  
• You degrade the value of arc-dodging and positional aces at I5.  More of the time they’re going to be moving first against the big guns across the table and can’t rely on being able to arc dodge an I4 jousting block.
  
  
• The more the game consolidates onto I5-I6 the more the ROAD roll will come to be pivotal in who moves first and decide more games.  And that matters A LOT more when players are tied at I5 than it did when you were tied at I4 because the I5 ships tend to include more aces with positioning/positional abilities.
  
  
• The more that I5-I6 jousting blocks come to be dominantly successful the more we pull back from the advantages of spreading those squad points over a wide table and the more we see the consolidated firepower of 300pts brought to bear on a single spot.  

• We've seen the variation of 3-ship to 6-ship squads pretty much entirely gone in favour 4-5 ship squads of high initiative pilots.  So as much as high-ship count efficiency lists are being removed by initiative kills I also think it makes things much harder for low ship count ‘murder lists’ to work.  A big ship like Rey or Boba usually had the advantage of knowing where the opponent was to arc-dodge and the advantage of being able to initiative-kill opponents, all to offset the natural disadvantages of bringing a lower ship count.

Oh, and another thing.  The lower loadout points.  That’s something I didn’t expect to be annoyed by but actually it’s really pissed me off because just as the game as hardened into a tough problem that I’d usually set out to try and crack creatively, I’ve had a lot of my choices for how to be creative with B-Tier ships taken away by their reduced opportunity for customisation.  

I didn't know where to stick that loadout gripe into the narrative flow of this blog so I just hurled it there.  Sorry!

SOME METAGAME STATS

I wanted to add some wider context to my own personal experiences, so I turned to Listfortress and Metawing.  I pulled all the recent tournament results, sorted by Pilot, and then I compared them to what was being played in April and May until the points changed.

At the crudest level, I looked at how each Initiative tier was performing.

In the old points you could see the impact of that I4 jousting efficiency that I talked about and the variation of successful and unsuccessful initiative values as you moved up through the tiers.  In the new points the story is sadly a lot clearer – every Initiative does better, on average, than the one below it.

There’s a further detail here, actually, which I want to point out – I3 and I4 are very close to each other on the face of it.  The only reason I3 is so close to I4 is one pilot – Keo Venzee, who tends to crop up next to Han Solo in the big Rebel lists we see around.  If you take Keo out of the mix then the whole of the rest of the I3 pilots drop away from the I4 pilots and sit a lot closer to I2.  

So does that mean Keo is really good?  He’s played all the time and has a high win rate.  Well, before the points change Keo was also played a lot but had a very low win rate.  I would suggest Keo is a small cog in a big machine and his win rate is not about what Keo himself does, but about how good all the I5 and I6 pilots around him are.

I3 Pilots in the old points

I3 Pilots in the new points

So is playing more I6 pilots really the easy answer?  It’s always more complicated than that, but I’d like to share the journey I’ve been on in the few games of X-Wing that I’ve played in the new points.

At first I played a melange of I3-I5 pilots, but found myself losing ships to being initiative killed too often.  So I made a Republic list with four I5 pilots and Anakin as an I6.  And that was fun for a couple of weeks but then there was a noticeable change in the lists I was playing against as my opponents adjusted to play more I5 and I6 pilots themselves.  My initiative advantage was removed and replaced, in the first instance, by the fact that ROAD now mattered hugely as I was trying to land a lot of positional effects at I5 (CLT arcs, Chopper R1 bubbles etc).  The another week or two went by, and now my opponents were bringing multiple I6 pilots and simply moving after me and countering my positioning abilities.

So I played with one I6 pilot and lost to the list with two I6 pilots.  I  learned my lesson and a fortnight later I played with three I6 pilots instead and beat the list with two I6 pilots.  This past weekend I saw multiple lists capable of making 4 or 5 attacks at I6, all to get ahead of the other I5 and I6 lists.  It seems like a lot of players are in a race of trying to scramble over each other for who fires first and hardest… and that’s a race where we’re going to hit the ceiling pretty damn soon because there’s not that many ways of firing 4 or 5 times at I6.

So far the movement of pilots through the initiative is quite gradual - about 4% of I1 to I3 pilots have moved up to I4+, but that trend is accelerating and I expect it to continue as the store championship season cements players into the most successful archetypes.

