Something must be done with x7s with no doubt. The question is - do we nerf them (if yeah - how), or do we introduce counters. I would prefer the latter. I must admit, i play defenders myself, but it started feeling dirty at some point. Defenders turn all the nice people to whiny, unhappy people. Token stack each turn at heavily undercosted ship (withx7) is just too much for most normal lists to handle. Especially against those z's or tie's trying to get their 1 hit, but it's impossible.

At some point just card pool is so big that options instead of getting better are just narrowing. The best builds and combos are just too great to take them down.

My prefered solution is just X-wing 2.0. It has to happen, and it better does as fast as possible. We need change, edition 2.0 can deal with token stacks with general, make titles built-in ships instead of autoinclude cards that you can forget, change turrets into mobile arcs, rebalance all the pilots and upgrades, maybe change some dials.

How i would make it happen? A big core-set like pack containing everything you need to transfer all the ships to 2.0 assuming that you have 1 of everything costing around, i dunno, 30$, and small transfer packs for around 3$ to transfer one of certain ship to 2.0 and reprint everything to make it 2.0. If it doesn't happen, the power creep will go on and the game will just fall apart. All the wargames and cardgames without rotation or ban system need it. Look at wh40k (from the good times). First few editions just fixed the mistakes of the previous one and changed the units. It made it fresh.\

You can even separate card packs from ships, making their price lower and preparing for 3.0.

Little trick i have found is play them yourself. You will then see theit weaknesses plain as day and know how to counter them better.

You can either arc dodge OR modify your attack. If you don't arc dodge you lose a dice duel, and if you don't modify your attack you don't hurt them at all and lose a slower dice duel.

The Dash matchup is pretty straightforward.

Or, you can fly PTL Dash and wreck Defenders. Imho the issue is still finding a good wingman for him, not Dash himself.

I'm assuming PTL is on Dash, because it always is.

Something must be done with x7s with no doubt.

That something must be done during list building and in Turn 0.

There are quite a few Defender counters out there, use them - if the X7 Defender(s) is causing you problems.

It seems to me from all that I've read that there is more balance and diversity than there has been quite while.

As for defenders, how often they win tournaments? Granted, I haven't been around for real long but from what I've seen it's JMs, Aces, and that sort of thing the top.

You can't get more than 3 of them out on the field, which is what? 18 health, 12 max attack dice and good agility. That's less than a crack swarm of 6 or 7 Ties.

The upgrade options are very limited for them, which I actually like. If I have more than 2 or 3 upg cards out there, I'm likely to forget something. So the fact that they are 1/2-way decent without having to formulate some masterful build is great. They are much more dependent on flying skill than card buffs, which might be where some of the rub is. You want to kill them, you need to fly better than they do.

That's kinda the point of x-wing, isn't it? Too many have become upgrade-dependent. There was a post the other day complaining about the "uber-ness" of a 4 x U-Wing block. Sure, it's a fat stack of ships, but it's rather clumsy to maneuver and susceptible to stress. Its overcome by superior piloting, not the same old jousting, charging headlong tactics everyone has gotten used to.

I think FFG has done a good job at providing balance toward the whole of the game, especially those areas that have been neglected by many, I.e., real dog-fighting, piloting, asteroid placement, etc.

Just my $0.02

Something must be done with x7s with no doubt. The question is - do we nerf them (if yeah - how), or do we introduce counters. I would prefer the latter. I must admit, i play defenders myself, but it started feeling dirty at some point. Defenders turn all the nice people to whiny, unhappy people. Token stack each turn at heavily undercosted ship (withx7) is just too much for most normal lists to handle. Especially against those z's or tie's trying to get their 1 hit, but it's impossible.

At some point just card pool is so big that options instead of getting better are just narrowing. The best builds and combos are just too great to take them down.

My prefered solution is just X-wing 2.0. It has to happen, and it better does as fast as possible. We need change, edition 2.0 can deal with token stacks with general, make titles built-in ships instead of autoinclude cards that you can forget, change turrets into mobile arcs, rebalance all the pilots and upgrades, maybe change some dials.

How i would make it happen? A big core-set like pack containing everything you need to transfer all the ships to 2.0 assuming that you have 1 of everything costing around, i dunno, 30$, and small transfer packs for around 3$ to transfer one of certain ship to 2.0 and reprint everything to make it 2.0. If it doesn't happen, the power creep will go on and the game will just fall apart. All the wargames and cardgames without rotation or ban system need it. Look at wh40k (from the good times). First few editions just fixed the mistakes of the previous one and changed the units. It made it fresh.\

You can even separate card packs from ships, making their price lower and preparing for 3.0.

