2023 X-Wing World Championships - Tournament Report (25th with 6FO)

How the heck are you supposed to write about the World Championships?  I manage to fill a blog with just a four round tournament that takes half a day and I was in Chicago for a week!

To avoid this being the longest blog in the world ever I'm going to try really hard to keep it brief and tight as much as I can.  You might still want to go and have a wee before you start this, though...

THE STORY SO FAR...

If you've not been following my blogs this year then they've laid out my journey in preparing for the World Championships.  I started by reflecting on how I'd need to raise my game if I wanted to play in Worlds, then worked to quickly hone in my squad choices onto First Order.  From there I found a squad I liked in what has become known as 6FO which I played through the Wampa Warm-Up and Sith Taker Open with good results.

What I'd settled on was a six-ship First Order squad with Ember and Grudge.  Aggressive and tough, I was confident that I'd found ships that were significantly undercosted and that in Grudge I had the 'X-factor' that opponents wouldn't be prepared for and which could turn matchups my way.

And because I was the only person in the world who seemed to like Blazer Bomb I included the rules for it on my squadlist that I printed out to take to Worlds.  It didn't save me much time - I had to explain Blazer Bomb to everyone anyway!

BEFORE THE TOURNAMENT

We flew out of Manchester early on Monday morning, heading via Dublin for the friendly pre-clearance at US Immigration treatment.  The 'we' at this point was myself and fellow Sith Takers Time King and Liam Baker, both of whom you will know well from the Sith Takers Snapshots Podcast.  In Dublin were we joined by Conor Holmes and then it was onto the long leg of the flight to the US.

In-flight entertainment: House of Dragons, which I've not watched but reminded me how good Game of Thrones was before the end, before the dark times.  And also Bullet Train, which I enjoyed FAR FAR more than I expected to and thoroughly recommend.  It's a bit like if Edgar Wright had directed The Raid, something like that.

We landed stateside and headed for a completely hilariously over-portioned BBQ platter with some of the other UK players who arrived early.  Then it was time for bed.

I had Tuesday marked off a day for clearing jetlag so I basically spent it entirely solo and just wandered around near the hotel.  I went to IHOP for breakfast that was so big I didn't have lunch, meandered around the nearby mall, watched Ant-Man: Quantumania at the AMC while bravely fending off sleep in their reclining seats, and finally in the evening felt sociable enough to join a rapidly-swelling contingent of players for delicious Chicago-style pizza at Giordano's.

Wednesday was another IHOP/skip breakfast combo, and then on returning to the hotel the X-Wing finally began.  The tables in the lobby had been taken over by X-Wing players and I whiled away the afternoon watching a bit of X-Wing and playing a bit with my janky fun list.  I watched Chrispy wombo-combo his Whirlwind Cluster Missiles into somebody who foolishly jousted him in the face, and I also looked over Bartosz Wojcicki's A-Wing list.  I liked what he'd done with it in bringing HLC and Proton Rockets to punch through 3 green dice, but I told him I still thought he was going to struggle with it.

HAHHAAHAHAHAHA.

Oops.

Then it was time to head to the Adepticon venue and grab out badges in the early pickup queue.  The early pickup queue was looooooooooooooooooooong.  The smart money was on sitting in the bar upstairs and sipping your beers while somebody standing in the queue below you for two hours sent you updates on how it was moving.  I was the chump standing downstairs in the queue for two hours.  FFS.

Aside/whinge: the queue felt a little bit shambolically slow and it was only when you got right to the front that it made sense why. One big long queue got split into three alphabetical queues that in turn got split into two smaller queues, like the 'S-Z queue' turned into 'surnames S-T' and 'surnames U-Z'.  When they cleared through a batch of people they'd go back out into the main queue and call in the next lot of people to sort alphabetically, but because the S-T queue had a gazillion people in it and the U-Z queue was basically non-existent it meant the whole Adepticon queue was being held up by the slowest-moving alphabetical subsection.  So everyone outside stood in line because the guy handing out U-Z badges had nothing to do but look bored and twiddle his thumbs while the S-T queue extended out of sight.  But everyone got their badges in the end so I guess it's no big deal in the grand scheme of things.