There's another smoking gun to watch the rise of in this metagame: Swarm Tactics.  In First Edition we had periods of time when Veteran Instincts became an essential Pilot Talent upgrade because of how fierce the Initiative wars were.  We don't Veteran Instincts around any more (thankfully) but we do have Swarm Tactics as a crutch that players can use to bring even more guns to bear at high initiative phases of combat.  In the old points Swarm Tactics was in 5% of squads (basically just the Midnight/Whirlwind combo that Chrispy popularised) while in the new points it's already in over 8% of squads and being used by multiple factions, especially Rebels.

WHAT TO DO?

We've been here before, of course.  Sometimes the X-Wing competitive metagame makes me happy and sometimes it doesn't.  In the past I've always been happy to duck away from competition for a while (eg. pretty much the whole of 2017!) and just go and pootle around with some janky stuff on the kitchen tablex, play tournaments only now and then.  It's frustrating that I can't really do that because the loadouts have been so culled, and it's not helping that the power level of the high initative ships is so strong that it can't really be bridged by a smattering of cunning tricks and a can-do attitude. 

So… I’m in a proper funk with X-Wing.  My squad builder has never been used so little because the idea of trying to build a squad to solve this problem seems largely futile.  If I1-I4 pilots are mostly bad then I’m immediately building my list almost entirely from a much smaller pool of I5-I6 pilots.  I’ve got less pilots to choose from and less points to customise them with.  For the first time in the entire six years of my playing X-Wing I’ve simply built a squad, put it in a box and then forgotten about squadbuilding and just taken the same thing everywhere.

But on the bright side... if you look at List Fortress there’s FAR more squads registered in the new points than there was in the old points, even though there’s a bigger time span in the old points.  The relaunch of proper official Organised Play tracks has seen activity pick up massively.  It’s great to see that many events of X-Wing being made, that many games being played.  Great that so many people who had been turned off 2.5 are coming back to it and finding it’s not what they feared it was.  Even if I'm personally in a funk as it happens.

I’m just a bit concerned that they’re returning just as so many of the things they worried about are finally coming true.  

• Granularity of points *shouldn’t* be an issue in a game with a two-tiered points system because you can compensate for one with the other, but at the moment it feels like the expensive ships have been brought down in cost so much that the points are less granular in 2.5 than they’ve ever been and the dynamic range for ship costing is narrower than it’s ever been.

• It feels like the random variance of ROAD rolls matter more than ever as we’re all cramming ourselves onto an Initiative system with basically only three settings (I6, I5, Everything Else) and we’re all overlapping, and overlapping with pilots and ships where the timing can really matter.  I played 2.5 from day one and I’ve complained more about ROAD influencing games in the last month than I have in the whole time leading up to it.

• Squadbuilding decision-making is being simplified to moving a few Duplo blocks around for maybe the first time in 2.5.  We’re still not in a world where we’re being forced to take Standardised Loadout versions of pilots and there’s no customisation, but the potential for customisation has been cut thinner than we’ve ever had it.

All though all the hoo-ha about X-Wing 2.5 and the transition to Atomic Mass Games my advice to people who didn’t like what was happening to X-Wing was simple: stop playing X-Wing and do something else instead.  And so that’s what I’m finding myself increasingly doing… I’m doing something else.  I’ve got my squad, I can leave it in a box and not worry about it and not have to open my squadbuilder and not have to think about X-Wing or talk about X-Wing because right now X-Wing isn’t holding my attention.  

Right now I’m actually playing Blood Bowl for the first time since 1995, and I’m waiting for my Kickstartered copy of the Apex Legends game to arrive, and those are happily filling the gap that X-Wing has left.

So, it’s kinda sad that I’m feeling disappointed when a Blood Bowl game falls through and I *have* to play X-Wing instead.  But also if I’m having fun doing something else instead then it’s kinda positive too.  

I hope that the next iteration of X-Wing points reverses a lot of what has happened.  Or that somebody cleverer than me finds a way to pivot this I5-I6 dominated metagame on its head and reopen up squadbuilding and game play.  And while everyone else seems to be having loads of fun playing X-Wing then clearly something is going right.  I'm happy to be at the thin end of the wedge.

Even if, right now, I’m in a proper funk about X-Wing.

Mental Health Awareness Week - Gollum and Me

 This is mental health awareness week and so I’m going to write a bit of an odd blog about something that is a current issue for me and is affecting my approach to the UK Games Expo..