And that Something is shoot them. I mean compared to the pre-nerf Phantom, Old Fat Han, and Torp Scouts are the Defenders really that bad? Imho they are not. That focus and evade only go so far. Against a string of attacks or some good ol' Homing Missiles, they will die.

Little trick i have found is play them yourself. You will then see theit weaknesses plain as day and know how to counter them better.

I'm assuming PTL is on Dash, because it always is.

I'm not one for fixing things that aren't broken, but I can verify that Dash does have other viable options beyond PTL.

Lone Wolf comes to mind.

Something must be done with x7s with no doubt. The question is - do we nerf them (if yeah - how), or do we introduce counters. I would prefer the latter. I must admit, i play defenders myself, but it started feeling dirty at some point. Defenders turn all the nice people to whiny, unhappy people. Token stack each turn at heavily undercosted ship (withx7) is just too much for most normal lists to handle.

Before I get what's bothering me off my chest - understand this isn't some sort of attack on you (despite quoting your post) or the experiences you've had to reach your conclusion about the x7 card. I see too much negativity on these boards, and definitely too many inadequate arguments to nerfs and fixes where they're not warranted.

I think the x7 (and also the TIE/d) are superb additions. The Defender as it stood was overcosted and inefficient when Imperial players could take a tooled up Soontir for pennies (just an example). The Defender was (is) a favourite for those of us lucky enough to have grown up with X-Wing and TIE Fighter on the PC. Being able to take one in X-Wing was exciting, but the realisation that the pilots along with the ship itself were lucklustre saw it shelfed unless for the most casual of casual games. It didn't really fit anywhere. Now with the Veterans expansion the Defender has had a whole breath of air to reinvigorate it. The result is a thematic, challenging ship that has seen play now at the top levels of the game.

I feel FFG hit the sweet spot with Imperial Veterans. Not only adding viability to an existing ship, but giving back to customers who already had a Defender or two already in their fleet.

Great, with that in mind I've got a suggestion for a TIE Punisher title that will see it get some use in top level play!

TIE /fu
Title
Action: destroy target ship at range 1-3.


That might be a bit overpowered, could nerf it by making it an in-arc ship. I reckon it should cost -1 points, though, as the TIE Punisher was a bit overcosted to begin with and needs a buff. At least now players who've got a couple of TIE Punishers in their fleet already will get some use from it.

Great, with that in mind I've got a suggestion for a TIE Punisher title that will see it get some use in top level play! TIE /fu Title

Action: destroy target ship at range 1-3.

That might be a bit overpowered, could nerf it by making it an in-arc ship. I reckon it should cost -1 points, though, as the TIE Punisher was a bit overcosted to begin with and needs a buff. At least now players who've got a couple of TIE Punishers in their fleet already will get some use from it.

Great, with that in mind I've got a suggestion for a TIE Punisher title that will see it get some use in top level play!

TIE /fu

Title

Action: destroy target ship at range 1-3.

That might be a bit overpowered, could nerf it by making it an in-arc ship. I reckon it should cost -1 points, though, as the TIE Punisher was a bit overcosted to begin with and needs a buff. At least now players who've got a couple of TIE Punishers in their fleet already will get some use from it.

Are...... are you crying?

My question here is: If you removed or 'nerfed' x7 Defenders, what powerhouse would immediately take their place?

Personally I've just found the action/token economy race quite tedious to keep up with. Always bound to happen the more and more upgrades and slots that appear, but it's definitely taken a bit of a shine off the game over the past year or so.

I guess that part of it is that it currently feels like there's X-Wing: The Dice Game and X-Wing: The Guaranteed Damage/Evade game, with the latter being the standard these days at events.

Maybe casual epic is the answer...

Reminds me of when I started magic back with the very basic 4th edition (power was all removed and very little was there in card economy), over the years new releases changed the game so much with how you could choose to win or take card advantage to new meanings. Each new expansion sees new winning decks in tournaments, follow up tournaments find counter-decks to those past winners and the 'meta' constantly changes and adapts to suit - I can only assume that X-Wing will do the same.

Perhaps if we're lucky a set of Title cards for the original ships will assist them in becoming a little more on par with the new releases.

Great, with that in mind I've got a suggestion for a TIE Punisher title that will see it get some use in top level play!

TIE /fu

Title

Action: destroy target ship at range 1-3.

