"Many Bothans Died To Bring Us This Information" - A Regionals Metagame Snapshot

I've been compiling results from a number of Regionals since the start of the year, seeing what that could tell me about 'the metagame' and the state of X-Wing at the moment.  I've picked up the results from the online resource Listjuggler for the Top-8 lists at a bunch of Regionals.  This isn't every regional, but I've tried to grab the bigger events, and in particular those from USA and Europe where I know the game is strong and all releases are up to date (sorry, Brazil!).

What you see below, therefore, is a snap shot of the top end of the metagame during the period between TIE Striker & UWings becoming legal and the rest of Wave 10 arriving (Upsilon, Quadjumper, Sabine's TIE).  Because all of this data comes from squads that made Top-8 it's a focused look at what has proven successful, and in particular what has been repeatedly successful.

Overall this is data on 523 ships from 186 squads in 26 Regionals.  (yes, I know 186 divided by 26 is only 7.2 squads per Top-8 - not every regional had all their Top-8 squads filled in)

FACTION BALANCE

At the very highest level of breaking down the lists Scum & Villainy edge the battle of the factions slightly, but overall you have to say this appears to be pretty healthy - far different from the way it looks about a year ago, before the Punishing One expansion really thrust Scum into the limelight.

POPULAR SHIPS

All hail the TIE Defender, most ubiquitous of all ships in the metagame today!

Once again this isn't a result you could possibly have called a year ago, when TIE Defenders were stuck on player's shelves gathering dust at an impressive rate thanks to their multi-angled solar panels   Of course it's all down to one card, really, the /x7 title, and it's not really a surprise to learn that of the 91 TIE Defenders featured in these Top-8 squads 89 of them equipped the /x7 title.

/x7 is crazy good.  I say that in the sense of: "they must have been crazy to make an upgrade this good".

Below TIE Defenders the Jumpmaster 5000 has survived the nerf to Deadeye and simply morphed into Manaroo action economy and Dengar double-taps.  You can't keep a good ship down and the Jumpmaster 5000 is a VERY good ship.  Joining the Jumpmaster in Scum lists are the two Wave 9 Scum releases, the Protectorate Fighter and the Shadow Caster.

Rebels, meanwhile, have run to the safety of their K-Wings.  That's right, their K-Wings.  When you break down the popular ships by Faction, though, what rapidly becomes clear is that Rebel players are still casting around for that 'killer app' ship, especially once you get beyond the K-Wing in first spot.  35% of all Rebel ships were not in the Top 5 choices, while for Imperial and Scum players it was much easier to pick a ship to fly and only 14 and 17%, respectively, selected something for from the norm.

In actual fact over 50% OF ALL IMPERIAL SHIPS were TIE Defenders.    The TIE Defender has basically replaced all other TIE Fighters in all their specialist niches.  Want to play TIE Swarm?  Use Defenders/  Want to play PalpAces?  Use Defenders.  Want to partner your Decimator with something?  Use a Defender.

Did I mention yet that /x7 is crazy good?

"% PROGRESSED"

Let's stop to talk about one of the statistics I've presented in that table above.  The '% Progressed' column is looking at what % of that ship in the Top-8 then won it's first match after the cut and got into the Top-4.  I think it's something that can be really revealing about the ships/pilots/squads that are good enough to beat average players and get you into the cut but then be found out by the stronger players who were also in the Top-8.

There's actually a clear trend behind the big losers in "% Progressed" which I think is very important.  If you look it's the little vulnerable guys like Z-95s and TIE Fighters, and the big hog large ships with low agility - YT-1300, YV-666, Ghost, arguably even the ARC-170 fits this bill.  This is interesting because it shows that it's not just particular ships that are struggling in the cut, but that there's consistent reasons why they're struggling that appear to be common across different ships.  When you get up to the best squads the TIE Fighters and Z-95s can't really trouble the better ships with just two red dice, or are flattened by attacks, while the big hogs that rely on a lot of Hull/Shield to stay alive are losing an attrition race against the big ships that also have more green dice/tokens to prevent damage.

POPULAR PILOTS

The list of popular pilots largely repeats some of the information from the ships side.  If TIE Defenders are highly played then of course Countess Ryad and Colonel Vessery will be played a lot as well.  There are some interesting things we might be able to draw from this extra detail though.

The '% Progressed' difference between Manaroo and Dengar is stark, for instance.  Although Jumpmasters as a whole do ok there's actually a world of difference between the success rate of Manaroo and Dengar, who actually behaves more like the 'hogs' of Bossk or Rey.

Another example: I personally would always have championed Commonwealth Defenders with their Palpatine Shuttle over Triple Defenders, and yet the success rate of Delta Squadron Pilots looked a lot higher than it is for Omicron Group Pilots - that might be something I've been getting wrong (although it might not be correct to assume they're always appearing as the third ship alongside Ryad & Vessery).