First, though.  I’m not a person who usually ever talks or write about mental health.  I’m 46 years old and right at the tail end of the generation that just reckons you should suck it up and get on with things, and so even when I have in past struggled with mental health I’ve virtually never sought help or support, I’ve just sucked it up and got on with things.  It’s always been a completely inadequate solution to a complex and protracted problem, and a solution that may well make things worse over time, but it’s how I was raised so that’s what I did.  I’m mentioning this only because if somewhere in here it sounds like a very poorly-worded and badly phrased or mishandled attempt at dealing with mental health that’s because I come from a generation famed for their mishandling of mental health issues.

Gollum and Me

I touched on this subject before, when I began prepping for Worlds in January: I have something I call my Gollum – a mean and cruel inner voice.  My Gollum believes I’m the best at anything I do and so it demands that I have to win at every game I play, I have to be champion of every tournament I enter, I have to prove I’m better than anyone else.  Gollum believes and demands all these things despite the complete lack of any evidence for believing that I *am* the best at anything I do (I‘m not), or that I *will* be champion (I never am).  And when Gollum doesn’t get what it wants it can get very angry with me for failing to secure the prize it wanted.

Gollum is a poisonous presence, once he comes out.  He twists how I think about the games I play, how I think about the results of playing.  It’s usual gradual and insidious, beginning with expectations of success, becoming a need and a hunger to achieve it, becoming a twisted self-hatred and sense of injustice around the reasons why I didn’t succeed, ultimately become a need for revenge/redemption through achieving even greater success next time.  A vicious cycle of the emotional stakes being inexorably raised, and my failure to achieve success creating deeper and deeper moods.

It's probably worth underling that none of this is rational or reasonable.  Gollum doesn’t care about the fact my opponents might be really good at the games too, and he certainly doesn’t care about the fact that dice have multiples sides and some of those sides are blank.  Gollum demands results and there’s only two possible outcomes – I fail and Gollum gets angry, or I actually succeed and Gollum raises the bar for the next event.  Gollum will never be happy.

It’s probably also worth saying that at no point does Gollum affect anybody but myself, at least not directly.  The only impact Gollum really has is on creating a toxic relationship between myself and the games I play.  But when Gollum has a hold of my mood he indirectly affects people around me, like my wife, who have to deal with me being snappy and bitter with Gollum being at the wheel.

So, without externalising this to anyone I did the ‘suck it up and get on with it’ thing, and just bottled Gollum up and developed some coping strategies.  One of the key methods by which I do this is deliberately hamstringing myself whenever I play an event, which is also something I’ve talked about before.  If I don’t try my absolute best to win an event then I have a handy excuse to point to when I don’t win it, and I can keep Gollum happy: yes, Gollum, we would have won if we’d really tried.  We’d have crushed them all.  You can go back to sleep now.

I’ve probably been coping like this with Gollum for 20 years or more, striking a balance between being as interested in competitive games as I can be because that sort of thing is my jam, while also making this just enough more difficult for myself so that I have an excuse for losing.  Playing a list I’ve never played before, playing a list I’ve made myself, playing a janky combo just to see if I can, playing something that I know has a bad matchup into the best lists… these are all ways that I can get my ‘fun’ out of the game without ever riling up Gollum.  I could be the Dread Pirate Roberts, fighting and losing with my left hand and being ok with losing, because I never have to find out if I would also have lost using my right hand.

By and large, it’s worked at keeping Gollum in check.  

But it’s been a rocky road learning how to manage this issue and X-Wing is maybe my 3rd or 4th attempt at keeping Gollum in check and I’ve left other games because I let him get out.  Gollum is why I quit with the World of Warcraft TCG and he’s why I quit Netrunner - in both cases I went to a fairly big event and did pretty well but came away twisted up about the fact that I hadn’t won.  I deserved to win.  I was the best.  I had the bet deck.  I understood the game better.  Nobody deserved to be ahead of me… and that’s Gollum being at the wheel, not me.  I know from my time playing Magic: The Gathering that letting Gollum drive the bus for any length of time can turn into a serious mental health issue, so in both cases I quit the game and took a break from playing anything competitive.

Gollum and X-Wing

Pretty much my entire involvement in X-Wing tournaments, right from when I started in 2016, has been about managing Gollum.  

