So I've been running something incredibly similar to this list for a while, the only differences being Concussion Missile on Quinn Jast and 4-LOM & Pulsed Ray Shield on Palob. After tooling around some with the contents of G4H, I made the following tweaks to the list:
| Palob Godalhi — HWK-290 | 20 |
| Predator | 3 |
| Twin Laser Turret | 6 |
| Mercenary Copilot | 2 |
| Moldy Crow | 3 |
| Ship Total: 34 | |
| Torkil Mux — HWK-290 | 19 |
| Twin Laser Turret | 6 |
| Dengar | 3 |
| Ship Total: 28 | |
| Quinn Jast — M3-A Interceptor | 18 |
| Deadeye | 1 |
| Harpoon Missiles | 4 |
| Guidance Chips | 0 |
| "Heavy Scyk" Interceptor (Missile) | 2 |
| Ship Total: 25 | |
| Sunny Bounder — M3-A Interceptor | 14 |
| "Light Scyk" Interceptor | -2 |
| Ship Total: 12 | |
To be precise, Quinn Jast swaps the Concussion Missile out for Harpoon Missile, while Palob swaps 4-LOM & Pulsed Ray Shield for Mercenary Copilot, leaving me with a 1 point bid. There are a handful of reasons for this!
1. Missile Swap: Raw numbers wise, Harpoon Missile will deal slightly more damage than Concussion missile will. In addition, it allows Quinn to potentially preserve his focus token for defensive purposes. Finally, the Harpooned! condition can potentially do more damage (And be stacked up due to Quinn), and, due to a timing trick, plays into reason #3.
2. Palob: As much as I liked using 4-LOM to shut down a token I was unable to steal, and PRS to make Palob slightly more durable, in the end they either went unused or did more harm than good. Recovering 1 shield or shutting down 1 token don't really help a great deal when it forces you into a 1-straight with no other ability to re-position. More often than not, ionizing Palob signed his death warrant. Stripping them off opens up 3 points to play with, but why go with Mercenary Copilot with a 1pt bid? Lets take a look at reason #3!
3. TLT & Harpooned! Timing: If the defender has initiative (The reason for the 1pt bit) then Harpooned! will trigger first off a crit rolled from TLT before TLT cancels dice results. Mercenary Copilot allows Palob to force the crit when attacking a range 3. This puts the enemy in a tough spot! Do they engage at range 3, trying to avoid the abilities of Palob & Torkil but subject themselves to the splash damage of Harpooned!? Or do they dive in trying to reach that range 1 bubble, under the full influence of both Palob & Torkil's abilities?
I plan to test this variation on Tuesday during some practice matches for regionals and will leave my findings here!