Warden Squadron Pilot stands out once again as one of the strongest choices - more on those guys later.

There's a couple of interesting things to note that actually happened just below where this chart cuts off.  The 5th most common Scum ship with the Scum HWK and when Palob Godalhi was on board it progressed 80% of the time but when it was Torkil Mux is progressed 0% of the time.  Similarly although Ryad, Vessery and Delta Squadron TIE Defenders all did very well in progressing there were only 4 copies of Maarek Stele in the Top-8, and none of them won their matches to make it into Top-4!

Oh and Soontir Fel?  Yeah there was no copies of the once-feared Imperial ace, and in fact the only Interceptor pilot to dare show his face was Carnor Jax (3 copies).

POWER CREEP?  POWER LEAP!

Let's cut to the chase.  While the Faction split looked very healthy the split by Wave looks anything but.

It's really hard to deny that power creep is happening when you get something like that - 78% of ALL PILOTS came from Wave 7 or later.  There was just one lonely entrant from Wave 2 (Chewbacca in the Millenium Falcon) and two ships with Wave 3 (two copies of Jan Ors in the HWK)

For transparency I'm making two key assumptions - I'm calling all Lambda Shuttles with Palpatine as effectively being released with the Imperial Raider (Wave 7) and all TIE Defenders with /x7 as effectively being released with Imperial Veterans (Wave 9).

2016 saw the power level of X-Wing rocket through the roof, and quite simply if you're not playing ships that were released in 2016 or the back end of 2015 then you're making life hard for yourself.  Anything dated before that faces and uphill battle to even make it into the Top-8 cut, let along progress further than that to actually win the tournament!

Wave 7 is rescued by Emperor Palpatine, K-Wings and the Hound's Tooth although, as we've seen, the Hound's Tooth and Shuttle are odds-against to progress beyond the Top-8 and you're better off playing more Wave 8 and 9 stuff if possible.

POPULAR UPGRADES

50% of ALL Scum & Villainy ships equipped Attani Mindlink.  50%!  

When you rule out all the two ship lists that don't really benefit enough from Mindlink, and all the generic pilots that don't have an EPT slot available, it adds up to almost every Scum pilot that could reasonably play Attani Mindlink chose to do so.

Attani Mindlink is also crazy good, especially in conjunction with Manaroo.

If you want to do well you will probably want action economy, and Attani Mindlink and Push The Limit are bringing that in spades - by far the two most common Elite Pilot Talents.  And you can see similar weighting towards a few key upgrades across other types as well.

I'm going to get a bit personal opinion here: Push The Limit and Attani Mindlink are terrible for the health and diversity of X-Wing and need to be banned or errataed to the point where their cost is so high people don't use them in most circumstances.  The power of the action economy they drive FAR outweighs the cost (both points and stress) that is incurred.  Look at this table...

Push The Limit and Attani Mindlink are the gatekeepers for how competitive new ships are likely to be.  Do you have the green maneuvers to make use of Push The Limit?  Great, you're probably a good ship.  No?  You're probably bad.  And this does not bode well for the ships we've just got in Wave 10 because none of them look like a natural home for PTL or Attani Mindlink, with the possible exception of the two Quadjumper pilots that have an EPT slot and may be good enough to fit Attani Mindlink on over similar cheap options that are already available.

I'm not saying "all ships that can't use PTL are shit" but the correlation between the ships that regularly and consistently do well and those that don't is a strong one.  There are exceptions (those pesky K-Wings again, for instance) but more ships fit the rule than don't.  Trying to compete with the inherent advantages these ships have drives away a huge range of more diverse ship/upgrade combinations that we would otherwise be seeing on the table a lot more.

POPULAR SQUADS

Paratanni heads the list with the most appearances in Top-8s (17), a very strong win rate to progress to Top-4 (71%), and also winning the most of this selection of Regionals (5).  For those unfamiliar with Paratanni it's a deceptively simple list that maximises the value from Attani Mindlink (see above for my opinions on that).

• Fenn Rau - Attani Mindlink, Concord Dawn Protector, Autothrusters
• Asajj Ventress - Attani Mindlink, Latts Razzi
• Manaroo - Attani Mindlink

Only 8 points of upgrades means you're buying a tremendous amount of ship for your points, and it's all Wave 8 onwards so all that juicy 2016 power creep is baked in as well... in fact only 2pts of Autothrusters are pre-2016!  Paratanni is hugely successful and very fun to play and challenging to play against.  It's also probably the single strongest X-Wing squad ever in the game so far, with no particularly bad matchups that have currently been exposed.  It's got portions of the Rebel Toolbox list (tough ships, stress control) with other traits that are very similar to Palp Aces (Manaroo's focus/target lock passing is equivalent to the Palp Shuttle, Asajj turtles harder than Soontir Fel, Fenn Rau punches like Prockets Darth Vader).  It look innocuous but is actually a monster of efficiency.