That might be a bit overpowered, could nerf it by making it an in-arc ship. I reckon it should cost -1 points, though, as the TIE Punisher was a bit overcosted to begin with and needs a buff. At least now players who've got a couple of TIE Punishers in their fleet already will get some use from it.

Are...... are you crying?

Bitter tears, yes,

My question here is: If you removed or 'nerfed' x7 Defenders, what powerhouse would immediately take their place?

Personally I've just found the action/token economy race quite tedious to keep up with. Always bound to happen the more and more upgrades and slots that appear, but it's definitely taken a bit of a shine off the game over the past year or so.

I guess that part of it is that it currently feels like there's X-Wing: The Dice Game and X-Wing: The Guaranteed Damage/Evade game, with the latter being the standard these days at events.

Maybe casual epic is the answer...

Reminds me of when I started magic back with the very basic 4th edition (power was all removed and very little was there in card economy), over the years new releases changed the game so much with how you could choose to win or take card advantage to new meanings. Each new expansion sees new winning decks in tournaments, follow up tournaments find counter-decks to those past winners and the 'meta' constantly changes and adapts to suit - I can only assume that X-Wing will do the same.

Perhaps if we're lucky a set of Title cards for the original ships will assist them in becoming a little more on par with the new releases.

But at times Magic would ban or remove cards when they made design mistakes.

What would replace /x7 is a good question though. At the moment the anti-Defender lists are almost as much of a problem as the Defender lists and it's not really clear whether removing /x7 alone would rectify things. I think there would need to be a small group of bannings (3 or 4 cards) to get things back to an even keel - it's not *just* Defenders that need taking down a notch or two.

Great, with that in mind I've got a suggestion for a TIE Punisher title that will see it get some use in top level play! TIE /fu Title

Action: destroy target ship at range 1-3.

That might be a bit overpowered, could nerf it by making it an in-arc ship. I reckon it should cost -1 points, though, as the TIE Punisher was a bit overcosted to begin with and needs a buff. At least now players who've got a couple of TIE Punishers in their fleet already will get some use from it.

This is precisely the point. The Punisher sux and I don't think I've ever seen one compete because it's too expensive and clumsy. You only bought it for mk2 engines, and that's stupid. I'm about to Buy a scyk just because I want some cards, but the ship is pretty dumb.

The defender was an expensive ship that had great potential but cost way too much for what it did. Now it's made a bit viable by a decent title. It doesn't get ept's, turrets, cannons, crew, tech, systems, missles, astros, illicit, bombs, or missiles. It gets a white k-turn, free evade and green banks, that's it. That makes it the best? Wow. Much awesome, big dice, many kill. I wish.

My question here is: If you removed or 'nerfed' x7 Defenders, what powerhouse would immediately take their place?

Personally I've just found the action/token economy race quite tedious to keep up with. Always bound to happen the more and more upgrades and slots that appear, but it's definitely taken a bit of a shine off the game over the past year or so.

I guess that part of it is that it currently feels like there's X-Wing: The Dice Game and X-Wing: The Guaranteed Damage/Evade game, with the latter being the standard these days at events.

Maybe casual epic is the answer...

Reminds me of when I started magic back with the very basic 4th edition (power was all removed and very little was there in card economy), over the years new releases changed the game so much with how you could choose to win or take card advantage to new meanings. Each new expansion sees new winning decks in tournaments, follow up tournaments find counter-decks to those past winners and the 'meta' constantly changes and adapts to suit - I can only assume that X-Wing will do the same.

Perhaps if we're lucky a set of Title cards for the original ships will assist them in becoming a little more on par with the new releases.

Magic dealt with most of its problems by format system. We have standard, format in which you can only play most recent cards, modern, in which you play cards with 'new' layout and legacy, all the cards with some bans (i will not talk about vintage or limited here). And guess what, legacy is total cancer. I know some people like being killed in second turn, but not many. You just need to go full 'turn 0' and get all those OP cards (legacy is full of those, it's not whining or sth) and prepare counters for like, every deck possible. (Fortunetly you have a sideboard) In fact, for casual player, none of those formats is really accesible. Cheap modern deck is like, 300$. And your standard deck will lose all of its value in 2 years. But it's still a way to have many diffrent enviroments. We have only "legacy" way to play x-wing because of its nature. And legacy never changes. Never.

