Don't have much kylo right now in the omaha meta. But I'm building for worlds and wanted to get people's feelings on something. In your squad building, do you counter kylo? Determination, Chewbacca crew and ship, draw their fire, Moffat jerrjerrod, biggs... etc. Or just accept the fact that you're drawing two blinded pilots on your high damage ship and that is it?

Honestly, he's not all that common anywhere. I wouldn't go to any special trouble. He takes arguably too much set up, or unavailable points/slots in most Imperial builds to slide in comfortably. Even building to suit him isn't that useful.

If you were really concerned about it, Biggs with R2D6 to get the EPT slot, and give him Determination. At least Biggs works against almost every build, and dumping the droid with IA doesn't remove the EPT anyway, so you may even get lucky and cancel an extra damage along the way.

Ragin' Chewie + Determination Leebo make for a fun Kylo-free list.

Bring more ships into battle

4 hours ago, thestggrwng said:

Don't have much kylo right now in the omaha meta. But I'm building for worlds and wanted to get people's feelings on something. In your squad building, do you counter kylo? Determination, Chewbacca crew and ship, draw their fire, Moffat jerrjerrod, biggs... etc. Or just accept the fact that you're drawing two blinded pilots on your high damage ship and that is it?

Looking at the system open results, Kylo just isn't popular enough that I'd bother building against him specifically. He's not making it into the cut at all (unless I missed a list somewhere).

Also, you're bad at X-wing and you should feel bad.

Swarms. Too many to show the dark side, and if it's Kylo shuttle they're take it down quickly. If it's Kylo crew, Boba Fett him out an airlock with a Proton Torp. Both of those approaches work against a variety of lists, so they're not just about Kylo.

Like Detemination RAC. Kylo vs you gets chucked and you can hand out a nice Damaged Cockpit. I play 60 pt RAC with 40 pt Echo.

My approach is Draw Their Fire (I like to use it on Kylo's shuttle to protect my bombers from regular crits as well)

9 hours ago, IG88E said:

Bring more ships into battle

Basically this. Two ship lists, especially two ship lists without much agility, are really going to struggle, so Bring More Ships.

Also, block RAC - if the player is good he'll have dauntless, but then he'll have stress and be predictable, and if you do it right, the ship getting the block will still get a shot on his second ship.

Draw Their Fire is also good.

(Note, I'm assuming here that the list is RAC and an ace or maybe RAC Colzet and a named TIE. I've not really seen Kylo used effectively any other way.)

I saw a Kylo shuttle on stream at Tattooine with Omega/Inquis iirc.

Lost badly though. I believe it was against a K-Wing based list, cant't tell if Miranda or Warden. Well yes you can show them the dark side and then for that they will not shoot you but plaster you with bombs and mines on your large ship XD

5 minutes ago, ForceM said:

I saw a Kylo shuttle on stream at Tattooine with Omega/Inquis iirc.

Lost badly though. I believe it was against a K-Wing based list, cant't tell if Miranda or Warden. Well yes you can show them the dark side and then for that they will not shoot you but plaster you with bombs and mines on your large ship XD

K Wings, as ever, are horrible.

And Kylo pilot is way, WAY easier to counter than Kylo crew.

I've been flying a Kylo RAC for some time now, won a couple of tournaments with it and gathered just about enough experience to get a good idea what I do and don't like to see on the other side of the table. There are plenty of ways to hard counter Kylo (Determination being the most obvious one) but the main problem is that most of them make no sense when you don't face Kylo, which is... most of the time actually (so far I've only met one other guy who uses him in his list). It's pointless to build your list to counter a threat you might never get to face in the first place, handicapping yourself against other lists in the process.

However, some lists do better than others against Kylo, so if you're worried about him, do NOT field:

- TIE Phantoms - the reasons are pretty obvious - a Phantom can get destroyed in 2 hits and if it gets blinded, it cannot cloak. It doesn't help that one of the most popular Kylo carriers happens to be a PS10 RAC, who hard counters Phantoms even without Kylo.

- Any other expensive ships with high agi but only 2 hull - E-wings, A-wing aces, Inquisitor etc.

- 2 ship lists, especially if one or both ships are durable but have low agi - one of them will just get neutralized for 2 turns in a row, cutting your firepower by about half. It will give your opponent enough of a headstart to outshoot you.

- Lists where majority of firepower is concentrated in one ship (lists with Swarm Leader for example) - Kylo usually finds it trivial to blind the most dangerous ship and nuke him down before he gets to shoot at all. This leaves you with whatever remains, which is often underwhelming.

You might consider using:

- Lists containing 4 ships or more, especially if firepower is spread fairly evenly across the list - it's hard for RAC to avoid fields of fire of that many ships and blinding just one of them isn't that effective. Unfortunately such lists are often not so good against everything else in the current meta and RAC will typically have a high PS ace in company, who can do very well preying on the weaker ships while you're busy with RAC.

- Biggs at the very least delays the moment Kylo is used, giving you more time to shoot with your list's full firepower. You don't need either R2-D6 or Determination. Biggs isn't an attractive target for Kylo anyway. Firstly, he can just discard the crit using his Integrated Astromech. Secondly his firepower is mediocre most of the time as he spends his only token on defence, so spending blind on him would be a waste even without IA. Thirdly, he doesn't have the hp/shields/agi ratios that would make pushing single damage through shields worthwile, especially if one more ship is shooting him as well (which is usually the case). It makes more sense to just TL Biggs and nuke him down and THEN start using Kylo to blind the heavy hitters Biggs was protecting. As I said though, he does delay that moment for a couple of turns, which may be telling.

- Draw Their Fire works quite well, but you need to make sure you put it on something that is reasonably cheap and not an attractive target otherwise. I've seen people use Draw Their Fire on Quickdraw and the only result was that since I knew his revenge shot is coming no matter what I shoot, I just used Kylo on him to suppress the extra shot and nuked him down. I took the regular shot in the first turn but killed him before he could fire again in the next one.

- Chewbacca is a pain in the posterior especially if he is the one with Draw Their Fire. This makes Kylo essentially 3 points of dead weight. The main problem is that Chewie lacks the action economy to be competitive in the current meta. I can usually handle him just fine even without Kylo for this very reason and he doesn't do all that well versus other lists either.

- Any list with multiple turrets, no matter their strength, can be a pain for me. This has nothing to do with Kylo - it's just that RAC doesn't like enemies he can't arc-dodge and since he has 0 agi, even relatively weak turrets may pick him apart eventually.