This past Saturday our TO organized a tournament at Portland’s Guardian Games around the rumored “Force Friday” Core Set that was rumored to be released, and although I originally couldn’t figure out how I was going to incorporate a single T-70 into a list and therefore was going to run a TIE swarm featuring the new FO TIEs, I was struck by an idea for a list at the last moment and had to borrow R5-P9 from a friend on the day of the tournament, as well as nail down my maneuvers to make sure I would always have Biggs in range 1 for the first engagement (even though I’m a rebel player, I don’t use Biggs very often). I had stayed up pretty late into the morning helping my wife get the apartment cleaned up for a landlord inspection, so I was a bit sleep deprived for this tournament, which I may or may not blame for some poor strategic decisions during this tournament.

37 Poe Dameron + Draw Their Fire + R5-P9 + Autothrusters

The star of the show, the whole point of the list was to enable Poe and turn him into an unstoppable machine. Poe seemed to be designed to be used with R5-P9, as he benefits from having a focus token but not spending it, and P9 turns that unspent focus into a shield token. Since Poe will be getting focus tokens externally, he doesn’t need to use his EPT slot to get a second action. Draw their Fire was intended to work with Biggs, since Poe gets to recover a shield for free each turn.

36 Kyle Katarn + Twin Laser Turret + Predator + Recon Specialist + Moldy Crow

There were several ways I could’ve gone to pass Poe a focus token, but I like Kyle the most because of how easy his ability is to trigger (just need to be at range 1-3 at the beginning of combat) and because he can bring a Twin Laser Turret to effectively give me 4 attacks each turn and to give me better board control over ships that I can’t keep in the arcs of the X-Wings. Predator synergizes particularly well with TLT. I could afford to spend so many points on making Kyle such a deadly attacker thanks to my next ship.

27 Biggs Darklighter + R3-A2

Ships like Poe want to be attacked last, so their shield regeneration can have the most impact against a lower amount of attaks. Biggs is a great way to force this to happen, and he has seen competitive play alongside Fat Han and Corran for this reason. With 2 points leftover, I decided to give Biggs the ability to deal out some stress to enemy ships, since I knew Biggs being stressed wouldn’t really be a huge deal since he dies pretty quickly.

Round 1: vs Sam

39 Trandoshan Slaver + Flechette Cannon + Cluster Missiles + Saboteur + Mercenary Copilot

60 Bossk + Crack Shot + AutoBlaster + Gunner + Saboteur + Greedo + Hot Shot Blaster + Hound's Tooth + Ion Projector

This was my first time playing against the YV-666. From what I could tell Sam was a newer player (I had to loan him 3 obstacles for the tournament, which I was happy to do), and although his list clearly wasn't optimized (there was easily enough room for 2 more Z-95s or a TLT Y-Wing), his maneuvering in the early turns was solid, with the generic Trandoshan slow-rolling up the middle while Bossk sped around the side, ensuring that one of his ships would be flanking me no matter which one I attacked. I placed my asteroids at around range 3 from his board edges to try to make it difficult for him to bank his ships in towards my ships which would be in the middle, but YV's speed allowed him to easily clear the rock close to Bossk.

I decided that I wanted to minimize the effectiveness of the Hound's Tooth title by killing Bossk last. Having never played against the YV-666, I was a bit caught off guard by how maneuverable the ship is, like when Bossk did a 4 straight, putting him in position to clear the debris. Then I made a mistake on turn 2, maneuvering my ships so that the Trandoshan couldn't block me but would still be in range if he did a 1 straight. I did not account for the YV's full stop, it's definitely something I'm only accustomed to thinking about when facing Lambdas. As a result, Biggs and Kyle were just out of range to concentrate fire on the Slaver, which I couldn't check until after Poe attacked since Biggs and Kyle can't afford to skip focusing to use Target Lock to check range (my ability to eyeball range is terrible, something I've started working on improving) and Bossk was out of Poe's arc. In spite of my flubb, my dice carried me through the round, dealing 3 damage to the Slaver and 5 to Bossk while Biggs only lost 1 shield. Now that I was fully aware of the full stop, I made sure to give Bossk a stress with Biggs to keep him from sitting on that sweet position just outside of the battle facing my ships.

