The intro…
Hello there! Welcome to this week’s blog!
There’s a few things to cover off in the intro this week so let’s get to it!
First up – the Newport tournament!
Yes, our official XWA Squad Championship event is happening THIS COMING SATURDAY!! WOOOOOO!!!!
We still have space so if you’re free and fancy a day of pew pew and fun with us then get on over to the Facebook event page and get your name down for a ticket! If you don’t to Facebook then drop me a line directly and I’ll sort it out for you!
It promises to be a great day in our new venue with plenty of parking, lovely light space, food close by and easy to get to. What more can you ask for!!
On the subject of buying tickets, we are now officially just 2 months away from the VERY FIRST XWA System Open event – the Welsh Open!
On the XWA side of things we have made significant steps this past week for finalising the prize kits and are close to being able to release that information. What does this mean for you? Well, I can promise some pretty amazing XWA themed prizes from participation right up to the winner but we will also have a bunch of Welsh Open exclusive items AND our famous bounty table packed full of goodies you can win!
You can get your ticket from Firestorm Games’ Battlefields website which will include the price of lunch on both days of the event!
Mark and I can’t wait to welcome you to Cardiff for an awesome weekend of X-Wing!
Before I wrap up I will mention one Squad Championship that I know of that happened this past weekend (although there may have been more!).
It happened at Neutral Ground in Plymouth with 12 players attending. Congratulations to Chris Burnett who went the whole day undefeated through 4 rounds of swiss and a top 4 cut to take the win!
Here’s the Longshanks link if you’re interested in looking at results or lists!
Ok, I think that’s all for now, let’s get into it!
The main bit(s)…
So this week is a bit of a mix of topics. I have played a few games but don’t have the pics or info for a deep dive on any of them
First up, my in person games.
I’m still in prep mode for the local tournament we’re holding in Newport. I can’t make use of the round 1 bye (that the winner gets) at the Welsh Open BUT I could use it elsewhere OR I can pass it on but keep hold of the lovely coin that the winner also gets.
In other words, while I’m not going super try-hard, I do still want to make a good fist of it.
I’m continuing with the Scum list I’ve been flying recently which is mostly the new Standard Loadout cards:
Han Solo (AaD) – Customized YT-1300 Light Freighter (6)
Chewbacca (AaD) (0)
L3-37 (AaD) (0)
Tobias Beckett (AaD) (0)
Lando’s Millennium Falcon (AaD) (0)
Ship Cost: 6 Loadout: (0) Half Points: 3 Damage Threshold: 6
Fenn Rau (AaD) – Fang Fighter (6)
Fearless (0)
Adaptable Power Systems (AaD) (0)
Beskar Reinforced Plating (0)
Ship Cost: 6 Loadout: (0) Half Points: 3 Damage Threshold: 2
Dengar (AaD) – JumpMaster 5000 (6)
R2-G8 (AaD) (0)
Synchronized Handling (AaD) (0)
Starboard Thrusters (AaD) (0)
Punishing One (0)
Ship Cost: 6 Loadout: (0) Half Points: 3 Damage Threshold: 4
Mining Guild Surveyor – Modified TIE/ln Fighter (2)
Ship Cost: 2 Loadout: (0/0) Half Points: 1 Damage Threshold: 1
Total: 20
Four cards (well, I’m using Infinite Arenas cards but, you know what I mean) with a bunch of triggers that can (and sometimes even do!) hit hard.
I have been missing some triggers – L3-37 being the main culprit – but on the whole I feel like I’m hitting a bit of a stride with it.
I’ve been working on my turn 0 and figuring out what Han and Dengar want (and conversely, what they DON’T want) and working out how to get that as both first and second player.
Fenn’s a fairly simple beast, point him at something and kill it, but the nuance is in the range control. The extra health over the 5 point version feels quite significant (as well as the added Beskar, when I remember it…) but getting him in close to something to get that 5 dice shot in AND trigger Concordia is still something I’m not always getting.
And then my TIE fighter. The very epitome of variance. Will he live? Will he die? Who can tell?!
In the two games I played last week, he spent the entirety of one of them on 2 health following the initial engagement, scored a good amount of points and drew a lot of fire. In the second? Dead from the first shot.
I did lose the second game but I can’t place the blame at the poor little Mining Guild Surveyor’s feet. My terrible turn 0 was pounced on by Josh who forced my ships into a bump chain with just a simple unexpected boost from Cad Bane.
Claerly in this game I failed to take advantage of the big empty space to my right. Quite the fail there.
I also misjudged how far a 3 bank, 3 bank SLAM was going to take me and should have done the 3 hard SLAM instead. Han dodged being shot by Old Teroch but couldn’t avoid going off the board the following turn to give away 6 points. I mean, he was on 1 or 2 health at that point and Fenn was chasing him down but still, I could have made Josh work for it a bit more!
After a game riddled with mistakes I lost 16 – 20 which, if I can learn from and avoid those mistakes in future, isn’t an insurmountable deficit and worth the short term pain.
And then my online game. I’m still playing in the Tauntaun team tournament where we use drafted pilots in mixed faction lists (check out this post if you missed it and want to know more!).
We narrowly lost in round 1, going down 2-3 out of the 5 games. I’d been beaten quite soundly in the game and wasn’t especially looking forward to what could happen to me in the next game.