Thursday was LCQ day.  I wasn't LCQing but I was along bright and early to support those who were, take in the rest of Adepticon, and then there was little practice warm-up tournament that I'd signed up for in the afternoon.  I spent most of the morning mooching around the stalls and deciding that I probably wasn't going to buy very much even though everything looked great - one of the blessings of flying to something like Adepticon is that your spending impulses are tempered by how much you can fit in your luggage.   It turns out Adepticom is, like, a big deal or something.  I'd been so laser-focused on coming to 'the X-Wing World Championships' that I hadn't really taken in that we were a small part of something much much bigger.  

By the time I'd finished mooching and got back to the X-Wing section it was becoming clear that the LCQ was serious business and ultimately a lot of great players never even made it into Day One of worlds, sadly including our own Liam Baker who missed out on the last round.  For my part I finally got to dig out my First Order ships and play some games in the Worlds Warm Up.  I lost the first to some crazy dice variance, which happens, then won the next two games.  They were meaningless games in the wider scheme of things, but they settled my nerves tremendously - I'd flown across the world to the biggest tournament of the year but my FO list was still really good and I still played it well and that still turned into wins just the way it had at home.  Phew!

Time for dinner and bed.  The real work started in the morning.

INTO BATTLE – THE 2023 X-WING WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS

DAY ONE

Ready to go!

ROUND 1 – Assault
vs Florent Barbare – Resistance – Ello/Nien/Kaz/Jarek/Finn

I’ve come across Resistance lists similar to this in the past and I’ve always been able to out-trade them thanks to the ridiculous efficiency of my TIE/fos. Of all the things I could encounter in Round One at worlds this was something I was very happy to see because I felt like I matched into it very well.

Ultimately that’s how it broke down against Florent but it took a long time to get there and was incredibly close – I’d initially planned on bagging Ello Asty as my main prize but every time I threw lasers at him he came back with double natural evades.  This game was incredibly close as I lost Ember very early so instead of pulling ahead with a quick T-70 kill.  That meant Florent and I ran virtually neck-and-neck through the scoring and it was only in the final turn that I significantly pulled ahead as 4 or 5 turns of gradually chipping away at Kaz and pinning him down with an Ion Cannon finally paid off.

WIN: 18-14

That was my first taste of Worlds.  I’d won but holy cow that was close and Florent had flown really well in taking me to the edge.  And that was into a matchup that I was sure I was better in!  Worlds was clearly going to be tough… but I had my winning start.

ROUND 2 – Scramble
Vs Stephen Consoli – Republic – Anakin/Contrail/Kickback/Wolfe/Boost

Stephen’s Republic list completely ripped me apart as I underestimated just how much he had specced his list to deal maximum damage and tear apart ships like mine.

One key element was that Stephen had brought Anakin in the full Delta-7B Aethersprite and equipped him with Outmaneuver, where many players would pick something like a Shield Upgrade or R2-D2.  I completely failed to adjust my approach for this change, assuming I could leave Anakin to flank and just eat the damage he dealt while I out-jousted the rest of his squad.  The second key element was that in taking things like Boost with a Proton Rocket and even little choices like Crack Shot on Contrail, he was better at jousting me in the face than I had been used to from Republic.

So what I probably should have done was fake the joust and then turn my ships into Anakin and blow him apart – removing the threat of Outmaneuver and punishing Stephen’s decision to not bring a Shield Upgrade.

That’s not what I did, though.  What I did was fly straight into the teeth of his jousting block which used Born For This to mitigate my attack then blasted back at me with bullseye arcs while Anakin prowled around behind me deleting TIE Fighters as though they were younglings.

