Since I've been playing, the Recon Specialist and Gunner have been the best two choices for a TIE Phantom crew slot (IMO). But at times i have tried out Tactician and Navigator.

Navigator felt cool, but was easy to pass when looking at the base maneuvering of the Phantom. (Especially Echo - who i prefer).

Tactician felt strong, but too limiting because of the range 2 requirement.

But now that i am looking at Mara Jade, I feel she might be a really strong new option.

Thoughts?

I like the combination of Weapons Engineer + FCS/TC. Having 2 TL's on the board will leave you opponent guessing which target you'll attack.

Rebel Captive is good as well

Rebel Captive is good as well

Yep, Rebel Captive is the pick of them, and none of the new ones look like they can replace it.

I can't decide. Rebel Captive still seems less potent than Mara Jade.

As for Weapons Engineer - totally agree that it's useful, but it seems to me that if you can lock them down that is better than keeping them guessing.

Control > Surprise?

Rebel Captive has the been the go-to choice for tournament level players. In case you muck up, attacking the Phantom is discouraged. Its also discouraged if you happen to just have a few random shots.

The rest are: Recon Spec, and Gunner and Intel Agent.

Weapons Engineer doesn't seem that useful. Would rather have Rebel Captive.

Mara Jade, will be a new hot tech though. especially a fun game.

Mara jade is awesome

Get in range 1 and don't expect to see much kturn

Mera Jade is gonna be good. I still like RC for now though

Rebel captive is such a great deterrent that it's hard for me to consider other options on the names phantoms. I really like recon spec on the genetics.

I can't decide. Rebel Captive still seems less potent than Mara Jade.

As for Weapons Engineer - totally agree that it's useful, but it seems to me that if you can lock them down that is better than keeping them guessing.

Control > Surprise?

Mara Jade is useless outside of range 1. She's also a waste of points and a crew slot against enemies with abilities that give stress like PTL or Opportunist.

I see Mara Jade as more of an early game card and Rebel Captive as one that gets stronger the fewer ships there are left one the board. I think Mara Jade is a stronger choice on ships that don't manuever as well as the Phantom does. On a Shuttle or a VT-49. Mara Jade is kind of a "Oh, I can't k-turn? Guess what? Neither can you." type of card. On the Firespray, she should make it easier to catch ships in the rear arc that weren't able to K-Turn and return fire.

On the Phantom I'd almost alway prefer Rebel Captive. It might be interesting to toss Mara Jade and Enhanced Scopes onto a Sigma. Between the blocking ability and the stress, that ship should be pretty effective at screwing with your opponents plans. It would take some practice to fly well and is a little on the expensive side but it could be fun to put on the table.

Mara Jade is very powerful, and we will see a lot of her but not on Phantoms specifically. After playing with both extensively, I prefer Rebel Captive on the named Phantoms and Intel Agent on the generics (generics get Enhanced Scopes, Stygium Particle Accelerator, Intel Agent), here is why.

Echo, and to a lesser extent Whisper, match up extremely well against swarms. Echo can (and often does) eliminate entire 100 point lists when those lists have lower PS and lack turrets. This includes all TIE swarms, all Rebel swarms, and most of the "high PS" 5 ship semi-swarms whose PS clocks in usually around 5 or 6. So the swarm is already a good matchup for you if you are running a named Phantom.

On the other hand, high PS and turrets are very dangerous to you. So Han/VI Lando, VI Chiraneau, Ion Turrets, named Phantoms, high PS ships with boost/barrel roll, all can make very short work of your Phantom no matter how well you play. You can somewhat mitigate this with positioning, but ultimately you are relying on dice luck to pull a 1/3 chance of success out, and nobody should plan on dice to rescue a bad matchup if they want to succeed.

Mara Jade is extremely good against swarms. Closing to Range 1 of a formation may expose you to a volley, but it prevents the swarm from K-Turning and continuing the assault. Combined with an Engine Upgrade/decloak/some other repositioning trick, you can often turn around and pursue the swarm, preventing it from EVER getting turned around unless it scatters. Scattering allows you to create a series of 1-1 or 1-2 matchups (against stressed ships that can't turn around) that your powerful ship should dominate. On the other hand, Jade is fairly worthless against the high-PS or turret ships because they move last and can dictate range, and even if they don't a Range 1 shot from a high-PS ship against your uncloaked Phantom ends badly and soon.

