There's a great sort of defiance in Spam Musubi. "Oh, you're going to destroy our traditional agriculture and steal our land and give us nothing but SPAM? We'll cook SPAM better than you ever thought possible."

Lol... @theBitterFig

I was commenting more on the Xwing point.

Still undecided on the SPAM. 😜

1 minute ago, JBFancourt said:

Still undecided on the SPAM. 😜

I'm mostly paraphrasing something a native Hawaiian said on an episode of Tony Bourdain's Parts Unknown. Whether or not anyone wants to eat the dish, that's an attitude worth of respect.

8 minutes ago, JBFancourt said:

I was commenting more on the Xwing point.

Yeah. I'm mostly just starting to think that FFG have reached the limit of the usefulness of buffing baseline efficiency and still having X-Wing be an interesting game.

I like the spam topping analogy. Flying 'naked stats' should be as efficient as filling an MTG deck with nothing but generic creatures, or to use a real hated deck example Red Deck Wins: It is literally the least interesting way to play as it ignores the vast majority of the design space to just try to win with really stupid stats to kill your opponent so efficiently no variant plan can get off the ground.

You shouldn't have to fly some wackadoo 'Dutch passes to Arvel who passes to Two Tubes who passes to Dutch' Rube Goldberg list, but A: mechanics should exist that force you to think about what your opponent is doing and vary your strategy (ex: Very strong and well costed AOE attacks that force swarms to not create firing lines without being dead in the water vs aces. I think Conc bombs are an attempt at this), and should have to have SOME strategy beyond 'Ima just beat you up.'

Raw stats as a strategy is inherently non-interactive, you can't really... do much to change how good stats are. Obviously a super great player can preform better against those lists, but you play sorta the same way against them every time because their entire purpose is to 'solve' X-wing. But you can do a LOT to change how good say... bombs are through excellent play. I think a lot of people took the wrong lesson from 1.0's clown fiesta, you kinda need both nuanced effects that let you develop a gameplan, but those effects can't be so wacky no gameplan can realistically develop because some wacky combo just invalidates the core game. You need there to be juuuuust enough spice in the spam sushi metaphor to make it so that part of every list's power is intangible, or situational, or otherwise concentrated into something that is negotiated through gameplay, rather than being pre-determined at building your list, to make list building an interesting element of the game that actually adds to the experience.

A lot of the new stuff seems to be pushing in this direction. Thread Tracers are hard to evaluate because they are going to rapidly swing in value based on board state. Starbird Slash at first seems like trading an attack for damage in a way that is deeply disadvantageous but once you remember it lets you do that to get a better position future turns its less clear. The purple moves on the ETA could be fantastic and let it do stress free turnabouts, but because the ship is so force dependent on turns where its not engaging maybe its worse than a red maneuver because it denies force recharge to set up for a re-engage. The V-wing configs are extremely hard to evaluate because your comparing a slight damage increase to the ability to highroll an ion on a clutch turn. Obviously some of these things may fall flat or not be actually fuzzy at all once we see them, but it feels like there is an awareness within FFG that raw efficiency really can't keep being the focus of ships.

12 hours ago, theBitterFig said:

I just hate it.

I don't think that actually fixes anything, and it also ruins entirely ways to play X-Wing that are well-loved by large parts of the community.

Mostly, spam isn't a problem. If B-Wings were 36 points to make a silly example, they'd be too cheap, and even if someone had to run 3B 2X or 3B 2U instead of 5B, there's still an efficiency problem even if the spam problem is solved. Capping ships in a list--particularly with a one size fits all that makes no distinctions between a TIE Silencer and a Z-95--just seems to me like a terrible idea.

I guess my solution to boring spam isn't to eliminate the spam, but to add toppings. Like, maybe one player wants bombs as their topping, maybe one player wants astromechs, maybe one wants sensors. I'd rather have than than just to keep reducing the costs of ships again and again and again until they're so efficient the game gets boring.

Get Hawaiian--SPAM with seaweed and rice.

Musubi-doobi-doo!