Fangaroo is similar but a bit more dicey - it trades out the tanky Asajj Ventress for a second Protectorate Fighter and some more toys on Manaroo.  You can see from its '% Progress' that it's a step behind Paratanni, but still a formidable threat.

The two lists based around TIE Defenders are about as strong as Paratanni in this data sample.  Interestingly this reverses the apparent advantage Triple Defenders had over Commonwealth Defenders when we compared the particular pilots earlier on.  It must be that the shuttle was appearing in some non-Defender lists that weren't doing so well, or that the Delta Squadron Defender was doing well in some lists outside of Triple Defenders.

The list that is missing here due to some minor variations, but still proving very successful as we've seen from the Ships/Pilots tables is the K-Wings so let's finally take a look at them.  I've spoken before at length about just how good Miranda Doni is right now and you see that reflected in her appearance as the #1 most popular Rebel pilot in these Regional Top-8s, but it was the Warden Squadron Pilots who boasted that hugely impressive 91% progression into the Top-4, and they look more like this...

• Warden Squadron Pilot - Cluster Mines, Seismic Charges, Extra Munitions, Advanced SLAM, Chopper
• Warden Squadron Pilot - Cluster Mines, Extra Munitions, Advanced SLAM, Sabine Wren
• Warden Squadron Pilot - Cluster Mines, Seismic Charges, Extra Munitions, Advanced Slam, Intelligence Agent

Bombs, bombs, bombs!  The Warden Squadron lists play X-Wing in a completely different way, eschewing their primary weapons almost entirely to instead SLAM their way around the table dropping Cluster Mines in their wake.

When I discussed Paratanni I made the comparison to Palp Aces, which isn't necessarily a link that I think many players would immediately make and with Warden Squadron I'm going to make a similar tenuous link, this time to the Triple Jumpmaster lists from summer 2016!

If you replace the high damage output from Plasma Torpedoes with the high damage output from Cluster Mines (just a different type of Ordnance) then most of the other pieces kind of fall into place.  Advanced SLAM gives the K-Wings the maneuvering and repositioning that Jumpmasters could have with their big bases, strong dials and Barrel Rolls.  It also gives them some of important action economy Jumpmasters got from R4 Agromech.

Away from the ordnance Jumpasters and K-Wings are both tough ships with 2 dice primary turrets to mop up what the ordnance left behind.  It's a bit of a stretch to say "they're just Triple Jumps again" but I think sitting them side by side helps to frame what Warden Squadron actually is, and that it's not a fluke it's doing so well.

And bombs, right now in this metagame... especially at the top end of tournaments... their time is now.  There are so many tough ships up that rarified atmosphere that the automatic damage of Cluster Mines and Seismic Charges is very attractive.  You don't need to worry about the free evade token of /x7 Defenders, you don't need to worry about all the focus-stacking and Latts Razzi evading of Paratanni... they hit the template they roll the dice, that's all there is to it!  And more than that, when you've got TIE Defenders flying their very predictable straight lines up and down the table, and the huge Shadowcaster bases whizzing about on their big green moves then lining up those Cluster Mine drops is actually pretty easy.

It's great to see K-Wings and bombs doing so well - I said as much when I talked about Miranda - but at the same time it's kind of worrying too.  It's worrying that best answer to all the token-stacking that's going on seems to be to just given up trying to beat it at all and just drop bombs.  Has defensive dice modification gone so far that it's not even worth trying to beat it?  Hopefully not.


TO INFINITY... AND BEYOND!

This is a snapshot of two dozen big tournaments.  It's not every game of X-Wing, it's not even every Regional and it's certainly not what games of X-Wing will be played next weekend, or the weekend after that.  Wave 10 could change all this, or it could change nothing.  Learn what you think you can from it, ignore what you think is misleading or where I've drawn the wrong conclusions.

And bring bombs.  Lots of bombs.

A Gaming Life

I've always been a gamer.

I was never really given much of a chance to be anything else in life.  My Dad had been a founding member of the local Historical Wargames Society 20 years earlier and, as those of you which children of your own will know, the decision to have kids is basically just a long term plan for ensuring you'll always have somebody to play games with.

By 4 or 5 years of age my creche on a Sunday would be in the corner of the church hall where the Wargames Society met to play, and by 6 or 7 I was fully engaged in gaming.  My Dad and I fought across the millenia, pitching ancient Byzantine armies against the Han Chinese in 15mm scale, launching epic charges with Polish winged hussars, fighting skirmishes in the ruins of WWII Europe, right up to duelling out the opening exchanges of WWIII with ultra-modern micro armour as my Soviets would attempt to subdue France.

