The obvious, Fenn plus 2 Hunters leaves 8pt.
Personally, I'm not super sold on this. 2 naked Sprays will suffer dice, 1 can be quite easily annihilated in an alpha. Fenn always suffers dice. As is often the case with Fenn things, I feel it's a bit eggs>1 basket.
If I went this way, I'd likely double down on the Fenn hammer and give him Outmanouvre. Sacrifice the Sprays to allow Fenn room to lock and nuke. A risky strategy, but likely quite effective. You could spend the 8pt on the Sprays, but a talentless Fenn is incredibly prone to crappy red dice, blowing things up is often Fenns version of arc dodging, you don't want too much risk involved in that.
However, other options intrigue me more. Im mainly trying to find as many guarantees, against as many archetypes as possible, and reduce the inherent risk.
These other options require the immediate jettison of Mr. Fenn 'muh dice' Rau, to get some actual decent points to play with.
Immediately, with Fenn out, we're shifting the balance of the list to our big boys. Maybe this is unwise, twin Sprays that aren't decently loaded Boba plus Emon/Koshka have not seen much action. Moving them into a 2 ship list is a winner and gives you much better control over what goes boom and when.
However, I am a firm believer in PerCo on a Spray. It's generally equivalent to 2 or 3 shield upgrades, or even more. The durability of an always focussed, or double focussed 2/3 die defence is considerable.
So let's add that to the Hunters. Now we have some genuine beef. 2 bruisers that should rarely lose their action and can shoulder a decent burden. They're not going to be too easy to remove.
And that's where my rabbit hole opens up fully.
Kad Solus with Outmanouvre brings us to a nice 200. This is super ship, concord into 4k/2 troll into double focus and whoops, there goes your agility. Hope you aren't blocked by a Spray.
But that's not much of a bid for our "ace". With many I4s running a mini bid, this could be trouble. They can't be allowed to dodge the Fang too easily while burning down the Hunters. Or just blow him straight up.
Fearless? It's great of course, but this Fang is not our frontline menace any more, so I'm not convinced that it'll see a lot of return. Bit dicey to go parking him in those spots, and we really do need a flanker/finisher.
So sad face for Kad, because the Skull is now a much more reasonable investment for that role. We can put Outmanoeuvre on him and be running at 193. We don't need all that bid, so what do we do?
Let the tears for absent Terry flow free.
Bombs are great here, but I'd prefer the Sprays to be mirrored for targetting/switching purposes. 2 Seismic take us to 199, which is fine, but removing 2/3rds of the obstacles seems a bit counterproductive and creates an awful lot of space for our Fang to avoid.
2 times CC then, to keep the Sprays engaged and the heat off the Skull.
No bombs
197, neat. I'm happy with this and it's likely gonna be 1st on the table. Seems to have beef for aces and a pseudo ace for beef and swarms. A nice collection of mods on offer overall. On paper, we've added a fair bit of reliability with relatively few changes. Simply ironing out some of the peaks and troughs.
Sure, we don't have Fenn to bully other I5/6s, but twin Sprays generally like those match ups anyway. Where they'll struggle, moving the ace from I6 to I4 is not much of an issue.
Plus, Skull Hunter is a pretty cool squad name.
Still, you can go many places. I've looked at a lightly tooled Koshka and Krassis, just 000 and Ion. Honestly don't know how that would play out, but with the increased potential for Init killing problematic masses of I2s and a bit of control for others, it seems a not terrible idea.
Ditching PerCo from the Hunters is still an option. There's a fair bit you can do with those points then....
So. What Would Jesus Do?
