2 hours ago, JJ48 said:

but in a case where one person collects multiple factions and his friend only collects one, it sounds like an awfully one-sided sort of fun to me.

I'm just going to assume that 2 friends who play together are not routinely jerks to each other, and it all evens out.

Nor am I suggesting pilots that throw 6 dice for all crits as their anti-faction ability.

But overall, the main problem is that your view prevents me from having something I might enjoy, and my view provides you with something you can ignore.

58 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

I'm just going to assume that 2 friends who play together are not routinely jerks to each other, and it all evens out.

You explicitly said this would allow you to build a list specifically to oppose someone else's list. What would you call that?

58 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

But overall, the main problem is that your view prevents me from having something I might enjoy, and my view provides you with something you can ignore.

I'm not really sure I see the point of this argument. Anything that is not broken or mandatory is automatically justified? If I, for whatever reason, might enjoy having an eighth faction that consisted of nothing but relatively weak I0 generics that cost 100 points each, FFG should make it simply because it's not game-breaking and others can ignore it if they don't like it?

I guess it depends on what we're discussing. If we're discussing some homebrew cards, then sure, you can make whatever you want and if I don't like it I just don't download and print out the pdf or whatever. But if we're talking hypothetical, official products, they should have some merit beyond just, "A handful of people might like some of them." Keep in mind that even card packs don't have infinite capacity, and every card included may mean some other card is excluded.

That being the case, I'm just not convinced that cards using this sort of design space would be able to be balanced properly consistently while still contributing enough to the game to be worth the hassle.

49 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

That being the case, I'm just not convinced that cards using this sort of design space would be able to be balanced properly consistently while still contributing enough to the game to be worth the hassle.

Well, then what design space do you propose that FFG explore?

18 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

Having 1 ace in a list that works better when a certain foe is on the table is not a hard counter if balanced by cost or opportunity. You don't lose if it shows up. But maybe you now have a Target of Priority. Which I believe is a thing already, if you play well.

Taking such a pilot is a risk for the listbuilder as well--if that is not part of what you are facing, then the pilot is less useful than an ace, and probably just a high IN generic.

See Palob for an example of this. Taking Palob right now is a risk, as Droids and Jedi either don't need or can't use focus or evade tokens. That's two entire factions he nearly useless against, but if he wasn't costed out of contention, I'd think we'd see him. He is a calculated risk but good.

Having a pilot that was specifically good against force users or specifically good against droids is decent design space. We have a couple of "if you are calculating" positive effects. It would be nice to see a "if the defender is calculating" negative effect on an I3 or I4 pilot. A droid hunter would be super good against one faction, and niche against all the others except Empire and FO (who don't have access to calculate to my knowledge).

10 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

Well, then what design space do you propose that FFG explore?

Personally, I'd like to see more trade-offs. Too many abilities are triggered every time they can be, as there's no reason to ever not trigger them. It would be nice to see more "get a bonus but also take a penalty" or "get a bonus only if you also give a nearby opponent a bonus" abilities to promote more tactical decisions during gameplay. 2E already does this more than 1E, but I think we can push it further.

3 hours ago, 5050Saint said:

See Palob for an example of this. Taking Palob right now is a risk, as Droids and Jedi either don't need or can't use focus or evade tokens. That's two entire factions he nearly useless against, but if he wasn't costed out of contention, I'd think we'd see him. He is a calculated risk but good.

Far be it from me to call Palob well-designed, but I think his main problem is just that he does too much too easily, and not his basic premise of targeting specific, common tokens. As I see it, an ability that works on most pilots in 5/7 factions--and which still works on a decent number of pilots in the remaining 2/7 factions--is quite different from an ability that only works at all on 1/7 factions.

6 hours ago, 5050Saint said:

A droid hunter would be super good against one faction, and niche against all the others except Empire and FO (who don't have access to calculate to my knowledge).

Pretty much FO will get it with the Agent Terex crew card and empire needs to take 0-0-0.

@Kleeg005 I do think wave 7 will make things more interesting. Both the republic and the First order are getting dedicated support ships. Between terax and the force users theirs definitely some passive mods.

15 minutes ago, reqent said:

@Kleeg005 I do think wave 7 will make things more interesting. Both the republic and the First order are getting dedicated support ships. Between terax and the force users theirs definitely some passive mods.

Ha ha, so yeah, you just named the two factions for which I have no representation. Yes, they will maybe get some folk interested. I'm not sure either of those factions actually need any help. I mean, yes, all of the "new" factions (and I include FO and Resistance in this to a lesser extent) do definitely need more ships in order to open up new (to them) styles of play. But ****, the options they are getting seem awfully strong. But I guess my response must be, "Whatever, if it gets more people to play."

Actually, there's a small bit of a FB thread on one of the local pages that is beginning to address this. I'm in the Seattle area, and at present there are four Prime Championships scheduled in the Portland area and only one in Seattle. There are only three known Store Championships currently scheduled within something like 120 miles of Seattle proper. My FLGS declined to order a Store Champ kit due to the abysmal turn-out we've been experiencing for any scheduled events I've tried to run in the last few months. It seems like there is some pretty massive X-Wing burn-out going around in my immediate neighborhood? Although we did last night get a new player for his eighth-ish game at my tiny little FLGS. So, you know. We just keep going and maybe it gets better? In the meantime, I repeat my plea:

More batreps, please. More repaints, please. Help me get my fix while I work and wait.