Each year we would eagerly await our city's annual wargaming convention and one year. in one of the gaming demo tables, somebody showed my ten year old self one of these.

Life would never be the same again.

SPACE WOMBLES

You can measure when somebody was first caught in the event horizon of the Games Workshop financial black hole by the first White Dwarf magazine they bought, and for my brother and me that was White Dwarf 105.  I'm actually proud to look back on 105 as my starting point as it featured the first ever Space Marines army list, rules for Chaos in Blood Bowl, Land Raiders, and introduced the incredible Eldar Harlequins (the full Harlequins army list arrived in 106)!

A lot of Warhammer history began with White Dwarf 105, and not just in the Sutcliffe household.

My brother and I went on to buy pretty much everything Games Workshop put out for the next 10 years or so, good or bad.  Every rulebook, every big box game, and (almost) every army - neither of us liked Squats or Dwarves much.  We basically did the lot, and you can write off pretty much my whole teenage years of gaming to this timeline of following the Warhammer universe.

While we spent most of our time amassing armies to duke it out in Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40k I'd like to give a big shout out to what I think were the three best Games Workshop products, each a big box game of its own:

• Blood Bowl - recently re-released, Blood Bowl is probably Games Workshop's best ever game but also their biggest mistake.  How can it be both?  Because Blood Bowl is such a great game that you don't need to keep buying figures for it.  The box, a team, a star player or two... you're set.  I'm sure that's the reason they kept it out of stores for all those years, because players who are happily playing Blood Bowl are players not collecting another 1,000pts of Imperial Guard hardware.
  
  
• Advanced Heroquest - I've never played Warhammer Quest so I can't attest to whether that recaptured the glory of Advanced Heroquest or not, but I'm going to assume it doesn't and that my rose-tinted glasses remain intact.  Advanced Heroquest was decades ahead of its time, as it's basically Descent/Imperial Assault.  Awesome components, great adventures, hugely customisable if the GM has even an ounce of desire to do so.  It's a shame it's gone.
  
  
• Space Hulk - I always loved Space Hulk's 'Warhammer 40k meets Chess' approach and some of the missions were insanely finely balanced.  Even the very first game that you play, the first mission in the first Space Hulk rulebook, is right on a knife edge for who wins it.  I could never justify springing for the lovely re-release that came out a few years back, because I knew I'd have nobody to play it with.  At the time though, my brother and I loved Space Hulk a ton.

Should I recount to you my dreaded Harlequin army?  The many Blood Bowl seasons we played through, with my glorious Praag Dragon's trapped in a perpetual duel for the title with my best friend's Undead team?  The massed ranks of Chaos I fielded in epic games, or the many daring dungeon crawls in the fantastic (and outrageously forgotten) Advanced Heroquest?

Games Workshop was every Saturday trip to the shops.  It was every Christmas list, every birthday present, every little bit of pocket money scraped together.  

But while I was growing up Games Workshop was expanding and changing rapidly as well.  At first I had been the youngest person in the store, surrounded by beer guts and beards, but by the time I was finished with Games Workshop five or six years later I was more likely to be the oldest.  The last time I played a game in-store at Games Workshop a player on the table next to mine threw a tantrum when his Eldar Farseer was assassinated on the first turn.

It was looking a lot like time to leave.

THE LURE OF CARDBOARD

One day a schoolfriend of mine, who had played Warhammer with us, spent a lunch break showing me a revolutionary new card game.  Before you ask it wasn't Magic: the Gathering, no it was something far far worse...

Let me be entirely clear: Spellfire is garbage of the highest order.

As Magic: the Gathering exploded in popularity ever other games manufacturer wanted to jump onto the CCG bandwagon and Spellfire was the Advanced Dungeon's & Dragons entry.  Random cards varying in rarity, glossy artwork and high production values, whole universes of fan-favourite characters from the AD&D worlds to call on, such as Drizzt, Elminster, or Count Stahl of Drakenloft.  Everything was set for Spellfire to be a massive hit.  

They were missing just one vital ingredient: a game worth a damn.

In most games there is a cost/power balance to be struck.  In X-Wing Han Solo is better than an Outer Rim Smuggler, but he also costs more points.  In Magic the Gathering some creatures were more powerful than others but they were harder to summon into the game - you could lose to a lot of cheap/weak creatures before you big/powerful creature ever saw play.  It makes so much sense even Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh do it!

Spellfire saw this system and thought "let's not bother with that and just make everything cost 0 instead".  So the card that gave you +1 attack was just as easy to play as the card that gave you +8 attack, the only difference being that the card that was +8 was rarer than the card that was +1.

It was pure Pay To Win.  You opened enough packs to only have +4 as your weakest buff, then your friend would buy more packs and get to only +5 being their weakest so they'd beat you.  Then you'd open a bunch more packs.... etc etc.  

