2019 X-Wing Recap

So much has happened in the last year of X-Wing Miniatures that I want to post a summary article about it all rather then every individual event.

The biggest thing that has happened is that X-Wing Miniatures got a Second Edition! This has been amazing and so wonderful for the game in my opinion. Later waves of ships in first edition started to have a lot of power creep and developers learned a lot after over five years of creating the game.

While there have been many changes, I am just going to call out two major changes. One has been an app version of the point scale. This allows developers to see how certain ships and interactions work and twice a year, can change point costs. The second change is the addition of other factions. There are now the original Rebel and Imperial with the Scum faction. They have also added Resistance and First Order following the new content from The Force Awakens. And, they have added Republic and Separatists from A Phantom Menace to Revenge of the Sith. This has allowed developers to have many more ships.

With so much content out, I think I am just going to stick to collecting Rebel, Imperial, Scum and Republic for now. I’ll see if this changes as time goes by. The other really great thing that happened was that they made most things from first edition compatible with second edition. There are some conversion kits that you might want to get but you don’t really have to get all new stuff which is great!

This first half of the year saw me going to my only two tournaments but they were really fun and I was only hoping to go to one or two more but that’s ok. On April 27th I headed down to Portland to play a Hyperspace Trial at Guardian Games. In this tournament I played a variant of a list that was popular at the time, Rebel Beef.

Rebel Beef is basically a four ship rebel list consisting of Wedge, some X-Wing, U-Wing and or B-Wings. All have three dice primaries so 12 attack dice total. Most people use Wedge as his ability is one of the best in the game. I’ve also seen four U-Wings that is pretty popular as you can use the stop action to block lanes. Most have at least one U-Wing to add Leia crew which lets your red moves, stops or K-turn reds become white gaining you an action on the turnaround.

I had Wedge, Biggs, Cassian in the U-Wing and Blade Squadron in the B-Wing. In this tournament I did very poorly and had one win at 42/46. At 1-3 I decided to drop my last game and head home. My first game was really close against a Resistance Bomber and this really came down to time and the last attack. Nothing really died all game and then a large number of ships exploded on the last round.

My second game, I was placed on a table in the back corner with no lighting and the fan blowing things around. Also, my opponent was flying Republic Anakin, Obi-Wan and an A-Wing. He was trying to outmaneuver me all game so we didn’t engage till 50 min into the game when I pushed the engagement. This was a frustrating game for me as I was there to play. I also lost a green dice and my cards kept falling on the ground due to the location. After thought, I should have just went to final salvo but I somehow got down in points and lost. My one win was against First Order, Kylo, Recoil and Omega Squadron. He had obviously not played much. My last lost was against a Separatist swarm where I got diced. I could not PS kill anything and they took Wedge out. This was a good tournament as I got to fly against a lot of different things and Guardian Games is a really cool store.

On June 1st I attended the main X-Wing event that I really wanted to go to, the Seattle System Open. Here I played Koshka Frost, 4-Lom and Palob, took 51/136 and went 3-3. I was really happy with this tournament and the result. Many of the games were very close and could have gone either way.

A popular list at this time was four tie phantom’s with the upgrade Juke. The phantom’s unpredictability of movement is really good and Juke just combo’s really well with them. I honestly don’t like them as I think they break the game a bit too much. However, it does take skill to fly.

Another popular list has been a Republic list. This is another high PS list that does a lot of arc dodging. This list is Anakin, Obi-Wan and Ric in the Naboo fighter. If Ric goes faster then your ship, he rolls an additional dice. I have seen so many games where Ric is at range one but has three agility with an evade and focus token and he comes out unharmed.

For the big tournament of Worlds in Minnesota, we saw that many believed that Separatist Nantex were the ship to win. This ship has the ability to tractor so tractoring themselves to get out of arc or reducing agility or putting other ships on rocks. There were many Nantex but none made the top 32 cut. The finals came down to the Seattle System Open winner who was flying Rebel swarm vs. Imperial Aces. While Wedge made an out of the blue move to take out Vader, Whisper and the Grand Inquisitor cleaned up to take the win.

There are many things to look forward to for the next year of X-Wing. I am really excited and can’t wait to get more games in. Right now, Epic is being introduced to second edition and soon, an new points adjustment will take place. The talent of X-Wing players here is amazing and I think that I am lucky to be able to have a great community as well as all this talent around. Well see what the new year brings, but for now just fly casual.