So you make a new list, fly it once or twice and lose. Badly. Like, half your ships make two attacks a game for an average of 0.5 damage per shot.

How do you analyze whether the reason is:

1. your list is bad
2. you flew it wrong
3. the dice were wacky
4. you did everything right, your opponent was just Worlds-class
5. some and/or all of the above

Followup question: How many trials should you give a list before you class it a complete failure and can it?

(The cruel irony here is that the worse you are to begin with, the harder it is for you to figure out the correct improvement method.)

I feel like you should ask your opponent first what they saw, especially if you know they are solid players.

Two heads figuring out stuff are more likely to find the right result.

I try to evaluate if I didnthe following.

1. Did I fly to my lists strengths

2. What errors did I make? For example, missed triggers or abilities

3. Did I make errors in my dials? Sometimes you can fly perfectly, but sometimes you can get outflown or manuevered. Example is a z-95 vs a TIE phantom.

4. What upgrade in my list had little to no impact in the game?

Always ask your opponent if he observed something.

Usually 4 to 5 missions and preferably against different list to really understand a list. Certainly talk to your opponents see what did and didn’t work.

Things to think about:

1: What was my list attempting to do?

2: How was I trying to make it work?

3: Was I too aggressive with my approach?

Just try not to jump to conclusions. I need alot of games against varying lists and opponent skill levels before I believe my own opinions. Roughly 15-25 games or more. Basically, 3 full tournaments. Always air on the side of your own opinion is probably wrong without a ton of in game experience with the specific list to back it up. The only short cut is to look at complete tournament data over many many games.

About 2 or 3 games to know if the list has potential to be something. Then can go further into testing or scrap it.

Win or lose doesnt matter in those games. Dice can screw me, maybe I did some bad maneuvers. But feeling the power in the list is most important.

Was the list fun? I don’t get many games so always making changes.

As someone who's played for 6 years, I trust my ability enough that if I build and fly a list and it does terribly, it's probably not worth my time to keep wasting time with it. Even if it was just bad dice, or just a bad matchup or something else that maybe was just a fluke and the list is actually decent, there are just too many lists in my queue that need testing for me to waste time on a list that has a bad first outing. The chances that it's actually an amazing list in spite of 2 bad games is not worth the cost of getting less testing in with other lists, especially now that I'm up to 3 factions.

And if a list is actually great and not just good, it should be performing even if it has bad dice rolls or whatever. And I can tell the difference between a list that lost and a list that's not performing.

If you feel like you don't have a decent level of skill that you can trust while you're evaluating a lists performance, then you should be mixing in top net lists into your practice queue alongside your own brews. There's nothing wrong with a player who's still growing wanting to brew their own lists, but you need to have a baseline to compare your brews to otherwise your just kind of wandering around in the dark. When you play with the great lists regularly alongside your own brews, you'll know what it feels like to fly a great list and then you'll know how your brew is performing in comparison.

It's always the dice.

At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

In first edition I would say that you should try to fly something that's known to be good go get the experience with that, and then try new list against meta lists.

It's a bit harder now, but I would still suggest looking at some tounament data. Not everything without a lot of high results on listfortress is bad, and you might have discovered something really good. But it's worth beeing more critical in that case. We don't evaluate lists in a vacuum. Maybe you have experience with one of the pieces already? Maybe your list is similar to another archetype; how is it different? is it really different, or just wors? This type of questions contextualise the evaluation, and makes it easier.

For an ‘unproven’ list I tend to ask if the list utilised it’s points:

Did I proc the abilities/upgrades I paid for? (Id include Initiative as a pseudo ability). It doesn’t really matter initially if the ability/upgrade went off but with no real impact at this stage - just confirmation it was used.

Did the synergies I’d envisioned work as planned? Or was it actually technically quite difficult to create the right conditions (range requirement etc) given the ship dials in use?

Then I tend to think of ‘time on target’. If I infrequently or rarely had targets in arc then that might be speaking to how well the list is able to threaten zones of the board. This feels more a reliable indicator than just fickle dice rolls.

Finally was there a real apparent weakness. For example the list can’t handle ion turrets, or stress, or is weak to alpha strikes.