Complete incompetence on my part, which Stephen took full advantage of.

LOSS: 7-20

Balls.  I have to be better than that.  I scraped a win against a good matchup in Round One and got dumpstered immediately in a tough matchup.  Worlds was tough!

ROUND 3 – Salvage
Vs Alexander Oehler – First Order – Hask Xi/Ember/Mal/Galek/DT/Scorch

I got a brief fright at the start of this round.  It came after the lunch break so Alex had chance to have checked my list out online before he got to table, so he was surprised to see I was using Blazer Bombs as apparently my registered list had Thermal Detonators on Grudge instead!!!  Fortunately head TO Chris Allen swooped in to solve the problem – I had all the blog posts and Instagram feed showing my love for Blazer Bombs and after he’d checked with my round 1 & 2 opponents that I had indeed used Blazer he was happy to correct the list I’d registered.  Phew!  If he’d asked me to use Thermal Detonators I had a problem as I didn’t have any with me, I’ve not used them since January.  I think what happened is that the original Worlds list entries got deleted and when I resubmitted I just grabbed the list out of LBN and pasted it in really quickly without checking it properly, and obviously pasted in an old version.  Yikes, that was close.

Onto the game itself: this game started out as almost a mirror match – I had Grudge while Alex had the Xi Shuttle – and I expected a very tight duel between our TIE Fighters.  I didn’t get one.

Alex set up in an unusual formation where he lined DT & Scorch up at a 45 degree angle… then on his first turn he did a 5-straight with Scorch and ran him right onto a piece of debris!  By the time Scorch was able to get off the debris Grudge and dropped his Electro-Chaff Cloud right behind it and my whole squad and converged to pounce on the stressed and vulnerable TIE and finish it off.

I don’t think Alex ever quite got himself back onto an even footing from that original mistake.  The way I’d swept my forces in off my left flank to attack Scorch had left his Xi Shuttle isolated and ineffective away from the fight and he didn’t have the mass of firepower pointing in one place to really punish any of my ships with Galek’s Tractor Beam so he was pretty badly outgunned in the central dogfight where it really mattered.  I killed a second TIE Fighter next turn and now held 2 crates to Alex’s 1 and my lead widened to 12-4.

A couple of slow turns where we traded shots but only scored equal crates gradually brought me nearer to the 20 points that I needed and with a final kill, which I think was the Xi Shuttle judging by that photo, I hauled myself over the line.

WIN: 21-9

Ok, that was better.  I felt in control of this one pretty much the whole way from the moment Alex dumped Scorch onto a rock.  I’d played well and executed the opportunity he gave me without leaving anything hanging.

ROUND 4 – Chance Engagement
Vs James Johansen – Empire – Vader/Morna/Oicunn

Double Decimators at Worlds!!!  I’m going to start this match at the end, because I lose this game and it’s the one that I “should have won”.

I’ve played against Decimator big hull lists in the past with my First Order squad and dealt with them all easily enough – both Double Decimator and Decimator/Reaper combinations.  James is bringing them in a slightly unusual configuration that I think really helped him out in this matchup, as both his Decimators are quite sparingly loaded out because they’ve had to find points to bring Cluster Mines.  You’ll usually find Decimators bringing some form of bombs to protect their ass with but it’s usually something like a Proton Bomb or Seismic Charge and my TIEs are happy to eat that 1 damage in order to keep piling the pressure on and remove a Decimator from the table.  Cluster Mines change that a bit because I don’t want to run through them if I can possibly avoid it, and although it takes a while to get there the Cluster Mines turn out to be critical.

So anyway.  James lines his Decimators up on my right flank and I set up full to joust him, with Grudge holding the centre ground – he’s going to try and slow Vader’s flanking action down a bit to buy time for the TIEs to eat up the Decimators.

