A Whole New World

It’s finally here, and a large portion of us have probably played in our first X-Wing 2.0 events by now. If what I experienced this weekend is anything to go by people are in general very happy with where the game is at, and the potential for where it can go. This weekend has seen my first two events of the new game, firstly at Ibuywargames, the store where I started playing, and secondly at Firestorm Cards. So a double bill weekend to start 2.0 off. Perfect.

There’s only ever going to be one list that I was going to be playing around with this weekend:

Would be a nice touch if the Virago Title updated Guri’s stat line with that extra shield.

I’m also much hyped to be using the Viper that Kei Taniguchi sent me out of the blue a few weeks ago. I could have used her at Nationals but the note very clearly said she was a 2.0 upgrade, so a 2.0 upgrade she was to me. I even modded my case (read: took a pair of scissors to some foam) to make my 2.0 case what it needs to be! Combined with all the other stuff I have acquired lately I am feeling quite strong in the gamer bling department at the moment!

Everything I need in one tidy place. Between Feldherr, Cog’o’Two, and Ulttimate Guard at least getting around tournaments is going to be easy enough, winning them certainly won’t be.

We now have bigger cards and moving stuff between tables doesn’t have some of the obvious solutions we used to use. More importantly they take up a lot more space. At Ibuy I came up with my solution to this after opening the update pack to the million dial clips. As I am going to use plastic dial covers, due to being very much not a fan of the new dial design, these are all spare to me. So here is how I am used a few of them. (sleeves used are from ultimate guard)

 

After 2 whole weeks without an X-Wing event to go to it is nice to get back to playing! The crowd is unsurprisingly local with so many launch events going on at the same time. I’m glad that proprietor, Ian Simpkins, has elected to let this be an “Extended (I guess that is the correct term going forward) Event” which means that we can all use anything and everything we want, which is good as it means the field is somewhat more diverse than Boba Fenn vs Tie Swarms.

There are some top players here wanting to get their 2.0 on. Regardless of how different the game is now, the fundamentals of being good at moving ships and anticipating your opponents moves with their ships are still key skills! Throw in a bunch of the resident Zombie Squadron crowd, a few fair 186th and a lot of other good players and you have quite the event ahead. I guess the best way to find out if Boba Guri is as good as many people have said it could be in 2.0 is to play it against people who know what they’re doing!

 

Around the room there are lots of different things on show, and it’s too early to really consider what the “meta” is going to be, but Imperials are looking popular. I don’t think it will take long for certain lists to find their place at the top of the pile but right now it’s a level playing field where no one really knows what’s good. Lot’s of theories and ideas but no actual evidence yet.

Game 1 against Steve Foreman from Zombie Squadron, both the Tubes, an Ion Turret Y-Wing and a Z-95, 3 lots of munitions and a lot of ship to chew through. I had to play this cagily, going straight into that many guns would just hurt. Chipping away damage at range the key turn saw Boba drop the X-Wing and Guri finish the U-Wing. I lost half on both ships, but as time was called there was only half a Z-95 facing my ships. I’d seen enough of my list to know I was going to enjoy the day, but also enough to know that playing against lists with double your ships and 10 more health is going to make for some interesting matches!

My Second game was against Andrew Pattison, running 4 Z-95s, Drea and Sirisu, Andrew uncharacteristically messed up his opening badly, and Boba got stuck in. A tokenless Sirisu took 4 hits from Boba at range one, then 2 from Guri (who was out of arc), and proceeded to lose a shield. I rolled my eyes as this defining moment of the game flipped the match up dramatically in Andrews favour. It was a fantastic match though, despite going on to narrowly lose it and a real learning curve. If 4 ships is hard work, 6 with attacking and defensive mods in-built is even worse! But the game definitely wasn’t unwinnable and when Guri dropped at the end Andrew breathed a sigh of relief.

And so to game 3 with Mr Jesper Winstrom (the pilot formerly known as Hills) with 4-Lom, Palob and Fenn. This was by far the hardest game of the day, but again did not feel un-winnable despite being the heaviest loss I suffered during the day. 4-Lom is a monster, and as Jesper and I chatted after the game we both agreed that he, with 0-0-0 and advanced sensors  and the mist hunter title may be a touch under costed. At 3 points 0-0-0 feels stupendously strong and if your search for scum crew doesn’t at least start with him as your default option then you might want to have a rethink! He’s incredible. I got half of 4-Lom, put one on Fenn, got rid of the shields from the crow but the strain of Boba being perma-stressed was too much to come back from.

The fourth game and my third fellow 186th in a row, Mr Janus Avivson running a naked Fenn Rau, and two bounty hunters. The target was obvious, kill Fenn. Fortunately in the early game I was able to land a Stunned Pilot on him which meant Janus had to be really careful going through the rocks with Mandalore’s Finest. Guri tucked in behind him and from there Fenn ran out of options. Meanwhile Boba, with the aid of Han Crew and Perceptive co-pilot was able to tank enough of the returning fire from the two lesser Firesprays to swing the fight in his favour. But bloomin’ hell, that was hard going. Proof that one Firespray can be better than two.