I love X-Wing but locally we have casual games Tuesday and Thursday nights and a weekly tournament. I can not make the weeknight games so Sunday tournaments are about all I get to play. Unfortunately too many of our players turn into Spike on Sundays. Some use the excuse of prepping for Store Champ/Regionals/etc, but I think it is more of them being Spikes than any prep. I get discouraged when going to a casual tournament and we have 2-3 players with meta list and the other 5 have casual/experimental lists. Some of those Spikes will bring non-meta list (but I think they are just trying to discover the next meta) and lose and have fun, but their competitive edge is definitely missing. I hate taking true meta list or net building, but I have meta list for some of these tournaments just to be competitive with the other meta lists and I have received grief about bringing a meta list.

Meta is always going to exist in any game and that is a fact. Sometimes ships that you love and fly will come into the meta. When I got into X-Wing I played Soontir, Firespray and Defenders all the time, I would do fairly good, but then I would run into Fat Han or Whisper or a swarm and my record was not as good. I have not flown Soontir or Defenders since they got their "fix"; partly because I didn't want to meta and partly because of trying different ships and loving scum atm.

Coming from Magic myself, I definitely notice the absence of different formats to shake things up. And rotation as well.

But when you look at some of the older formats Magic do at least try to shake it up now and then with bannings/unbannings.

Something must be done with x7s with no doubt. The question is - do we nerf them (if yeah - how), or do we introduce counters. I would prefer the latter. I must admit, i play defenders myself, but it started feeling dirty at some point. Defenders turn all the nice people to whiny, unhappy people. Token stack each turn at heavily undercosted ship (withx7) is just too much for most normal lists to handle. Especially against those z's or tie's trying to get their 1 hit, but it's impossible.

At some point just card pool is so big that options instead of getting better are just narrowing. The best builds and combos are just too great to take them down.

My prefered solution is just X-wing 2.0. It has to happen, and it better does as fast as possible. We need change, edition 2.0 can deal with token stacks with general, make titles built-in ships instead of autoinclude cards that you can forget, change turrets into mobile arcs, rebalance all the pilots and upgrades, maybe change some dials.

How i would make it happen? A big core-set like pack containing everything you need to transfer all the ships to 2.0 assuming that you have 1 of everything costing around, i dunno, 30$, and small transfer packs for around 3$ to transfer one of certain ship to 2.0 and reprint everything to make it 2.0. If it doesn't happen, the power creep will go on and the game will just fall apart. All the wargames and cardgames without rotation or ban system need it. Look at wh40k (from the good times). First few editions just fixed the mistakes of the previous one and changed the units. It made it fresh.\

You can even separate card packs from ships, making their price lower and preparing for 3.0.

And that Something is shoot them. I mean compared to the pre-nerf Phantom, Old Fat Han, and Torp Scouts are the Defenders really that bad? Imho they are not. That focus and evade only go so far. Against a string of attacks or some good ol' Homing Missiles, they will die.

Little trick i have found is play them yourself. You will then see theit weaknesses plain as day and know how to counter them better.

Ol' Terry approves this message.

Coming from Magic myself, I definitely notice the absence of different formats to shake things up. And rotation as well.

But when you look at some of the older formats Magic do at least try to shake it up now and then with bannings/unbannings.

I too would like to see xwings rotate out.

My buddy and I have taken this into our own hands and had matches that were "1 named pilot only", or "only ships from the original trilogy", as well as a combination of the two. We'll usually play two matches using builds we think are strong "meta" types perhaps but then end the day with something different.

-Cal

Something must be done with x7s with no doubt. The question is - do we nerf them (if yeah - how), or do we introduce counters. I would prefer the latter. I must admit, i play defenders myself, but it started feeling dirty at some point. Defenders turn all the nice people to whiny, unhappy people. Token stack each turn at heavily undercosted ship (withx7) is just too much for most normal lists to handle.

Before I get what's bothering me off my chest - understand this isn't some sort of attack on you (despite quoting your post) or the experiences you've had to reach your conclusion about the x7 card. I see too much negativity on these boards, and definitely too many inadequate arguments to nerfs and fixes where they're not warranted.

I think the x7 (and also the TIE/d) are superb additions. The Defender as it stood was overcosted and inefficient when Imperial players could take a tooled up Soontir for pennies (just an example). The Defender was (is) a favourite for those of us lucky enough to have grown up with X-Wing and TIE Fighter on the PC. Being able to take one in X-Wing was exciting, but the realisation that the pilots along with the ship itself were lucklustre saw it shelfed unless for the most casual of casual games. It didn't really fit anywhere. Now with the Veterans expansion the Defender has had a whole breath of air to reinvigorate it. The result is a thematic, challenging ship that has seen play now at the top levels of the game.

