Interesting Math. I do like the odds.

I love Lando, but he always drops the multiball when there are limited combat options and when you need him most loves to drop the goose egg.

every

friggin

time

I was lucky enough to roll 3 consecutive double blanks with him on the Ghost my first time trying him. I now hate Lando and that will never change.

729

262144

​Those are some slim odds!

from your fraction, about 3%. if 30 ppl have played Lando since the beginning of the card, it was bound to happen (30 x 3% = 90 %).

That is not 3%...

I love Lando, but he always drops the multiball when there are limited combat options and when you need him most loves to drop the goose egg.

every

friggin

time

I was lucky enough to roll 3 consecutive double blanks with him on the Ghost my first time trying him. I now hate Lando and that will never change.

729

262144

​Those are some slim odds!

from your fraction, about 3%. if 30 ppl have played Lando since the beginning of the card, it was bound to happen (30 x 3% = 90 %).

That is not 3%...

It's 0.278%

On a ship with 0 defence dice, every evade is basically a free hit point. Running around with 2+ evade tokens a turn can double a VCX's survivability.

I see. It's just a fundamentally different outlook. I see the Ghost as built for aggression, and something like FCS/Hera/Han simply works out as more efficient to me. The game's continued to shift toward favoring offense (Theorist's conclusion that this is bad for the game is up for debate, but denying the premise is not a tenable position).

I'm not entirely sure it's true that "the game's continued to shift toward favoring offense," and I think to the degree it's true, it looks more like a backlash than an observed trend.

In Waves 1-2, the lists that dominated were universally Imperial swarms that brought high Agility and lots of hit points.

The Wave 3 Worlds list consisted of Biggs (who's unambiguously a piece of defensive tech) and as many hit points as Heaver could reasonably shoehorn in without giving up offense. Other common lists included Han Shot First, which relied a great deal on either tanking damage with Han or using the X-wings as ablative armor.

The Wave 4 metagame had the Phantom (or more specifically Whisper) as one pole, which depends principally on cloaking and arc-dodging for survival--both of which are defensive elements of the game. The other pole was the Large, turreted reaction to Whisper, which again implicated some very tanky Han builds with maximally efficient escorts.

The Wave 5-6 metagame was dominated by two-ship builds emphasizing arc-dodging, regeneration, and token-walling mechanics (Dash/Corran and Chiraneau/Fel), all defensive. We start to see some offense with things like IG-88B supporting double HLCs, but it fails to really cut through the defense.

Things started to change in Wave 7 likely due to the TLT, which made green dice and stacks of tokens iffy prospects. But we still saw a great deal of investment in Imperial aces, which rely on mitigation (dice and tokens) as well as Palpatine--who, critically, is often reserved for boosting defense. And on the Rebel side, we saw a lot of investment in regeneration (mostly Poe, but a healthy side of Miranda). We still get Brobots, and they seem to be gaining steam--but remember the Aggressor is literally the most durable ship in the game under MajorJuggler's assumptions about the action economy.

We still have nothing like an equilibrium in Wave 8, but so far what I've seen suggests that we're going to get two major poles again: alpha-striking lists including things like triple JumpMasters and Crack swarms will sit at one pole. They'll be opposed by things like the Chopper/Super Dash list that won the 40-person McPherson, KS store championship: lists that can "counterpunch" by tanking damage and then hitting back to kill or cripple an opposing ship.

So while you can't afford to neglect offense (it's a huge part of the picture of overall efficiency, which is a critically important part of successful play), the trend of X-wing overall has been that a narrow set of defensive strategies in list-building are what lead to reliable tournament performance, and you can't make it through a championship tournament without reliable performance.

And maybe that is changing, but if so it's changing slowly. And it's also changing in reaction to the game's more general trend, not in line with it.

I think up until TLT, the meta was shifting towards a more and more reliable defense with turtled Soontirs and tokens and evade actions. Some people were countering with consistant offense, to take advantage of the occasional defensive lapse. Other people were going incredibly spiky offense, to try to overwhelm.

This got turned on it's head with TLT, the evade token is close to useless against it, and 1-2 agility is borderline useless against it. It it the epitome of consistent offense to take advantage of defensive lapses, and the meta adjusted either turtlier or beefier.

Now the Jumpmaster and ordinance is swinging it super hard the other way. Every additional green dice is worth it, and the hp that is most worth it is 4x+1. This is spike offense, the opposite of TLT, and any defense helps, not just super turtles and 3+ agility.

I think up until TLT, the meta was shifting towards a more and more reliable defense with turtled Soontirs and tokens and evade actions. Some people were countering with consistant offense, to take advantage of the occasional defensive lapse. Other people were going incredibly spiky offense, to try to overwhelm.

This got turned on it's head with TLT, the evade token is close to useless against it, and 1-2 agility is borderline useless against it. It it the epitome of consistent offense to take advantage of defensive lapses, and the meta adjusted either turtlier or beefier.

Now the Jumpmaster and ordinance is swinging it super hard the other way. Every additional green dice is worth it, and the hp that is most worth it is 4x+1. This is spike offense, the opposite of TLT, and any defense helps, not just super turtles and 3+ agility.

Very well stated. JoeBossSeven needs to show up with his "Good Post" stickers.

One thing you pointed at, that TLT and Ordnance pull the game in opposite directions... It makes me want a list in which I'm using both.

Thanks for the puzzle