We can all agree that the better pilot should win the majority of the time if flying mirror matches. Likewise if two players of equal flying ability face off, a Championship winning list will likely win over a notably sub-par list. But how closely does flying and list building compare to each other? Is it even possible to separate the two? Can a player be good at one but not the other? Or do they naturally evolve together? Whaddyathink?

I'd say that they're about 50:50. If you run a terrible list for a given meta, it's almost impossible to win in the long term regardless of your skill level, though you can get lucky in the short term - but really good players can still do it, c.f. the guy who got Han/Jake into the cut at UK nationals. SImilarly, if you run one of the best possible lists in the meta, but do it badly, you're unlikely to do well against better players, even if they're not running lists of the same tier as yours. It also depends how bad you mean by bad in skill terms - players who run U boats but never use a focus action probably exist...

To some extent it also depends what you mean by player skill; I think this comes in two different areas. One is purely practical - judging how far a given move will take you, whether you're in arc or out without measuring, where a boost/br combo can take you. The other is tactical - predicting your opponents' movements, knowing which action is best in a given situation. Almost anyone can manage the former with enough practice, but the latter is something that's much more difficult to learn.

I'd say both are equally important, and both are key skills to doing well.

In X-Wing you can copy the current meta hotness and still get stomped on, if you don't know how to use it. Likewise someone like Paul Hever can win games with a sub-par list.

I'd guess that you could have people who are good at one or the other but not both. People who are really good as spatial awareness and measuring by eye could fly really well, but not have a solid understanding of how to make an effective list, or visa versa.

As far as which is more important... I'd say neither.

If you rate a list on a scale of 1-10 and player skill on 1-10, a list that's a 9 flown by a 5, would have a huge advantage over a list that's a 5 and a player who's a 6, for example.

A great pilot can make an inferior list work for him. Case in point, we have a guy here in Atlanta that is a nightmare when we he plops X-wings on the table. He used them to hunt phantoms whenntheybwere at their peak. That's how good he is at it.

In a competitive setting, I would actually go one step further:

Fyling: counts for 33%

List building: counts for 33%

Building your list according to the meta you will face: counts for 33%

Why the third cathegory? Remember when Falcons with gunners were hot and everyone was using them (pre-autothrusters)? Everyone was flying that good list (list building skill) and many were flying it well (flying skill). Paul Heaver went one step further, however, and build and adapted his list to include C3-PO and R2D2 instead. The reason: if the game ever devolved into a Falcon Gunner vs his Falcon list, he would win every time.

So understanding the meta that you are likely to face is also a skill.

However, some lists do artificially inflate the pilots ability. I think x7 defenders do this to some degree.

i'd have to agree its kinda 50-50.

You can be the most amazing pilot ever but if youre running double Punishers youre going to get your butt kicked.

However, excellent flying skills can make a lot of ships very powerful to some and useless to others. The general consensus in my meta is xwings and t70s suck period, you never see them even in a joke list - except me and 1 other guy. Theyre just insanely difficult to use right and are crippling if you goof up.

The "meta" lists are usually reserved for those who either 1) cant be bothered to actually learn how to play the game the way it was intended and rely on cheesy gimicks to win or 2) lack imagination and adaptability to play anything else. In fact the main reason i beat such lists is because im running something theyve never faced before and have 0 idea how to deal with it, even if its technically pretty crap in comparison lol. There is only 1 guy in my area that actually does know how to adapt on the fly - and i can never beat that mofo lol....

how important one is compared to the other is is irrelevant

you need good list building to mitigate bad RNG

once bad RNG is mitigated, your good flying matters more

for whatever definition of "good" we're working with ofc

Flying is way more important, you can take the last year's winner of world's but if you don't know how to fly it the list alone won't hand you a win.

Good pilots can win even using weaker lists.

Both are of equal importance. If you make a list but you don't fly it properly you have wasted points however even if you fly a list expertly if you don't build the ships in the list in a way to support each other you have made the battle harder then it needs to be

For winning games, you only need to know how to play. If you're terrible at building lists you can just netdeck, if you're terrible at playing the game you have to improve your abilities.

List building is important at first, because you need to bring an efficient squad to the table. If you don't, for most players there's going to be a pretty hard ceiling on how well you can do. Once you get into efficient squads, though, I think pilot skill matters a whole lot more.

The problem a lot of newer players face, is that it's really hard to build pilot skill flying an inefficient list that gets stomped all the time. Players who want to be creative and buck the meta get frustrated this way. I've been an advocate of new players playing efficient meta lists to learn how to play, before they start trying to fly fun interesting lists they've made up. That's hard, because list building is one of the best parts of the game, but you've got to be good enough to recognize whether a list works and be able to fly it before you can go off inventing your own.

Once you get good, though, you've got a lot more potential to make strange lists work.