I feel FFG hit the sweet spot with Imperial Veterans. Not only adding viability to an existing ship, but giving back to customers who already had a Defender or two already in their fleet.

The prices could have been reversed on the /x7 and /d titles and we still would have seen a lot of /x7s hitting the tables.

Coming from Magic myself, I definitely notice the absence of different formats to shake things up. And rotation as well.

But when you look at some of the older formats Magic do at least try to shake it up now and then with bannings/unbannings.

I too would like to see xwings rotate out.

Yeah rotation doesn't work as well for miniatures games for this reason. Perhaps rotating legality of upgrades from Waves would do it, but as they never planned ahead for rotation there's nothing on the face of the cards that could really be used as an indicator of what upgrades are allowed and which aren't.

Coming from Magic myself, I definitely notice the absence of different formats to shake things up. And rotation as well.

But when you look at some of the older formats Magic do at least try to shake it up now and then with bannings/unbannings.

I too would like to see xwings rotate out.

I would hate to see a rotation list. I think they have done a good job on the errata and they could do a restricted list like their card games if certain combos become too OP. Fat Han was the only thing they never had to errata to correct, but the time it took for them to counter it was way too long. Palp/Manaroo are the next nerf/errata I predict and both will probably see a range restriction.

I picked up HotAC and it is the most fun I had in X-Wing since I first picked it up in wave 3/4. I love the coop aspect and having 3-4 Spikes is not so bad.

Something must be done with x7s with no doubt. The question is - do we nerf them (if yeah - how), or do we introduce counters. I would prefer the latter. I must admit, i play defenders myself, but it started feeling dirty at some point. Defenders turn all the nice people to whiny, unhappy people. Token stack each turn at heavily undercosted ship (withx7) is just too much for most normal lists to handle.

Before I get what's bothering me off my chest - understand this isn't some sort of attack on you (despite quoting your post) or the experiences you've had to reach your conclusion about the x7 card. I see too much negativity on these boards, and definitely too many inadequate arguments to nerfs and fixes where they're not warranted.

I think the x7 (and also the TIE/d) are superb additions. The Defender as it stood was overcosted and inefficient when Imperial players could take a tooled up Soontir for pennies (just an example). The Defender was (is) a favourite for those of us lucky enough to have grown up with X-Wing and TIE Fighter on the PC. Being able to take one in X-Wing was exciting, but the realisation that the pilots along with the ship itself were lucklustre saw it shelfed unless for the most casual of casual games. It didn't really fit anywhere. Now with the Veterans expansion the Defender has had a whole breath of air to reinvigorate it. The result is a thematic, challenging ship that has seen play now at the top levels of the game.

I feel FFG hit the sweet spot with Imperial Veterans. Not only adding viability to an existing ship, but giving back to customers who already had a Defender or two already in their fleet.

The prices could have been reversed on the /x7 and /d titles and we still would have seen a lot of /x7s hitting the tables.

That's my preferred fix, yeah. It doesn't kill /x7 at all and I think you'd actually see /D appearing quite a bit - they're annoying with the stress/ion/tractor they dish out but you can kill them a lot more easily. /D would be fine at -2, /x7 would still be very good at 0.

Coming from Magic myself, I definitely notice the absence of different formats to shake things up. And rotation as well.

But when you look at some of the older formats Magic do at least try to shake it up now and then with bannings/unbannings.

I too would like to see xwings rotate out.

Yeah rotation doesn't work as well for miniatures games for this reason. Perhaps rotating legality of upgrades from Waves would do it, but as they never planned ahead for rotation there's nothing on the face of the cards that could really be used as an indicator of what upgrades are allowed and which aren't.

A rotation style format for X-Wing would have to be well tailored. I'd love it, though, if done right! Ships may never rotate out. Fix (or some ship specific, away with x7, keep TIE/D, for example)) titles should, for the most part, not, as well as Guidance Chips and EM. Then you'd also need a low power, but usable (example Ion Cannon Turret) upgrade for each slot thats always there. Reprints could be a good way to keep old upgrades that aren't problematic (hey look, Stealth Device in the U-Wing!) in the game.

However that pretty much leads to a convoluted, seemingly random list of cards. At some point FFG will be forced to. You can't keep the game growing for ever and expect it to be healthy. Rotation could do so much, imagine a world without PTL and VI, it would be so different!