Imagine if every TIE Interceptor cost 18pts and the only difference between Alpha Squadron Pilot and Soontir Fel was that Soontir was extremely rare and the Alpha Squadron Pilot was common.  My brother and I went a long, long way down that particular rabbit hole before we saw the light.

Unfortunately the light turned out to be an oncoming truck.  A truck with the Magic: The Gathering logo on the side.

A MAGICAL  UPBRINGING

I'm not going to recount my years with Magic: The Gathering blow-for-blow, don't worry, but it wouldn't be doing the subject any justice not to spend time saying how much it changed me.

The short version is that for my best friend Neil, and I, Magic became an obsession.  At our peak we probably played for up to a dozen hours a day, repeating matchups endlessly to find the best strategies and approaches.  I went away to university and got my Magic education there, hooking into websites like The Dojo and the nascent internet via the unversity's shiny 56k modem.  I learned to cut my decks down from 120 cards, although by the time of my first ever tournament I couldn't quite get it below 70 as I knew I couldn't live without the third Prodigal Sorceror.  I would buy copies of The Duellist and leave them ruined forever with highlighters and frantic text in the margins - card advantage, tempo advantage, Necroptence, Forgotten Orb, Orcish Squatters... I remember each of these articles today as though they were fresh off the printing press.

I breathed in Magic: the Gathering and I breathed out mana symbols as I exhaled.

Neil was the first of us to make it onto the Pro Tour and play Magic on the big tables for serious money, though.  While I was away at university learning the theory of Magic he was putting it all into practice and playing in much bigger tournaments much more regularly.  When my degree ended and I came home we teamed up, smashing our way through the 1998 tournament season of Rath Block constructed tournaments.  We both qualified for the Pro Tour that time, with a friend of ours borrowing my Sligh deck to become the first UK player to win a premier-level Magic tournament.  At Grand Prix Birmingham the world's best players came to play us, and we sent them packing.  Neil and I had made it, and as I prepared to take on the Pro Tour the doors to us becoming the greatest players in the world swung open...

...then slammed shut.  It took a few years for the bomb to fully detonate, but I think making it onto the Pro Tour in the way that I did was the poison pill that killed Magic for me.  I never replicated the dominance that Neil and I had managed through the summer of 1998 and the continual striving for that glory ultimately chewed me up inside.  By almost any measure I had a lot of success in those next two years, both as a player and a deck designer, but by the measures I was judging myself by I was a miserable failure.   Alongside playing success had coming writing success as well and I got a slot writing for Starcitygames.  Thankfully none of my old writing still exists because it would read like the slow descent into self-absorbed mania and ranting self-justification that I'm sure it was.

I walked away in 2001, the UK Nationals that year remaining my last big Magic tournament for the best part of a decade.

In 2006 Magic came back into my life when Richard Hagon decided to set up one of the first Magic podcasts, called Moxradio, with Neil and I joining others as regular panelists.  Moxradio's business plan might have been critically flawed (Rich understood perfectly well how to make a great podcast, but didn't quite grasp just how few people would be willing to pay for one!) but it opened some incredibly important doors while it existed.  Moxradio travelled to Gran Prix Turin to provide podcast coverage shows alongside the established text coverage, and a star was born.

Today Rich is the face of the Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour, and oversees a whole video/text coverage crew at events around the world.  I followed Rich through the doors he kicked down and spent six years travelling to Grand Prix and Pro Tours around the world to provide strategy analysis, player interviews, and my fair share of blatant marketing and PR schilling.  An awful lot of what I wrote was only of temporary interest (if you cared how Player X's performance with Deck Y in 2010 then I'm your guy.  No one cares.) but in and amongst the fluff pieces and drudgery of trying to find as many new ways of saying "he summoned a creature and attacked" there were some great things that I'm very proud of having written.

I occasionally stepped out from behind the coverage desk to compete in events, as well.  Rich, Neil and I travelled to Grand Prix Toronto in 2010 and did far better than we had any right to expect (actually, that's unfair as we had made a conscious decision to become the best players in the world at that one format on that one weekend, and essentially achieved that goal).  When the Grand Prix rolled around to my hometown in 2015 I picked up a deck of 75 cards I'd never seen before, in a format I'd never played before, to finish up at the top end in the cash prizes.  I could still play when I had to, but I didn't the time to dedicate myself to Magic in the sort of depth that I'd need in order to compete.  I'm still waiting for my next game of Magic.

And that was Magic.  Roughly 1995-2015, give or take.  Twenty years (on and off) in which I took the full journey from kitchen table to Pro Tour, and then back again to the kitchen table.

Of the three of us I'm the only one who got out.  Rich found his niche both in front of the camera and back in the producers seat (going so far as to be the only one of us to unofficially appear in South Park, when they did their Magic episode), while Neil was always a better natural player than me and has become one of the most successful UK Magic players of all time, still travelling year-round to Grand Prix and Pro Tours.

