So I went to my local shop for a tournament for the summer kit. I showed up running the classic Bounty's nightmare list ran by Sable Gryphon in the Austin regionals. My first match I faced tie advanced swarm with accuracy corrector and the tie title with Darth Vader leading with advanced targeting computer. He did not fly well as Boba was in range 1 at all times and the match was over in about 10 turns. He complained that the store should ban lists and my list was too good, and I shouldn't bring a nationals winning list to a store tournament. My wisdom is, is he right? Or is he just being a sore loser because he got demolished with a list he has wanted to run for months?

What is Bounty's nightmare?

What is Bounty's nightmare?

Boba plus IG-B

As a former Magic the Gathering player who would play top tier decks and play against top tier decks every week, I see nothing wrong with playing regional and national winning lists. Part of the challenge of this game is knowing how to fly your ships and figuring out your top priority to take out. This means that you can run a great list, but still lose because you didn't fly properly. I play with my 7 year old son, and we field highly competitive lists, because I enjoy the high competition level. It is my reward for buying the ships and spending time studying squad lists and strategy. The people I play with at my LGS don't seem to mind the lists I bring, in fact one guy wants me to help him work on lists.

As a former Magic the Gathering player who would play top tier decks and play against top tier decks every week, I see nothing wrong with playing regional and national winning lists. Part of the challenge of this game is knowing how to fly your ships and figuring out your top priority to take out. This means that you can run a great list, but still lose because you didn't fly properly. I play with my 7 year old son, and we field highly competitive lists, because I enjoy the high competition level. It is my reward for buying the ships and spending time studying squad lists and strategy. The people I play with at my LGS don't seem to mind the lists I bring, in fact one guy wants me to help him work on lists.

Completely agree. Seeing the same deck over and over again was par for the course in competitive Magic. It was generally accepted that the 'best' players were those that could pilot those decks well in the mirror match, as well as against different strategies. As such, I could always find opponents that were more than willing to play against my tier 1 decks, either to hone their skills at the mirror match or to see how an innovative metagame call would fare against them. Often, it wasn't very well - that's why a top tier deck is a top tier deck! On the other hand, about once a season you'd see a pro take down a big tournament by playing a deck that was strictly terrible in any match-up that wasn't against the dominant strategies.

I've argued elsewhere that in X-Wing, many of us really do have a strong belief that even tournament matches should be somewhat thematic, so it's frustrating to see the same lists over and over. I totally get it - I wish every match could be between different factions and innovative lists - but this just isn't going to be the case in tournament play. It's an interesting tension in this community: so much of it is driven by tournament theorycraft (to the extent that Epic seems like a redheaded stepchild), but so many of the underlying sensibilities seem to be driven by the casual player's desire for a thematic, canonical game experience.

So I went to my local shop for a tournament for the summer kit. I showed up running the classic Bounty's nightmare list ran by Sable Gryphon in the Austin regionals. My first match I faced tie advanced swarm with accuracy corrector and the tie title with Darth Vader leading with advanced targeting computer. He did not fly well as Boba was in range 1 at all times and the match was over in about 10 turns. He complained that the store should ban lists and my list was too good, and I shouldn't bring a nationals winning list to a store tournament. My wisdom is, is he right? Or is he just being a sore loser because he got demolished with a list he has wanted to run for months?

This seems especially ironic to me because isn't a swarm, when flown well, generally a good counter for a two-ship list? Of course they're harder to fly well! Or at least, harder to fly without bumping and denying yourself actions. Really just seems like homeboy was bummed that the sweet new upgrades from his expensive Raider didn't just guarantee him a win against a proven list.

I remember someone saying that double IGs were the top of lots of tournaments. They also pointed out that double IGs are at the bottom of a lot of tournaments.

If you don't know how to fly it well, the list won't do it for you.

List building is important but if you were never allowed to fly things that had won elsewhere, this would be a rubbish game.