Hi Everybody! Elan Morin Tedro/Jeebus/Kyle here again reporting on the Chicago Prime tournament at Pastimes in Niles and my first attempt to get a ticket to Worlds 2020. You may or may not remember me from my previous report from Worlds 2019 where I fought my way through conspiracy theories to bring my main man Gial to the second day of my first real tournament. After Rebellion in the Rim dropped, I experimented with and considered bringing a modernized fish farm. Only one person in my local play group has an SSD and he's a (phenomenally skilled) player with a more casual mindset, so I hadn't been able to practice against it much as I'd like- particularly against the popular builds. I abandoned it after realizing an SSD would just blow up my flagship on round 4 and have a substantial chance of tabling me outright. I wanted to bring a strong all-takers list, so I improved my old Worlds List with Rebellion in the Rim (RitR) objectives and upgrades, since I knew it could handle most any matchup including the SSD. My old list's biggest weakness, Imperial Two Ship, has drastically fallen out of favor, which was another positive sign for it.
Enter:
The Halibut and His Harem
My flagship remained unchanged from Worlds 2019 and is a pretty standard Ackbar pickle build. I'm still liking Home One as a title, because it makes the red dice for Jaina's Light and the MC75 quite reliable.
With the advent of the SSD, accuracy generation and token stress has become a lot more important. Additionally, a lack of Two Ship means I no longer felt the need to include Bail in my list. This let me replace QBTs on the MC75 with Quad Turbolaser Cannons, an upgrade I card I used to consider dubious due to the lack of MSU or flotilla spam. I tested it out on a suggestion from
@Formynder4
, and found it was expensive, but quite good with the Home One title. Home One lets me change one of my dice to an accuracy for QTCs to add another die, so the ship has a guaranteed 6 dice with 2 accuracies on every attack if I want it with a nontrivial chance of 3 accuracies if I want them. This is really helpful against SSDs because as long as the 75 isn't making the first attack with Ackbar (or if it has a double arc!) against an SSD, I can lock down its good tokens to make my opponent decide about discarding tokens.
I knew I wanted to bring Ezra. He's my absolute favorite, and quite possibly the strongest upgrade card in RitR. At Worlds, my Contested Outpost got screwed up by an Interdictor 2 ship +1 with Grav Shift Reroute, and in my local games he's been a huge boon. He can yank a space station away from your opponent, throw an asteroid in their way, or move a purrgil closer to your ships so you can start scoring Hyperspace Migration with more ships sooner. Unfortunately, this meant I had to drop officer Leia and her command fixing. This is non-trivial in long events where you get tired and inevitably make mistakes. As I had two points left, I put a skilled first officer on my MC75 for budget dial fixing, leaving me with a one point bid.
For objectives, I took Advanced Gunnery for obvious reasons and Hyperspace Migration because it's an abusively strong farming objective (especially when combined with Ezra) that needs to be errated. Asteroid Tactics is definitely the weakest of the lot (and one I will likely replace), but being able to land on asteroids with impunity and regain spent/discarded defense tokens is nice when I've put so many points into two ships and the exogorths can help keep squads under control.
Game One:
My first game was against John Thomson, who was my partner for the team game on the last day of Worlds 2019. John was running a Raddus list with a huge 26 point bid. He had a Mon Karren flagship with a Bright Hope Comms Net flotilla. For the Raddus drop, he had a Mc75 Ordnance Profundity with APTs and Ordnance Pods instead of External Racks, which he admitted was a bad swap. If you're going squadless, just double down on killing the carriers. When the Profundity jumps in, it births Cham's Honor with Ex Racks to unload dice into an unlucky recipient and screw all their dials. With his bid, he took player 1 and chose to play asteroid tactics.
He deployed his Liberty and flotilla going speed 3 rushing towards me. With my strategic advisor and going second, I could force him to activate all his ships before any of mine prior to his drop. This let me me kite his Liberty and force a round 3 drop, destroying his flotilla with my MC75's guaranteed double accuracies at long range and putting 4 hull damage into his Liberty before he could even drop. He dropped on round 3, and unloaded a bunch of dice into my MC75, which responded by destroying Garel's Honor and severely wounding the Profundity.
On Round 4, the Profundity finished off my MC75 before being destroyed by Home One. Over rounds 5 and 6, I almost destroyed Mon Karren, but on round 6 officer Lando rerolled my 7 damage (which would have destroyed his ship) into 4, allowing him to brace and escape- netting me a 7-4 win.