It's hard to really express fully what Magic did for Neil and I.  It took two kids from a crummy little town in the UK and gave us the world.  Most of the places we've been, we've been because of Magic.  The friends we've made, most of them we've made through Magic.  The people we are  today, absolutely a large part of that came through all that we did while playing Magic.

OTHER GAMING ACTIVITIES

I didn't just play Magic, though.  My time at university was happy meeting point of my being the last intake year to receive student grants instead of loans, just as games manufacturers around the world went into overdrive trying to replicate Magic's card game success.  I pretty much bought them all - Battlemech, Star Trek, Netrunner, Rage, Shadowfist, Babylon 5, Jyhad, Star Wars, Middle Earth, Dune, Legend of the Five Rings.  It seemed like every IP that was just lying around got picked up, dusted off, and shoved onto a CCG game for me to acquire.  It's probably lucky that Magic got its hooks into me enough that I ultimately left all the others behind or I'd be a penniless hobo by now.

When I quit Magic in 2001 a very unusual game & hobby stepped up to replace it out of leftfield - the WWF Smackdown series of video games!  These games featured a 'Create A Wrestler' (CAW) mode where you could add wrestlers into the game who weren't included to begin with.  Randomly I discovered that I was very good at this, and for a couple of years I ran a website showcasing my designs that other players would copy into their game.  I used to turn on my PC and be bombarded by dozens of IMs from people asking for me to create their favourite wrestler in his new tights he wore at the last show - I nearly maxed out two whole MSN Messenger accounts with the people who wanted my help!  It's mental that this sort of thing even exists, let alone that you can become 'famous' for it, and in part I'm only mentioning it now in the hope that somebody reading this will go "Hey, yeah, I used to play those games too and I totally used your CAWs" to prove it even happened.  

So if you remember the name 'Ceilican' from back then, well, The Ceilican was me!

Random aside from a random aside: the guy who very kindly did all the fiddly programming of 'Ceilican's CAW College' was Mark Turpin, who went on to become Turpster and a leading Warcraft/Hearthstone/gaming youtuber.  We gamers move in small circles.

I fell hard into World of Warcraft too, spending a good five years roaming Azeroth in every spare hour.  Years later my combined love of Magic: The Gathering and World of Warcraft made me the perfect person to go on and work for Upper Deck and Cryptozoic on Magic-style strategy coverage for the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game.  The guy running the World of Warcraft organised play in Europe had previously run Magic: The Gathering and knew both Rich and I through that, so when he scraped together budget for a coverage & promotion team he knew where we were.  

We gamers move in very small circles.

INTO FFG'S ORBIT

I'd never heard of FFG.  I played Magic and I played World of Warcrat, and that was basically it.  Fantasy Flight Games?  Never heard of them.

Another Magic friend of mine, Keith, had heard me wax lyrical many times the original 1995 release of Netrunner and took it upon himself to force me to sit at a table and play the FFG re-release with him.  It was like meeting back up with your college sweetheart and finding that you're both single and wouldn't it be nice to go get a drink or two and maybe catch up on old times....?

Approximately a week later I'd bought every data pack available at the time, and my first Netrunner blog came along very shortly after that.

I plunged into my local playgroup headfirst, bringing the discipline and energy that had pushed Neil and I to success in Magic into a new game that was almost entirely unprepared for that sort dedicated approach.  The local Netrunner guys were great company, and some of them were really good at the game, but I think it's fair to say that none of them quite thought about or approached the game with quite the intensity that I did.  

I pretty rapidly became the local player to beat, then as my first Store Championship season rolled around I set about forming an elite cohort from the best of my local competition and bullying them all into playing the best decks as well they could.  Stronger together, we all made each other better which is the objective of forming a team.  Between us we took down the majority of the tournaments we played in, at least within our part of the UK.  

But the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and I was burning out fast.  My first Netrunner blog was in September 2013 and just six months later my whirlwind tour of Netrunner was coming to an end, with my April 2014 blog entry seeing me signing off out of the game.  I'd accomplished a lot in that time, both as a player and a strategy writer, but I'd simply had enough.  

I still remember the tournament that finished me - a Store Championship - that I made the cut in but ultimately didn't win because I'd just stopped caring about whether I won or not.  I'm somebody who looks through the surface features for deeper trends and patterns, and in Netrunner I saw what I considered fundamental design errors that meant games became very repetitive.  Once I'd seen the pattern I couldn't unsee it - I wasn't engaged by Netrunner any more, I was bored by it. 

In May 2015 I was back, though.  I'd never actually gotten around to selling my Netrunner cards and when I joined a local games club who occasionally played Netrunner I was bitten by the bug again.  Ultimately it proved short-lived, though, and within a few months I did finally sell all of my Netrunner cards.  I realised I wasn't actually enjoying playing Netrunner as much as I was writing about it, and once I'd had a couple of months to explore the new cards that had come out in my absence I was back to being just as bored as I had been first time around.