At first it’s going pretty much exactly to plan – I lay fire into Oicunn with everything I’ve got and he doesn’t last long.  Long enough to drop the first set of Cluster Mines and that pulls my TIEs out of position because I didn’t feel like I could k—turn or s-loop over the back of the Decimator as I might normally like.  But Oicunn dies anyway, and then we turn to start on Morna Kee and even strip shields of Darth Vader as he sweeps into my rear.  I’m bleeding out half TIEs every turn and James is steadily scoring points from me by taking off half TIEs each turn, but with Oicunn’s 7pts already banked I’m well ahead.

Then comes the pivotal moment.  Most of my TIEs are chasing Morna Kee but we’re now behind her and I know the Cluster Mines are coming, so I need to break off the chase for a turn.  I see where James has put his Darth Vader and I’m pretty certain that he’s going to 2-turn and come in behind where he expects my TIEs to be as they chase Morna Kee.  I’m also pretty sure that Scorch can get to a position where he will bump Vader onto an asteroid.  Malarus is behind Morna and stressed from her ability, but she’s also in place to cut back the other direction and surprise Vader with a volley of Cluster Missiles.  It will mean eating a couple of Cluster Mines but if I use a 1-turn I will stay stressed and won’t be able to push damage into Vader.  I think I have the perfect trap and I pull the trigger.

Morna Kee drops her Cluster Mines.  Most of my TIEs scatter to avoid them.

Scorch does a 3 straight to block Vader and sits right where I need him to be.

Malarus 2-turns to her right, flying over 2 Cluster Mines on her way to intercepting Vader.  She rolls 4 hits and dies on the spot.

Vader 2-turns, Scorch bumps him onto an asteroid.  Vader takes 2 damage.

Vader is on an asteroid with 1 hull and 1 force and I can’t shoot at him because Malarus dies to a 6% chance of taking 4 damage from Cluster Mines.

If I kill Vader there I would win the game 20-10, but with Malarus dead we instead play on three more turns and James continues to grind points out of my TIEs.  He ultimately steals the win with the final shot of the game when he scores half of Grudge.

LOSS 19-20

I lose 19-20 in a game I arguably should have won 20-10.  Bugger.  Now I was just one loss away from failing to make Day Two, and I REALLY wanted to make Day Two.

ROUND 5 – Scramble 
Vs Andrew Oehler – Empire – Vader/Morna/Moff Gideon/Feroph

Another bloody Decimator!

At first I thought I’d need this round to be repaired when I saw my opponent's name as I’d already played Andrew in round 3, but that was Alex Oehler and now his brother has the opportunity to take revenge.

Unfortunately for Andrew he fell into almost exactly the same mistake that Alex made against me.  If you recall Alex had rocked his own Scorch to hand me a head start in the third round.  In this game Andrew 3-turned his Morna Kee towards my incoming TIE Fighters but missed out on bumping any of by thiiiiiis much… but did manage to clip the corner of an asteroid by thiiiiiis much instead.  

That was a massive problem for Andrew.  Instead of being double-reinforced with one my TIEs at range 0 and returning fire, Morna takes two damage from the asteroid and is single-reinforced with all my ships at range 1 and unable to fire.

Morna limped away from turn 2 with just 3 hull left, which I swiftly finished off, and Andrew conceded the game.  His chances of making Day Two have been ended by that tiny misjudgement with Morna and I think he just doesn’t want to have it dragged out over the next hour.

WIN 20-0

I accepted Andrew’s concession with a huge sigh of relief – I’d made it to Day Two!  Bouncing around right in the middle with my W-L-W-L-W pattern meant I’d never actually felt any sort of positivity all day, it had always felt like being really under the hammer right from that tight first round game against Florent Barbare.  If I’d strung a couple of back to back wins together maybe my mood would have lifted but from a competitive standpoint this first day of Worlds had been really hard work.