Game 2:
My second game was against Josh Piggott, who drove up from Missouri. I'd never met Josh, but I knew he snagged a 7-4 win against Nick Litrenta in round 1. Nick took
3rd at Worlds 2018
and
won the spring 2019 Atlanta regional
, so I knew he wasn't going to be a slouch. This game was an Ackbar mirror match. Josh was only running three of my most-hated Rebel ship, the Assault Potato MkII. Each ship had ECMs, XI7s, an intel officer, and I believe gunnery teams. Because I had him substantially out-activated, I took player 1 and picked his rift ambush. Truth be told, this is an objective I haven't had enough time to play (which is part of why I didn't bring it myself), but Ezra's ability to throw the rift in front of your opponent is extremely potent and it was something we'd talked about doing locally even if it hadn't happened in a live game. I deployed Jaina's Light at the edge of my deployment zone in Ezra range of the rift at speed zero due to the rift. Josh either forgot or chose not to do a speed 1 maneuver on one of my ships. Jaina kept the token because I wanted to wait to spring the trap, moving ahead slowly due to the rift, while my big ships maneuvered around the obstacles to and put their guns on two of his potatoes because I had more dice, more activations, and better dice fixing tools.
Unfortunately, his squads denied me my ideal rift movement and I had to put it farther to the side than I would have liked. Some precise movement got me into this position, carefully avoiding the asteroid with my Home One.
I probably tossed Jaina's redirect too soon, and sped up to 4 instead of engineering, trying to escape his 2400s. She was unsuccessful and blew up during the squadron phase of round 4 or 5. I destroyed the closest Assault Potato, I got my MC75 up to speed 3 and behind his assault frigates while my Home One cut in towards them to hammer them as they approached the rift. My ships easily destroyed the closest assault frigate, which had been weathering most of my fire. The middle assault frigate put itself on course to overlap the rift trying to avoid ramming his flagship, which led to its swift demise. Josh's flagship then ran away at speed 3 and took maybe one shot all game. I destroyed 198 in assault frigates and lost the 56 point Jaina's Light for an 8-3 win.
Game 3:
Game 3 was an absolute BLAST of a game and a real nail biter against Fair Game's Jack Otto/Jotto Otts's SSD. He had a JJ Ravager with LTTs, leading shots, intel officer, SW-7s, and some other goodies with two flotillas (one repair crews, one comms net, and one of them had officer Vader). He gave me first player and I picked his infested fields objective. Having been screwed pretty hard by this objective's obstacle movement playing Nick Litrenta at the charity tournament a few weeks prior, I spread out the obstacles as far as I could, placing Jaina's Light near one of them at speed one while my big ships were near the middle of the board. My 75 was a bit behind the Home One in deployment. His SSD came at me hard while his flotillas ate obstacles to collect victory tokens. Jaina gradually accelerated to speed 4 to flank the SSD and his flotillas, while my 75 moved to head off the SSD. On round 2, it took a long range Ackbar shot into the SSD's primary side arc, then lodged itself double arcing the SSD in its front arc while receiving a single arc in return at close range. I damned near pissed myself when it took a 10 or 11 damage shot from Ravager at medium range. I tossed my brace due to the intel officer, then activated it first on the next round. I unloaded both arcs into the SSD. My front arc shot saw him spend a brace and redirect, which let me blow ex racks on the side arc shot and use Home One/QTCs for two guaranteed accuracies to lock down his good tokens and caused him to blow a brace. The 75 had an engineering dial, so it wasn't able to avoid the double arc and got murdered to death in the SSD's next activation along with my flotilla. An unfortunate ram had put one of Jack's flotillas at 2 damage and the other healed itself instead of the SSD, so Jaina's Light was able to kill the closer flotilla with a medium range Ackbar shot and ram the remaining flotilla to death, denying him Choke Daddy Vader rerolls. Home One then took its shot and moved to start getting out of the SSD's front arc. I did some math and determined Home One could survive one more front arc shot from the SSD and activated Jaina's Light because it was in the greatest danger of death. The SSD activated, both ships (barely survived) then I was able to last + first with my Home One. My last activation did substantial damage to the SSD, and the side arc shot of my first activation left it with 1 hull point to be finished off by my rear arc. The Home One/QTC combo had done its job, with the lack of a redundant brace being tremendously helpful for finishing off the SSD. It died, having used every single point of hull and shields on the entire ship, netting me an 8-3 with a MOV of 214 because he scored 30 more objective points than me.
It was an extremely fun and challenging game. Just an absolute blast for both of us. Jack played it really well and I was confident I was going to lose up until I got the last first at the end of the game.
I ended the tournament in 3rd place with 23 tournament points, having avoided some rough pairings (for example, CGYSO's Eric Taylor was paired with Nathan Coda in round 1, which saw
5 different people score 10-1s and a 6th score a 9-2.
I was extremely happy with (and frankly surprised by) this outcome. Chicago has a lot of very strong players, and the winner, Andy Graber, is a phenomenal player who drove down from Minneapolis and also played in the charity tournament at Pastimes a few weeks ago.