This time around I finally sold my Netrunner cards and bought into the new A Game of Thrones LCG.  Then shortly after that finally got released (and I mean finally - man did they botch the launch of that game) I sold those cards as well and bought...

...X-Wing!  All those years of looking longingly at the Millenium Falcon expansion pack.  All the times I'd managed to convince myself not to buy it even though I didn't play the game, just for the model.  All the decades of cardboard replacing miniatures, of shuffling replacing dice.  I finally gave in and bought a friend's collection that he wasn't using.  To reuse the meme, mistakes were made.  Rapidly and expensively.

It was Star Wars.  It was spacial awareness and dice probability.  It was mindgames with your maneuver dial.  It was painting miniatures again (which somehow I'd got much better at in 20 years of not practicing).  It was something totally new, but as I crossed back over into miniatures gaming and found myself surrounded by players who had also left Games Workshop behind (just, in most cases, 20 years after I had done so) it was also something quite familiar.

AND NOW...

You know the rest.

Everything has come around full circle.  I'd begun by playing my father's wargames with him, and now thirty-odd years later we're back doing the same thing with the odd game of X-Wing - he loves the system and keeps threatening to come along to one of the local tournaments with me.  Maybe in a few years my kids will share the same memories of gaming with me that I have of playing with my own dad -  the decision to have kids being just a long term plan for ensuring you'll always have somebody to play games with, after all.  

Maybe they'll not be interested in gaming at all.  Maybe I'll disown them.

I've always been a gamer.  I think I always will be.

"Stay in Formation!" - When Thane met Biggs

Captain's Log - Stardate <Insert Random Numbers Here>

Our ongoing mission to find new and more interesting ways of enjoying playing X-Wing has led us back to the Heroes of the Resistance expansion for some new upgrades, and a rendezvous with an old friend: the Lothal Rebel.

The idea of pairing the Ghost with Biggs is about as old as the Ghost itself as replacing the Ghost's 0 Agility with the opponent having to shoot at Biggs instead is a pretty obvious synergy.  The only things I've really changed here is to integrate Rey crew onto the Ghost, which I think is a very powerful addition to this build.  During 2016 we often saw Dash/Ghost as a pairing and with 'Super Dash' coming in at 58 points it was just about what the best 42pt build was for the Ghost, which usually came down to deciding to spend the last 2pts on either Han Solo crew or Chopper as your pilot, with neither being a slamdunk superstar in the role.

• Lothal Rebel - Fire Control System / Hera Syndulla / Rey / Autoblaster Turret / Tactical Jammer (43pts)

• Biggs Darklighter - R4-D6 / Integrated Astromech (26pts)

Rey crew is your slamdunk superstar on the Ghost.  After spending a couple of early turns stacking Focus tokens onto the Ghost you've now got a huge gun that can flip about pulling red moves every turn (if you have to) while fully modifying your dice thanks to Fire Control System and Rey.

So far, though, there's nothing particularly special here.  Let's add the secret ingredient...

• Thane Kyrell - Jyn Erso / M9-G8 / Alliance Overhaul (31pts)

Thane Kyrell sits in this formation and supports the whole list with fantastic action economy - I usually hate statements like "Imperial Biggs" etc, but in this case I'm going to go ahead and say that in this list Thane Kyrell is "Rebel Manaroo". 

Sitting your ARC-170 in close formation with Biggs and the Ghost you can guarantee that your opponent is going to have to shoot at Biggs, thus guarantee triggering your free action with Thane Kyrell.  It's like a Push The Limit you didn't have to pay for.  With Jyn Erso onboard the ARC-170 your extra action could be to throw Biggs another 3 Focus tokens, or to set a target lock and use M9-G8 to start nerfing your opponents attacks.  

Alternatively, if the Ghost is running stressed and has managed to run down all the Focus tokens it had from Rey then Thane can top it back up.  Basically, there's always something good to do with Thane's free action that supports the rest of your squad in their key objectives - avoiding damage and dealing damage.  And the payoff if it all goes to plan, with Biggs nestled in behind the Ghost's Tactical Jammer at Range 3 of enemy fire?  

You've got a Biggs with FOUR green dice and as many as FOUR Focus tokens!

M9-G8

Let's take a quick moment to talk about M9-G8, who might be a bit of a sleeper hit astromech.  While he can target lock friendly ships to help you attack I think most of the time it's best used to reroll incoming damage, especially in a list trying to keep Biggs alive!  The key rule you need to know is that as the defending player you will reroll incoming red dice before your opponent does any of his modification (target locks, focus etc) and that as a dice can only be rerolled once whatever you do with your reroll cannot then be target locked back up to a hit.  

