With the reveal of the Mist Hunter cards, we have some new stuff to think about. I've been fiddling with some ideas, and the card that has captured my interest is Zuckuss (crew).

"When attacking, you may receive any number of stress tokens to choose an equal number of defense dice. The defender must reroll those dice."

The effect of the card is potentially powerful, as it can counteract naturally good evade rolls and just generally make it harder to dodge your attacks. However, it comes with a pretty stiff penalty if used heavily.

So who is best suited for this card? Well, anyone can take it if they have the spare crew slot, and at 1 point you don't need to use it all the time to make it worth it. But what if you really want to build around it? You would either need to be able to consistently burn off one or more stress per turn, or just go the Tycho Celchu/R2-A2 Y-wing route and just accept that you will never get rid of all your stress tokens.

With that in mind, I propose the following build:

The HWK has 3 red maneuvers: both 3 banks, and the 4 straight. Losing access to these limits your speed, but the HWK has no K-turns to lose. The TLT is accustomed to making some unmodified attacks, and forcing the opponent to reroll their evades is an attack modification in its own way. The glitterstim is optional but it can give you some dice modification on both offense and defense if you see a good opportunity, and might be enough to crack a harder target like soontir for a hit or two.

I would be curious to see the math on unmodified TLT attacks while rerolling all the target's natural evades, but it feels like a potentially solid build, and could add a little more variety to the standard TLT build options. At just 25 points I am more willing to at least experiment with it a little.

I would love to hear any other thoughts on this or other ship builds using the Zuckuss crew card.

I think FFG designed Zuckuss crew to fit best with 4-LOM's Mist Hunter (and the other way around, too).

If not 4-LOM, then you kind of want to use Zuckuss crew on a ship that is shedding stress constantly like a YV-666 with K4 security droid.

Palob

No actions? No problem! I'll steal your ****!

What, you have no defensive mods? Reroll naked evades!

Someone pointed out the other day that the Firespray has no red on its dial, with the exception of the k-turns, so it's not a bad choice for the "I didn't plan on taking any actions anyway" platform.

I do like the YV-666, because as was said you can also take K4 and get an action that way.

I like the idea of running it on the YV-666. Maybe something like

Latts Razzi (33)

Zuckuss (1)

Weapons Engineer (3)

K-4 Security Droid (3)

"Hot shot" Blaster (3)

Heavy Laser Cannon (7)

It's not a cheap setup - that's fifty points, but just about anything you point that laser cannon at should be taking serious damage, and even while you're trying to turn the ponderous thing around she can be supporting your squad with her target locks.

I like the idea of running it on the YV-666. Maybe something like

Latts Razzi (33)

Zuckuss (1)

Weapons Engineer (3)

K-4 Security Droid (3)

"Hot shot" Blaster (3)

Heavy Laser Cannon (7)

It's not a cheap setup - that's fifty points, but just about anything you point that laser cannon at should be taking serious damage, and even while you're trying to turn the ponderous thing around she can be supporting your squad with her target locks.

Here's a 48 pt build thats not super competitive but I think would be fun to run:

Bossk(35)

K4 (3)

Zuckuss (1)

4-Lom (1)

HLC (7)

VI (1)

It at least gives you a pretty good chance to use Bossk's ability at a high rate, if you can keep your target in arc.

It at least gives you a pretty good chance to use Bossk's ability at a high rate, if you can keep your target in arc.

How are you getting crits? Or is that HLC supposed to be a mango?

How are you getting crits?

I've actually had pretty good success off if the rerolls from the k4 TL. I've ran Bossk with both Calculation and Mercenary co-pilot before and haven't really noticed a huge difference. If your still worried about the crit though I guess you could also switch HLC to Mangler canon and it would save a few more points too. A big asterisk here though is I usually put EU on Bossk as well, but not sure if that works here depending on how much you're using Zuckuss. It might be difficult to just do a green manuver and keep more agile ships in arc. Now that I think about it I think I'd put EU on that build as well.

Maybe on the Jumpmaster, as you can give it the Unhinged and give yourself (hopefully) loads more greens.

I agree with all the thoughts so far. These days I'm getting used to flying highly stressed ships and embracing it.

I'm throwing Zuckuss into my current favorite list.

HWK-290: · Torkil Mux (19)

Ion Cannon Turret (5)

· Zuckuss (1)

Y-Wing: · Drea Renthal (22)

Twin Laser Turret (6)

· R4-B11 (3)

YV-666: · Latts Razzi (33)

Tractor Beam (1)

Gunner (5)

Tactician (2)

· Bossk (2)

Inertial Dampeners (1)

Zuckuss is great on YV-666 too. Just add Bossk or K4 to allow actions. Dial has plenty of white and self bumping offers lots of control for your own movement.

Palob
Wired
TLT
Zuckuss

The most assured 2 hits a turn you'll get in any list with the control that Palob adds to the board by making your opponent not want to focus/evade token. It's a beautiful piece in any list.

The only other ship I'd put him in is

Trando Slaver
Bossk Crew
Gunner
Zuckuss
Feedback.