Here’s my list:
Han Solo (AaD) – Customized YT-1300 Light Freighter (6)
Chewbacca (AaD) (0)
L3-37 (AaD) (0)
Tobias Beckett (AaD) (0)
Lando’s Millennium Falcon (AaD) (0)
Ship Cost: 6 Loadout: (0) Half Points: 3 Damage Threshold: 6
Bodhi Rook – UT-60D U-wing (4)
Fire-Control System (2)
Hera Syndulla (4)
Pivot Wing (0)
Ship Cost: 4 Loadout: (6/6) Half Points: 2 Damage Threshold: 4
Derek Klivian – RZ-1 A-wing (3)
Lone Wolf (3)
Proton Rockets (6)
Ship Cost: 3 Loadout: (9/9) Half Points: 1 Damage Threshold: 2
Dash Rendar (YLF) – YT-2400 Light Freighter (7)
Expert Handling (2)
Magva Yarro (5)
Overtuned Modulators (3)
Ablative Plating (2)
Outrider (0)
Ship Cost: 7 Loadout: (12/12) Half Points: 3 Damage Threshold: 5
Total: 20
That next game was to be against Jack Johnson of Steel City Squadron in Sheffield. Jack is a VERY good player (representing England in last year’s XTC among other achievements) and had a couple of very scary ships in his list:
Poe Dameron (EoD) – T-70 X-wing (6)
Heroic (0)
BB-8 (EoD) (0)
Primed Overdrive Thrusters (EoD) (0)
Black One (EoD) (0)
Ship Cost: 6 Loadout: (0) Half Points: 3 Damage Threshold: 3
Kylo Ren – TIE/vn Silencer (6)
Brilliant Evasion (2)
Malice (4)
Sensor Scramblers (1)
Ship Cost: 6 Loadout: (7/8) Half Points: 3 Damage Threshold: 3
Aayla Secura – Eta-2 Actis (4)
Brilliant Evasion (2)
Compassion (1)
Predator (3)
Ship Cost: 4 Loadout: (6/6) Half Points: 2 Damage Threshold: 1
Seventh Sister – TIE Advanced v1 (4)
Brilliant Evasion (2)
Malice (4)
Fire-Control System (2)
Ship Cost: 4 Loadout: (8/9) Half Points: 2 Damage Threshold: 2
Total: 20
I had big chunky ships while Jack has mostly 3 agility ships and Poe who can potentially be wherever he wants. I had a feeling that variance was going to play a big part. I was right.
I don’t have any pics of this game sadly but there’s some pretty familiar storylines from my first game.
My ships just couldn’t reliable damage Jack’s ships.
Dash was single modded at best as Jack focused on Bodhi and Han. Thankfully Jack hadn’t yet mastered how to fly Poe and managed to self bump a couple of times, allowing me to chip some damage.
After a pretty intense early few rounds where I was bleeding damage and Jack’s green dice held up well enough to keep me from inflicting the same to him, Dash managed to one-shot Aayla with natural hits and crits out of hand.
It was too little too late though as I went in to the final turn needing to achieve far more than Jack to hit my win condition.
I needed Poe to die and Han to live.
Poe was on 1 health and facing a rock so I knew he wouldn’t get a shot. I opted to bank in with Han rather than run and while it did get me a kill on Poe, Kylo (who was also on 1 health) managed to finish Han from range.
Coupled with Kylo claiming the middle objective as a last second choice, Jack took the game 16 – 23.
Still, it was a good, fun game and I felt like I was much more familiar with the list and had a much better idea of waht I was trying to do with it than I had in the first game.
Thankfully my team mates bailed me out and, following a REALLY tight match between Chris Black and Levi Schadt, we took the win 3 – 2! Wooo!
After round 2 we now have a (very brief) opportunity to change our lists and while I felt like I initially wanted to (because I think that this Dash isn’t as good as the old Dash and he hasn’t been pulling his weight), I think that I will stick with it.
Being a team tournament there’s often the added layer of the ‘game with a game’ of pairings. The captain (not me this time!) needs to try and look at where the achievable wins are and make pairings accordingly to have the best chance of getting the right results.
It doesn’t always work that way of course and while, on paper, I felt that the first game should maybe have been easier for my list than the second, the opposite was true (although I lost both, of course!).
It’s been really interesting and fun and I’m looking forward to whatever the next round brings!
Now, this past weekend the new venue that we play at in Newport held their official opening event.
Some of the people known to the owners were invited to come and demo games so that people could see what goes on and if there’s any new games they fancy playing.
As such, I headed down with some REALLY basic/themey lists and a case full of tokens!
In the end I played 2 pretty full games, going through turn phases , working our way up to looking at pilot abilities and upgrades.
Will anything come of it? Who knows. One of the guys is a regular with the store (they moved from another location) and loves Star Wars. The other is a young lad who already owns the core set. Whatever happens, it’s great to have a nice space to play in and people interested in the game.
The conclusion…
A bit of an odd one this week with so much going on! I guess my list/strategy conclusions were made earlier so there’s not too much to talk about here!
Next week’s blog is going to be later than normal since it’s the Newport event this weekend and Monday is a public holiday in the UK so it’ll be family time for me.
Thanks for ready and I’ll catch you next time!
The outro…
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