I think almost everyone agrees that Maarek Stele is the least cost-effective pilot in the game. So I issue this challenge:
Assemble a 100 point squad based around Maarek Stele, post it here, and use it in your next match. I am interested to see if we can crowdsource some usefulness out of him.
I played him over Vader at league once, his ability actually came in useful. The enemy Falcon had Determination. I was able to pick out the most detremental crits and weed out all the Pilot crits that would otherwise would have been discarded.
I don't know that he's good enough to base a full squad off of though.
Played the following tonight.
Fel with PTL
vader with VI and homing missile
stele with ptl and homing missile.
Worked well wasn't enough to win the scenario we were playing. Firing the two missiles was nice. I've also flown this list against four x-wings. Won that game. Fel and Vader shot down an x-wing in the first round. I rolled three crits and a hit with stele's missile vs no evades I was able to pick a direct hit to drop a second x-wing. After that it was over.
When X-wing first came out, I toyed with a squad that looked like this:
The objective being to use Squad Leader to get Maarek a Target Lock and Marksmanship on a single turn (as well as Vader getting a Target Lock) and get all the missiles off early.
Of course, the problem with the squad was that it was very reliant on getting first blood, and couldn't hold up if it didn't.
In general, I haven't found a way to make Maarek good. The issues I always have with him are a) his ability is marginally useful due to the plethora of shields and ways to mitigate crits, and b) he needs an [arguably suboptimal] upgrade to make his ability even remotely useful, and for the cost of Maarek + Upgrade, you can just get Vader instead, who is awesome all on his own with no upgrades whatsoever……and then you can make him even cooler with upgrades.
I could see Maarek having some ulility as a counter to Han Shoots First, but you'd have to keep him alive long enough to strip Han's shields so Maarek can drop some ship-crippling crits on him. And frankly, he just doesn't bring enough to a squad in general to be worth having to counter that very specific scenario.