Job done, though.  And now I started to look ahead to a second day.  If I wanted to make Top-8 then I’d need to have a perfect day and go 5-0, and coming off the back of a 3-2 first day that seemed like a long shot (even if you assume 50/50 chance in each game I’ve only got a 3% chance of ending on 5-0).  On the other hand, my round 4 defeat to those blasted Cluster Mines had been extremely narrow, convert that to a win and I’d have been on 4-1 so it wasn’t impossible… it was just that all the better players were ahead of me and the more I won the harder my route would be.

But for that evening I could really just be satisfied that I’d managed to deliver my one true goal coming into these World Championships in qualifying for Day Two.  There were a lot of great players who didn’t make that cut, or who hadn’t even made it through the LCQ the day before.  Even if I crapped out tomorrow I’d be ahead of some great players.  That meant it was time for a celebratory steak and a nice big sleep!

DAY TWO

Ok.  So my first goal was achieved.  I just needed to be perfect.  Back to the tournament I went but this time with no genuine expectations on me - I would just keep playing X-Wing until somebody told me stop, and see where that got me.

Round 6 – Salvage
Vs Chris Patrick – First Order – Midnight/Whirlwind/Hask/Wrath/Malarus

Day two started with a huge test against one of the most recognisable First Order specialists: Chrispy.  Chris was using his signature blend of Cluster Missile wombo-comboness, with Midnight using Targeting Synchroniser and Swarm Tactics to raise Whirlwind up to I6 for a devasting initial Cluster Missile barrage.

But I still felt like this was a list that I was matched up favourably against and my first target was clear: kill Midnight.  Without Midnight’s Swarm Tactics Whirlwind drops to an I3 and I can kill him before he stacks up on focus tokens.  Order of operation: Kill Midnight -> Kill Whirlwind -> Kill whatever is next -> Champagne and medals in the officer’s mess.  All too easy.

Chrispy lined up his Whirlwind block (WW, Midnight, Hask) on my far right flank and the other two ships inside-left.  I deployed initially across my whole right side, then on turn 2 everything converged onto his Whirlwind block and I went for the kill with every gun I had.  I had almost exactly the engagement that I wanted, with my full list jousting just half of Chrispy’s list.

Half of Chrispy’s list blew the absolute shit out of my full list.

When I lost round 2 against Stephen Consoli I’d got the engagement horribly wrong and I still don’t think that’s what happened here.  There was a couple of miscalculations – mainly that I got a bit spooked by Chrispy stealing two objectives with Malarus and Wrath and I decided that Galek had to grab one back instead of focusing for the engagement, while Malarus barrel rolled out of Whirlwind’s bullseye arc.  That sounded clever until it became clear I’d just handed him an obvious secondary target for his Cluster Missiles and Galek died at I6.

Ultimately, though, that mistake with Galek only played into the fact that the dice swung favourably for Chrispy on the initial engagement.  Not completely absurdly, but enough to mean that I lost Galek before he fired and failed to push the 4th damage into Midnight and kill him in return.  And that, pretty much, was that.  I’d swung everything to break Chrispy’s combo and failed, and as Wrath and Malarus pulled in behind my forces I just got eaten alive in a few turns and conceded to cut the misery short for my brave troops.

LOSS 0-20

I came into Day Two needing to be perfect in order to make Top-8 and I’d thrown it away within two turns.  That really stung.  But I’d lost by such a hilariously large margin that I could only shrug as it was well deserved.  Now all that remained was to play out my remaining games just for the hell of it.  I may never get to play in another World Championship so I was going to squeeze every minute I could out the time I had left in the tournament.

Round 7 – Chance Engagement
Vs Carrie (Jedi Autobot) – Resistance – Poe Falcon, Ello, Nien, Finn

If you’d have asked me at the start of the day I would have said that the pressure was already off having made Day Two, but I clearly would have been lying because now that the faint possibility of Top-8 was gone it felt like every lightbulb in the room had suddenly got a little brighter.  The pressure was REALLY off now and I had a very enjoyable joust-off against Carrie, a Chicago local whose World Championships had started two days ago at the LCQ.  Like me, Carrie was determined she was going to play out every damn round of Worlds and she was going nowhere!

