Umm, 2 Regional winners would disagree with that. Interceptors are fine.

+1 they're fine, just don't run too many.

We saw virtually no Alphas in the Store Championships, and now we have seen two winners in the Regionals with the same mixed squint squad, which is a complete reversal. But two weeks into the Regionals is too early to make any sort of definitive statement on the meta game suddenly changing.

On the theory side, Alphas still don't make as good jousters as Academy Pilots, they simply cost too much. Interceptors have always been on the edge of being highly competitive, but they are not quite there. However, if you can squeeze three squints into a 6-ship list then you are spending almost all your points on ships rather than upgrades, which is optimal. (96 points on ships for 6 mixed TIEs vs 90 points on ships in a 7 TIE swarm). The added firepower helps offset the loss of having an extra ship plus the extra 6 available points. It also depends on the meta: this particular squad is a pure PS1 squad (minus Howlrunner) so it doesn't waste any points on the PS bid. If your opponent goes all PS6+ then this works heavily in your favor.

As I mentioned in the Regionals thread, I actually played several mock-games with this exact squad when wave 2 came out. It's good but has more weaknesses than the standard 7 TIE swarm.

Regional winners are also a very small sample size of what makes a good list. Plenty of lists are good competitively and didn't win.

So, we should ignore what wins at Worlds, because that is a really small sample size?

There is ultimately no reason to ban new releases in the middle of the event scene. All these events are self contained so it matters not that one a month later then another might be run with more options available, the only thing that matters is the players in the event all of reasonable access to the same option as each other.

Clearly there are degrees of confidence in any measurement or observation. The skill level is going to be higher at Worlds which makes that data point more meaningful than a Regionals data point, which in turn is generally more meaningful than a single Store Championship, except for the really large ones like Farmageddon.

However, "quantity has a quality all of its own". The standard deviation increases as the sample size decreases. Statistics 101. You could look at the #1 winner of Worlds and declare that everything other than a B-wing and X-wing is a bad craft, and that the Imperials are horribly under-powered because they failed to gain a #1 spot. But that's only looking at one winning list. A more meaningful measurement would be to look at the Top 16, which is why I helped find the last couple of 2013 Worlds Top 16 squads that weren't known yet on these forums. (yay for the interwebs and google translate)

Regional winners are also a very small sample size of what makes a good list. Plenty of lists are good competitively and didn't win.

+1. I personally think that a solid measure of what makes a "good list" at the competitive level are the Regionals squads that make the Final Cut or Top Third based on attendance and numerical ranking. For better or for worse, this simultaneously measures both success and general popularity. The question going forward and getting back on topic is then:

" How often will TIE Phantoms and TIE Defenders make it into these Final Cut lists? "

It is a good question and Doug's article brings up some great points about how these ships can attempt to establish themselves in the competitive meta game.