On the next turn I angled Poe towards the Slaver in case he tried to speed forward, and also started banking Kyle away from the fight to keep his TLT at an effective range. Bossk tried to do a 3 straight to clear his stress but I think didn't account for Biggs' maneuver, and ended up crashing into Poe. Bossk rolled a hit and a crit against Biggs' single evade, allowing him to bypass Draw their Fire with Bossk's ability and put Biggs down to 2 hull. My entire team lit up the Slaver, dealing 8 damage to it and leaving it at 1 hull, unfortunately allowing it to finish off Biggs. On the next turn the Slaver bumped into Poe, only moving about a millimeter forward, and Bossk slammed on the brakes, which allowed Poe to pull a Tallon roll to the left in front of the slaver to face Bossk, knowing that Kyle would easily be able to finish off the Slaver before it could fire. Poe lost 2 shields to Bossk, one of which was recovered by K5-P9, but first Poe managed to push through Bossk's last shield and put a Damaged Engine crit on him, effectively crippling him in the late game. Kyle finished off the Slaver. Next turn Poe bumped into Bossk but the roll for Ion Projector failed to ionize him, and Poe was able to recover back up to full health thanks to a focus token from Kyle, and Kyle turned hard to the right towards the top of the map and dealt two more damage to Bossk. Bossk went down on the next turn after landing on an asteroid, and his pup only lived 2 more turns after that without ever firing a shot thanks to Poe dodging his arc with boost. Although I didn't fly too great here, some good luck and a much more optimized and efficient list gave me the decisive win.

Round 2: vs Alex

12 Bandit Squadron Pilot

48 Miranda Doni + Twin Laser Turret + Extra Munitions + Jan Ors + Proximity Mines + Conner Net + Advanced SLAM

40 Poe Dameron + BB-8 + Autothrusters + Push the Limit + Weapons Guidance

My opponent decided to take initiative, which was kind of nice that my Poe would be moving after his, making it harder for him to arc-dodge me, but annoying because Miranda would be able to recover shields with her ability before Poe could shoot her. Miranda was my first priority target, thanks to her ability to regenerate shields and her 9 points of bombs, I knew I was going to want to take her out as quickly as I could.

The game started as a joust up the middle, with his Poe getting a little too fancy wiggling between the asteroids on my left flank and finding himself in a not so great spot with an asteroid blocking his ability to turn into my ships. Miranda lost her shields and a hull to my combined attack, while Biggs only lost 1 shield again with the enemy Poe stuck out of position and unable to shoot any of my ships. The Bandit had used Jan Ors to take an unused evade token which caused it's attack dice to whiff. I made a mistake here in using R3-A2 to stress Miranda, probably because I had just finished explaining how R3-A2 worked and didn’t want to forget to use it and just snapped it off without thinking if it was a good idea.

Forgetting that I was stressed. I then forgot that Biggs was stressed and put down a k-turn, the first time I think I have ever done that in my 2+ year history with this game, which my studious opponent quickly caught and knew exactly what I was in store for. Luckily, my opponent tried to turn Biggs out of the fight but only ended up crashing Biggs into the Bandit with a 3-speed turn, leaving the Bandit unable to fire at Biggs. Meanwhile his Poe decided to just hang out in his pocket of the battlefield rather than risk hitting the asteroid, while Kyle went 3-straight right past the Bandit and my Poe 4k-turned right behind Miranda. Miranda took a few shields off of Poe who was no longer protected by Biggs. My Poe brought Miranda down to 1 hull and Kyle did some damage to his Poe from downtown, being unable to shoot at Miranda who was at range 1.

On the next turn Miranda fled down the middle of the board to put some space between her and Poe, and the Bandit turned into the middle to face-off with Poe. Biggs went straight to clear his stress and Kyle turned right to stay on the edge of the battle, while his Poe continued to meander his way around the asteroids back to the fight. Opting to deal with the more immediate threat of the Bandit, Poe cleared it's shields at range 1 and Kyle finished off its two hull points, denying it the opportunity to fire. Miranda regnerated her shield, and failed to stick any damage through Poe's autothrusters and R5-P9. Miranda continued to regenerate shields and not stick any damage for the next two turns before falling to Poe and Kyle, and his Poe managed to finally finish off Biggs before taking exact lethal damage from my Poe with 4 hits and 2 green blanks at range 1. My Poe and Kyle ended the battle unscathed thanks to R5-P9.

While mistakes were made on both sides of the table and my opponent's dice rolls were not great in the beginning of the game, I think this match again came down to points efficiency. There was only 1 point in my list that went unused (draw their fire), while Alex had 13 points in his list that went unused (Weapons Guidance, Advanced Slam, Prox Mines, Conner Net, and Extra Munitions never came into play), points that could have been spent on another Z-95. It can be hard to see these inefficiencies when you build a list for the first time, but it’s important to keep in mind when you’re testing out a new list, to look for upgrades or abilities that go unused or underused and how you can spend those points more efficiently.

