It has come to my attention that I may see a heavy control meta pop up at my regional tourney. Having pretty much zero experience against it, how would one prepare to deal with control lists? Obviously, don't ever stress yourself comes to mind. Anything a little more specific?

Lots of green on your dial.

Action independent upgrades like Fire Control Systems or K4 droids.

Don't fly a big ship straight towards a table edge?

Kill them fast. Really it depends on what you are flying. If turrets, go for the stress dealers first. If small based ships, you might want to focus on ion dealers first.

Focus fire onto one ship at a time as usual for this game.

Depends what you're flying. For example if Soontir gets Tactician'ed a bunch of times he's done for. If you're flying Emon with Andrasta don't go all Prox mines. Swarms don't care as much. If you're flying Super Dash I'd be hesitant to PtL and I'd put myself into positions where if I did get stressed/ionized it wouldn't be the end of the world, or where a green would be a good maneuver next turn.

There is also always building your squad entirely around broken action independent cards like FCS and Predator and C-3PO. That way stress doesn't affect you at all.

I've been using Iggy B and escorts to relative success. My iggy is PTL reliant, it keeps the damage high or I can tank up for those turns when I'm banking back around to the fight. I'm also running FCS to keep the attack up on turns when I need to attack and tank at the same time.

Suggestions?

Also, since when is predator broken?

Also, since when is predator broken?

It isn't. When you put multiple sources of action-independent bonuses together, it might seem that way, but you have to invest to make that happen.

It is, however, quite good.

Also, since when is predator broken?

Also, since when is predator broken?

It isn't. When you put multiple sources of action-independent bonuses together, it might seem that way, but you have to invest to make that happen.

It is, however, quite good.

What he said. When RAC has Predator and you bump the **** thing and it still gets to constantly score 3/3 and 4/4 hit shots on you it's quite irritating. Same thing when IG 88B has 2 stress tokens on it and it still gets gunner with HLC and FCS. This kind of hyper action economy is stripping away an aspect of the game that I enjoy, having to plan maneuvers that allow you to clear/not squire stress and planning out actions ahead of time. If I'm flying say, an A Wing I might want to TL and save it, and then next turn combo it with a focus.

The game was built around your ships only getting one action, or two if you paid for PtL and received a stress token. Not, I get to boost, mini target lock, and mini focus. Oh no, you bumped me. Now I ONLY get to reroll and get a free focus to crit.

Obsidian swarm will usually do the trick.

Yeah, but actions are free. You have to pay for all that other stuff.

The first way to deal with control lists is to outnumber their control pieces. All control lists share a weakness in that uncontrolled ships can out damage them. So if your opponent has 2 ships with control features, you need 3+ ships on the table to do this. This will apply at all stages of the game, so if you can reach a point where your pieces outnumber their control you should be in the drivers seat. A large ship will count as "2" if your opponent is using Ion control, but only one if they are using stress control.

The second way to deal with control lists is to remove as much maneuver and choice from the game as possible. Put your ships in a position to be effective even if your opponent controls them. Often this is a sub-optimal place, but as long as your ship is doing something useful you should be in good shape. For example, start slowrolling in from R3, so that 1 straights can keep your opponent in front for as long as possible rather than trying for the flank shots.

If you're really irritated, you can fortress with Buzzsaw Lambdas. It's honey badger heaven. Or you can cop out and go action independent, large based turrets.

So, skipping the fatty turrets, what EPT would you put on an anti-control aggressor? The obvious is predator, but you can get the same effect from FCS for 1 point cheaper, and still be action independent. Outmaneuver?

I've gotten really good at utilizing my PTL build to use the aggressor as a hit and run machine, but that also really relies on autothrusters and green doce to not require all my tokens at once.

Aggro beats control.

Aggro beats control.

Which is funny because Aggro is control.

Funnier still is that people love Biggs and then complain about cheap "tank and spank" game mechanics in other games.

No. Aggro is aggro and control is control. It's tempo when they work together.

Biggs forcing you to fire at him is control (holding aggro)...but ok bro, you got this.

I usually start by becoming best friends with a fellow control player and then really enjoying the wackiness that occurs. Other people above have gotten it right, actionless stuff like Han, predator, is tough to deal with, also stuff that outnumbers us by a good margin. Most lists that employ one or two anchors, especially ones centered on action economy are vulnerable to proper control lists. Ive never had to take my control lists up against a tie swarm and I have no idea what my plan is if that happens.

Biggs forcing you to fire at him is control (holding aggro)...but ok bro, you got this.

A Biggs build if the other ships are built for damage would likely be called tempo not control since you control the PACE of the game and lean toward aggression to close it as fast as possible.

Things like multiple ion turrets would be real control since they trade off having slower damage for dictating your moves.

So... He was right. I understand why you think the way you do but in his context it was absolutely right.

It's hard to translate control, aggro and tempo from Magic terms into X-Wing since all of your resources are readily available.

Closest examples would be

Control: Limiting movement, limiting actions or ability to interact. Stress effects, Ion effects, dedicated blockers, etc.

Aggro: Overwhelming force through sheer firepower. TIE Swarms, BBBBZ, HLC/Mangler platforms (IGs), Vader crew, boosting/barrel rolling into range 1 constantly, like RAC and Soontir.

Tempo: I'd say tempo would be much more fitting as attrition, whittling down the enemy in a cost effective matter. Fat Han and Z's, Dash-Corran, Phantom builds, Chewbacca-Lando, Triple Firespray, Biggs Walks the Dogs

Of course, in X-Wing, everything changes with every game. There's no dedicated, finite way to play a build, MAYBE with the exception of Rebel Control. You may run Han like an Aggro build, IGs can adapt an attrition strategy against its harder matchups and TIE Swarm may use tempo to bring down other tempo builds through the death-by-a-million cuts way of killing things rather than getting into range 1 ASAP and risk getting blown up right away.

Swarms can handle a control build very well.

The thing about control in X-wing is that in order to obtain full control pf a ship to where it can't move as well and perform an action is you need on average 2 ships to control 1 ship. Basically saying you need to either double stress (which usually requires 2 stress giving attacks) or combine it with ion (or double ion tokens when dealing with a large base ships).

Ion does not prevent actions to be a control and a single stress can be cleared with a green maneuver for the action and only prevents red maneuvers so a player can chose a white maneuver to clear arcs then green to clear stress if needed. That being said a single stress or Ion token is rarely enough to achieve full control. So if you outnumber your opponent who brought a panic attack list you have a very good chance of winning.

That is a very fair point Spike.

And I agree those terms translate into this game loosely at best. I just wanted to point out that pewpewpew was using the term correctly in that context since it was referencing the builds. It is hard to define xwing by those terms though and they surely aren't the best for the job

Well, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna run a 3 ship scum build, with one large base. So, effectively 4 ships for control purposes. I'll have to test it, see how I can keep action independent

Well, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna run a 3 ship scum build, with one large base. So, effectively 4 ships for control purposes. I'll have to test it, see how I can keep action independent

a large base ship does not count for 2 ships in terms of control. It still suffers the same effects when double stressed, and even though 1 more ion token is needed it is still susceptible to Ion effects. In a matter of fact large ships are easier to control because they often cost the points of 3 smaller ships.

Here is a perfect example on how a control build works. Against the match with 3 ships earlier it was much harder than against 2 ships which proven to be very vulnerable to control tactics as a decimator nearly got flown off the board (until vader killed the pilot for incompetence) and whisper was essentially out of the game. Now this was before the cloak modifications so if the same situation happened there will be some changes but it does show how control works and what control will not work against.