18 minutes ago, ForceSensitive said:

WotC keeps screwing up their game Magic when they design blue cards

The formula for what makes control fair in MTG (and most games) is pretty well known: Make sure it is oppressive to 'impatient' play or play that ignores it, and make it an actual knife fight when played around, so that it still has an effect even in 'high end' games. Blue when designed well rewards slow play and both sides conserving their resources more than normal, and the reason why some modern blue control cards are rough is because they extend the resources of blue out so that one card can deal with many, which is intended to be a weakness of theirs, and just lets them toss out a strong control effect whenever they want rather than trying to maximize the impact to keep themselves alive.

I would say the biggest similar offender in X-wing for 'bad control' isn't tractor, but ion turrets, which have a similar issue of being a way to just spam a control effect whenever you want, with a bonus of it being more damage than the 'pure damage' option in the same slot. Tractors had issues, but I don't think the statement 'most designers are bad at designing control effects' is true at all. It is just that a well designed control effect needs to be... well... controlling, and frustrate you a little bit!

I do agree that the -1 agility on tractors is a huge problem on something that is meant to be about messing with your opponent's positioning on top, and I have long been of the opinion that the ramification of holding a jam token should be -1 agility, to make jamming actually worthwhile as a 'soften them up' status effect. That way you have to choose if you want to limit future choices, mess up their current positioning, or make it easier for your other ships to kill a target, rather than getting this weird bundled benefit of 'toss your opponent into the way of a rock AND also light them up extra good this turn' which is FFG's real issue with control: overbundling. It is where they went wrong in Netrunner too, for example, some of the most oppressive control stuff was so oppressive because it did like 4 different variants of control at once, like how Inversificator Kit builds allowed Kit to bypass Ice, force move Ice, and change the type of Ice the were facing all at once.

2 hours ago, wijkd said:

Proton bombs with trajectory simulator would be a bit scary for them no? Would at least allow some heavy board control...

Yes, if you can catch them in the blast radius. Ion can help with that.

31 minutes ago, FlyingAnchors said:

Yes, if you can catch them in the blast radius.

This seems to be the kicker. The difference between a 1 hard + straight boost or roll and a 5 straight + straight boost or roll and everything in between is huge. Especially when you can't stop the reposition to get away from the bomb.

@dezzmont you seem to have mistook my point. Apologies, I could have phrased it better. When I made the comment of designing bad cards for M:tg in blue, I was referring to comments made by Mark Rosewater as a key designer in the game during his Podcast and in his design articles on the website several times. To summarize his thoughts, whenever they are designing the game, the heavy control color blue is usually where they make the most mistakes. They know what they want the color to do, and what it should do, it's just then they get in too deep occasionally into their 'player' mentality and it gets out of hand and away from their 'designer' mentality. He has cited many mistakes throughout the years in that game all were in blue not because it's design philosophy was inherently flawed, but because the designers at the wheel get excited and it basically blinds them to their own rules of what's fair. Then they create for themselves cards they would be hyped to play at crazy low costs, and with effects that blue gets impact the deepest levels of the games structure. From the power nine all the way throughout the games life.

He theorizes that this is partly due to most of the design team having blue as their favorite color to play, since go figure, the guys who design mechanics like effects that touch the most mechanical depth when they're playing. In theory, the RnD department is suppose to act as a check to this and usually catches it and send it back for or with rewrite, but things slip through. I'm sorry I couldn't link you to specific episodes or articles, but a dive through his archive is at least interesting to anyone interested in design.

The same thing here would seem to apply. Or at least we see the same symptoms crop up in X-wing on our end. Occasionally a card comes out, or a mechanic, or a ship, that is everything a *player* would want in one package. Like how we got PTL way long ago. It was cheap, had low to negligible in game cost, and broke the action economy system. It was the best self control card you could get, and so it was everywhere.

We saw it again with the Phantom and had to see, what was it, like three nerfs in 1e? Then it recurred in second briefly even though they had even further nerfed it. Because hyper mobility and mods that you can't interact with are clearly good. (Glares at Nantex in aurabesh) and again with Quadj/bumper tractors.

In conclusion, it was not a blanket statement of 'designers suck at this', but rather 'when designers make a mistake it's usually in this area, and here's a likely why'. We'll move on to why ion is not nearly the problem you describe later thanks to its 2e rewrite. And then we can move on to jam and why -1agi shouldn't be attached to anything but Wedge. One step at a time my dude. That's three whole discussions your starting friend 😜

@ForceSensitive

Jamming beam is intended to be a weapon you use to soften up a ship and make it easier for other ships to attack, by stripping beneficial tokens for defense (and, to a lesser extent, clearing locks, but that is a very niche use). However, it fails because in order to do this requires generating a hit on an attack, and a more efficient way to remove green tokens is to just land hits on attacks to force your opponent to defensive mod. But the niche of 'make it easier for allies to hit a target' is an important one, and its one that is being explored already with stuff like Starbird Slash, because there are too many ships that are way too good at ignoring large volumes of low dice fire. Thus, it is reasonable to say 'there probably should a way to get a -1 agility penalty at the cost of an entire ship's engagement phase SOMEWHERE in the game' and a big problem with tractors is that they need to be priced around hucking people into rocks and being annoying on top of the -1 agility, while jamming beams are so worthless they currently cost literally no points. And -1 to agility is completely related to the concept of 'softening up a target at the cost of damage.' To put it another way: When they first re-worked tractoring a much more intuitive change would have been to just remove the -1 agility aspect, or make it so you chose between that and being repositioned, and that is what a lot of people suspected would happen, but apparently the -1 to defense is valuable enough to how the game functions to stay in despite 2.0 being very 'anti-control' in general and very willing to nerf it!