I said at the start of my Round One report that I’m used to bullying Resistance lists and unfortunately for Carrie I think I kind of did that here.  IIRC I used Grudge in the centre of the table to threaten the lanes that Poe was about to come in on, and that led to Carrie sending Poe aaaaaaaaaaall the way around the outside of the table from my left flank and through my deployment area before he really got into the fight.  With Poe out of the fight I was able to smash through Ello Asty pretty quickly, and Carrie had even found herself trapped so deep on her own side by my 5-straight opening that she fighting without anybody at Range 2 of the centre objective.

I racked up the points to rapidly build a lead and although it all got more even going once Poe finally joined the fight I was able to coast over the line to 20 as Ember destroyed Finn despite his stack of Focus tokens.

WIN 20-11

Round 8 – Assault
Vs John Wetherspoon – CIS – Jango, Grievous, Durge, Baktoid Prototype

Somehow I’d managed to go through 8 rounds before meeting my first Firespray, but here at last was Daddy Fett.

John split his forces on deployment, with Grievous on my left flank and Jango and Durge on my right.  I decided I was going to go for Grievous so I swept my forces over to his side of the table, leaving Grudge to drop a Chaff cloud in front of Jango and Durge to slow their pursuit.  The Chaff Cloud had a really nice little extra benefit this time – Durge had cloaked on the first turn to get in behind me faster as I’d gone after Grievous, but the Chaff Cloud blocked his forward decloak!  That pushed Durge further away from the fight than ever has he had to decloak even further onto the flank.

I hurled a ton of lasers at Grievous and John had to send the General onto the defensive for the right of the game while I had Ember in hot pursuit.  It took a few turns but Ember finally got his kill, and the Baktoid Prototype was eaten by my TIEs a turn later.  

I’d felt ahead all the time because of board position for our ships, but the scoreboard said we were virtually neck and neck right up to the point where I got Grievous and could open up a lead.  John immediately started to pull that lead back in by killing my own ships but by then I’d gotten to the point where all I needed to do was squat on a couple of objectives to guarantee hitting 20 points and winning the game.

WIN 20-17

And that, in round 8, was the first time I’d managed to string together back-to-back wins at Worlds!

Round 9 – Chance Engagement
Vs Marcel Manzano – First Order – Nightfall, Whirlwind, Malarus, Galek, DT, Scorch

I’ve heard of this guy!  Marcel was bringing another variant of the 6FO list I was playing, but this time with two TIE Whispers.  I knew that this was probably going to be an incredibly tight match against a good player, and so it proved.  It also proved to be a really sloooooow match and we barely finished Turn 4 before time was called, meaning it would all rest on the outcome of Turn 5.

I managed to fake out most of Marcel’s squad on the initial engagement – he’d kind of set up his forces to have 3 mini-jousts across the table, but I swung in to have all my forces come to bear on what he had in the middle, leaving a bunch of his ships pointing at empty space. Grudge then did a stellar job and his Electro-Chaff Cloud was the difference as both Marcel’s heavy guns in the centre, which I was targeting, – DT and Scorch – entered the fight jammed and stressed from coming through the chaff.  

And then the Blazer Bomb that I could merrily drop into the ensuing melee dealt critical points of damage to Marcel’s TIEs and set me up to get vital objective points as everything devolved into a mad knife fight of bumping TIE Fighters and dice been thrown in every direction.  

The game finished 9-6 in my favour.  Because of the nature of our squads we both rolled a ton of dice in this game and the outcome of any one of those dice rolls could have swung the game in either direction.  But with dice luck being even I think this was one of the many games of the weekend where Grudge really earned his corn and was the vital edge I needed.

