TL;DR: You should try out the Legacy format.

Winning List and "Prize"

Rules and Regulations

This past weekend, we held we called a “Legacy” Tournament using today’s rules, errata, and FAQ with the following modifications.

1) You may only use pilots and upgrades from waves 1-3.

2) You may only use asteroids as your obstacles.

The main differences between the old wave 3 and “Legacy” come from the ability to use the Force Awakens Damage Deck and the half MoV from large ships. Additionally, there are no modified wins.

The inclusion of the new damage deck means ordnance and secondary weapon based lists, as well as aces, don’t start off handicapped with the poorly balanced original damage deck.

Half MoV may not have been necessary with the lack of point fortresses in wave 3 but I felt was an overall fair addition to the game.

Removal of modified wins prevents swarm hell. Especially the old modified wins going all the way to 32 points.

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Meta and interesting stats

With 18 players we had still had an uneven distribution of Rebels (13) to Imperial (5).

Over 86% of all the points were spent on ships.

All but 2 rebel lists had a generic B-Wing. The other two had at least one YT1300.

The most common upgrade was FCS followed by Stealth Device.

The only ship not used at all was the TIE-Bomber.

The top 4 lists were the Vader Swarm, ABXY (missing), Biggs' Bloody Daggers, and Han + B's.
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Observations and Discussion

One thing that was very evident to me was the list diversity despite having only 12 ships to choose from. While the dominant archetype was definitely a 4 ship rebel lists (with Biggs anchoring 7 of the rebel lists), no list was identical.

There was a severe lack of arc dodgers. Without Autothrusters and Palpatine, arc dodgers were at the mercy of the dice if they ever got caught.

There were few turrets. Without upgrades like C3PO and Predator, turret ships lacked the efficiency to arc dodger, tank shots, AND have accurate fire.

Leading up to this tournament some of us tried out legacy lists and I played about 8-10 games of the format recently. This experience reminded me of all the good and bad aspects of “classic” X-wing:

1) There is a much larger emphasis on turn zero and the turns leading up to combat in this game. Jousting is the dominant strategy of this game because there aren’t tons of repositioning actions or pilots. You must ensure a good approach with strategic obstacle placement and good formation flying. There is very little recourse for a bad approach. Conversely, a great approach might not always net you the win because

2) You are much more at the mercy of the dice. Actionless dice modification is extremely rare at this stage of the game. It wasn’t uncommon that a ship could pop off a range 3 obstructed shot and land some damage. However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing because

3) 2 dice attacks still count for a lot. The most defense dice you could roll is 6 and correspondingly, the most attack dice you could roll right now is 6 and that’s only through some insane rube goldberg-esque squad featuring Jan and Expose or Advanced Proton Torpedoes. Additionally, there are almost no actionless modifiers for those green dice so red dice escalation isn’t even necessary.

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Conclusion

I’ve probably rambled on aimlessly for a bit but I hope that you try Legacy as a format. It is a great way to go back to a simpler X-Wing (for better or for worse).

What do you think? Would you try Legacy? What would you change? One thing I'd consider adding is Imperial Aces...maybe the Rebel Transport. Allowing debris wouldn't be a crazy change either.

List Juggler here

http://lists.starwarsclubhouse.com/get_tourney_details?tourney_id=2607

So, basically, your Legacy Format meant that only Vader and TIE Swarm were the viable Imperial lists, and he didn't even have TIE/x1? That sounds, ah, positively enthralling for Imperial players. No wonder over half the players showed up with Rebel lists.

27 minutes ago, iamfanboy said:

So, basically, your Legacy Format meant that only Vader and TIE Swarm were the viable Imperial lists, and he didn't even have TIE/x1? That sounds, ah, positively enthralling for Imperial players. No wonder over half the players showed up with Rebel lists.

That's a fair point, but the hostile level of sarcasm seems pointless. Is offering constructive criticism out of the question?

I wonder what a "modified" Legacy might look like, where you can only use wave 1-3 ships but pilots and upgrades are all fair game.

Palpatine probably needs to be banned, but otherwise that could be interesting...

10 minutes ago, DR4CO said:

I wonder what a "modified" Legacy might look like, where you can only use wave 1-3 ships but pilots and upgrades are all fair game.

Palpatine probably needs to be banned, but otherwise that could be interesting...

Pattiswarm all the way. It was meta up to Wave 8 as well.

4 minutes ago, spacelion said:

Pattiswarm all the way. It was meta up to Wave 8 as well.

Yeah, fair call.

You still might be able to come up with a way to handle it, though, and it at least would be something different to worry about compared to the current meta. Hmm...

TLDR: Booster drafting is another way to do Legacy-type gaming, and other themes as well.

I've been testing out a drafting format that can be used to create these sorts of themed tournaments. It works best with a relaxed group of about 4-12 players who are willing to loan ships to each other, and the organizer will need a large collection of their own cards in order to create the draft packs.

Players sit in a circle, each player receives a draft pack containing 8 ship cards and 16 upgrades, each player selects 1 pilot card and 2 upgrade cards, then passes their pack to the player on their left. This continues until all of the draft packs are empty. Players assemble their 100-point squads from their pool of drafted cards. Players are paired up randomly (or in such a way as to avoid mirror matches), and play commences. (So far, we've played one match and called it a night, but you could run multiple rounds or whatever.)

