Prepping for Belgian Nationals







Belgian Nationals are coming up soon and I have a problem... Several planning issues and work-related stuff interfere with my regular scheduled training. And now the FAQ and Guns for Hire are released. So there is a disturbance in the meta and I have to prepare for it somehow. Time to start brainstorming.







What I want to do now is pick between 4 lists. 4 lists which I think will work well in the new meta. 2 of them are older lists, but untouched by FAQ v4.4.0. The other 2 are new lists, using the new hotness from Guns for Hire: "Harpoon Missiles". If you have not read the new FAQ , be sure to read it and get up-to-date. There are some huge changes in there concerning Biggs Darklighter, Jumpmasters and "Genius". I'm not going to go over them here. There are some excellent blogs and podcasts out there that have talked about it in detail :)What I want to do now is pick between 4 lists. 4 lists which I think will work well in the new meta. 2 of them are older lists, but untouched by FAQ v4.4.0. The other 2 are new lists, using the new hotness from Guns for Hire: "Harpoon Missiles".





Aka Quad TLT Y-wings. I talked about it in length on my previous blog. It strengths are that it just eats up 1-agility ships, which are still huge and that it's generally easy to fly, even out of formation. It also would not be the first time flying it for me. The problem is that it will fail against any ship with an agility higher then 3 or additional tokens. I'm looking at you, triple defenders!





Another build with 4 times the same ship. 4 Auzituck Gunship "Kashyyyk Defender" with Wookiee Commandos. Another list that is to be flown out of formation. With a lot of offensive capabilities thanks to those 3 red dice, that 180° firing arc and those Wookie Commandos. These also allow you to do a reinforce action as extra defense every turn. Problem might be the dial, as it does not have 'cool' maneuvers like koiogran's or talon rolls.

Two super-agile platform's for Harpoon Missiles, which will be able to fire every time thanks to that Outlaw Tech and Deadeye. The third ship is a fairly standard 'Bumpmaster' with the addition of calculation to trigger that Harpoon Condition. I'm fairly certain this is an awesome strong build. I feel it will at some point, fairly soon, replace the triple Jumpmaster. As negative points I don't see too many. It might suffer against a TLT-centric build if it cannot kill one of the enemy ships fast enough. Another negative point is that I have 0 reps with it, but that's the case for all but Thug Life.







Harpoon Missiles This list is discussed on PhilGC's latest blog 'Such an X-wing Hipster' . Jesper Hills combined 2 Black Sun Aces with Harpoon Missiles with a Captain Nym with Harpoon's and TLT. Again this seems like a very powerful list using the new hotness. It has 4 or more Harpoon Missiles it can fire. All of them will trigger of each other thanks to the crit from Guidance Chips. A common theme in the negative factors is that it might be harder to fly and I have zero reps with it. I feel this list has more offensive power then the previous one, but lacks a bit more in defense.





So the new hotness, Harpoon Missiles with it's 'Harpooned' condition. Arguably the best missile around. Some ideas about it though. When you fire Harpoon Missiles and they hit you apply damage and then apply the condition. This means that on your initial Harpoon Missile shot the 'Harpooned' condition won't trigger, unless maybe the 'when destroyed' clause.





Each ship can only have one of each condition. That means that if you hit an already 'Harpooned' ship with another Harpoon Missile it will not get 2 'Harpooned' conditions. As pointed out by As pointed out by David Hammond and Ashok Hemmings on the X-wing UK Facebook group there's currently no reason multiple 'Harpooned' conditions can't stack. As you can see on this Reddit thread : there are still a lot of unknown's about 'Harpooned' rules!

With the lists above I'm pretty sure I only touched the tip of the iceberg of possible lists after the introduction of Guns for Hire and FAQ v4.4.0. I'm entirely confident to predict it won't be one of these lists exactly to win our nationals, though the archetype might be close. What do you think about these lists? Which one should I take to Ghent next weekend? And how do you feel about the new hotness and our new FAQ overlord. Let me know in the comments below!



