43 pt Red Squad vs 46 pt Sigma Squad

vs

List 1:

vs

List 2:

Gimmie 4 juking phantoms over xwings any day.

Well, the Phantoms have the initiative advantage and the manoeuvre advantage. Crack Shot should - hopefully - be irrelevant because if a TIE phantom with the pilot skill advantage lets itself get boresighted by an X-wing it deserves everything it receives.

Which means it's more an issue of those torpedoes. Now these are an issue. Range-dancing the two with regular protons is possible, but you're unlikely to kill them both before they get at least one proton shot off, and that can really cripple a phantom.

I want to say the 4 juke phantoms. But it's going to require clever flying, because in a straight head-on pass they're going to get reamed by torpedo fire and crack shot; the X-wings have a 1 hit advantage over them in core stats to make up for the evade token and the torpedoes are painful - especially that advanced torpedo.

Sigma squad seems frankly superior to me . Initiative is first point, and the cloaking is the second.

Nevertheless, it requires perfect flying because those torpedos are means.

In terms of outmaneuvering, I think the TIE Phantoms have a slight edge, but not as much as people think. The Imperial player will still need to fly their pants off AND fly pretty unpredictably since the Rebel player will know where the Phantoms will be coming from after they Decloak. I also think a good X-Wing player will be able to react to how the field looks when each of their fighters activate and open or close S-foils to either get out of Range 1 of Phantoms or close the gap as needed. Obviously its a difficult thing to nail down a Phantom, but the Phantom won't easily be able to nail down the X-Wing player either.

I think both lists have a lot of merit, but I actually think the X-Wing player has the advantage. Repositioning, IMO, is usually stronger than prepositioning and will have more effect on the Combat phase than the other will.

Of course, maybe both of these players will just keel over from trying to predict each other's moves because both squads have tons of options.