WIN 9-6

Three wins back to back!  And against a big time player as well!  This was crazy.  I checked the standings for the first time all weekend and found I was sitting in 57th place.  That was a long way away from the possibility of Top-32 and a little extra in prizes and I figured that even if I won the last round I’d be no higher than 38th or so.

Round 10 – Salvage
Vs Steen Jensen – CIS – Jango, Grievous, Durge, Bombardment Drone

Riding high off three wins my final match at Worlds would be almost a straight repeat of my game against John Wetherspoon in round 8.

My strategy had worked well enough first time so I used it again, focusing on General Grievous and using Grudge to delay the approach of Jango and Durge.  It worked again, and this time even more spectacularly than it had done in round 8!

The speed and directness of my assault really caught Steen out, I think.  I again forced Grievous onto the defensive straight away, but this time we were playing Salvage not Assault and Steen didn’t feel like he could spare any actions to collect crates as he was working so hard just to tread water in the combat.  I killed Grievous even more quickly this tim, and the Bombardment Drone followed on the next turn.  With those kills in my pocket, and ahead on crates with Steen not having collected a single one, I was 13-0 ahead and the game was almost certainly over.

Steen was resigned to his fate by this point, but like me he wasn’t going to leave the World Championships without a fight and we battled on to the end.  He picked up a couple of kills to avoid a whitewash as my TIEs just grabbed the crates and ran for the farthest corner of the board like the cowardly First Order dogs they are.

WIN 21-6

That was the end of my World Championships and we’d been among the first games to finish.  I checked the standings and saw I was now 37th, pretty much exactly where I'd expected to be.  Then, as the results from other games came in, my Strength of Schedule tiebreaker got better.  And better.  And better again… I was 26th?  No, wait, I was 25th!?!

I was 25th!

I was 25th at Worlds!!!

Because of the way my results had fallen early on: Win-Loss-Win-Loss all the way, I’d never felt like I was anywhere close to the top end of the tournament.  I’d just put my head down and played the games that were in front of me, especially after suffering that knockout blow so decisively against Chrispy at the very start of Day Two.  I’d never had a hope that I might finish anywhere near where I did.  I was delighted.  25th at Worlds and 3rd highest placed UK player (behind Oliver Pocknell and Dom Flannigan).  I will take that.  

Not bad for a humble Jack!

FILTHY HOBBITSES

And so, I was left with the what-ifs.  I lost two games very heavily but the third defeat, against the double Decimators where I’d lost Commander Malarus so unfortunately to the quadruple Cluster Mines damage… that one now stuck out as the game I needed to have won, and probably should have won.  Win that and I’d have been Top-8.  And then I could have made the final with 6FO just like Niklas God did.  And I could have been World Champion.  I would have been World Champion.  My list was better than Niklas’ list.  Grudge would have been my MVP in the final and I’d have won it easily.  I’d have won it 20-0.  And everyone would have had to bow before me and recognise my greatness, recognise my genius in choosing Grudge and Blazer Bombs!!!

This was my inner Gollum, crawling up onto my shoulder and hissing in my ear.  It ssshould have won itsss tournament.  It ssshould have been champion.  The dice robbed ussssss.

Well, frankly Gollum: you can fuck off.

I wasn’t going to let my inner Gollum spoil this for me.  If I’d won that game against James Johansen I would have been drawn against tougher opponents in every round thereafter.  The chances are I would have eaten another big loss somewhere along the lines just like I did against Chrispy.  Indeed a lot of the players who had been riding higher than me during the tournament were now sitting behind me in the rankings.  

I pushed my Gollum back into his box and closed the lid.  All I needed to know was that 7-3 was a fantastic result and I’d probably been fortunate to submarine my way to that sort of finish on a late charge of wins that I’d never managed to string together while I was still in contention for a Top-8 spot.