I’d also ask how hard to my opponent have to work? If they’re not obviously thinking during the game maybe my strategy is too transparent with obvious counters.

1) ask your opponent what their experience was of playing against your list. Did they feel you were asking tough questions for what to do and they played well, or did they feel everything you did was predictable and easy to dismantle?

2) sense check yourself on whether what went wrong is going to keep happening or was a fluke of that game/opponent?

3) what do you think you can do differently that would meaningfully have changed the outcome? If you're getting beaten that badly something significant needs to change... is there a different way to try it?

This old blog of mine might be worth a read: http://stayontheleader.blogspot.com/2016/06/strike-me-down-how-to-lose-at-x-wing.html

TBH I'll be ready to can a list after 1 or 2 games, but I think that's a combination of being good at doing step 2), being too impatient to really think much about step 3), and having a very high bar set for how good I want my squads to be.

It also varies greatly from the kind of ships used.

5 Y-Wings as an example can get arc-dodged several times and get reduced to puny 2 die shots with no double tap against lists with high maneuverability.

Same happens with ships that move alot shoot alot and... do not have rerolls. you can plot several killboxes and get all your reds going blank. Argh.

As of late this is happening. My builds are rather solid in effects, maneuvering etc.. and when I shoot (and even reroll) I get only blanks.

Then I get to remove my piece because my opponent rolls a threehitsonecrit with a double damage. true story guys: twelve dice with focus and rerolls against a miserable U-Wing with no modifiers. 1 damage in. My Maarek left the field being full, after a nice threehitonecrit with a double damage.

@ficklegreendice you were wrong all along.. change your name to FickleRedDice lol

I don’t evaluate a list at all after 2 games. 10 or so will give you some idea.

Here is how I evaluate a list:

1) Do I have fun flying it? If the answer is no, then there is not much of a point to continue if it ruins my long term goal of "fun".

2) Does my opponent cringes upon seeing my list? I find that I have a lot of fun when they do, especially if they can't figure out how to approach / fight it.

3) Do I win more than I lose?

4) And finally, if there a popular bad matchup that threatens to give me a bad day?

Part of this lies in listbuilding. You have to ask questions of your list, such as how you expect to win and do you have the correct tools for the job. That pre-work makes your post game analysis a lot easier. Either your assumptions were wrong or you flew it wrongly.

Simple fly and shoot lists I find pretty easy to evaluate. It all comes down to whether I managed the approach right and whether the dials and Inits I have are amenable to changing it for the better. If they are, then it'll take a dozen more games to really figure that out.

Synergistic lists I'll sometimes ditch permanently after 1 or 2 games, when it becomes apparent that the work needed to make it tick is either too hard to set up, too unreliable or just doesn't gel at all. You need a crap load of work to get it right against a varied field of opposing squads. It's only worth it if you really enjoyed losing with it and had the odd glimmer of success in the defeat.

The bottom line for both is- Did I enjoy it? Was there a ray of light in there?

Easier to link than copy this mess:

16 hours ago, martini74 said:

3. Did I make errors in my dials? Sometimes you can fly perfectly, but sometimes you can get outflown or manuevered. Example is a z-95 vs a TIE phantom.

I think you're exaggerating here. I get that TIE Phantoms have gotten slightly nerfed, but I hardly think a Z-95's going to be outmaneuvering one!

7 hours ago, Yearfire said:

It's a bit harder now, but I would still suggest looking at some tounament data.

This can be helpful, but keep in mind whether you're looking for a tournament list or a casual list. A tournament list designed for a strong initial strike followed by simply surviving to time, for instance, may not fare so well in games without a time limit.

5 hours ago, Arma Quattro said:

Then I get to remove my piece because my opponent rolls a threehitsonecrit with a double damage. true story guys: twelve dice with focus and rerolls against a miserable U-Wing with no modifiers. 1 damage in. My Maarek left the field being full, after a nice threehitonecrit with a double damage.

I hear ya. I still remember the ill-fated 4- Lambda game I played where, despite getting 2-3 shots every turn, not a single hit went through all game.

Meanwhile, I've never had a TIE Defender survive more than three attacks against it, despite supposedly being one of the tankier ships.

4 hours ago, TasteTheRainbow said:

I don’t evaluate a list at all after 2 games. 10 or so will give you some idea.