From the outset I was playing non-meta lists that I’d made myself, often lists I’d deliberately refused to practice with.  Yes, I tried to make my lists as strong as I could because understanding a game and trying to exploit what I know is what I get from playing games, but so long as I was on the outside looking in I had an excuse.  I didn’t play a Crack Swarm I played my Slaughterhouse Five.  I didn’t play Triple Scouts, I didn’t play Paratanni I played Bobatanni (because I knew it was worse).  I never played aces, or big ships, or TLT, or Miranda, or whatever the best list was.  Not because I wanted to be a special snowflake, but because it wasn’t safe for me to pick up a meta list and play that.  So I played Snap Shot A-Wings, or A Score To Settle Quickdraw, I championed Quadjumpers and 4-LOM at the start of Second Edition, Scimitar Bombers, C1-1OP, Cartel Spacers and Alpha Squadron Interceptors.  Whatever the proven hot stuff was at the time I made damn sure I wasn’t playing it.  Playing a good list means I’m trying to win and trying to win means Gollum is going to start paying an unwanted interest.

Committing to attending Worlds this year was a calculated risk.  I couldn’t justify the expense of going to Worlds without at least TRYING to do well (even with Asmodee picking up most of the bill the trip still ran up a bill as the most expensive tournament I’ve attended since Grand Prix Toronto in 2010).  Spending three months practicing and iterating my First Order list 6for Worlds makes my Worlds list the most games I’ve ever played with a single squad.  Usually by 10 games with a squad, maximum, I’m getting ready to tap out and try some other bad ideas, but I played nearly 50 games with 6FO.

I went into the practice period very concerned about how Gollum would react, but in truth he was refreshingly quiet.  I think the fact that I was heading to the World Championships and that I would playing in the toughest room for X-Wing I’d likely ever be in had tamed even Gollum.  I played a list that I’d made myself, but which I was confident was good because it was running parallel to what other groups had found to be very good.  But there was still a huge question mark over where I would stack up against that caliber or players and so when I emerged in 25th place at the end of road I was genuinely delighted, and as I flew back with my arms full of swag even Gollum had to accept that I’d done pretty well.

There, and Back Again

And then it started.

25th at Worlds was really good.  But hadn’t I thrown away one of my games by being an idiot?  And hadn’t I been terribly unlucky to lose another one?  And hadn’t a list very much like mine actually won Worlds?

Why hadn’t I won Worlds?  I could have done.  I should have done.

For April I pushed the intrusive thoughts away, picked up some janky lists and had fun.  And then the Regional at the UK Games Expo was announced, and I decided to play in it.  And there’s a Worlds invite on the line.  And really nice template trays.  A lot like the ones I should have won at Worlds but failed to get.

I was 25th at Worlds.  3rd highest UK player.  There’s 4 template trays at the UKGE.  That template try is mine.

And then the expectation that we’d be using new points gave way to probably using the same points we currently have.  I could fly 6FO.  

I'm going going to crush everyone.  I'm not going to repeat my mistake in the game I threw away, I'm not going to get screwed over the by the dice.  I'm going to win the UKGE and prove that I should have won Worlds.

I could fly the 6FO that I should have won Worlds with.  Anything other than winning the UKGE will be a failure.  

And again, none of this is reasonable or rational.  I threw a game away because I'm entirely capable of throwing games away.  I lost to the dice in a game because I'm playing a dice game and sometimes you lose to the dice... I probably won my fair share of games with hot dice too.  It’s not a reasonable thing to think that I will win UKGE.  It’s not a rational thing to think.  But Gollum is driving the bus now, at some point over the last couple of weeks he snuck past me and has a hand on the wheel.

I’m writing this blog on the 16th of May.  The list submission deadline for UKGE is the 19th of May.  I had every intention of flying my Worlds list one last time but I’m no longer sure if I can actually do that and maintain the right frame of mind.  I don’t like how I’m visualising the UKGE, and specifically I don’t like how I’m visualising using 6FO in that event.  

It was one thing to go into a big event at Worlds when I didn’t know where I stacked vs the other players and I didn’t know how good my list was, it’s another thing to go into the UKGE ‘knowing’ that I’m the 3rd best player in the UK (based on the results of this one event, which is fucking ridiculous to use as a measure but then this isn’t about being rational), and ‘knowing’ that I’m playing THE GREATEST SQUAD THAT’S EVER EXISTED IN X-WING (also ridiculous).  Gollum doesn’t care.  Gollum demands results.