I'll tell you what I did notice, though... aside from the two rounds that I lost by a huge margin I was only behind on THREE turns in the other eight games, and for a total of just four points across those three turns.  And I wasn't behind for a single turn in rounds 7-10!

My squad was clearly extremely good, and I was right there rooting for Niklas God and his very similar 6FO list in the final.  Ember deserved the win, she's been such a fantastic ship to add to the lineup and so many people don't really know about her at all.

His lissst would have been better sssstill if he'd use Grudge, my preciousssss...

SWAG

There was so much stuff.  SO MUCH STUFF!

Most of this was participation prizes - playmat, templates, the Phoenix Cell kit, the swanky phoenix tokens... you got all that just for turning up.

The red alt art cards came out to play on Day Two and then the Phoenix damage deck was my Top-32 prize.

I'm not really a swag kind of guy, I tend to give most of it away at some point.  That these commemorate my one trip to Worlds means I feel a little differently about these so maybe I'll hang onto them.  Maybe I'll even make a dreadful Phoenix Cell list to use those cards in!

THANKS

This is a list that will almost certainly be too short.  Thanks to all the Sith Takers and other UK folks that I travelled out with, especially Tim, Liam, Elliot, Steve, Alex, Conor and Dom.  Thanks to the Sith Takers we left at home but who had helped me to prepare along the way, especially Rich, and to the non-Sith Takers who I leaned on for First Order chat, especially Dale.  And thanks to all the people on my little Discord who had put up with me talking FO nonstop for three months, especial Daniel, Nicholas and Greg (who I finally got to put a face to the username with over dinner at Worlds).

Tim and Liam will be talking about their Worlds experience on the Sith Takers Snapshots podcast in the next couple of days so make sure you check that out too.

Thanks to the Kraytcord and everyone there who worked on First Order lists or the Worlds prep in general.  We disagreed on a lot of details but the fact that so many were hot on 6FO kept me confident that what I was finding locally with Ember & Grudge wasn't too far wide of the mark.  I genuinely found the Kraytcord a tremendous help to bounce ideas back and forth, probably the best online community I've been part of for actually helping improve performance.  

Huge thanks to the TO team - Chris, Kris, Tim, Dee, Phil and anyone else I've forgottten - for running the event so smoothly and getting over the few inevitable speed bumps so well.

Thanks to all the people I met for the first time for being really friendly.  It was great to put faces to so many usernames.  Sorry to the ones that I was too socially inept to go up and talk to even when I should have done - you can be quite daunting you know!  Thanks to Mark Myers for telling me not to be a shithead, which is always good advice.

Biggest thanks saved for last to my wife for agreeing to me leaving the country to play with plastic spaceships for a week (she agreed long before she really appreciated what that would mean for her in volunteering to be a single parent).  She's been desperate to get out of the country ever since we locked down for Covid and now had to put up with me jetting off without her.  If I want to do Worlds 2024 I might have to start getting back into her good books straight away and rebuild that line of credit!

And lastly: congratulations to all the Top-8, especially our new World Champion Niklas God!

We had a really diverse Top-8 with almost every faction represented and Bartosz proved that I knew naff all about A-Wings compared to him by missing out so cruelly on being in the final himself.  Rebels almost won Worlds?  Who knew!?!

And commiserations to Chrispy, who charged as hard as he could through the Saturday to finish 9th and was the only player to miss the Top-8 cut on an 8-2 record.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Jank.  I haven't played a single list for as much time as this in the whole time I've played X-Wing and after three months of solid 6FO I think I'm about tired of it.

I love this list and I've enjoyed playing it, but I think it's time to retire 6FO and do something else.  I'm leaving it with a combined record (in tournaments and practice games) of 41-5, which I think is an incredible score.

And one of those losses was only because Tom Reed cheated.  So it doesn't count.

I'm going to slap Fenn Rau onto the table and face-joust people with Fearless for a bit, or Concussion Bomb my own Rush.  I've got three months of bad ideas for squads backed up, after all!