Who's Gaming House in Rapid City SD has a Xwing store manager who is recently addicted to x-wing, and so they ran their first tournament this past weekend. I made the 2 1/2 hr drive across the border from Wyoming to participate in my first tournament.

I've mostly been playing casual games with friends, with only 1 other person in the area really into the game, so it was fun to play against some more experienced players.

I ran whisper + Vet instinct, adv cloak device, fire control, gunner
Howlrunner
3x academy TIEs

I've been playing this whisper build ever since wave 4 came out, so I was pleased to see it do well in nationals. The support has changes, but whisper stays.

Rd 1 was vs a bomber list. Jonus, 2 bombers the ps4 kind(gamma I think). And dark curse. Bombers loaded with various combinations of proton rockets, seismic charges and flechettes.

He ran proton rockets and seismic charges, which I have never played before. The rockets got some good shots off, hurting howl runner but whisper evaded the shots and jonus rerolls. I made the mistake of taking his bunch head on with whisper. Whisper took a lot of fire to start off and got caught by a seismic blast for some damage. Just a terrifying alpha strike that tore up my support swarm and hurt whisper. His problem was that after the strike and bombs he was dogfighting with 2 attack die ships. I ended up with whisper with 1 hp and nothing else, but I stayed in range one, which nullified his flechettes and just hunted his last two bombers. We were the only table to not go to time

Rd two was against a similar list as mine. Echo with 4 ship howl runner swarm (mostly obsidians)

Echo had recon spec and sensor jammer. I learned my lesson from rd. 1, and kept whisper out of the middle. We ended up with phantoms in opposite corners, and swarms jousting in the middle. His echo ended up too far away, and whisper had an early shot on howlrunner. My howl and whisper managed to kill his howl off in the first round of firing, and he bumped one of his TIEs while maneuvering. That poor TIE was burned down early leaving him at a aerly two ship disadvantage. Whisper was positioned to mop up, and Echo flew into an asteroid trying to catch up to the fight. So pretty soon it was down to his Echo and whispers buzz saw chewed her up while decloaked. I think this game was about 25 minutes long. I had nearly an hour break until my last match.

Rd 3 was one of two lists I was worried about. Bounty hunter, soontir fel, Echo

She had won both her last matches, both times losing the bounty hunter first. I know how terrifying soontir fel can be if ignored. He was my target. Plus being at PS 9 he was a serious PITA for my whisper decloak shenanigans. I had initiative (98 pts.). So I would shoot and cloak. From what I had seen, no-one was a really good echo pilot, so as long as whisper was alive I wasn't worried about her. Bounty hunters are good, but soontir was the danger.

We set up with phantoms facing each other, swarm heads up with soontir and bounty hunter. The hope was the swarm would burn down soontir. Not so much. I ran correctly, jumped far ahead to get r2 shots on fel. But 8 dice later and just 1 hit. She focused fel and the BH on howlrunner who died fairly quickly. Whisper and Echo ended up next to each other, parallel without shots pointing in the same directions..so I zoomed whisper off to fight with fel+bounty hunter. She sent Echo off the wrong way and Echo was out of the fight for the next 2 or 3 rounds. Quickly I was down to whisper + 1 tie, and I flew awful. Several times without shots for whisper, but in other peoples arc... so the choice is cloak or evade. At one time I had both whisper and the last tie sitting on a rock, both under fire.

Still gunner whisper came through, as one turn killed fel, next turn killed Echo, couple turns later stripped shields from the bounty hunter. And that was all she wrote as I was able to just trail the bounty hunter and tear it up.

There was a big mistake in the game, and I feel kind of bad. The other player had forgotten to put any shield tokens down (2 Echo, 4 bounty hunter). I noticed when I shot the hunter and she said she had a crit....I knew there were shields left. So she put her tokens out. Problem was that earlier I got three hits on Echo, and she said it was dead. I did not remember hitting Echo earlier...but figured I just forgot the 1 hit that must have gotten through. No...she was just counting the hull points. But we didn't realize that until several rounds later when shooting at the bounty hunter what happened. I don't think that 1 hit on Echo would have made much difference, and this was her third game playing without shields and I was the only one to notice (like I said, bounty hunter had died the last two games). So kudos to her for winning earlier with a handicap, but still feel bad because the winner of our game would end up the overall winner and the loser 2nd place.

So I went 3-0 and got another copy of rebel aces and had a good time. The winter tournament kits hadn't come in yet, so I've got an IOU for the soontir fel alt card. No Falcons and relatively few turrets, which is what I was worried about.

I really liked the seismic charges, and think I will add one to the next firespray I play. I was not impressed with the Echo pilots at all. I was the only whisper playing today, there was 1 more Echo that I did not play against. It needs some serious practice to play well, but has a hard time competing with other mobile ships that out PS it. Soontir fel was terrifying.

I've been playing this whisper with shuttles usually. And I missed them. I switched to the howl mini-swarm last night, but probably will go back to at least 1 shuttle. I just realized I only have 1 gunner card....perils of playing on vassal; you forget what you are limited to IRL. Now I have 4 A-wings, so time to play with those and leave the phantoms in the box for a while.

Great report and congrats on the win! Similar to you, I've been flying Phantom with shuttles and BH since wave 4 came out. Tried it with a Howl + mini swarm once and didn't like it, so went back to tweaking which shuttle, which BH and sometimes subbing in a defender (which I'm liking more and more).

The funny thing is, I swear by Echo. Played with Whisper a few times and didn't like it. She's super hard to land hits on with the gunner, evade, focus, and cloaked, but if the opponent brings the right stuff (ion cannons with a lucky shot or R3A2/Flechette cannons), Whisper is toast since she can't arc dodge as well as Echo. So I guess it really depends on local meta.

As for Echo, it is an uphill battle against Whisper (which is discussed extensively in another Whisper v Echo thread ), and it takes a lot of practice to fly well. But, once you get to a good level with Echo, it's actually not too bad to guess where Whisper is going and use Echo to block his decloak. Take Rebel Captive and it causes all sorts of issues for Whisper, especially if your other ships have Whisper in arc.

I actually play against Soontir quite a bit with Echo. If Echo can withstand one round of shooting by Soontir, then Echo is pretty much behind Soontir the rest of the game forcing Soontir to either get out of arc and not shoot, or turtle like crazy.

Always super fun to play against Soontir and Whisper with my Echo, because it's a mind game and a battle of pilot skills at that point, and that's what I love about the game

If you're ever on VASSAL, I'd love to play some practice games since I can always use more practice against Whisper.