Many of you will know how enamoured I am with Meta-Wing, and as part of that I had been collecting the Top 20 pilots each month from Meta-Wing's ranking. Over time I've also had my curiosity piqued and so look backwards at previous months, going all the way back to January 2015. It's a long term top-level view of the X-Wing metagame that I've not really seen people discuss very often, and which I personally find pretty fascinating.

I've split a little over three years of X-Wing history into six 'ages', which are often very clearly delineated from each other as new expansions arrive and throw the game off into a new direction. Those six ages are:

• Part 1) Jurassic Park http://stayontheleader.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-six-ages-of-x-wing-1-jurassic-park.html

• Part 2) Twin Laser Palps http://stayontheleader.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-six-ages-of-x-wing-2-twin-laser.html

Coming Soon...

• Part 3) Scouts
• Part 4) Veterans
• Part 5) Mindlink
• Part 6) Rebel Revenge

Hope you enjoy them!

Ahhhh.... such nostalgia.

Devastating brobots with my PalpAces.. ?

You missed the earlier times: before the Dark Times, before the Phantom.

Oh, wow. That's really, really well done. I like the historical approach, and how you trace the development of various archetypes. As someone who's only recently started playing X-Wing, I see this as a valuable historical lesson rather than nostalgia.

I really enjoy this series, and I like how you are looking at it historically. I am a bit sad that all of wave 1-6 are lumped into one big category, as there was a lot of change throughout those waves. Really, I think the Phantom had a lot to jumpstart this big change that you are building too.

14 minutes ago, lj1983 said:

I really enjoy this series, and I like how you are looking at it historically. I am a bit sad that all of wave 1-6 are lumped into one big category, as there was a lot of change throughout those waves. Really, I think the Phantom had a lot to jumpstart this big change that you are building too.

Well, I was primarily trying to tell the story of Wave 7 onwards because I think so little of the Waves 1-6 metagame has survived to be relevant today.

I only looked before Wave 7 so I could tell the story of how transformative Wave 7 was. My impression is most people think of Wave 8 as the point where things took off (Jumpmaster, Ghost, Inquisitor etc) and tbh that was what I thought I would find too, but when you do the digging... man, Wave 7 (specifically the K-Wing and Raider expacs) was ENORMOUS.

Great articles. I started playing at the very end of 2016 so I really appreciate the history of what I missed.

Also, starting out, your blog was a tremendous help. I'm glad to see it's still going.

I started around wave 7, and one thing that stood out to me at the time about X-Wing was that there wasn't much power creep for a game of it's type after a year or two. The humble TIE Fighter from the very beginning of the game was still very competitive (especially once Crackshot came along) and iconic early ships like the TIE Interceptor were top-tier with a few newer cards. I think that impression stuck with me well past the point where it stopped being true, so I'm eager to read more and follow more of the metagame's history with fresh eyes.