Which took me to my final game of the day, 2-2 and hoping for a positive result from the first 2.0 tournament. This was probably the game I had wanted most all day, because a Guri off is always great fun. Ben Barber running Fenn (who I am quite scared of), Palob (who I am developing an intense dislike of after the game with Jesper) and Guri (who I know can swing games in her favour with surprising regularity) promised to make for quite the game.

The Opening saw Boba do some bashing of Palob while trying to make Fenn’s life hard and the Guris went for each other. I was able to get my Guri behind his, which put the writing on the wall for Ben’s cyborg. Palob raced across the board to help but it was too late and in doing so Boba was able to shoot down the HWK, leaving Fenn vs both my ships. One on one I think Fenn could probably take either of them, but the two together while dealing with Damaged Engines, meant that it was only a matter of time before the inevitable demise of Skull Leader.

Top of the 3-2s, and 5th out of a tough field of 20 was a really pleasing start to the 2.0 journey. I previously thought 2 ship lists are going to have a hard time in 2.0 and today only confirmed my opinion. Reviewing the list there is only one change to try at the moment. With action economy at such a premium I rarely found myself able to take a lock with Guri to trigger the Fire Control System. Taking into account that her primary strength is her mobility, I’m going to swap that out for a collision detector and see how she goes with that. I’ve also dropped the Seismic Bombs on Boba, I didn’t really use them at ibuy.

Day two of the weekend is a trip to Basingstoke, home to a community that has really developed in the last 12 months. The representatives of Firestorm Squadron have done really well in the last 12 months, making cuts at Nationals (Ed Gold) Euros (Mark Feldschreiber) and doing consistently well at other events (Phil Pond, Steve Burton, Dom Flannigan, Nic Harris), and the venue now regularly attracts a plethora of good players for it’s events. A few others from Saturday’s event have also embraced the double header weekend, and there were a total of 18 people playing, another healthy turn out.

Dan Flewitt, the TO, has also elected for an Extended Format Event. I have to applaud him and store owner Jimmy Chung for putting their launch event on Sunday rather than Saturday as it means more people will get to play more games. It’s stuff like that which makes the X-Wing community viable, more often than not we are fiercely loyal to one store in terms of buying toys, but will travel to multiple stores to support their events. Hopefully this ethos will continue with organised play going forward which should keep it growing (and keep me busy at weekends).

The first game of the day was against Calum Brown’s beautifully painted IGs and an escape pod. Calum hadn’t flown the list before and it was his first time putting it on the table. The Escape Pod simply refused to die but once Guri got in amongst the IGs she really made the outmanoeuvre count, both my ships were bleeding heavily but they had enough to finish of the droids on the other side of the table.

If you told me a few months back that I would be scared of a HWK, a B-Wing and a Y-Wing I would probably have looked at you with a distinct look of disbelief. But when I set up for Game 2 against Ed Gold I was more than a little apprehensive! Boba went the long way around to get the first engage, and then it was a question of bullying his ships one at a time. Guri was mean to the B-Wing, and whilst the incoming fire was unpleasant (2 lots of proton torps in the list) I had enough to finish it. Boba dropped and Guri went for the Hail Mary joust with the Y-Wing. Fortunately her prayers were answered and the Y-Wing went pop.

I forgot to take a photo of Game 3, my second game of the weekend against Jesper. He was running Old Teroch instead of 4-Lom today. It was on a knife edge and then I totally misread what he was going to do with Palob and basically gave him Guri. It was closer than yesterday, with me killing Fenn, taking half on Old T but not scratching the HWK. The Moldy Crow is really good, and the list J was running looked really good fun to fly. He went on to win the event as the only 4-0.

And so to the last game of the weekend, against Mark Feldschreiber trying a variant of the list that took him to the cut at Euros this year. Torani, Nym and Jostero. Mark got his deployment wrong, allowing me to isolate Torani early on, and one agility ships HATE this Guri. She dances around them and then shoots them a lot. It was quick and bloody with me getting the 200-0 win by one health on Boba.

I will definitely be sticking with the Collision Detector variant at the next event I go to, it gives the Star Viper insane mobility and unpredictability. I didn’t use it every game, but it was so helpful to have there for when I needed it.

Over all for the day I finished 3-1 and third, which I was really happy with. Again, quality players making up the field so I was really pleased with how this event and the weekend in general had gone. I had a good couple of days, made even better when at the end of the day I got this message over Facebook from Morten Holmsgaard Kristensen in Denmark:

Now that finished my weekend on a massive high. Morten, you legend!

Seeing as how it’s now 2.0, it’s time to resurrect the tournament score tracker starting from 0. For those of you not familiar with it the premise comes from targeting a consistent 67% performance at X-Wing events, with 4-2 being the minimum scoreline to make a cut at large events. I mean, we all play for fun but it’s nice to see how things are going right?

Games Played	% Win Rate	+/- on Last Time
9	67%	NA

Two ship builds are going to be hard work, but since when has putting myself in an uphill battle ever put me off playing how I want to play? The potential is there I’m just going to have to fly as well as I possibly can. Every single game.

Next Time: MOAR GAMES!

If you’re looking for X-Wing events then head over to the 186th Tournament Calendar to see what’s going on near you.