With the local Regionals at the end of July and Imperial Veterans having only just been released I was keen to use the final tournament before then – a Spring kit at the FLGS – to try out some Defenders.
I’d experimented with single, double and triple Defender lists and after a lot of thinking I decided to go with 3 Defenders. One didn’t seem like enough, two always seemed to leave the non-Defender ship lacking so three it was.
The list was:
Maarek: x7 and Juke
Vessery: x7 and Adaptability
Glaive: x7 and Adaptability
I was surprised by how resilient the x7 Defender is and with the above list being all PS7 to get above other Defenders and Brobots I could shoot before a lot of the scary lists in the meta right now, except Palp Aces. There were 19 people in attendance so we would play 4 games.
Game 1: Jamie
Jamie’s a local player who uses nothing but X-Wings. He had Wedge, Wes and Biggs with a variety of droids, with Wedge having Opportunist to take advantage of the tokenless victims Wes leaves in his wake.
This game was mostly determined by dice – great for me, bad for Jamie. I nuked Biggs in the second round of shooting and the green dice did not look kindly on the X-Wings so things were over very quickly with only the loss of a shield on Maarek and Vessery. Obviously that’s quite lucky but I do think the fact all of Jamie’s tokens go into offence didn’t help here. He was frequently without tokens on defence and that led to dead X-Wings, though my good red dice just exacerbated the problem.
Result: Win 100-0
Game 2: Rory (possibly, I think I’m remembering that right)
So the heady height of table 1 now and Iw as up against a very nice guy who was attending his first tournament. He had Chiraneau with the Vader/Gunner combo, the Inquisitor and Wampa.
I knew I had to get rid of the Decimator as quickly as possible but Wampa was also potentially a pain. We set up in opposite corners and Rory slow-played it very nicely, biding his time. I was also waiting for the right moment to get into range and when I finally did Wampa was out of range and RAC took a fair amount of punishment.
Unfortunately my Glaive also took the brunt of the firepower and Maarek wasn’t involved yet so I was without my most potent weapon against the Decimator. I remedied that in the next turn but Rory got rid of the Glaive thanks to Vader and his trusty Gunner. The Decimator went down soon after, leaving me with Maarek with one hull damage from Wampa and a healthy Vessery.
What followed was a cat-and-mouse jaunt around the asteroids with pot-shots being taken and missed as we both tried in vain to penetrate the defences of out tokened-up enemies. Eventually I got a block on the Inquisitor and mustered the damage dice to put him onto one hull. He then banked the wrong way, straight into an asteroid…and survived two damage rolls.
Meanwhile Wampa had put another hull damage on Maarek, leaving him at 3 shields but only 1 hull! I started to worry I wouldn’t be able to hunt either ship down before Wampa took down Maarek but eventually I caught Wampa in both my arcs and got rid of him. The Inquisitor followed shortly afterwards due to some nice bump work.
For only his second tournament game Rory played extremely well. He had a good handle on his movement and his target priority was very good, which are probably the 2 most important factors for new players. The game was very finely balanced and a little more luck one way or the other could have hugely changed the result.
Result: Win 100-32
Game 3: Lee
Lee is another veteran of the local tournament scene and I’d played him a couple of times before with different lists. This time he had:
Dash: Kanan, PTL, Engine
Poe: R5-P9, Autothrusters, Predator
I’m not a fan of the Dash set-up here and this game showed why. Lee gave me initiative so Dash could move after me.
After an initial engagement where I stayed in formation for a long time and did minimal damage to Dash things kicked off in about the 4 th round when I broke formation and Poe Talon-rolled in front of Maarek and Vessery. 7 red dice later and some appalling evades from Poe left T70 debris all over the place and me free to hunt down Dash.
That took a while but I kept my arcs wide and went for some largely unsuccessful bumps. This is where the x7’s resilience and the weakness of the Kanan Dash build came to the fore.
Lee was having to arc dodge every turn, even though he had most of his dial open thanks to Kanan. That left him with only one offensive action a turn and I could usually get at least one, often two, arcs on him even after the boost or barrel roll. Combined with my Focus/Evade every turn it was proving difficult to do anything to my Defenders while I was chipping away at his health.
Eventually weight of fire took Dash down without me losing anything, though my ships would need to replace their shield generators after the beating they took.
Result: Win 100-0
Game 4: Billy
So the last game and I was up against another Decimator:
Kenkirk: Emperor, Ysard, Predator
Whisper: Kallus, VI, FCS, ACD
Kallus went on Vessery and we deployed in diagonally opposite corners. I moved to engage quickly, trying to burn Kenkirk down before Whisper was in position.
My initial volley stripped Kenkirk’s shields and his return attacks did little. Now I had a decision to make: I could keep gunning for Kenkirk but Whisper had put herself in a position that made his movement very predictable. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get all 3 ships shooting at Whisper but it was too good an opportunity to pass up so I went after the Phantom.
Sure enough the decloak went where I expected and, also as expected, I could only get a couple for shots at Whisper but things got even better when Whisper’s move took her onto a rock. My shooting wasn’t great and Palpatine did his thing but that still left Whisper down to hull and with no decloak movement next turn.
I closed in, weathered a range 1 shot on Vessery from Whisper and finished her off in the next round. Then it was just a matter of mopping up. Kenkirk went down quickly under the combined fire of 3 Defenders.
Result: Win 100-0
So after 4 games I’d only lost 1 ship and I ended up in 1 st place. The triple x7s did better than I expected. I’m not sure if people underestimate them because they’re so unlike how Defenders used to be or if I got a little lucky with the match-ups or if they are actually just that good but I enjoyed flying them. They do very well against 2-ship builds due to the token stack and being able to whiff one dice roll thanks to their shields.
I didn’t play any of the 3 big meta lists (crack swarm, U-boats or Palp Aces) but I think my general resilience should help and I’ve done well in testing against the swarm and aces. I’m not sure if there’s much room for modifying the list since points are so tight and there aren’t many upgrade slots left to fill anyway. I’ll probably keep practicing and see how it goes against a greater variety of lists.