Mynock Podcast Episode 6 - Tournament Season Hath Begun! with Guest Aaron Bonar

By Rytackle, in X-Wing

Available Here
DIRECT LINK

Happy New year fellow Aces! We have a fantastic show to get you brains ready for Store Championships. Ryan and Dee have already played in one and shall do their very best to impart some wisdom onto all you little dewbacks :)

SIDE NOTE: We made a mistake when talking about Omega Leader (Lockdown). C3P0 can actually be used by an opponent because it happens before the modify dice step. Also we mention putting gunner on a TIE Shuttle...you can't because it's too pricy. Dee is a bit senile in his old age lol

Here is the episode rundown:

[00:00:00]-[00:58:00] Introductions and Interview with Aaron Bonar (Kinetic Operator)

[00:58:00]-[01:13:00] TIE Advanced Prototype & Guidance Chip Preview

[01:13:00]-[01:27:00] Ello Asty, Red Ace, Hobbie with Targeting Astromech, and Integrated Astromech

[01:27:00]-[01:35:00] Let's name more TIE/FOs! Omega Leader = Lockdown

[01:35:00]-[01:43:30] Important timing windows and FAQ Changes for your upcoming Store Championships!

[01:44:40]-[01:54:50] Ryan and Dee's first Store Championship of the year! How'd we do?

[01:54:50]-[02:15:10] Ship Retrospective: The Rebel Y-Wing, Upgrade Cards of the Week, and Beginner Tips.

[02:15:10]-[02:41:50] Advanced Tips with Dee - Knowing Yourself and your bias

[02:41:50]-[03:08:17] Another Buying Guide, Ending, and Force Awakens Epilogue Discussion.

Take a break from moisture farming and connect us to the blutooth in your T-16 Skyhopper. FLY BETTER!

https://www.facebook.com/MynockPodcast/
[email protected]
http://recreatorstudios.com/collections/1105782-x-wing-compatible

Edited by Rytackle

I'm a fan of you guys. Good stuff. It's always fun to hear KO talk, too, even if it was about kicking my ass at Regionals.

Yeah whoops Gunner on TIE Shuttle. Are we SURE about the timing window when C-3PO actually adds the evade result? I'm gonna go have my prune juice now.

EDIT: Yup. Initial response from FFG is that C-3PO triggers AND resolves immediately upon the defense roll. So it can be Juked. And even though it occurs outside the Modify Dice window, C-3PO still cannot be used against Lockdown (Omega Leader) if he has a target lock on the 3POing ship.

Edited by Mynock Delta

Thanks for doing the show.

Love hearing Monty Python references. ^^ Enjoying your podcast, guys, keep it up.

Edited by Rividius

Question about the advanced tip: Is there a resource that lays out the math or other objective info that you recommend? I understand the need to avoid pre-existing biases, but what should I rely on instead?

Math is pretty objective, but understand what it is. 'Jousting value' people refer to is brute efficiency. So just because it's inefficient doesn't make it bad.

Look at whatever the ship can do and ask yourself 'can I leverage what it can do to make up for its inherent inefficiency'.

If yes, great, if no, it might be just bad, or there might be something no one had thought of yet.

Great show guys, you are fast becoming my favorite podcast!

Love the podcast but did you guys change the way the podcast is uploaded?

It has yet to appear on Pocket Casts (the Android podcast app I use) for download.

Love the podcast but did you guys change the way the podcast is uploaded?

It has yet to appear on Pocket Casts (the Android podcast app I use) for download.

No I haven't changed it. Every upload has been through libsyn. Please let me know if it still hasn't shown up, because then I'll have to examine my RSS feed.

Thanks everyone for the kind words! We're doing our best!

The Bakersfield fellas listen regular, thanks guys!

Love the podcast but did you guys change the way the podcast is uploaded?

It has yet to appear on Pocket Casts (the Android podcast app I use) for download.

No I haven't changed it. Every upload has been through libsyn. Please let me know if it still hasn't shown up, because then I'll have to examine my RSS feed.