When your opponent has Focus the maths of M9-G8 are not particularly compelling as you've only a 25% chance of the rerolled dice coming up a blank that they can't turn into a hit.  When your opponent doesn't have Focus the maths get a bit better, though, and 50% of the time he's worth an extra point of damage you don't have to deal with.  Even in cases where they do Focus a rerolled dice back into a hit, though, this list is pumping out quite a lot of damage so removing a Focus from their defence dice might be just as useful in the long run.

M9-G8 works pretty well in this list but I think it doesn't really showcases his full potential.  I've got another list that does that, using Hotshot Co-Pilot Han Solo to strip Focus away from attackers then Shara Bey's ability to assign two Target Locks to double M9-G8's effectiveness.  It's also worth noting that M9-G8 does not have a range limitation on his ability once the target lock has been assigned, and as we know from cards like Manaroo and Emperor Palpatine that can be a great benefit.  

M9-G8 could be an astromech to keep an eye on over the next few waves...

Kanan Jarrus vs Thane Kyrell

If you compare/contrast this to some of the more common Ghost/Biggs lists, usually with Kanan Jarrus in the Ghost and a docked attack shuttle, I think it's a good way to evaluate the strengths & weaknesses of the list.  In raw numerical terms this list is better at keeping Biggs alive as giving Biggs enough Focus tokens for all incoming attacks is better than reducing some incoming attacks by one red dice, especially if you can position him to be rolling four green dice each time (and don't forget M9-G8 is there to help as well!).  It's also got more raw damage output as you've got the ARC-170 on the table instead of a docked Phantom.

That's not really the whole story though.

The key difference between the two lists is how the Ghost will fly, as they have pretty much opposite approaches.  Typically those Kanan Jarrus builds will spend more points on an expensive Twin Laser Turret and try to play keep-away with the opponent, while the Lothal Rebel is much more interested in heading towards the opponent and using his big front gun.  The Kanan build isn't just trying to use a turret it's also usually trying very hard not to make red maneuvers if it doesn't have to, because it needs to have its actions available to Focus up.  This Lothal Rebel is the opposite in that you've spent a bunch of upgrade slots in maximising your firepower while performing red maneuvers!

This has a big implication for Biggs because he simply can't keep up with the Ghost when it pulls that big 5 K-Turn - especially if he was hiding behind the Ghost to begin with!  

Rather than trying to shepherd Biggs for as long as possible with Kanan I find there's usually a natural point where the Lothal Rebel 'detaches' and leaves Biggs to fend for himself (or at least, to fend with support only from Thane Kyrell and Jyn Erso).

The Thane/Biggs axis in action!

This doesn't necessarily mean Biggs is thrown to the wolves when the Ghost leaves, but it's true that this list is at least as interested in removing opposing ships from the table as it is in protecting Biggs from all possible harm.  The photo above is a really good example of this, where I was playing the list against Paratanni.  

Right before this round of shooting the Ghost had k-turned away to leave Biggs and Thane surrounded by enemies.  All three Scum ships opened fire on Biggs but as Thane Kyrell was able to donate three Focus with Jyn tokens (don't forget Thane uses both front & rear arcs for Jyn Erso!) it meant that Biggs only lost one shield!  My combined fire removed Fenn Rau in return and I went on to wrap the rest of the list up with the Lothal Rebel chasing Manaroo down in endgame.

Turn to the Dark(lighter) Side

I've really enjoyed the games I played with this list so far.  I think it has the action economy and raw firepower to win games but it also has some neat interactions within the squad and really requires good flying to keep your ships working together nicely.  Judging when and how to break the formation up is another challenge.  You want to frustrate your opponent with Biggs for as long as possible but there's going to be a point where the obvious 'keep the team together' move will just see your opponent take advantage of how restrictive your formation is, and that's the point to make the unexpected step and break the formation up to go onto the offensive.

One of the neat things about the list is how resistant it is to bumping, which is especially useful as you're trying to run in formation where one unlucky bump might well concertina through your whole team.  Thanks to Rey, M9-G8 and Thane Kyrell not all your dice modification is dependent on actions, though - the Ghost can still draw down a Focus token, M9-G8 can still frustrate attacking dice and Thane can still use Jyn Erso to throw Focus tokens to Biggs after an opponent has fired.

That the power and action economy doesn't come so easily as it does in other lists makes it more challenging and interesting to fly (IMHO), although also obviously limits just how strong the list is.  On a good day, flown well, I think than can hold its own against the top lists.  But should anything go wrong then the way that your ships support each other can quickly become a weak point to exploit.

I think that's how X-Wing should be, though, so I'm happy to keep plugging away with this and refining my formation flying as I go.  I'll win some, I'll lose some (and lose some more than if I was playing Commonwealth Defenders, no doubt), but hopefully I'll continue enjoying playing the game as I do so.