He's a sentient humanoid, aquatic-looking creature.

He looks Lovecraftian and that's probably why he's batsh*t crazy.

Ackbar is beatable with good deployment and ship maneuvering. VSD's have a tough time, but blitzing ISD's and flanking Glads can do well. Insidious and engine tech Demolisher are great against the conga line. Cr90's are easy to kill while just worrying about ackbar's broads. Ackbar is great, and his lists are tough, but still beatable.

What is super hard is to beat ackbar 10-0 or 9-0, Ackbar hurts, it's a damage race.. getting max or near-max tourney points vs Ackbar takes a lot of luck and outclassing your opponent.

Ackbar is beatable with good deployment and ship maneuvering. VSD's have a tough time, but blitzing ISD's and flanking Glads can do well. Insidious and engine tech Demolisher are great against the conga line. Cr90's are easy to kill while just worrying about ackbar's broads. Ackbar is great, and his lists are tough, but still beatable.

What is super hard is to beat ackbar 10-0 or 9-0, Ackbar hurts, it's a damage race.. getting max or near-max tourney points vs Ackbar takes a lot of luck and outclassing your opponent.

Agreed. exactly

Ackbar is beatable with good deployment and ship maneuvering. VSD's have a tough time, but blitzing ISD's and flanking Glads can do well. Insidious and engine tech Demolisher are great against the conga line. Cr90's are easy to kill while just worrying about ackbar's broads. Ackbar is great, and his lists are tough, but still beatable.

What is super hard is to beat ackbar 10-0 or 9-0, Ackbar hurts, it's a damage race.. getting max or near-max tourney points vs Ackbar takes a lot of luck and outclassing your opponent.

I think we'll be seeing fewer 10-0s in general, not just Akbar, though that may change whenever we see the new MOV chart.

Ackbar is beatable with good deployment and ship maneuvering. VSD's have a tough time, but blitzing ISD's and flanking Glads can do well. Insidious and engine tech Demolisher are great against the conga line. Cr90's are easy to kill while just worrying about ackbar's broads. Ackbar is great, and his lists are tough, but still beatable.

What is super hard is to beat ackbar 10-0 or 9-0, Ackbar hurts, it's a damage race.. getting max or near-max tourney points vs Ackbar takes a lot of luck and outclassing your opponent.

I think we'll be seeing fewer 10-0s in general, not just Akbar, though that may change whenever we see the new MOV chart.

I agree, most 10-0/9-1 will be as much to bad rock/paper/scissor matchups as anything. Will be interesting to see some folks with worse win/loss records be ranked higher due to close losses in big tourneys.

Guys, the sky is clearly falling.

I admit I have this sneaking suspicion my general bitterness toward Ackbar will fade, or at least switch to Rieekan.

I honestly can't decide if I hate them, or if I'm starting to love them for how they're mixing up my list building.

Had someone else run an MC80 and 3 CR90 A's tonight at the tournament I ran. He ran his MC80 off the board at the end but he would have won except for that.

His opponent was Mikael Hasselstein who was running 3 VSD's and a Imperial Ace set of squadrons.

If you're having trouble with Ackbar, don't despair. I recently led Admiral Motti to a glorious and victorious martyrdom aboard the Devastator.

Important notes about playing against Ackbar:

First of all, while his Assault Frigates are the scariest to play against, they have the worst time against being cut off. Unlike Mon Mothma's whales, they can't make you reroll your black crits and they lack the probable maneuver token from Garm Bel Iblis that would help them hop over you. Also, you're out in* his front arc.

Secondly, he probably doesn't have enough points left over for anything but a fighter screen.

List Building:
Step 1: Forget about VSD's unless they are carriers. You will have bad time bears with it. I say this as a man with 3 VSD's.

Step 2: 4+ ships and at least half of your list can functionally go at speed 4. Preferably, the only thing stuck at speed 3 is your ISD.
Step 3: Bring all the black dice crits you can find and a method to reliably get them critting.

Play Style

Step 4: Move the ISD to cut them off (Consider it martyred as of now) and send all of your speed 4 goodies to the front of the line, staying in the front arc.

Step 5: Fire all the missiles and ram like it's going out of style.

Honestly, sometime soon people are going to recognize that Garm Bel Iblis still works great and have horrific fleets of 2 whales and Liberty or 3 whales and Redemption with Projection experts. All swarming with the choicest of B-Wings, A-Wings and HWK-90's.

My crazy prediction is that the best admirals of Wave 2 were always with us, Garm Bel Iblis and Motti. Screed and Riekan are second for their respective factions. You heard it from me first. Shame me if you disagree, remember it if you agree.

Had someone else run an MC80 and 3 CR90 A's tonight at the tournament I ran. He ran his MC80 off the board at the end but he would have won except for that.

His opponent was Mikael Hasselstein who was running 3 VSD's and a Imperial Ace set of squadrons.