So in the next four days I have to pick my squad.  I *want* to fly 6FO but I may not be able to.  I may have to take back control and play something else instead, something that I know has a ceiling so that I can sit back and be happy with coming 22nd.

I do want that template tray, though.  Or do I?  I don’t think I do - I’ve never cared about prizes and swag before, really.  I think Gollum wants it, but it’s been a bit harder to separate the two of us this week

So...

If this has felt a bit rambling it’s probably because I don’t really have a neatly tied-up narrative flow for this problem.  I don’t have a solution to tie it up into a neat bow at the end.  And as I badged it up as a mental health thing I think a healthy dose of perspective is needed.

Not knowing which plastic ships you should choose to play with in a Star Wars game seems like such a meaningless thing to have as an issue.  How can I even bundle something like this up into ‘mental health’ alongside all the much bigger problems that people have to deal with and which has a much bigger impact on their lives?  But I think to an extent that’s what makes mental health issues into mental health issues – the scale of the impacts don’t have rational connections to the scale of the causes.  So it's about plastic spaceships but also it's about that I’ve spent decades running away from these issues.  I'm unable to fully embrace what *I* want to do because I’m afraid of how it can and will spiral out of my control, and how much it can and will affect people around me if I let that happen.

Plus I know that I can always pull the plug on Gollum if need to by just doing what I did to World of Warcraft TCG and Netrunner, and just slamming the door on him and walking away.  But if I can avoid doing that then I will, I think at this point I've managed to sustain playing X-Wing longer than any other game, maybe even including Magic.  I don't want to, but I know I can go cold turkey, and lots of people with 'real' mental health problems don't have that escape hatch.

Gollum is part of who I am.  Maybe he comes from being raised by a family of teachers so I whizzed through my school years expecting gold stars and merit badges and the real world has come up short in terms of the external validation that Gollum craves.  I don’t crave it (I think I’ve a long history of self-sabotage on social media platforms to demonstrate the lengths to which I’ll sometimes go to ensure I don’t get external validation) but Gollum does.  

Gollum is part of who I am, but I don’t have to like him and I don’t have to let him win.   And sometimes that’s a bigger struggle to manage that at other times.  This week, which happens to also be Mental Health Awareness Week, it’s on my mind a lot.  And this time I decided to share how my wacko mind works sometimes.  Thanks for reading

2 FAT 2 CURIOUS - "More fun" rhymes with "Tor Phun"

The World Championships has basically consumed a quarter of my X-Wing year.  I wrapped up my participation in a little Star Wars: Legion league in between Christmas and New Year then from January 1st I had my gaming mind fixed on Chicago pretty much right up to the moment when I wrapped up my last game of Adepticon.

The blank slate of being able to do whatever I wanted and play whatever I wanted spread out before me like a glorious fresh canvas.  I could play any squad I wanted, any bad idea or janky combo that came to mind.  Hell, I didn't even have to play X-Wing I could go back to Legion (a cursory glance at Legion Worlds results told me it's not a good time to do that, unfortunately - me no likey Blizzard spam or Dark Troopers) or I could finally get the games of Bolt Action in that I'd promised to my dad.

But really, after a week of hardcore playing X-Wing at the end of three monrths of hardcore thinking about X-Wing all I really wanted to do was... uh... softcore playing X-Wing?  Is that a thing?  Is that the right turn of phrase?  

Yeah, jank.  That's what I'm talking about.

JANKING AIN'T EASY

I had a backlog of bad ideas built up over the first three months of the year, so for my first FLGS play session after Worlds I wanted to explore a bunch of them.  I wound up taking three lists each built around a different ace pilot that happened to begin with the letter R...

Opponents got a choice of Ric, Rush or Rau!

I had a Republic list built with the intention of getting Ric Olie into position to fire an Advanced Proton Torpedo with 6 red dice (the 5 plus his abillity adding one) with double mods from a nearby Synched Console.

I had a First Order list that used Concussion Bombs to damage Rush on the first turn and make him into an I6 super-ace.

And finally I had a long shot plan for a Debris Gambit on Fenn Rau, with Gamut Key supporting Fenn to stack both Focus and Evade then keep them into the next turn so he could survive that tricky approach turn.