You play the same list for 10 games?!

I stated that if I am flying a z-95 perfectly, no matter what, a phantom should be able to Outmaneuver my Z95 and I shouldnt get a shot on the phantom

4 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

You play the same list for 10 games?!

If you want to win stuff with it yea.

1 minute ago, TasteTheRainbow said:

If you want to win stuff with it yea.

Maybe. I'm just thinking that at 1-2 games a week, it would take forever to be able to play more than a handful of lists that way!

50 minutes ago, TasteTheRainbow said:

If you want to win stuff with it yea.

QFT. Its all in the motivation of it. I can tell whether an expected synergy can consistently work in a few games, but if you want to evaluate your list against "the field", there's now enough different list types that you probably want a good couple of games vs a few different types of lists. I'm on limited time so I only get a handful of games a week anyway.

Example: Last weekend I really wanted to fly Grievous, so I played a couple games vs a friend (losses) and realized he didn't want to be fully loaded given the rest of my list (Maul/Dooku). So I took him to a small tournament at 49 points: Him + Trick Shot. He was either going to be phenominal (vs lower PS) or a "free 50 points" as I named him, because at I4 he's not great since 2/3 (and most, looking around) of the people I played had some sort of I5/6. 5 games with Grievous right there. He's out of that list, replaced with his amazing 3 point crew card on another ship. My initial motivation to quote him while killing Jedi remains. And as for the rest of the list, I added a few upgrades to two of the ships and removed Grievous in place of another ship: Droid that now either hands off calculates or throws buzz droids. It fills the "squishy ace killer" role, knowing that the list I took last weekend had a weakness to those. So while my list is evolving a little, its still a 3-ship list with two big ships and a 3rd smaller list, still flies mostly the same, etc.

18 hours ago, Quarrel said:

So you make a new list, fly it once or twice and lose. Badly. Like, half your ships make two attacks a game for an average of 0.5 damage per shot.

How do you analyze whether the reason is:

1. your list is bad
2. you flew it wrong
3. the dice were wacky
4. you did everything right, your opponent was just Worlds-class
5. some and/or all of the above

Once or twice is not nearly enough, IMO.

I do 5. All of the options are a possibility, and need to be accounted for.

18 hours ago, Quarrel said:

Followup question: How many trials should you give a list before you class it a complete failure and can it?

(The cruel irony here is that the worse you are to begin with, the harder it is for you to figure out the correct improvement method.)

Toughie. If I think I flew it well, the dice were fair, and the matchup wasn't too "hard counter", then I might abandon the list.

More likely, something else caught my eye and I want to fly something different. 😕

Practical example: I flew 5 Y's at Redmond hyperspace. I went 3-3. So I think it's a solid list, that I flew well enough.

I'm tinkering with the list for the hyperspace in Richmond BC. Thinking about taking 4 y's, or 4 + an A-Wing, or sticking with 5 Y's, or possibly abandoning the list. (Very unlikely)

I'm going to decide over the next month of practice sessions. About 1-3 games a week for the next month.

1 hour ago, Jyico said:

So while my list is evolving a little, its still a 3-ship list with two big ships and a 3rd smaller list, still flies mostly the same, etc.

It's a good point this. Evolution is important. The archetype is the key thing to get to grips with and judge a lists progress within.

I might ditch an entirely new list after a couple games if I had clear problems with it, but often, parts that showed promise will remain. So the new list will eventually have proven elements, around which, other things can be tried. Until something either clicks or becomes an identifiable balance problem.

My 3 ship Imperials has undergone a longish proving process. The latest element, 7th Sister, was an instant hit. So although the list is only technically a week old and 5 games in, I knew after the first 2 games that it was very good. The older elements, Rex and Echo have been in and out of various squads, a couple which fell sort of flat, even if they did not.

Making the most of the list, finding out the harder match ups and working out how to beat them will take basically forever. It may not even be something I'm capable of doing, but I know someone else probably could.

Another example, Kath and 2 Skulls, I used it once, got mashed and could see the synergy it depended on was a right royal headache. But the 2 Fang Firespray list is one I've done well with in a completely different form and I know it works, so the fail point was easy to identify.