Indeed, I got taken to town twice by Ackbar. My first battle (the one mentioned above) I won simply because he was kiting too fast. By rights, I should have lost that match.

I did lose the second match. Both the fleets had one MC80+Ackbar, and both had small ships with Turbolaser Reroute Circuits doing tremendous damage to my Motti VSDs.

I refuse to believe that the sky is falling, but I do need to give Ackbar and the TRCs some serious thought. Admiral Schiear Kaan has some good ideas, above. I do think I need to shelve the 3 VSDs for a while. It was my first time running 3 of them - it didn't go well in terms of maneuvering them. I deployed them as a bit of a phalanx, and it didn't work out.

One capital list I want to try is the ISD 2x GSD 2x RD with critical effect weapons and all under Screedovision. Use Raiders with NK-7s and Gladiators with APTs or something. I dunno.

I am seeing VSDs endangered as gunships, which is a little unfair because of how effective the Assault Frigates are. Still, VSDs are the only ship in the game that can pump their firepower up to 5 black and 3 red dice in an attack using Expanded Launchers, with a gunnery team. If the rest of your list is more mobile, you could use a tractor-beam equipped VSD to drag targets into it and pummel it with a massive forward attack using Expanded Launchers. So as some kind of defensive anchor to use when the rest of your fleet is drawing attention. Just a thought.

It's also available as a Hyperspace Assault space fist, and a lot scarier than anything the Rebels could use there. Hyper right in front of the enemy ship you hate and cut loose.

Every rebel ship I can think of has at least two dice (usually red ones) in front arc.

So for a price premium, all ackbar is doing is shifting part of your front arc to your side.

So he saves you the trouble of positioning for dual arcing. For 38 points.

I'd argue the MC80 has the manoeuvre options to dual arc pretty well if you wanted to play it that way. For 38 points Ackbar saves you the hassle and lets you play the standoff game. Of course, like Vader, he also means you deny yourself the advantages of the other commanders.

Of course in the case of gunnery team ships (whales) his effect is much more significant.

So required approach would be not to fly multiple ships in front of multiple whales?

One of the cool things I like about Admiral Montferrat is that when you ram, the dial stays at speed three. So to slow down you simply aim for a convenient enemy ship to temporarily allow you to move at speed 2 or 1. Thankfully ISD-1s love to be pointed at enemies at close range and just happen to have more hull than anyone else and a big fat base to disrupt enemy movement.

Plus Adm M effectively negates half the Akbar bonus.

One of the cool things I like about Admiral Montferrat is that when you ram, the dial stays at speed three. So to slow down you simply aim for a convenient enemy ship to temporarily allow you to move at speed 2 or 1. Thankfully ISD-1s love to be pointed at enemies at close range and just happen to have more hull than anyone else and a big fat base to disrupt enemy movement.

Plus Adm M effectively negates half the Akbar bonus.

True, only drawback being once you overlap a ship you must discard him. Still he is way better than needa and his evade. Only thing i can think of that negates his effect is jainas light title.

One of the cool things I like about Admiral Montferrat is that when you ram, the dial stays at speed three. So to slow down you simply aim for a convenient enemy ship to temporarily allow you to move at speed 2 or 1. Thankfully ISD-1s love to be pointed at enemies at close range and just happen to have more hull than anyone else and a big fat base to disrupt enemy movement.

Plus Adm M effectively negates half the Akbar bonus.

....ship speed stays at 3 anyway because collisions do not change the set speed of the ship? It is only a temporary reduction. On the next turn the ship will move as it had before the collision (if possible).

ANd ramming something ejects Montferrat through the window on the bridge and into space, and your attacks are no longer considered obstructed.

One of the cool things I like about Admiral Montferrat is that when you ram, the dial stays at speed three. So to slow down you simply aim for a convenient enemy ship to temporarily allow you to move at speed 2 or 1. Thankfully ISD-1s love to be pointed at enemies at close range and just happen to have more hull than anyone else and a big fat base to disrupt enemy movement.

Plus Adm M effectively negates half the Akbar bonus.

....ship speed stays at 3 anyway because collisions do not change the set speed of the ship? It is only a temporary reduction. On the next turn the ship will move as it had before the collision (if possible).

ANd ramming something ejects Montferrat through the window on the bridge and into space, and your attacks are no longer considered obstructed.

One of the cool things I like about Admiral Montferrat is that when you ram, the dial stays at speed three. So to slow down you simply aim for a convenient enemy ship to temporarily allow you to move at speed 2 or 1. Thankfully ISD-1s love to be pointed at enemies at close range and just happen to have more hull than anyone else and a big fat base to disrupt enemy movement.

Plus Adm M effectively negates half the Akbar bonus.

....ship speed stays at 3 anyway because collisions do not change the set speed of the ship? It is only a temporary reduction. On the next turn the ship will move as it had before the collision (if possible).