Round 3: vs Xander

Tempest Squadron Pilot + Hull Upgrade + Accuracy Corrector + TIE/x1

Tempest Squadron Pilot + Hull Upgrade + Accuracy Corrector + TIE/x1

Tempest Squadron Pilot + Hull Upgrade + Accuracy Corrector + TIE/x1

Tempest Squadron Pilot + Hull Upgrade + Ion Pulse Missiles + Accuracy Corrector + TIE/x1

This was a match where points efficiency was no longer tipped in my favor. At 6 hit points, 3 agility, 2 hits every attack and a fairly good dial, I was essentially fighting against four TIE Defenders! Accuracy Corrector also meant that once again Draw their Fire was unlikely to be triggering for me this round. Another problem was the only thing I knew how to do with my brand new list was joust, but I knew that I was not going to want to go head-to-head against this list. Knowing that he would probably be deploying his ships in the corner and me deploying mine in the middle, I set up my asteroids loosely in his corners and along the side of the board to make it harder for him to turn his ships into mine, while my lower number of ships would have an easier time maneuvering through the rocks.

As I rushed my ships forward, Xander durdled around in his corner with hard turns and barrel rolls, seemingly content to let me come through the asteroids to get to him. I maneuvered my ships so that Biggs and Poe would be going around the right side of the middle asteroid while Kyle went around the left side of it to provide support fire to the X-Wing's left flank from outside, just close enough to keep supplying Poe with focus tokens. Xander banked towards the middle and used barrel rolls to split his ships to go around the large asteroid in his corner. Due to the quirkiness of range involving arcs vs turrets, one of his TIEs was in range of Kyle's TLT but was unable to fire back, and lost 2 shields thanks to Predator and bad green rolls. My goal was to engage the two TIEs in the middle of the board, focusing on the already wounded TIE, and keep the two outside TIEs out of the fight for a turn if possible. The two outside TIEs were facing towards the large corner asteroid going into the 4th turn, so I knew that they would have to bank away from the asteroid to avoid it, so I tried to put my X-Wings behind that asteroid as best I could to force the TIEs to turn away from my X-Wings. Using some old school formation tricks, I had Poe take point with Biggs coming up behind him, forming a single-file line that would make it easier for me to avoid obstacles next turn.

Most formations want to approach the opponent at an equal range (right), but Biggs wants to be further back while his teammates take point to allow his squadmates to take close range shots while the enemy is forced to shoot at long range.

My trick worked to an extent, as I remember that at least one of the TIEs, if not both, on the right side of the map overshot and did not get to attack that turn. I believe I was also able to put Poe at range 1 of the TIEs while Biggs was at range 2. TIE Advanceds are still really beefy though, and my team only managed to put two more damage on the injured TIE while Biggs lost 2 shields, which I also forgot to stress with R3-A2 to keep it from k-turning.

Next turn I Poe and the TIEs k-turned around each other, while Biggs pulled the "Biggs" maneuver and turned out of combat towards the other TIEs to keep himself out of converged arcs and force the opponent to split their fire, and stay alive so he can come back later in the game and mess up the opponent. With Biggs out of the way, Xander identified Kyle as his priority target that was enabling Poe to have dice augmentation and damage recover even while stressed. The rest of the game continued with the typical knife-fighting (close-in dogfighting with hard turns and k-turns) that you see after two jousting lists collide. I think by sheer luck the TIE that I killed first was the one with the Ion missiles, as they never came up and I didn’t even realize they were in his list until the game was over (remember, sleep deprived). According to my notes I was able to keep my fire concentrated on one TIE at a time, which is key when fighting against lists like this, and was able to kill one TIE every 3 turns thanks to some very poor green dice results from Xander, with lots of eyeballs being rolled while he had evade or stress tokens. Kyle was down to 1 hull after the 3rd TIE went down, and in an attempt to keep him out of the last TIEs arc, I ended up clipping the board edge with the corner of his base, another tournament first for me, although I didn't feel too bad since Kyle was almost dead anyway.

I was excited to pull off some arc-dodging with the brand new Tallon Roll, but Xander saw it coming from a mile away and left Poe stressed and facing the wrong way.

Biggs was still miraculously alive at this point thanks to my Biggs maneuver earlier, and narrowly escaped death a second time against Xander's last TIE that he had used to expertly block Poe's Tallon Roll. Biggs took the hint and ran for the hills while Poe came around and finished off the TIE, again completely unscathed thanks to Biggs and R5-P9. I got lucky again with Xander rolling poorly on his green dice this game, and this time luck had a much bigger factor in our game. Had Xander's one of Xander's TIEs survived a turn or two longer and managed to finish off Biggs, Poe may have been unable to finish off two TIEs on his own to clinch a full win. Predator was also fantastic

Round 4: vs Austin

Obsidian Squadron Pilot

Obsidian Squadron Pilot

Obsidian Squadron Pilot

Darth Vader + Predator + Engine Upgrade + Advanced Targeting Computer + TIE/x1

Omicron Group Pilot + Advanced Sensors

I think there's some saying that the hardest advice to take is your own. I think my lack of sleep and practice finally caught up with me this game, as I seemed to manage to do everything wrong. I offer this embarrassing farce of a match to you all as an excellent example of what not to do in a game, as well as to reinforce strategic advice I have given in previous articles.