Rebel Captive only helps against a single attack, so it is fairly worthless against swarms. On the other hand, it affects the FIRST ship to fire, providing help against the highest PS ship to fire at you. Since those are precisely the ships you need the help against, Rebel Captive is good during bad matchups. It is by far the most helpful against other Phantoms, preventing them from cloaking back up.

So Mara Jade on Echo/Whisper gives you more help when you don't need it, but no help when you do. Rebel Captive is powerful against ships you need help against, but doesn't help much against lists you don't need any help with. Power levels aside, "win more" buttons are far less useful than "in case of danger" buttons.

Edit: Tactician loses as a Phantom crew because it is a more difficult way of putting stress on a single ship, and Rebel Captive already does a good job (better, in fact) of putting stress on the ship you need to stress anyway.

Here's a build I've been toying around with;

Sigma pilot

SPA

Flight instructor

Sensir jammer

35 points. I've been playing two along aide carnor. Assume you have an evade every turn and your opponent doesn't have a focus catheter some pretty durable phantoms right there

Here's a build I've been toying around with;

Sigma pilot

SPA

Flight instructor

Sensir jammer

35 points. I've been playing two along aide carnor. Assume you have an evade every turn and your opponent doesn't have a focus catheter some pretty durable phantoms right there

I'm trying to avoid any 'Echo' jokes here!

In all seriousness though I'd agree with the others that Rebel Captive is a must-have.

let's go thru the choices and evaluate them. By default, I would be looking at them from the named ACD Phantom perspective, not so much the blank Sigma type of phantom. Mostly ACD Whisper actually, my ACD Echo ALWAYS has Recon Spec because it is just too good on Echo.

Intel Agent: Supposedly useful on lower PS Phantoms, since you could choose the optimal decloak option against a specific target (you do know the concept of 1 maneuver selection, 2 maneuvering options on the phantom right?). However, I find this card to be a little too overrated. If your opponent is something like Soontir PTL, he would still be able to arc dodge with the help of boost + roll despite you knowing his maneuver. If your opponent is something more traditional like an Xwing, you could probably already guess pretty well where he's going, so there's no real need for this. Also, more experienced opponents would already guessed where your optimal decloak position is, since given a game situation, there's not much choices you would honestly have, eg. forward would make you overshoot your target, your left decloak is blocked by an asteroid, you really only have the decloak right option. Interesting choice, but not something I'd actively promote.

Navigator: Somewhat identical to Intel Agent, in that I can see people who would benefit from it and their reasons, but I myself dont really see myself using it. Once again, if you can guess your opponent's maneuvers well enough, Navigator isnt necessary. Whenever I use it, I often find that the maneuver option that I chose is already what I wanted to perform anyway, so I couldnt use Navigator at all. It is useful though to allow you to maximize attacking opportunities, eg. changing forward 2 into forward 4 to engage a target at range 1 is a really powerful tool to have, and I do enjoy using it for this intent. Some simple tricks would be things like instead of a hard turn 3 + roll outwards, you can now do a hard turn 1 + roll inwards, which really means that your phantom is now at 2 different end positions from a single decloak choice. But for 3 points, you are paying quite a lot of points just to have this option. I know of people who swear by it, yet at the same time I know that I wouldnt be able to get much use out of it myself.

Flight Instructor: Seems pretty good at first glance, until you realize that Recon Spec would pretty much do the same thing, but better. 2nd ability rarely matters since the things you want to protect yourself against are all higher PS than you, and the things that are lower PS than you you dont really need any help to deal with them. Also, it can be difficult to find 4 points from your 100pts just for this questionable upgrade.

Gunner: Not recommended by me since I go by the logic that 4 atk dice = I would hit my target most of the time, especially if I have FCS or focus or both. Of course, with gunner FCS you could do that combo of attacking, reroll your hits into blanks so you would miss, get a FCS TL, and hammer again with your gunner shot + TL. But for 7 whole points, not very sure I'd want to pump that onto my ACD phantom and make it hit the 50pt mark. I strongly recommend against Gunner actually, please use something else. Not too particularly useful on mook phantoms either, I cant recall the total number of times I had gunner on and I get so frustrated that my 4 attack always goes through dealing 1 hit to my target, making me unable to trigger gunner for a better shot. Curse that 4 attack value!

Recon Spec: Extremely useful on Echo to the point of being an auto-include. Nearly useless on Whisper except when talking about fringe situations or epic games. On Echo, you get 1 focus for attacking, 1 for defending, which is very very important. Whisper's ability is like a built-in Recon Spec, so you dont need Recon Spec, and even if you do intend to stack 3 focus tokens for defense on Whisper, they cant do anything to save you from rolling blanks. If you are Echo, just chuck it on, virtually no other crew card available has that much of a power on Echo. If you are Whisper or mook phantoms, consider using something else.