One by one I put my janky aces onto the table and one by one I learned pretty much the same thing - they weren't worth the effort.

First to fall was Ric Olie, whose 6-dice APT plan fell apart before I even got the table when I actually read his ability properly and realised it only works on primary attacks.  The list was ok because all the other pieces were solid and I won my game with it, but the spark of trying to get a big hit off was gone and Ric swept around the table mostly ineffectively.

Fenn Rau managed to lose his engagement joust against Contrail, by which time he was now too far ahead of Gamut to get further coordinate support, and anyway he was stressed.  My glass cannon had to fly so defensively he achieved nothing before dying - the rest of the squad won me the game but Fenn himself was a bust.

The only one of my 'aces' who actually aced successfully was Rush and the bomb thing worked just fine.  But once you've made an I6 with 5HP and linked autothrusters you do kind of wonder why you didn't just play Soontir Fel to begin with and have, like, multiple talent slots and a good ability to actually achieve stuff with (and 4 squad points not tied into a bomber).  And the list still had DT and Scorch and an FO Bomber in so didn't feel like I'd changed the channel enough from my 6FO Worlds list.

Back to the drawing board.

2 FAT 2 CURIOUS

Although none of my aces had really worked the session hadn't been a total bust... I had liked all the other stuff I had in my Fenn Rau list, so for round two I decided to riff on that and see what I could get.

Stealing with pride, the list already featured the version of Q9-0 that Dimitris Stavlopoulos had almost won a Worlds Qualifier with last year and now to replace Fenn Rau's little Fang Fighter I added to it the Doctor Aphra build that had taken Jerremy Chalameau to 47tth at Worlds.  I really like both the builds here because of the synergies they have in their loadout so I want to stop and talk about them for a second because I think they're great examples of finding solid combos.

• Q9-0 (ST-70 Assault Ship) - IG-88D, Lando Calrissian, Heavy Laser Cannon, Electronic Baffle, Razorcrest, Contraband Cybernetics

Q9-0, IG-88D and Lando form a virtuous triangle of effects.  IG-88D is like a cheap Perceptive Copilot and gives you two Calculate tokens.  Lando crew can spend one of those calculate tokens to reroll 2 attack or defence dice so the fact that you've got two of them to spend means Q9-0 can be pretty well-modded on attack of defence with just a single action.  It also then chains into Q9-0's pilot ability to take a calculate action after he k-turns or t-rolls, meaning you can turn the Razorcrest around and STILL be double-modded.

Is that all?  Hell no!  You've got a whopping Heavy Laser Cannon bullseye arc to line up and benefit from those double mods with, and the Razorcrest title gives him a linked Evade-Barrel Roll action and, hey, isn't that Evade also a green token for Lando to spend on offensive dice mods if he has to barrel roll to line up the HLC shot?   Sure it's not double mods but mods are mods.

And Contraband Cybernetics and Electronic Baffle help you to manage those red moves and actions profitably.  It's a really nice little self-sufficient synergetic package of a ship for just 6pts.

• Doctor Aphra (YV-666 Freighter) - Rook Kast, Fenn Rau, Han Solo

Doctor Aphra's pilot ability isn't completely wasted but this is all about the virtuous triangle of the three crew options she's taking into battle with her.

Han Solo lets you take a red Focus action when you engage.  When you perform a red action Rook Kast lets you also take a strain token.  If you've got a strain token she'll then let you turn a blank red dice into a hit, meaning that from a standing start of no mods your red focus action from Han sees you shipping maximum hits 85% of the time at R2-3 and still 75% of the time at R1.  And because you're not taking that strain token until you engage at I3 you've both got a good chance of not being shot while it's there AND there's no chance the opponent could shoot it out from under you and turn Rook's dice mod back off.  Oh, and Fenn Rau?  Well it turns out that he triggers with the same timing as Han Solo and so you can make him resolve second and immediately clear the stress that Han gives you for the red focus (if all his requirements are met).

So now you've got a YV-666 that takea a Reinforce action most turns and then double mods its attack anyway, usually for no cost.  That's pretty sweet.

Oh, and Fenn Rau crew also really helps out Q9-0 with all his k-turning and barrel rolling and Contrabanding?  Nice.