Austin set up his Lambda and TIEs in the corner, with the TIEs facing the middle and Vader in the far opposite corner. I had the brilliant idea (ie fell right into Austin's obvious trap) of deploying directly across from the Lambda to rush forward to try to catch the TIEs out of position and beat Vader to the fight. TIEs are extremely good at turning, and I'm not sure why I thought my squad would be fast enough to get within range of the TIEs before they were back in position to meet me. Your formation is only as fast as your slowest ship, which is another reason I recommend symmetry in list building, and the HWK only being able to go 3 straight without giving up its focus tokens meant that "rushing" was never a viable tactic for this list.

The blueprints for disaster

The second mistake I made was choosing to ignore Vader after I realized that there was no way I would be beating him to the fight. I had Vader coming straight at me, I should have turned Biggs and the rest of my squad left to try to catch Vader with R3-A2, but I was afraid that he would be able to dodge out of Biggs arc and leave one of my ships stranded with no attack that turn. Instead, I made my third mistake, which was I decided to shoot at the Lambda first, after writing an article only a few months ago about how you should never shoot at a Lambda shuttle first. I think my reasoning was that the Lambda was the only ship that was in range of all 3 of my ships and that I wanted to use R3-A2 to keep the Lambda from pulling a full stop and blocking Poe's k-turn while having a fantastic position to shoot from for the next few turns.

Biggs took 3 damage down to 2 hull on the crackback. Somewhat comically, Biggs evaded all the damage from Vader's attack including the crit, and none of Austin's other attacks had crits for Draw their Fire to mitigate. Things only got worse on the next round of attacks when I timely evade roll from the Lambda left it on 1 hull remaining at the end of the round. Because the Lambda was now facing in completely the wrong direction, it was essentially dead anyway and I had basically wasted my first two turns of shooting on attacking a ship that was already doomed to become irrelevant. Biggs went down, and on the next turn Austin banked all of his TIEs towards Kyle and dealt heavy damage to him, but accidentally bumped Vader into his own shuttle (it was extremely close) and I took a turn off of shooting the shuttle to take some shots at a stunned Vader, but his green dice were decent enough that I was only able to strip off his 2 shields. Next turn Poe finished off the shuttle just to have some closure, and Vader took out Kyle before he could shoot.

The game was now pretty hopeless with Poe facing down 4 TIEs and Vader. However I decided that I was gonna try to at least keep Poe alive until the end of the match to maintain my MOV. Vader and the TIEs met Poe near the bottom right asteroid, with Poe being blocked by the lead TIE. Vader got a devastating roll of 3 natural hits at range 1 and added a crit to that, and Poe rolled blanks, losing his shields and getting a Console Fire. Poe also rolled a strong 3 hits against Vader, but Vader rolled 3 natural evades to counter. I thought it was over there, but miraculously the other 2 TIEs rolled poorly against Poe’s hot green dice even without his ability. I sped Poe 4 forward out of the fray towards the top of the map, and decided that I would probably avoid more damage by taking a focus than by clearing the console fire, which luckily didn’t damage me. The TIEs k-turned, and in a bizarre move that even Austin wasn’t sure why he did it, Vader banked away from Poe and towards the southern edge of the map, deciding he had better things to do than help the TIEs finish off Poe. The TIEs had no chance breaking through autothrusters and Poe’s ability, and Poe regenerated a shield. The rest of the match was spent fleeing Poe away from the TIEs, clearing fires and regenerating shields.

Smell ya Later!!

The TIEs finally caught up to Poe in the top right corner, but thanks to fully regenerated shields, weren’t able to kill him in time, and I kept a decent MOV rating and was able to say that Poe never died today, although I still lost the match horribly.

I really liked the list I flew for this tournament, although the one thing that definitely needs to change is VI on Poe instead of Draw their Fire. PS9 was a pretty big weakness for my list, and VI would go along way to help with that. Poe is definitely a powerful ship, and it’s pretty nice that you can build a strong Poe for for only ~36-38 points and have a strong ace ship, as opposed to Corran who usually clocks in at ~45 points for similar abilities.

I hope you enjoyed this overly detailed report of the T-70s first tournament outing. I probably spent too much time on this and should have just gotten it out there sooner, but I really enjoy and learn from the small details in a match, and that’s want I want to give you guys.

You can see the full lists and tournament results here: http://lists.starwarsclubhouse.com/get_tourney_details?tourney_id=640