July 2020 Points Changes - Separatists & Scum

Continuing my review of how the seven factions will respond to the recent points changes, this time I want to look at two factions who were at the top of their games: Separatists and Scum.

Below is my faction tiering as I thought it was and you can see that Separatists and Scum are right at the top of the totem pole.  Separatist swarms of various flavours have been hugely strong ever since they arrived in the game, while Scum is arguably the single strongest faction in the game with multiple vectors - Boba at the top, but also the hugely efficient Scyks and Fangs too.

Do the July points changes do anything to shake this up?

SEPARATISTS

When I wrote my review of how factions would do in Hyperspace after the January points changes I said that Separatists were at the same time both an incredibly thin faction with only a couple of good pilots - Trade Federation Drones and Techno Union Bombers - but also one of the strongest because those two pieces were so strong they could carry the whole faction.  Well, for the first time we've had a points increase on one of these pieces with the Trade Federation Drones going up from 19pts to 20pts.

This is not enough.

My generic efficiency analysis highlighted just how powerful Networked Calculations was and that when massed together the Vulture droids were mathematically as good as TIE Fighters... TIE Fighters with blue turn maneuvers and linked actions.  Droid lists are currently able to afford lots of ships and lots of toys along with them - Grappling Struts, Discord Missiles and other weaponry, DRK Probe Droids or Tactical Relays - and I don't believe an increase of 1pt does enough to change this fact.  With so many toys already included it's relatively easy for droid players to trim a couple of upgrades and still continue to run with the fundamental strength of the list - lots of bodies and calculate tokens for Networked Calculations.  

You can see this in sample Sear Swarm lists like the one above, or in the mixed Hyena/Vulture squads like the one below... which often actually also benefited by the reduction to Plasma Torpedoes!  Droid swarms get trimmed slightly but fundamentally they're still going to be able to function with 98% of the power level they used to have and there's no compelling reason to Separatist players to feel they need to make major changes to lists that were already working.  Sear Swarms have it worst and they probably have a real decision to make about how much they need TA-175 vs other upgrade cards, but the munition-base swarms were arguably better anyway and haven't suffered nearly as much.

Away from the Droids there has been some major points changes to the Nantex Starfighter.  Originally the Nantex and its tractor beam shenanigans proved to be as popular as a fart in an elevator and the ships got hammered not just by big points increases but also by rewriting the tractor beam rules!  That double whammy pretty much entirely erased the ship from playability for the first half of 2020, which a big discount in this round of changes hopes to fix.  There's two angles to this - firstly that most of the Nantex have now been priced to make sense without having to use Ensnare (but then saw Ensnare go up in cost), and secondly that Sun Fac came down in cost while Ensnare stayed the same cost for I6 pilots, putting the big bad of the Geonosians back into contention.

Tackling them in order, I actually quite like the new discount non-Ensnare Nantex.  At 29pts for a Stalgasin Hive Guard you're actually pretty comparable to where an Autoblaster Scyk is sitting (at 28pts with the cannon adding an extra dice in bullseye).  It might take some adjustment to how Separatist players think about their squads and ships but I'm definitely not ruling out that Nantex swarm can now work without having to rely on Ensnare, or that the Nantex can be a good filler ship.  I'd much rather they were 28pts than 29pt because that's the break point for being able to afford 7 of them in a squad like you can with Scyks, but with cheap Vultures around as well I think there's some potential for a Nantex swarm to work, just laying down those cheap bullseyes and bringing 20 red dice to the table.

The big bad of Sun Fac, however, I'm much more lukewarm about.  He may well be the cheapest points cost that he's ever been to field with Ensnare but I think the six months that he's sat out on the bench have been really unkind to Mr Fac.  

• Original Cost - Sun Fac with Ensnare: 78pts.  1 Tractor token for any size ship to be tractored.
• January - Sun Fac with Ensnare: 82pts.  Unable to affect Medium or Large bases.  Tractored ships can rotate
• July - Sun Fac with Ensnare: 73pts.  Unable to affect Medium or Large bases.  Tractored ships can rotate

Tractor tokens are much less effectively against medium or large bases (like Boba Fett or Dengar) and being able to gobble up one small ship is much less potent when that ship is a cheap generic Scyk or TIE Fighter with a bunch of mates around who can take revenge.  Add to that, with the fact ships you tractor can rotate to fire at Sun Fac if he moves them I think he probably needs more high Initiative friends around to help ensure that he kills his intended targets before they can fire on him... and there's not a lot of high initiative around in the faction.  Sun Fac will scare a few aces but he's always been very similar to Fenn Rau and we can see from how Fenn has dipped in form that it's not a great time to be an ace hunter.

