X Wing Musings

Having established last time that all factions seem to be relatively equally placed in this Brave New World, there were 2 big events worldwide over the weekend: the Cornish Nationals and the Californian Open. Great timing for someone just starting a blog, as it gives real content to analyse!

Starting with the Cornish Nationals, 22 players attended in Truro which is pretty decent. There was no stream to watch, but just looking at the lists, something jumps out – Scum and Resistance are both pretty popular! 5 lists from each faction and (spoiler warning) 5 of these 10 made the top cut. FO and Republic were also well represented (4 and 3 respectively), Rebels and Empire were there (both 2 players) but CIS was on its lonesome with a single player representing (Sam Cooper).

Just looking at some of the lists, it seems that size doesn’t matter… there’s no clear pattern to effective list size! 3 ship lists are showing strong again, with four showing up to play and two of these making top cut. On the flip of this, there are a few volume lists – two Republic weenie swarm lists and one Resistance list all with 6 ships (and again, two making the cut). Considering the rest of the field (except one bold CIS player with a 5 ship list) flew 4 ship lists, it’s interesting that there’s no clear trend. This is pretty annoying because I was all set to start shouting the 3 ship lists are back in a big way, but it’s not as simple… statistically, the top cut contained 4.25 ships… which I guess is less than the 4.5 ships that were seen before the points change, but isn’t conclusive. It’s probably worth mentioning that Chris Burnett won with a 3 ship Resistance list (Rey, Poe, Vinnie), which is in itself impressive (well done Chris!), so Resistance chalk up their first scalp of the weekend.

On to the Californian Open, where 23 players attended. There was a stream (thanks to 312 Squadron) and it was good to see what was going on (some games were extremely close and great viewing!). It was a very different story to the Cornish event… 6 Republic lists, 5 Scum, 4 Resistance, 4 Imperial, 2 Rebel, and 1 each for FO and CIS. So again, Scum is very popular and CIS is not…

Size wise, there was pretty much a full spread of lists, including one 7 and one 8 ship squad. Average ship count for the event was 4.78 (so going in the opposite direction). One point of interest was that only 2 players took large based ships at all (in both cases their respective lists had both a Jumpmaster and a YV-666)… one made the cut, the other came dead last.

In the top cut, 4 players were Republic, 3 were Scum and 1 was Resistance. All except 2 were 4 ship lists. Wouldn’t you know it, Resistance won (with a 5 ship list) in what turned out to be a gripping final (well done Mobius!).

Two big events… both won by Resistance! So does this mean they are the new hotness???

Well… no. What was evident from the games I saw over the weekend was that most of the games were very close (at least to a point) – there wasn’t anything so overpowered it was broken. Resistance, though, do have a few, reasonably priced, strong set pieces:

10 points gets you Kaz or Finn – both very strong and now with enough loadout to make them useful. 10 points also gets you L’ulo L’ampar or Seftin Vanik in A-wings, with enough loadout to be dangerous. Whilst not the strongest A-wings, they are both I5 and good to go. 10 ALSO gets you a Aftab Akbar or C’ai Threnalli in the Wartime Y-wings (another new feature of the game is that the Resistance Y-wing now comes in 2 flavours – cheap, flimsy Y-wings or more expensive Wartime Y-Wings with the Wartime Loadout baked in). This is all before you start looking at Xwings, of which there are a few… So 10 is the magic number.

10 points is the new 4 points. If you can find a list with a bunch of decent 10 pointers, you have a shot, and this is (nearly) what Mobius did with his list (Finn, Kaz, L’ulo, Zizi Tlo and Greer Sonnel in an A-wing heavy list!). It seems, as well, like every faction has at least a couple of decent 10 point ships:

• FO has Captain Malarus or Captian Phasma
• Republic has “Captain Obvious” Ric Ole, Hound in the LAAT, Jag in the Arc or Aksoka in the Aethersprite (although, as mentioned before, they have a huge number of very cheap Z95s and Torrents to pad out any list!).
• Empire has Lieutenant Sai, plus loads of very decent TIE Interceptors and TIE LNs.
• Scum has Dalen Oberon in the Starvipers or Viktor Hel in the Khiraxz (both very underutilised over the last few seasons).
• CIS has Volen Das and Wat Tambor / Captain Sear
• Rebels have… well… a mixed bag! Jake Farrell (SSP), Arvel Crynyd (BOE – AKA “Captain Suicide”), Keo Venzee in A-wings and Dutch Vander / Hol Okand / “Pops Krail” (BOY versions) in Y-wings.

Of course, if you flex up to 11 or 12 points, the world is your oyster – every faction has some top tier talent around this point. So really, it’s about how many solid shooters you feel comfortable about squeezing in.

This argument does fall over when you look at what Chris flew at the Cornish Nationals – 3 chunky ships. However, when you think about it, all 3 of those ships (Rey! Poe! Vinnie!) hit very hard and don’t die easily – you have to commit to taking one off the board before moving on, and with nearly 30 hull and a lot of defensive mods, they aren’t going down easy!

So for now, we just have to concede that Resistance are stealing the march on things, but there’s no new secret sauce just yet. There’s still plenty to think about and things to try.

Next time… Strategy! How the new paradigm could change the way you play…