Just unload attacks until you are jumped past, then you can just zap them the rest of your dull existence.

^^^that Palob is brilliant. When wired isn't triggering on turns that by some miracle you aren't stessed, you can take regular action. Otherwise, you are modifying everything. I've been looking for good home for wired. Thanks for the tip.

Trandoshan Slaver with Bossk/Gunner/Zuckuss and just never shedding all the stress you pick up is absolutely powerful at putting shots through on ships rolling lots of greens.

With Cheapcreep's Palob in mind, I modified my lis - replacing Drea with Palob:

Title ~ Devil HWKs (or Cheap HWKs)

YV-666: · Latts Razzi (33)

Tractor Beam (1)

Gunner (5)

· Bossk (2)

Tactician (2)

Inertial Dampeners (1)

HWK-290: · Palob Godalhi (20)

Wired (1)

Twin Laser Turret (6)

· Zuckuss (1)

HWK-290: · Torkil Mux (19)

Ion Cannon Turret (5)

Stygium Particle Accelerator (2)

· Cloaking Device (2)

I would be curious to see the math on unmodified TLT attacks while rerolling all the target's natural evades, but it feels like a potentially solid build, and could add a little more variety to the standard TLT build options. At just 25 points I am more willing to at least experiment with it a little.

It depends pretty heavily on the defenses of your target, and with multiple attacks from the TLT the math gets messy pretty quickly. (By which I mean I don't have the time to do it right now.)

My intuition, though, is that you're not going to gain much by pairing Zuckuss with a TLT. The TLT's major strength is the consistency of its damage output; an accurate, low-damage weapon sets the ceiling for Zuckuss' effect very low.

Zuckuss allows your your TLT to find it's mark on high agility targets like Whisper or Soontir, or if not damaging them, at least forces them to use up tokens.

I think the real winner here is anything that is willing to compound massive amounts of stress and use Wired for rerolling eyes, as is being discussed.

The beauty of this is one of the best ships in the game, the Stresshog, will have nothing on these ships, or stress in general.

I honestly think Zuckuss + Wired can be top tier level competitive, but the ships which choose to go this way will be pretty restricted on their dial, which got me thinking...The best pilot/ship to take him (outside of maybe 4LOM)? If that white 2 Sloop holds true, the Punishing One could turn out to be down right insane.

Punishing one doesn't put out enough damage per points and has a PWT, defeating the purpose of the white seggys

White seggys is for ordnance (can't fire without actions) and dengar's ability (far less useful without actions) and the price for durability will make maneuverability essential on the toilet seat, which zuckuss effectively tosses out the window

The hwk and yv666 are IMO the most obvious winners (yv666 also doubling down on 4 lom due to big base ion interaction + big fat arc) with 4lom pilot as a distant second since he still needs stress to turn his fat ass and he can only pass one at range one

Punishing one doesn't put out enough damage per points and has a PWT, defeating the purpose of the white seggys

White seggys is for ordnance (can't fire without actions) and dengar's ability (far less useful without actions) and the price for durability will make maneuverability essential on the toilet seat, which zuckuss effectively tosses out the window

The hwk and yv666 are IMO the most obvious winners (yv666 also doubling down on 4 lom due to big base ion interaction + big fat arc) with 4lom pilot as a distant second since he still needs stress to turn his fat ass and he can only pass one at range one

Toilet seat can take Unhinged Astromech though. Dial dependent this may make Zuckuss and Wired good still. If Zuckuss is used conservatively the stress should not be an issue

My 4LOM with zuckuss crew shot range 3 at a soontir (who had bumped, so had no actions). he rolled 4 natural evades. 4 stress later, he rerolled 3 blanks and a focus, got the 1 evade from autothrustres. I had 2 hits and a crit, so fel now has no autothrusters and a crit on him (shaken pilot in this case, didn't matter since palob's TLT had him at range 2 and killed him).

Zucrewuss deserves effects that care about hitting the opponent. I'll be putting him on Bossk, or on ships with Ionization effects.

Palob

Wired

TLT

Zuckuss

That's what I had in mind, too. I've run lists with Palob quite a bit, though (with just TLT), and the biggest problem for me is that he evaporates under focused fire and is too slow to run away. Wired but no actions doesn't really help on defense, so he'll still likely go down very quickly.

Still planning to try it out, though -- he should be very effective for as long as he's alive.

Interestingly you can use Zuckuss to reroll enemy blanks if you're trying to trigger gunner/bossk.

Since I haven't purchased a yv666 [yet] I'm gonna run zuckuss on my mist hunter, just for starters. Thinking 4-LOM, guri and kavil. However something like this is looking pretty sweet too:

Kavil- tlt, wired

4-LOM- mist hunter, PtL, adv sensors, tractor

trandoshan slaver- bossk, gunner, zuckass

102 iirc but its just a concept atm.

Should cut through greens pretty handily and really doesn't care too much about stress plus 28 health is fairly decent.

I think I'll be running him on Bossk for sure. I think one point on a slaver w/bossk gunner could work as well. So TL DR on the YV