Overall I think very little changes for Separatist players.  The pieces they're used to using have only slightly increased in cost while the pieces that got a discount in this points change are either unfamiliar and untested, or poorly equipped for the modern metagame.  With the proven methods still effective I doubt most players will spend too long worrying about whether to bring a Nantex into play and simply stay locked onto the Droid swarms.  That's also setting a real high bar for whether any of the upcoming new ships like the HMP Gunship or Tri Fighter can actually muscle their way into the starting lineups or not.

SCUM & VILLAINY

The last six months have seen Scum pretty fairly cemented to the top spot in any format you care to mention.  From the moment Boba and Koshka announced themselves at the Milton Keynes System Open they were the dominant force in Hyperspace, while in Extended it soon shook out that Boba and Dengar were a great pairing with Dengar able to snipe away the few things that Boba might have trouble with.  It's been a real reign of terror as the rest of the game cowered under Boba Fett's gaze, so surely Boba got a big hit in the July points changes, right?

Wrong.

Boba essentially got hit twice, a little bit on the pilot card itself (+1pt) then more heavily on the Slave I title (+4pts).  I think this is the right way to do it and although I know a lot of people were expecting a bigger increase on Boba himself, I think we've seen in the past that when he doesn't have this specific combination of tools - Slave I and Maul - to be able to reposition AND have dice mods he's really fair.  Before players landed on Maul crew the Perceptive Copilot was a common version and that Boba Fett was really beatable, so I think Boba himself at 85pts was fine.  I just thought somewhere between Maul and Slave I the price needed to go up by more, and I was all for slamming Slave I with Supernatural Reflexes levels of costing by initiative just to bomb it out of the game for a while.

That's not what we got and I think the Boba lists will absorb a +5pts increase pretty smoothly, probably just dropping a Hull Upgrade and carrying on.  It hurts them... a bit, but probably not enough.  Arguably Boba actually gets stronger in these changes as some of the the things that he struggled with got hit harder.  

Boba is fine and should be going nowhere, either in Hyperspace or Extended.  He's still the guy to beat.

But away from Boba Fett there was another successful line of play for Scum players - the M3-A Scyk that I've been banging a drum about ever since they dropped in points in January.  I've had a lot of success (and fun) with Scyk swarms and although things didn't work out for me in Milton Keynes the squad I took there with such high hopes has performed incredibly well for Akhter Khan during Gold Squadron's Space Jam tournament series during lockdown.

• Space Jam Chicago: Top 4 with a 7-2 record
• Space Jam Rome: Top 4 with an 8-1 record
• Space Jam LA: Top 16 with a 5-2 record
• Space Jam Sydney: Top 4 with an 8-1 record
• OVERALL: 28-6

Akhter's list is the same one that I took to Milton Keynes and it's untouched by any of the July points changes.

Also unchanged are the Ion/Tractor Scyk Swarm I took to the Element Games Store Championship and did well with, and the Autoblaster Scyk Swarm that Nikolas God also did very well with in the Space Jam series.

Scyks are still incredibly efficient - almost certainly the most efficient ship that's ever been in first or second edition - and the points haven't changed on them at all.  Crazy!

Although Scum players have plenty of incentive to just carry on playing what has been working so well for them to date there ARE a bunch of little quality of life points changes to unpopular ships like the YV-666, IG-Aggressor and Lando's Millenium Falcon.  On the one hand I don't think any one of these price drops is enough to flip one of these ships from 'bad' to 'good', certainly not good enough to dislodge Boba Fett or Cartel Spacers.  On the other hand the Scum faction loves to have unexpected tricks and problems for its opponents to solve and these price cuts certainly make all those 'off-meta' type of lists that little bit more competitive and dangerous.

In the end I think Scum are in a similar boat to Separatists.  Yes there's potential for exploring cool new things but the old reliable things are still just as reliable as ever so why change a winning team?  It's still going to be a Boba and Scyk world out there for the next six months, I'd expect.