There's a lot of complexity to this question, but I don't think the best players in the world (Paul H, Jeff B, etc.) could beat an average player if the match-up was unfavorable. For instance, with XXBB I'm pretty sure world-class players would lose to a Mediocre Joe with Triple Scouts at least nine out of ten times (and that one win probably stems in large part from swingy dice). As long as Mediocre Joe is competent enough to not put his ships on rocks and accidentally bump his own ships a bunch.

Also, it's not just how "good" of a list someone has, it's also what they happened to get paired against. MATCH-UP MATTERS: The strength of a list is entirely relative to what it's flying against. A Dash/Miranda Sabine-Super-Net bomb list is ruthlessly potent against Palp Aces, but dies almost instantaneously to Triple Scouts. So there are no lists that are "good" in a vacuum, per se, as every list will have good and bad match-ups. Even Palp Aces can struggle a bit against Rebel Regen Stress Control, but those lists were so rare in the era of the Wave 8 Torp Scout meta that Palp Aces were getting a free pass.

So list-building is informed by the expected meta, but even then it's all random luck once pairings start happening. Even if someone's meta-estimations are exactly right about the relative frequency of list archetypes at an event, once pairings start happening it is quite literally the blind luck of the draw. There might only be five Crack Sawrmt builds out of sixty at an event, but you might get paired against them during three of your match-ups. You might never get paired against them. Nothing you can do about it. This is the part of the reason I have such a hard time understanding how people can drop $1,000 and hop on a plane to go play at Worlds -- so much is entirely out of your control. You might get paired against your worst match-up in your first three rounds. Or you might get paired against your best. Hard to drop a half-week of your life and all that cash to go find out.

8 Z-95, 2X+3Z, 4 Starvipers etc etc.... after those examples, I can say 70/30.

70 is the skill, 30 the list. Say what you want but if we think about it, metagame is completely skill-dependent. There's a men who think about a new list, win the championship, and then becomes "metagame".



We spend too much time arguing about lists sitting on a chair, than think about "how to play" those lists. Anyone remembers Mindlink 3Scyks+Palob list?

how important one is compared to the other is is irrelevant

you need good list building to mitigate bad RNG

once bad RNG is mitigated, your good flying matters more

for whatever definition of "good" we're working with ofc

You can mitigate with good flying that RNG just fine. I had plenty of RNG fluks for and against me, but I can honestly not say that RNG ever won or lost me a game. This should change when players become really good and you can not expect them to make more than one or maybe two mistakes per game while the list building is top notch too … but in general? Fly better, screw random, build better and negate random almost completely.

I think the most important aspect of "list-building" is to find a list that suits your mentality. If you´re an impatient player who prefers to be able to joust or get early action you might not bother with Palp-Aces. You can "net-list" a few different builds that all have strong tournament results in a simular meta, but you might do much better with certain lists than others because they suit your style. Knowing yourself, and your mental capacity in a multi-round event are the most important factors in building or copying a list in my opinion.

I've found that there are actually THREE separate phases to playing X-wing.

1. List building

2. Playing the game

3. Complaining about why you lost (broken cards, overpowered meta lists, faulty dice, etc...)

I went 0-4 last Saturday at a store team championship and you KNOW I laid into that third step heavily after each round =)

Generally when i lose about 8/10 of the time i know why i lost long before it happened. RNG usually isnt a factor, a miscalculated turn or forgetting about a card being in play usually is.

Not saying rng never cripples me. Ive lost Oicunn in 3 shots because of insanely bad crit luck, no amount of flying could save that and no build could fix it either. It just so happened that i drew All Damage Faceup first and then drew 5 of the 7 double damage cards in the deck one after another. Funny thing was im the kind of guy thats constantly shuffling my deck until dials are set...so its not like i forgot to shuffle lol.

Yeah, i could have had Moff in there, but ive found the points for him tend to push lists with oicunn juuuuust over the too expensive threshold.

But thats rare. I think ive had insanely bad crit luck in general in maybe 6 games, usually its the other way around where i somehow never draw a double damage no matter how many crits im given lol. Ran a TIE Swarm once (8 ships no upgrades) and i drew a collected 16 damage cards - 14 of which were face up because i kept dodging everything except the random crit. Not a single double damage was face up, but both facedowns were double damage LOL my opponent was rightfully livid

how important one is compared to the other is is irrelevant

you need good list building to mitigate bad RNG

once bad RNG is mitigated, your good flying matters more

for whatever definition of "good" we're working with ofc

You can mitigate with good flying that RNG just fine. I had plenty of RNG fluks for and against me, but I can honestly not say that RNG ever won or lost me a game. This should change when players become really good and you can not expect them to make more than one or maybe two mistakes per game while the list building is top notch too … but in general? Fly better, screw random, build better and negate random almost completely.