The actual rationale you had behind blue being 'hard to design' is actually really interesting, and I clearly misunderstood what you were trying to say! I have never seen that particular Rosewater talk (and would love a link!). I do think X-wing's problem right now is being too shy with control elements as a fallout from 1.0, because strong control is generally more healthy than strong 'value' due to it opening up the 'how much do I try to target control vs be greedy to avoid losing to strategies that care about having more value than me' dynamic. I would not accuse 2.0's design at all of trying to push control, I would actually say the opposite, but that is its own discussion.

On 9/9/2020 at 11:26 AM, Bucknife said:

So.... Back to countering the bugs:

Dead Man Switch spam seems to be my best/cheapest/laziest counter to Nantex spam.

...

Here's the real qualifier for any list:

Can you kill 3 Nantex by turn 2?

Two is an edge, but three is the actual tilt as long as your remaining list isn't lower initiative than the three remaining bugs.

On 9/9/2020 at 12:26 PM, Bucknife said:

Can you kill 3 Nantex by turn 2?

Obviously this is about average result, or at least probable, or else the obvious answer is 'yes, duh.' I think this is going to be a bit of an unrealistic goal, sadly.

5 droids with ESC droid swarm and ESC droid swarms are pretty intense alpha strike for their cost. In theory running 8 ESC droids gets you 1 kills turn 1, and on turn 2 you could in theory get down to 3 with some of the 'change' you built up. But this doesn't seem realistic

Tactical relays may help? Kraken helps quite a bit by reducing the number of droids required to secure a kill down to about 3 and a third ESC droids.

The big issue is, of course, the Nantex can I-kill droids, so your losing some of the calculates in your swarm to defense and are probably losing some of the target locking droids Kraken is helping out to boot. So that is probably a no-go there. I think (And I am not an expert at all so take this with a million grains of salt) that the Nantex just out-joists most swarms period due to that I-kill factor. And I don't think non-swarms have the damage to really force through on the Nantex: Even something as reliable as a range 1 Boba with 4 re-rolls does 1.8 damage average, and that is about as big an attack as you can expect to get in X-wing, so your almost certainly not going to be popping a Nantex without multiple attacks from ships of that caliber of damage.

Focus fire helps a bit, follow up shots along the vein of 4 damage double mod do 2.6 damage average, so double tapping with say... a double modded proton torp is a kill on average at 4.4 damage. Huzzaah!

Now the question is how to get that output, especially without losing too much damage to I-kills or to the follow up attack, to the point where you can have 4 of those double modded shots turn 1, and at least 2 on turn 2, or having 3 and 3 each turn and just hoping to get a bit lucky on the lead shot for one of the ships in question.

You could also go single modded 4 dice spam, that is 1.2 damage the initial shot and 1.9 the followup. That means about 3 ships per-Nantex kill, so you need 6 turn 1, and at least 3 turn 2.

Again, this depends on keeping a Nantex in multiple arcs and not getting I-killed.

5X loses pretty badly, as they lose 1.5 X-wings (before even accounting for bullseyes and just assuming range 1 turret shots!) before returning fire and taking out only 1 Nantex in a full joust. The next turn, the X-wings lose 1.25 X-wings, and take out another Nantex, then its 1:1, and then it starts swinging really poorly for the X-wings as they stop being able to kill a Nantex a turn while the Nantex don't lose any damage on turn 4 and that advantage compounds till its over. If you assume even 1 Nantex gets a bullseye each turn it isn't even that close. A 6X list would do a bit better, but that doesn't seem likely at all, so rebels are just gunna be SOL for another 6 months (no, I am not bitter, shut up. But for real though I think it is fair to say 2.0 has failed utterly to keep the 'X-wings will always be a relevant ship' promise that was made, and Rebels as a faction don't just need balance tweaks anymore but a full points 'makeover').

So I don't think this 'pop 3 on 2' method is going to work, at least without bumping some Nantex or getting lucky on some arc dodges. Obviously headsimming and running math is super freaking questionable but it sincerely does seem like a pretty toxic list that might be worth an emergency nerf, especially because it further puts a lot of factions that aren't doing too hot deeper in the pit. The last year's meta was super rough on the casual community and this seems to be pushing that even harder, and combined with Covid this might be a 'game health' problem, not just a 'tournament balance' problem, because just like Boba the Nantex absolutely trashes any list that isn't extremely efficiency minded.