This years world champion list: 89pt swarm! I'm sure of it! Totally beat out that 100pt rebel list...

Makes me wonder if people on the rebel side will start using the 2 falcons butted together and just outlast everything going to time.

As for me, I don't know how many tournaments I will ever get to play, but if I do I intend to bring it.

Im not gonna turtle up in the corner of the board and act like a chicken. Hell this game is a dog fight, might as well jump in with the rest of the pack and howl lik mad.

I will lose, but at least my opponent will have to work for it and I would rather be a good sport at the end of the day.

Makes me wonder if people on the rebel side will start using the 2 falcons butted together and just outlast everything going to time.

As for me, I don't know how many tournaments I will ever get to play, but if I do I intend to bring it.

Im not gonna turtle up in the corner of the board and act like a chicken. Hell this game is a dog fight, might as well jump in with the rest of the pack and howl lik mad.

I will lose, but at least my opponent will have to work for it and I would rather be a good sport at the end of the day.

This was never really all that viable a strategy. There's really no "turtle" to it - you're not moving sure, you get no extra defense, you're completely at the mercy of any halfway decent pilot choosing his position to hit one of your Falcons while the other is out of range. It's more like a slug tactic - slow, but squishy. You're railing against and insulting something that pretty much doesn't exist.

If there's an actual turtle threat, it's probably Interceptors or A-wings. If they can kill something early, they're fast enough to stay at long/out of range and circle the board, boosting to avoid shots when they can and loading tokens when they can't.

If Squints or A-wings usher in a new era of turtling via simple refusal to engage, secondary weapons will become more important. Ion missiles especially, will tag and trap such ships so I doubt it's really something to worry about. Frankly an uptick in named pilots will lead to more diversity in lists and the manifestation of personal taste more IMO. Something to look forward to if it makes the game more balanced overall and results in less stock style lists being run.

Y Wings all loaded with PTs. Destroy an enemy ship and outlast their weakened damage capacity.

Who has 4 y-wing? But yeah that would be a pretty effective list. 4 PTs should be enough of an alpha strike to take a ship or two out and the y-wings would have so much hull and shields to eat through.

I've got 4 Y-wings. I wouldn't call that list "effective," though in this limited context it might work.

I think a lot of the theorycrafting about a shift to tankier builds is a bit too reactive. All of th e higher HP ships have low defense and die fairly quickly to focused fire. They also tend to be expensive in terms of their point cost.

Yes, you could load up on double Falcons and have 26+ hitpoints, but then you're only really making two attacks per turn. Against a lot of lists, that's not necessarily going to win the damage race.

If Squints or A-wings usher in a new era of turtling via simple refusal to engage, secondary weapons will become more important. Ion missiles especially, will tag and trap such ships so I doubt it's really something to worry about. Frankly an uptick in named pilots will lead to more diversity in lists and the manifestation of personal taste more IMO. Something to look forward to if it makes the game more balanced overall and results in less stock style lists being run.

Unless you're going to build specifically for the second action you need to make that work, you're looking at about a 6% chance of a hit against a F+E Interceptor. If you do hold it for a turn, or have the focus via an action pass, your hit chance goes up to a whopping 15%.

Somehow, I don't think that's going to cut it.

I think a lot of the theorycrafting about a shift to tankier builds is a bit too reactive. All of th e higher HP ships have low defense and die fairly quickly to focused fire. They also tend to be expensive in terms of their point cost.

Yes, you could load up on double Falcons and have 26+ hitpoints, but then you're only really making two attacks per turn. Against a lot of lists, that's not necessarily going to win the damage race.

A-wings with refit are the exception, it has exceptionally good jousting efficiency based on the stat line. It is better than a B-wing, and only trails naked TIE Fighters by 1% - 2%. They are basically the same, and that is before dial/action/etc considerations. A-wings have not seen much use up to now because they were overcosted, but that will change after Rebel Aces. If the full win condition was still 33 points, then 6 refit A-wings could have difficulty getting full wins before going to time. By lowering the differential to 12 points, this is no longer an issue.

If a ship is good and is also tank, it should become more competitive. The refit A-wing and Firespray fall into this class. All of the other tanky ships aren't competitive to begin with, so going to time is not the main reason they are not used. Firesprays already see competitive use, so as tanks they might get a slight bump too.