ANd ramming something ejects Montferrat through the window on the bridge and into space, and your attacks are no longer considered obstructed.

When I read his card this is exactly the image I had in my head.

Honestly, sometime soon people are going to recognize that Garm Bel Iblis still works great and have horrific fleets of 2 whales and Liberty or 3 whales and Redemption with Projection experts. All swarming with the choicest of B-Wings, A-Wings and HWK-90's.

My crazy prediction is that the best admirals of Wave 2 were always with us, Garm Bel Iblis and Motti. Screed and Riekan are second for their respective factions. You heard it from me first. Shame me if you disagree, remember it if you agree.

Funny you should mention this--I very much agree. Just today I took Garm to a tournament with two whales (ECM/Boosted Comm/Flight Controllers) and a CR90 token dispenser (Tantive/Raymus), with 4xA/5xB/Jan. It works extremely well, and the kicker: the list is almost entirely Wave 1.

I think Garm retains his status as the high skill-cap Rebel admiral. His applicability is not immediately obvious--I myself dismissed him for a long time--but the more I've been using him, the more power I see him add to my lists.

I still sincerely think that Ackbar owes his popularity to the outright obviousness of his utility. There are very few subtleties associated with "get two more turbolasers." He's going to drop once people start learning how to address him.

I'd say Ackbar gets his popularity from his power. I like power. Unlimited powarrrrr

Honestly, sometime soon people are going to recognize that Garm Bel Iblis still works great and have horrific fleets of 2 whales and Liberty or 3 whales and Redemption with Projection experts. All swarming with the choicest of B-Wings, A-Wings and HWK-90's.

My crazy prediction is that the best admirals of Wave 2 were always with us, Garm Bel Iblis and Motti. Screed and Riekan are second for their respective factions. You heard it from me first. Shame me if you disagree, remember it if you agree.

Funny you should mention this--I very much agree. Just today I took Garm to a tournament with two whales (ECM/Boosted Comm/Flight Controllers) and a CR90 token dispenser (Tantive/Raymus), with 4xA/5xB/Jan. It works extremely well, and the kicker: the list is almost entirely Wave 1.

I think Garm retains his status as the high skill-cap Rebel admiral. His applicability is not immediately obvious--I myself dismissed him for a long time--but the more I've been using him, the more power I see him add to my lists.

I still sincerely think that Ackbar owes his popularity to the outright obviousness of his utility. There are very few subtleties associated with "get two more turbolasers." He's going to drop once people start learning how to address him.

You don't really address taking more damage, which is what Ackbar provides.

In that sense, he's really point and click whereas Garm takes a little bit more thought.

Ackbar fits well with Rebel long range tactics. Last game, I kept my CR90a at long range from the Empire all game, rarely getting any dual arcs, but finding the Empire squarely in a side arc. The only dual arc I got was side/aft, in which case an Ackbar broadside with TRC was clearly a better option. Also, where a dual arc allows the opponent two opportunities to use defense tokens, the Ackbar broadside concentrates firepower into one volley, limiting the options for damage mitigation.

On the flip side, with moderate control of positioning, one can force the Ackbar fleet to restrict their own fire, by giving targets only in one side arc at any given time. This impedes 3 out of 5 available Rebel ship classes, at least.

On the flip side, with moderate control of positioning, one can force the Ackbar fleet to restrict their own fire, by giving targets only in one side arc at any given time. This impedes 3 out of 5 available Rebel ship classes, at least.

This will hardly hamper a fleet consisting only of the other 2 ship classes. Flown well, these will always get two shots from the side.

Guys, the sky is clearly falling.

I admit I have this sneaking suspicion my general bitterness toward Ackbar will fade, or at least switch to Rieekan.

I honestly can't decide if I hate them, or if I'm starting to love them for how they're mixing up my list building.

Of course the sky is falling, I shot it.

I regret nothing!

I played 2 games on Saturday, I took 2 MC80 and 2 MC30, to test out the new ships with Ackbar to test out the new commander. I also threw in some command cards to round things out and some ECM to let me use the MC80 defense tokens as I wanted not as my opponent wanted.

My opponent then rebuilt his fleet and I stayed with the one I had. 5 Guppies and Ackbar, I thought I would have a very close game on my hands and a bloody one at that.

Here are some points I noticed:

If you can fly between two ships and have a right side shot and a left you get an awful number of dice

Having ECM meant you could play your braces as you needed to

Having Home One and Ion Batteries allowed me a modest amount of dice manipulation

Dice manipulation and damage prevention is key, my friend was rolling 5 red dice each time he fired but without any form of dice manipulation they were random as ever

My weekend update:

TRCRs with Ackbar are just as powerful as we thought. Did 11 damage on a single CR90 activation via Akbar slash. I then conceded at the end of the round after my MC80 went down in flames (oops).