Weapons Engineer: Can only be used if you have FCS, so that's a big usage restriction already. Quite useful if you have Vessery in your team, otherwise it isn't really a good upgrade at all. Too expensive for too little.

Saboteur: I kinda like this one actually, especially on Whisper. It is quite funny when you use this to trigger direct hits and polish off 1hp targets. However, due to the luck based nature of this card, it should only be kept to non-competitive use. Would suck big time if you used it at an extremely crucial time and it fails you. Also, at those range 1 situations your Whisper would more likely want to Evade rather than Saboteur as an action choice, especially when going up against turrets. Still, it is fun, I'd play this.

Merc Copilot: For a short period of time, I really loved this thing on Whisper, for the exact same reason that Saboteur is good. If your opponent doesnt have good enough anti-phantom options, chances are he would attempt to catch you by flying slowly, so this would mean range 3 engagements, which is where this thing comes into play and punishes him for doing anti-phantom flying strategies. If you are lucky, this thing allows you to easily OHKO Z95s, cripple Xwings / Bwings / TIEints and really tears apart HWKs and Ywings. The only reason I stopped using this on my Whisper is because my local meta is extremely Chewbacca heavy. That's it.

Darth Vader: hahahahaha, don't.

Rebel Captive: Extremely powerful anti-phantom option, probably not too much use if not going up against an enemy phantom. It does not discourage your opponent from attacking your phantom at all, because when they go after it, they really want it dead, stress or no stress. It does make Soontir Initiative a bit less effective against you though, I'd give you that. Otherwise, if you are looking for stress control, Tactician is a more viable option than Rebel Captive. If you are looking for anti-phantom, Rebel Captive is useful, BUT leaving the slot blank, betting 3 points on initiative bid for your VI Whisper is a much stronger anti-phantom option, you simply choose to go last and arc-dodge him, as opposed to having him shoot you and hope your 4hp 2 green doesnt die from his 4-5 attack dice. I would recommend using this if you cant find anything better, it is a really good option if you arent too sure what you want to do with your phantom. I was stuck with this when flying the phantom competitively for the first couple of tournaments, and it did serve me well.

Tactician: More similar to Merc Copilot than Rebel Captive actually, this upgrade allows you to go for your target and pin it down with stress tokens and makes you dangerous at range 2. If you wish your phantom to have more of a tactical usage other than mere pewpews, take this. One key tactic I really like with Tactician is to attack Target A and stress it, then ignore it and go for Target B to stress it, then go on to Target C or back to A on the subsequent round, etcetc. Keeps your opponent's team maneuvers locked down, especially when you are up against PTL Ewings. Unfortunately, it isnt particularly useful against the phantom's traditional enemies though, enemies like falcons or another phantom.

Fleet Officer: nope, that stress token will kill you. I did have some success with putting it on a empty Sigma that I used as HLC support though, but even then it still isnt that suitable an upgrade.

Ysanne Isard: Extremely powerful when you can get her to trigger, but requires a lot of luck since your phantom must have exactly 1 hp left. When she triggers, it's like having both ACD and stygium on your phantom. Too bad whether she triggers or not is entirely up to luck, and your 1hp phantom will still die from that random 3-4 green blanks dice roll.

Mara Jade: Not too bad at first glance, until you realize that being at range 1 against multiple enemies will get you killed, especially when harmless TIEs/Z95s suddenly become dangerous due to the 2 atk value jumping to a 3 from the range bonus. Once again it helps you to pin down targets, but Tactician is a cheaper option that is much much safer and easier to use.

Moff Jerjerrod: tried it once, saved me from a crit, had a good laugh, swear never to use it again. If you thought Ysanne requires a lot of luck to use, wait till you try him.

Lots of words!

But after reading all of the posts (even that Epic from Duraham) I have to agree that it really comes down to:

Recon Spec vs Rebel Captive vs Tactician

And I like Duraham's point that:

* Echo will overwhelmingly prefer Recon Spec

* Whisper depends on the rest of the team/ play-styles but is largely a choice between the two stress-makers

--- if you expect to maintain range, pick Tactician

--- if you expect to be a primary target, pick Rebel Captive

For example, I think when i run a Whisper with a Shuttle, i will use Tactician and single out threats while they are focused on the Shuttle. Otherwise, it looks like i should try Rebel Captive on Whisper.