Thanks everyone for the kind words! We're doing our best!

I removed it from my list and then added it back and the new episode appeared. It was probably an issue on my end.

Keep up the good work!

Good job, guys. I bit of rambling here and there but I think you are starting to develop your own "voice". Keep 'em coming!

Just an FYI, I use an app on Android called Podcast Addict and it hasn't had any issue downloading the episodes.

Any chance you guys would edit the down to say an hour? 3+hrs is daunting to take on.

Question about the advanced tip: Is there a resource that lays out the math or other objective info that you recommend? I understand the need to avoid pre-existing biases, but what should I rely on instead?

Math is pretty objective, but understand what it is. 'Jousting value' people refer to is brute efficiency. So just because it's inefficient doesn't make it bad.

Look at whatever the ship can do and ask yourself 'can I leverage what it can do to make up for its inherent inefficiency'.

If yes, great, if no, it might be just bad, or there might be something no one had thought of yet.

^THIS^

The work Major Juggler provides is indispensable, because let's face it, when you're deciding whether or not to play chicken with an opponent, it's terrific to know who has the advantage, and by how much. Those odds can inform you on how to control the game, by pressing a favorable joust: your opponent must either break or dice chuck with you at a disadvantage. Or the numbers could be screaming, 70+% of the time, you are going to lose the game unless you reposition. Well, you'd better abandon that attack line, or even better, armed with that knowledge, don't even approach it in the first place.

Outside of those specific jousting scenarios, you need to rely on your own judgment, informed by info you collect from other quality players. There are no available objective numbers; X-Wing is not a solved game. I love the work being done in major sports vis a vis advanced metrics. Baseball is on the simpler end, because it's virtually turn-based and so few events occur simultaneously. Football is a nightmare to analyze, because there are 22 combatants in constant fluid motion. X-Wing feels somewhere between baseball and basketball, and I'm sure there are unexplored avenues of quantifying X-Wing play statistically that nobody has yet broached. (I was a literature and philosophy major; there's no way I can even begin to approach the math involved. It'd involve recording massive sample sizes of games and interpreting them into charts and graphs.) It's in that unknown space, that X-Wing becomes an art. I'm guessing that that elegant mystery of out positioning each other was what hooked most of us into the game.

That's why I gushed over KO's play. He's a master of grasping the interplay of space and motion, and that allows him to dictate the tempo and terms of his matches. The dream is ever to find that way to fly a squad that nobody else can deal with. I think it's pretty cool that over our last two shows, we had the two extreme ends of the spectrum. Brad loves to get in your face and overwhelm you with 5 target-locked dice from Whisper and double use of Vader crew from RAC. Aaron loves to shut you down and erode you at his leisure. Both approaches are completely valid in this deeply subjective space.

EDIT: I didn't really answer the question LOL. Ultimately, you do have to trust your own judgment. Just know that we human beings are incredibly fallible, so that judgment needs to be continually scrutinized, refined, and even painfully uprooted in order to ameliorate the impact of those biases I discussed on the cast.

Edited by Mynock Delta

Any chance you guys would edit the down to say an hour? 3+hrs is daunting to take on.

Ignore him, 3 hours is fine !, you guys make me laugh, yours is now my favorite podcast

Good job, guys. I bit of rambling here and there but I think you are starting to develop your own "voice". Keep 'em coming!

Just an FYI, I use an app on Android called Podcast Addict and it hasn't had any issue downloading the episodes.

That is SO generous. I ramble non-stop. It's painful to listen to it myself LOL. I've got a touch of cluttering, because my brain tends to race on ahead before my mouth is done. Hopefully, I can get a handle on it again. I used to do sales when I was younger, and I know I was able to eradicate the issue back then.

Any chance you guys would edit the down to say an hour? 3+hrs is daunting to take on.

Any chance you guys would edit the down to say an hour? 3+hrs is daunting to take on.

