Sharing my recent play experience with what I feel is one of the strongest crew cards in the game, once wave 9 officially hits the meta, Latts Razzi crew:
When defending, you may remove 1 stress token from the attacker to add 1 evade result to your roll.
http://xwing-miniatures.wikia.com/wiki/Latts_Razzi_(Crew)
It is a 2 point scum crew card. With so many good scum crew cards, why is this one better? It's not entirely obvious, but the key is that it can be used every time when defending to add an evade, if your opponent has a stress to eat. To illustrate, lets take the example of a uboat with overclocked r4 firing a plasma torpedo at a ship with 2 agility (ex: assajj). Assajj tokens up and does a focus evade with PTL. The overclocked r4 leaves a stress on the uboat for Assajj to convert to an evade.
The probable results are:
0 damage - 23%
1 damage - 66%
2 damage - 10%
Pretty nice to eat a uboat torpedo and have a 90% of taking only one or two damage! 25% chance of nothing!
So, how does this card work over the course of a game? Well, ive played 12 games with latts on two different lists, one an Assajj + 2 TLT and the other Dengaroo with Latts on Manaroo. Here are the number of HPs saved by Latts in each of those games:
1 - 5
2 - 6
3 - 5-7?
4 - 4
5 - 2
6 - 6
7 - 0
8 - 7
9 - 11
10 - 7
11 - 5
12 - 0
59 HP saved in 12 games. An average of 5 HP saved per game. For a 2 point crew card. Also, I will toss out games 7 and 12. In game 7. I tabled my opponent so quickly there wasnt a chance for latts to play a part. Game 12 was last night against a very strong player in my local meta, who avoided shooting at latts, but lost 100 - 0 (mostly to very bad variance with his offensive dice). Taking these out I am up to 6 HP on average saved per game.
If you look at palp, he costs 8 points and lets say he saves an average of 3 HP on soontir in a game. That is worth about 45 points of HP saving for a cost of 8 squad points spent for palp. A 4.3x "return" on your 8 point palp investment.
Doing the same with Latts, she saves me 6 HP on my 45 point manaroo. Or, 6 HP on my 50 point Assajj. Each HP saved on manaroo/assajj is worth about 5 squad points (they have 9, 10 HP respectively), latts protecting me from about 35 squad points of damage over the course of a game. But, latts only costs 2 points to palp's 8, giving me a 17.5x "return" on my latts .
This bit of mathematical comparison, I am using palp just for his defensive ability to save HP on one ship. Palp is obviously not one third as good as latts, because he can be used for offense and also can use his power on other ships anywhere else on the board. Where, latts, only works on the ship she is on.
But, latts also has some other advantages. The options for playing against a list with latts are:
1. Ignore her and give your opponent 6 HP
2. Dont stress your ships. But, this effectively neuters many PTL ships to a single action. Not ideal. Some awesome ship builds downright suck if you cant stress them when shooting.
3 Attack the other parts of the latts squad first. Which, in my case is two TLTs or Dengar in dengaroo. Then the ship with latts is free to pound on you.
My point being here, that latts is a top tier card, probably the best in wave 9. It might be as good as palp or zuckuss in terms of the best crew cards in the game.
Agree? Disagree? What are your thoughts?