I think I'll also test out Mara Jade/ Stygium PA on a Smash Sigma 30 pt build. I suspect that will be a nasty problem. The goal being to spam stress while cloaked. Not sure if that will be worth the points.

Heh, what about Outlaw Tech?

Rebel Captive is good as well

I love the idea of a rebel captive tied up in the back seat (or wherever) of the phantom.

one thing to note about Rebel Captive vs Tactician is that Rebel Captive depends on your opponent. I once had a game where my opponent did not fire with Corran, fired with the rest of his team, and then activated Corran's ability to fire at my phantom, so that Corran doesnt get stressed.

If you are trying to actively use stress as a weapon, Tactician is much more effective and suitable for the job.

Heh, what about Outlaw Tech?

Scum only. Even it it wasn't, it's not a particarly good fit as it requires you to stress your Phantom to activate.

one thing to note about Rebel Captive vs Tactician is that Rebel Captive depends on your opponent. I once had a game where my opponent did not fire with Corran, fired with the rest of his team, and then activated Corran's ability to fire at my phantom, so that Corran doesnt get stressed.

If you are trying to actively use stress as a weapon, Tactician is much more effective and suitable for the job.

If he had Corran and had a couple of other ships that had shots on your Phantom, I don't see why he'd worry about the stress on Corran. Actually getting something like a Phantom or an Interceptor in your arc is what double-tap was made for. Corran's two shots plus 2 shots from other ships, all in one turn, should result in a dead Phantom more often than not. Trading a stress token for a dead Phantom is a trade I think I'd make any day of the week.

Mara Jade is very powerful, and we will see a lot of her but not on Phantoms specifically. After playing with both extensively, I prefer Rebel Captive on the named Phantoms and Intel Agent on the generics (generics get Enhanced Scopes, Stygium Particle Accelerator, Intel Agent), here is why.

Echo, and to a lesser extent Whisper, match up extremely well against swarms. Echo can (and often does) eliminate entire 100 point lists when those lists have lower PS and lack turrets. This includes all TIE swarms, all Rebel swarms, and most of the "high PS" 5 ship semi-swarms whose PS clocks in usually around 5 or 6. So the swarm is already a good matchup for you if you are running a named Phantom.

On the other hand, high PS and turrets are very dangerous to you. So Han/VI Lando, VI Chiraneau, Ion Turrets, named Phantoms, high PS ships with boost/barrel roll, all can make very short work of your Phantom no matter how well you play. You can somewhat mitigate this with positioning, but ultimately you are relying on dice luck to pull a 1/3 chance of success out, and nobody should plan on dice to rescue a bad matchup if they want to succeed.

Mara Jade is extremely good against swarms. Closing to Range 1 of a formation may expose you to a volley, but it prevents the swarm from K-Turning and continuing the assault. Combined with an Engine Upgrade/decloak/some other repositioning trick, you can often turn around and pursue the swarm, preventing it from EVER getting turned around unless it scatters. Scattering allows you to create a series of 1-1 or 1-2 matchups (against stressed ships that can't turn around) that your powerful ship should dominate. On the other hand, Jade is fairly worthless against the high-PS or turret ships because they move last and can dictate range, and even if they don't a Range 1 shot from a high-PS ship against your uncloaked Phantom ends badly and soon.

Rebel Captive only helps against a single attack, so it is fairly worthless against swarms. On the other hand, it affects the FIRST ship to fire, providing help against the highest PS ship to fire at you. Since those are precisely the ships you need the help against, Rebel Captive is good during bad matchups. It is by far the most helpful against other Phantoms, preventing them from cloaking back up.

So Mara Jade on Echo/Whisper gives you more help when you don't need it, but no help when you do. Rebel Captive is powerful against ships you need help against, but doesn't help much against lists you don't need any help with. Power levels aside, "win more" buttons are far less useful than "in case of danger" buttons.

Edit: Tactician loses as a Phantom crew because it is a more difficult way of putting stress on a single ship, and Rebel Captive already does a good job (better, in fact) of putting stress on the ship you need to stress anyway.

Very well said.

Rebel Captive and Gunner are likely the only ones I'll ever pick. Intel Agent if I have 1 point remaining or something and don't need an init bid.

Rebel Captive just provides SO much good. It is tough to pick anything else.

I mainly play Echo, so in the end it's always a battle between Rebel Captive and Recon. Recon usually wins in local games, and rebel at higher tournaments.