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 like your post. System format would be the best way to balance without changing any card texts, and would have an effect for the rest of the life of this game. The easiest system format to implement imo would be competitive missions... which brings us back to this post:

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/226118-fixing-the-meta-problems-without-changing-a-single-card/

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.

I can deal with them, i play dash a lot and i know how to exploit their weaknesses. But defenders are what scaries most casual players out of tournaments. And having to deal with the list before you face it is not a good design. It just shows that this ship is basically superior in vacuum.

Incorrect, it shows that it is something you need to consider . If you expect to meet x # of defenders, you include 1 or more counters to them in your list and you adjust your tactics.

Primarily when building your list, during deployment & in the initial approach. What comes after that is up to your grasp of the situation and of the game, the dials, and the dice gods.

Different formats are definitely great. At the store I TO for, we alternate between standard 100 point tournaments (for the more competitive players) and weird formats and crazy events. We've done Escalation, Hangar Bay, faction-mixing, free-for-all, and more. Our next tourney is going to be 117 point squads in honor of the new year, 2017. Shaking it up like that has brought in some more casual players and still keeps the Spikes and Johnnies interested because they have to figure out how to win in format with no established meta.