For fun I recently decided to dig up an old rebel AABBZ list I played extensively about 2-3 years ago. At the time I was winning about 70% of my games with it. I considered it a better version of the popular BBBBZ list back then.

I did some tweaking with it to drop the Z and enhance the A's & B's a bit.

After 11 games with it now I'm 2-9 with it, with 8 of the 9 losses not even close to winning.

Now I knew with as bad as B-Wings are currently, and with A-Wings just being "alright", I probably wouldn't win a majority of my games, but I didn't think my record would be THAT poor, and I certainly didn't think my games would be so lopsided basically every time. I did have the worse dice luck compared to my opponent most of the losses, but even then I probably still lose all those games, though maybe a few would be close at least.

I feel like I flew well in most of my games as well, which just makes the losses even more hard to swallow.

Another big issue was PS. I think there were 5 or 6 ships TOTAL in all the games that had PS equal to or lower than my ships. No one wants to fly low PS anymore for the most part, even mid PS seems to be dying somewhat.

Just amazes me how one of the better lists I ever made just a few years ago could now be utter trash.

I'm working on a series of blogs charting X-Wing meta development since Jan 2015.

One of the most striking things is that, Dash aside, pretty much any squads from Pre-Wave 7 are worthless. TLT & Palp shattered the game into a million pieces, and then between Wave 7 and Wave 8 you see the pieces of modern X-Wing put into place.

You see people vainly trying to plug away with B-Wings and Z-95s for a bit, but by the time Wave 8 is on our doorsteps it's Palp Aces, Rebel Regen and Crack Swarm all fully formed.