The following presents a detailed concept for a fantasy football style auction draft of unique pilots in an X-wing event. Feedback is welcome, especially from those who might have participated in something similar. I didn’t find much in the way of detailed proposals for this type of structure on the forum here, so I trust this isn’t reinventing the wheel too much. My league hasn’t actually tried this yet, and I’m hoping commenters on this forum can point out any glaring weaknesses of the format that we haven’t noticed.
This particular proposal is thematically based on the first Death Star assault from A New Hope, primarily to keep complications down as our league tries it out and irons out the kinks. Available ship types will be only X-wings (T-65), Y-wings, TIEs and TIE Advanced, and one Millennium Falcon. This also gives us the opportunity to enjoy the game from a simpler time, and use ships and pilots that normally don’t see any competitive use.
Once the draft mechanics are fleshed out more, we would like to use it to set up future draft themes, whether it be a Return of the Jedi Death Star II scenario, a Scum-only war, or a Rebels (animated series) or Rogue One theme.
The Event Format
Currently we envision setting this up as a four-man event, taking place over a handful of league nights, where each player owns a Rebel roster and an Imperial roster. (This same structure could be applied to an eight-man event if each player were restricted to one faction.) Each unique pilot can only be owned by one player.
Each player will play each of the other three players in a 6-game, 100/6 Round-Robin format, playing two games against each opponent (his Rebel list vs. the opponent’s Imperial list, and his Imperial list vs. that opponent’s Rebel list).
A league winner is declared for the Round-Robin series, and is the player who simply accumulates the highest win/loss record, with a standard MoV tiebreaker.
A capstone match is loosely envisioned (so far), likely a team-play Death Star Trench Run scenario, with one idea being that only pilots that survived the Round-Robin battles could participate. (The implications of this have not been fully fleshed out.)
The Draft Concept
All of the named pilots from the chosen ship types will be gathered into two draft-eligible pools, Rebel and Imperial. Every named pilot MUST be drafted onto a roster.
Each player will have a faction-specific roster budget (perhaps in the 60-point range, although this value hasn’t been tested) to spend during each faction’s draft auction.
All of the faction’s various unique pilot cards will be shuffled together, and each pilot will be brought up for the draft auction in random order. (Or, we could do this in alternating turns, where each player nominates a pilot to be drafted, until all roster slots have been filled for that faction.) The bidding will begin at HALF the point value on the pilot card (rounding up).
Once each pilot has been drafted via auction, the point cost of the winning bid becomes the cost of that pilot for squad building and MoV purposes in the winning player’s roster. This introduces exciting possibilities for squad building, as suddenly a named pilot may cost less than a generic, and the 100-point game’s economics open up unpredictably.
Draft Auction Mechanics
Undecided are the specifics of how the draft auction will be conducted. It could be a verbal auction with the starting bid at half the printed value of the pilot card. Or it could be a blind auction (each bidder enters their bid on paper or handheld device) with all bids revealed simultaneously; this could get tedious in the case of multiple ties.
Avoiding the tediousness could be achieved by having each player in turn nominate a pilot for bids, with the starting price set at half the printed value; if no other player chooses to bid higher, the nominating player automatically wins the auction for that pilot at the starting price.
There is clearly room for devious tactics in the draft auction, especially for players placing a priority on winning the Round-Robin series. (There also may be a trainwreck of someone drastically overbidding on a powerful pilot just to deny its use to others, with no intention of ever fielding that pilot in a 100-point match list, then running out of budget before all his roster slots are filled. This possibility will need to be tested out.)
Roster Composition
Draft-eligible unique pilots available among the restricted ship types from A New Hope are as follows (starting bids shown in parentheses):
Rebel total: 12 unique pilots, exactly 3 per roster.
X-Wing: 8 unique pilots.
Tarn Mison (12), Biggs Darklighter (13), Hobbie Klivian (13), Garven Dreis (13), Jek Porkins (13), Luke Skywalker (14), Wes Janson (15), Wedge Antilles (15)
Y-Wing: 3* unique pilots.
Dutch Vander (12), Horton Salm (13), *Keyan Farlander (13) (Per the Legends lore that he was the sole Y-wing survivor from A New Hope, with his B-wing pilot ability and PS7 simply applied to the Y-wing ship stats and upgrade bar [no EPT]. He has been added to reach a total number of Rebel pilots that is divisible by 4, without breaking theme by introducing more than one YT-1300 pilot.)
YT-1300: 1 unique pilot.
Han Solo (23)
Imperial total: 16 unique pilots, exactly 4 per roster.
TIE Fighter: 10 unique pilots.
Chaser (7), Wampa (7), Youngster (8), Winged Gundark (8), Night Beast (8), Dark Curse (8), Backstabber (8), Mauler Mithel (9), Howlrunner (9), Scourge (9)
TIE Advanced: 6 unique pilots.
Lieutenant Colzet (12), Commander Alozen (13), Zertik Strom (13), Maarek Stele (14), Juno Eclipse (14), Darth Vader (15)
Round-Robin List Building
Lists must equal 100 points or less, applying all normal squad building and upgrade rules, with the exception that all unique pilots cost the value of their winning draft bid.
Players may field as many or as few of their drafted unique pilots as they choose, with unlimited availability of generic pilots from the allowed ship types (except for the YT-1300, only one of which, Han Solo, may be used in the league event by the player with the winning bid).
Only authorized ship types may be included.
There is no restriction on upgrade cards based on the Wave of their release.
Still undecided is whether a unique pilot’s total build with upgrades must be fixed throughout the series. Thematically, of course, each unique’s upgrade configuration should stay fixed, but this probably introduces undesirable record-keeping requirements in the case of ordnance and discardable upgrade cards.
Options for Pilot Fate
One concept for the Round-Robin series is that unique pilots can only die once. Thus, in each match a player may choose to field a different squad (or be required to, due to the loss of a unique pilot), and can even choose to leave unique pilots on the “bench.” The idea here is a campaign-style series of games, where only the unique pilots that survive the Round-Robin matches may play in the capstone Trench Run team event.
To guarantee survival to the Trench Run, one option may be that a wounded unique pilot may flee the battlefield. This would count as MoV loss for tracking scores in the Round-Robin series, but the pilot could return in future Round-Robin games and/or the Trench Run with full shields recovered and critical damage (excluding Direct Hit) cards turned face down. These pilots would carry over their hull damage to following games.
A slightly different version of this would be that unique pilots may be fielded with fresh health in all Round-Robin games, no matter their fate in previous games, but only those unique pilots with 1 or fewer “deaths” in the 3-game Round-Robin series could participate in the Trench Run.
Capstone Event
In this proposed four-player format, where each player has a squad of each faction, some method would be required to assign players to only one faction team for the Trench Run event.
Logically, the two highest finishers from the Round-Robin series ought to be able to pick which faction they choose to play. If indeed it is decided that unique pilot deaths from the Round-Robin series influence what lists can be fielded in the capstone event, this becomes an important factor in picking which side to play with an aim toward being on the winning team in the capstone event.