Dice can and WILL decide games and no amount of "fly better" can change that. The less you build to mitigate rng, the more games itll decide independently of your input

Note you can fly sometimes to mitigate rng simply by disallowing shots, but lets not pretend thats possible in some matchups ESP against PWTs and flying lower ps v dash

There is just about nothing you can do in those,scemarios other than trade better than your opponent, and that is when the dice can **** you

Ive had my face melted by enough triple stress, no mods dashes to know; not to mention omega L getting one shot by a no mod HLC through his evade thanks to an absolutely perfect 3 hit one crit roll with a drawn direct hit

Thats the simple reality of the game, dice matter and you have to build to mitigate that

The ONLY time rng doesnt matter is when you can just kil your opponent with guaranteed damage

I'm inclined to agree with nikk whyte on this. A good player can make a sub-optimal list work for him/her while a poor player can flub even high meta lists. Percentagewise, I'd say 60% play skill, 40% list building.

While I believe that skills in both play and building increase with experience, kraedin does bring up a good point about being able to just use lists that have done well from online.

I believe it was the Red Baron that said something along the lines of "It's not the box. It's the man inside the box" after nearly being out flown by a British pilot in a pusher engine biplane. I think, like most, it's about 50/50. One of my favorite lists that I made, after getting a Firespray, is Bossk and Boba, each kitted to take full advantage of Botha abilities. Can't wait to grab fearlessness.

You can mitigate with good flying that RNG just fine. I had plenty of RNG fluks for and against me, but I can honestly not say that RNG ever won or lost me a game. This should change when players become really good and you can not expect them to make more than one or maybe two mistakes per game while the list building is top notch too … but in general? Fly better, screw random, build better and negate random almost completely.

This is so painfully naive and optimistic it hurts. You must not play much X-Wing. There will be occasional games where randomness largely determines the result.

For instance, in a game of Palp Aces vs Dengaroo where R5P8 triggers successfully with the a [Hit] every time. There is nothing the Palp Ace player can do to avoid this outside of spreading attacks and not attacking when a ship has only 1 Hull left, but they cannot survive if the attrition war if R5P8 is hot. They just have to hope in such match-ups that R5P8 rolls average [50% trigger rate]. I've lost a game at Gencon because I've rolled Hit-Hit-Crit-Crit (via TL+F) against a cloaked but now token-less Phantom with 1 Hull remaining rolled four natural evades. I action-stacked my own attacks and focus-fired to strip the target's tokens, but there is nothing I can do if my opponent rolls four natural evades. That single swingy evade roll basically handed my opponent the game. Similarly, I've won at least three touranment games of X-Wing due to a lucky Blinded Pilot on a ship that would have killed me with return fire before I could kill it. If they don't draw Blinded Pilot I lose (unless they entirely blank out on reds) but if they do I win. I'm smart enough and humble enough to realize that in such situations I got entirely bailed out by luck (RNG). Sable won a game at Worlds 2014 when he dropped a Proximity Mine on an enemy's Whisper and the roll was Hit-Hit-Crit, which of course turned out to be a direct and killed the full health Whisper. That big swing of luck definitely determined that game. We could list countless examples--both real and hypotethical--that illustrate times when RNG decides games, despite the best efforts of players to mitigate it. This is a dice game. The random luck of dice is supposed to influence the outcome. Don't like it? Go play chess.

If you don't think RNG can sometimes play a substantial roll in the outcome of a game, the next time you play a friend in a casual basement game, let them treat their first six evade dice rolled as auto-successful evades. I bet they win the vast majority of those games assuming you two are even roughly even skill level.

I'm going to say it's not a matter of one being more or less important but rather that list building begets flying skill. A list full of 8 z95s does not have a much room for a skilled player to pull out unique solutions and adjustments as a list with some imperial aces. Overall I think flying skill is the most important thing to determine the winner across a series of games, but without a list containing enough tools to adapt the flying skill is capped artificially.

Also I think you have to look at any list or strategy across a course of time. Randomness is a factor in this game and it can be blinding and all encompassing if you focus on it too hard. Interestingly in most strategy settings, xwing included, results do not always dictate correct choices. Over the course of time a skilled pilot with a list containing enough tools should do very well, even if individual games are lost on the basis of random chance.

In my 3+ years, I've decided flying is about 50%, list is about 30%, and luck (dice) about 20%. Better pilot generally wins, especially if there's a large gap. List is important, but generally, it's more about avoiding the bad matchups, and if that's not a factor, list importance goes down. The third is luck and it's completely irresponsible to suggest that any dice game doesn't involve significant luck, regardless of skill or list. They can be mitigated (see: Palpatine), but dice will always be more than an incidental factor.

I'd say you can't really compare the two.

If you have someone who is a great pilot then can still do wonderfully well despite terrible list building provided they have enough common sense to let someone else do that list building for them.

How a list is built can greatly affect the skill required to fly it sucessfully but a better pilot should do better with any given list assuming randomness doesn't swing things.

If you're going to play competitively I'm going to say that flying ability greatly trumps list building. While list building is very important it is entirely possible for one person to build multiple squadrons for various pilots and have them all do better than with something they came up with. However your flying ability is entirely your own and while some squadrons can be easier to fly than others your skill may not help it perform to it's peak.

Where the two may be tied together is having a list builder recognizing the strengths of the pilot and maximizing those while a good pilot still needs to know what he can do even if he isn't the one to put things together.