Ignore him, 3 hours is fine !, you guys make me laugh, yours is now my favorite podcast

Thanks both of you! It may come to that, when I (eventually) run out of things to say. It's a deep concern, because Ryan and I initially agreed on a biweekly schedule, and I'm running through my personal content pretty quickly LOL. I pressed Tarn RySon pretty hard to make sure we had timestamps, for listeners that don't have a 3 hour commute to kill. For now, BlodVargarna, I'd suggest you just break it up, and listen to it in chunks as convenient.

Everyone else, please drop us a line. Would you like shorter and more frequent podcasts, or fuller ones that might end up being less frequent because we need to build up content to share?

I've got no problems with length. For one, I just listen to it over a few different sittings if it's long. For another, podcasts, for me, are sort of a stand-in to sitting around and talking x-wing (a luxury I hardly ever get to do). The casual, extemporaneous style just feels more like that.

Props for staying away from extended coverage of every match that everyone on your podcast played at a tournament. I don't mind hearing anecdotes about a match that had something cool happen or had a stuation that inspired a more in depth conversation about a point in the game but starting every podcast with an hour of tournment rehashing is a slog to get through.

Keep up the good work.

Great pod cast guys, I'm a big fan of the physiological discussion and its something a lot of players should learn to understand. It drives me nuts sometimes that people at my LGS often look down on others because they don't follow the same "rules of engagement" as them. To me that's "fly casual" gone wrong.

Anyway keep up the good work.

Props for staying away from extended coverage of every match that everyone on your podcast played at a tournament. I don't mind hearing anecdotes about a match that had something cool happen or had a stuation that inspired a more in depth conversation about a point in the game but starting every podcast with an hour of tournment rehashing is a slog to get through.

Keep up the good work.

I couldn't agree with this more. All podcasters need to take note of this- We like interesting things that happen at tournaments. Otherwise, we are hearing about a tournament we are invested in very little. Go over interesting lists and maybe how they were run (if they did well), and the top lists overall. The end.

I really enjoyed both guests you guys had on recently. Guys like KO and Brad both illustrate the larger point you've been making in the last couple shows: One of the keys to successful X-winging is playing in a way that is true to your personality, so that you can more easily maximize the strengths of your natural play style.

Now I just need to figure out what my play style is.

I really enjoyed both guests you guys had on recently. Guys like KO and Brad both illustrate the larger point you've been making in the last couple shows: One of the keys to successful X-winging is playing in a way that is true to your personality, so that you can more easily maximize the strengths of your natural play style.

Now I just need to figure out what my play style is.

A solid indicator is when, even if you lose the match, you simply have fun working your squad. When I was coming up as a competitive player, I flew a TON of 4X. I was still grappling with some basics of the game, and it was steady and resilient. Now that I've had a taste of victory via aces, if it doesn't roll, boost, decloak, or SLAM, I get bored out of my mind. I also have that auto-include-Veteran-Instincts-97-point-initiative-bid-hangover in order to exploit as much advantage I can from repositioning. Does flying Whisper so much hurt me? Yeeeah...over the course of long tournaments, the likelihood of rolling 4 gut wrenching blank greens is pretty high. But I've gotten pretty adept with her, and it's satisfying when you do make the final tables of major tourneys on your own terms, or "rules of engagement".

Props for staying away from extended coverage of every match that everyone on your podcast played at a tournament. I don't mind hearing anecdotes about a match that had something cool happen or had a stuation that inspired a more in depth conversation about a point in the game but starting every podcast with an hour of tournment rehashing is a slog to get through.

Keep up the good work.

I couldn't agree with this more. All podcasters need to take note of this- We like interesting things that happen at tournaments. Otherwise, we are hearing about a tournament we are invested in very little. Go over interesting lists and maybe how they were run (if they did well), and the top lists overall. The end.

I'm another in support of this idea. Turn by turn accounts are hard to follow and not very illuminating in podcast form. I will add the caveat that I am a visual learner, so complex spatial ideas go in one ear and out the other. Perhaps others translate this kind of battle report better than me.