On top of those two excellent ship designs that I've blatantly poached from more creative Scum players than myself I added the Tor Phun that I enjoyed trying to out in my 'if I crap out at Worlds at least I can have fun playing this' Scum list: Mandalorian Optics for aggressive mods and Elusive to have my Fang be a bit less vulnerable to just exploding for no gain.  I've had a lot of phun with Tor Fun and I was happy to use him again.  Then to finish the list off the ever-present Durge.  Yeah, Scum Durge isn't a patch on CIS Durge but I still enjoy the challenge of lining up those lethal Proton Cannon shots.

So my final Scum list was...

    2 Fat 2 Curious

• Q9-0 (ST-70 Assault Ship) - IG-88D, Lando Calrissian, Heavy Laser Cannon, Electronic Baffle, Razorcrest, Contraband Cybernetics

• Doctor Aphra (YV-666 Freighter) - Rook Kast, Fenn Rau, Han Solo

• Tor Phun (Fang Fighter) - Elusive, Mandalorian Optics

• Durge (Rogue-Class) - Marksmanship, Lone Wolf, Proton Cannons

And even in Tor Phun and Durge theres's nice little interactions.  Like Mandalorian Optics assigns a Target Lock but isn't a TL action, so if Tor Phun destroys his target he can still take a TL action ahead of his bonus attack.  And if you can keep him out hunting on the flank so Lone Wolf is active it helps Durge to reroll those Proton Cannon shots, which something like Predator or Crack Shot can't do.  Line that bullseye up and it's like hitting jackpot on the slots and everything lights up - 4 dice, crits from Marksmanship and Proton Cannons and the opponent can't mod his dice from Dead To Rights.  Lets-a-go!

Oh.  And does Fenn Rau crew ALSO help out Tor Phun and Durge a lot with their linked red actions?

I gave this list a spin earlier this week and *loved* it (full disclosure, I didn't have Lone Wolf so that's value TBC right now).  I still find Fenn Rau crew to be a lot tougher to get to trigger than you'd actually expect but with all 4 ships looking for him at times he paid off his 4pts pretty quickly.  I dunno what it is with him, like each clause of his ability seems pretty plausible to pull off and yet there's so many of those little hoops to jump through that you wind up missing one of them a lot more often than you'd think.

But, yeah, other than never actually managing to Fenn Rau the strress off Aphra when Han gave it to her everything else worked.  Aphra's gun was super-reliable and I could definitely see myself deciding to go full Party Bus like it's 2016 and adding 4-LOM crew in place of Fenn Rau.  

Q9-0's HLC was ripping into things repeatedly. I got the Evade->Barrel Roll attack into Obi Wan Kenobi with Lando's offensive reroll at range 1.  I tallon-rolled into a double-modded HLC shot onto an ETA-Actis... it would all have been picture perfect if a Wounded Pilot crit hadn't double-stressed me on the t-roll and then the Razorcrest's crappy blue maneuvers finally kicked in to cramp my style.  

I even managed to get a bonus attack off with Tor Phun, who used Mandalorian Optics to lock and kill Obi Wan for the last bit of damage then Target Locked another ship for his second attack.

Oh yeah, and Durge was... Durge was ok.  Which is why I'm fiddling with his loadout to try Lone Wolf.  He's cheap, he did a job and he certainly wasn't *bad*... but I wanted more fireworks than I got.

I'll take it as a win.  I mean... I did win the game so technically it was a win, but I'm also going to take the listbuilding success and ensuing fun as a bigger win.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

So, that's it really.  I made a list and I liked it.  It was fun.  It was a nice change of pace to not be trying to murderkill everything with 6FO like I've been doing for the last three months.

And I also hope that in these ships you can find something you might want to try out yourself, because I know Scum players are always on the hunt for the next wacky combo of effects they can string together!

I didn't just play Aphra and Q9-0, there was also a CIS list with Pre Vizsla, but that's one that I want to try again before I'm sure I can recommend it.  There's definitely something good in Pre Vizsla's ability to throw extra attack dice, but I think unlike the Q9-0 and Aphra examples his loadout probably adds up to less than the sum of its parts rather than more.  There just aren't the crew options in CIS that Scum has, I think.  I'll keep tinkering, though, and maybe you'll be reading about that one soon after all.

Until then, Fly (a bit) Casual!

=====================================

PS. Have an X-Wing haiku...

Requirement: more fun

Hurt itself in confusion

A new friend, Tor Phun

Nice.