The Legacy-ish part of this is in the creation of the draft packs. I'm only making 8 packs for my events, since that's the largest number of players I'm likely to involve in this sort of thing on our casual game nights. That means I need (just) 64 pilot cards split roughly into thirds by faction, and (just) 128 upgrade cards which should be of the types that are useful for the pilots that end up making the cut. After settling on the final mix, I shuffle all the ship cards, and shuffle all of the upgrades, then distribute 8 random pilots and 16 random upgrades into each of 8 envelopes.

For our first draft event, I used Wave 1-3 ships, but included upgrades from Waves 1-10. The verdict was that it was fun, but it did show the limits of those older ships. Big furball, bumpfest. No Scum. We needed more variety.

For our second draft event, I went weird and decided to created a "wave 2 meets wave 10, with Most Wanted stuff too" theme. I thought it was a good idea to see if the format would hold up when mixing old and new stuff, plus basic Scum, and it mostly did. Since this really sloppily-assembled card pool still produced decent and interesting squad options, I feel pretty certain that a more carefully curated card pool will work just fine.

So I'm working on my third draft event card pool, and I'm hand-picking every card, because the game really doesn't break cleanly along category lines. If you just go with Wave 1-3 ships, you lose some stuff like ARC-170s and TIE Strikers that would be fun mixing it up with some of the stuff that was released earlier.

Well since I already had the joy of experiencing the traffic jam known as Wave 3 meta. I am not a fan of this format but Really no one should tell you how to play.

I will say I prefer formats that make more options available not restrict options. Legacy is not really necessary since X-wing doesn't have a type 2. Also I like the idea of debris clouds instead of every mat an asteroid field with 5 small and the big one.

If you just make certain exceptions to balance it a bit more (allow the TIE x1 fix and advanced targeting computer in particular) and keep the pool mostly the same this seems like an interesting format for those hungry for the 'good old days'.

I personally like the game as is present day and think the increased complexity from wave 3 is a good thing but I can't fault you for trying something to bring back that simpler time some do yearn for.

5 hours ago, DagobahDave said:

TLDR: Booster drafting is another way to do Legacy-type gaming, and other themes as well.

So I'm working on my third draft event card pool, and I'm hand-picking every card, because the game really doesn't break cleanly along category lines. If you just go with Wave 1-3 ships, you lose some stuff like ARC-170s and TIE Strikers that would be fun mixing it up with some of the stuff that was released earlier.

Cube draft the whole thing.

1 of each Ship Model , 1 of each upgrade card.

1 hour ago, spacelion said:

Cube draft the whole thing.

1 of each Ship Model , 1 of each upgrade card.

I've experimented with that sort of thing, but it doesn't quite work as simply as that. You'll end up with a bunch of pilots all getting rejected because they can't access some must-have card like Autothrusters, and Attanni Mindlink is useless without a partner. So you end up making some artificial edits no matter what, like throwing in some extra Chardaan Refits or whatever. And I figure once you start doing that, you might as well get what you really want and just deliberately suppress and highlight certain pilots and upgrades.

I agree that the lack of imperials was most likely due to their dominant archetype being swarms and the lack of current swarm players (due to a number of reasons) contributed to people shying away from Imperials despite their reputation for wave III dominance.

It was mostly an exercise in seeing if the game was actually better or if it was just nostalgia. It's a little of column A, little of column B. There are huge benefits to playing early X-Wing, but there are a bunch of things that are not so great. Wave 7 is a close competitor for "best" X-wing and we'll probably start experimenting with that soon.

I will say there was a lot of enthusiasm for this format in my area and overall I think it was a success.

I'm not asking you to only play Legacy nor am I knocking the current meta, but I am hoping you at least give it a shot.

These sorts of formats are all ban lists, basically. And I think it's important to recognize that the game's design wasn't rolled out in a consistent way, so you don't get great results with restrictions on broad categories of game components.

But I feel like the Golden Age for X-Wing is actually embedded somewhere in the card set we currently have available to us, and it's going to take ban lists (or something like them) to figure out the right balance of jousters, turrets, Emperors, Zuckusses, TLTs, Biggs and all the rest.

I mean, 2012 me was just waiting for the day to come when I could build squads with a dozen ship types for Rebels and Imperials and holy cow Scum too? That day is now, and I'm looking at all these doomsayer X-Wing players who think the tournament gameplay is in the garbage (which it is), but that shouldn't come as any surprise. We're allowed to play with every single card from every single expansion, and every season we end up with the most abusive squads because that's how ya win. Players will still do that no matter what card list you let them draw from, but if you want Wedge Antilles and Darth Vader and Talonbane Cobra to be apex predators in your ecosystem, I'm certain you can develop a ban list that will get you there.

Might be a really long ban list, so an allowed list might be easier. And I think you'd want to more carefully restrict how certain cards are used, because unique/generic/banned isn't granular enough. We need more subtle card limits than just unique (2 of a kind maximum, 3 of a kind maximum, some generics should be unique and maybe vice versa) maybe a limit on the number of turrets allowed per squad, some cards should and should not have faction limitations, and so on.

I think X-Wing is getting to the point where we could cycle upgrade cards. I am hesitant about cycling pilots is I don't like ships getting officially binned (as opposed to being de facto binned right now)

10 waves and 4 years worth of unrestricted pilots and upgrades has certainly lent itself to this emergent behavior meta.