@AllWingsStandyingBy I'm with you that it is powered-up list. But every single person in the day two was playing something that people have seen. Hell, Nand got a front page article about his list. This was a tournament to show skill in x-wing, and Justin proved himself to be the best player at that tournament.

1 hour ago, chervorlovesu said:

@AllWingsStandyingBy I'm with you that it is powered-up list. But every single person in the day two was playing something that people have seen. Hell, Nand got a front page article about his list. This was a tournament to show skill in x-wing, and Justin proved himself to be the best player at that tournament.

Oh absolutely, and I don't disagree. I'm just talking about the overall reaction of the public community at large to event results. Winning with classic power ships or builds is still an impressive feat of game play, no doubt, and not to take anything from those who do well at any large event. But the overall enthusiasm of the public reaction to a win seems to be in some part of function of how "meta" or how "creative and new" the list itself is. List-building is only one element of at least four key aspects to doing well at X-Wing tournaments (See Below), but it's an element that tends to garnish a lot of positive attention and discussion only when it's a new or novel list or a list that everyone had written off as being not able to compete. Because otherwise it's just an expected result, more of the same, etc. ...

The winner of any big X-Wing tournament always needs:
(1) a good list
(2) good on-table decisions
(3) overall good luck with dice
(4) overall good luck in the random pairings

Every one of those is a necessary but not sufficient condition of winning a large event. Take Nand's win last year. He won Worlds with Dengaroo when even the creator of Dengaroo had moved to a different list because Dengaroo had a so-so match-up against X7s. Nand was lucky in (4) in that he only had to play against one X7 list in his two days (and it was the one game he lost), while other players were playing against X7s in five or more of the games. Does that mean that Nand didn't make great decisions and deserve credit for his win? Of course not, he's clearly an exceptionally good high level player.

Basically, to win any big X-Wing tournament, you have to be both lucky and good . Being good isn't enough on it's on, nor is being lucky.

@AllWingsStandyingBy very well stated !