Sometimes you have to give up the dream. My dream was to be the best BB-8 Poe player in the world. What I’d come to realize is that the best BB-8 Poe player in the world might habitually sit on a middling 3-3 Swiss record at an event of any meaningful size. That can allow one to stumble into some sweet faction prizes, but doesn’t feel all that glorious. Others might object, but since, to my knowledge, I’m the only person to have won an official FFG OP thing (#tinytrial) with BB-8 Poe, I’m going to pretend that makes me the best. Long may I reign…?

It wasn’t just mediocre performances which killed the dream. The recent points change, Hyperspace legality rulings and minor errata changes had a heavy hand. My next planned FFG OP event is the System Open at Adepticon. System Open main events are Hyperspace format, so barring a surprise announcement of Prime Championships or something of the like before Adepticon, Hyperspace will be my focus. What can I use with Poe in Hyperspace? BB-8 is legal, so that’s good. No Resistance Falcon in Hyperspace, so Rey is out… huh. Also no L’ulo, Crackshot or Predator, and the Composure errata means Snap no longer gets his double-modded attack… Black Squadron is dead. Pour one out! What now? I could try to revive that Danger Zone list of Poe/Nien/+1 …Zizi, Maybe? Pattern Analyzer isn’t Hyperspace legal, so Nien probably the wrong choice, drat!

Wait a minute. The Blue Squadron Rookie T-70 dropped 3 points. My crowning achievement in X-Wing was making top 32 at GenCon 2018 with Poe and three rookies. Is it possible? Holy crap, yes it is. BB-8 doesn’t fit, but R4 and Heroic do. Well, that seals it. It’s time shrug off my self-imposed BB-8 restriction and remember the good ole days. Poe and three Blue Squadron Rookies it is.

I now have over two months to plan, play and practice for Adepticon. Prior to that, we have a big deal (to us, locally) team tournament, The Missouriclorian. (If you read this blog, you already know what happened there, but let’s pretend for a bit you don’t know what happened so all of this will contain a more exciting lead-up.) There were a couple local 3-round tournaments planned before Missouriclorian, so those would be a good test bed. Missouriclorian and both of these mini-tournaments are Extended format, which allows me to throw BB astromechs onto each rookie. (Oh, how I wish these little guys were Hyperspace legal).

The first mini went fine, with a 2-1 record. The first game was against Michael Peterson running Kylo and Friends. It was a pretty back and forth game with the lead changing hands several times. I misplayed Poe pretty badly the final round to take a shot from Kylo which he didn’t need to take, and lost the game. Sad. The next game was against Matt Cary playing Lt. Sai/Deathrain/Vader, which was kind of an early bloodbath. Matt and I always seem to have swingy dice games, and this was no exception, with the T-70s just trucking Deathrain. That left me with all four T-70’s against Sai and a beat up Vader. I’ve learned that the rookies can bully aces if they have the numbers, so Poe at 2 hull chose violence sitting in arc range 1 against Sai, expecting to die… and didn’t cuz dice. Vader can’t deal with four T-70’s, but he tried! The last game was against Jeremy Oursler fielding Boba/Emon. Jeremy opted for a joust, for which Emon received the worst of it. Jeremy played Boba with a bunch of T-70s harassing him well after Emon was removed from the board. The game started slipping away, which made me realize I needed reset in a corner and stop crowding Boba, giving him a bazillion rerolls. That worked out, and Boba gasped his last under a hail of T-70 lasers from beyond range 1. Takeaways from that tourney are that rookies can bully, and I didn’t use my BB astromechs enough.

The second mini found me with the same 2-1 finish. This was a little funky, though. The first round, I was paired against Joe Dumey with Vader/Whisper/Grand Inquisitor (I think?). Joe was running the event, I kept getting calls and texts from home, so our game was a little disjointed. We were pressed for time, and Joe was only playing so someone wouldn’t get a bye, so it wasn’t like we took it super serious. I eked out the win and felt very “meh” about it. The next game I played Earl Haug and his horrifying quintet of Ion Cannon gunboats. This could have gone either way, and I was a little salty about his list in general. Earl is an awesome guy, but boy do I hate control. Our lists were mostly smashed up against enough other for a lot of the game with few modded shots by either side. It felt a lot like a dice game, neither of us really getting a big swing one way or another. The latest Ion ruling also shuts down my BB droids, so that was a bummer. Good win for Earl, though, and hope I never see the list again! The final round was against Scott Holmes running what he usually does, Obi/Plo/Ric. This one went my way, with the Jedi having a hard time dealing with so much health, so many 3-die arcs, so much blocking, and Poe hunting them. Lessons learned from this event are BB astromechs can help generate amazing killboxes and that I loathe a lot of the “no consequences” junk that haunts the Extended format.

Those two primers had me feeling pretty good about taking the list to Missouriclorian. I’ve already gotten far more bat-reppy than I like, so I’ll skip over that portion to the more important stuff. We can stop pretending you don’t know the results, Arch Alliance won and it was glorious. The event was a blast, superbly run by the tandem of Bob Howe and Doug Howe. Most of us in attendance know each other pretty well already. It’s a competitive team event, but it felt more like a weekly local game night with a ton of friends in attendance. I’d like to shout out my opponents: Matt Nute, Ryan Kraus, Jason Griffith, Mike Wnek… all great MoKan people, great opponents, none of whom I’d had the pleasure to play before. A special shout out goes to Matt Ritts. The guy is like a giant, cuddly bear who’s had the misfortune of losing to me in each of the three games we’ve played – the first time in the first Missouriclorian final, the second in swiss at the #tinytrial I won, and finally the third time in this second Missouriclorian final. He’s way too good for me to keep up this run against him, so I’m hoping to match-up dodge Matt for the rest of eternity.

It’s been a good couple of weeks, a 9-2 tournament performance for the list. They weren’t top tier events, but I did face tough opponents playing good stuff and trying to win. The changes to points and Hyperspace have done me a favor, helping me cast off (some of) my self-imposed restrictions. Honestly, I’ve felt pretty liberated. Poe is no longer this endgame ship I must protect or I lose. I can trade him if the rookies have numbers. I can throw rookies around with abandon, and they can soak up shots. If I lose one, it’s not the beginning of the end, and it’s probably a good thing because my opponent isn’t shooting Poe.

People argue Poe is a little over-costed, to which I don’t disagree. But in a Hyperspace meta, though, he might be a force. I’ll continue to experiment with his wing-mates; there are a lot of options available. I don’t consider Poe plus 3 rookies my rubber-stamped list for the next six months, just the bar to measure others against. I’m sure there are many more lessons to be learned. I’ve yet to face some of the stuff many figure to be Hyperspace meta staples, such as 5A, 5X, Fenn + Fangs, Four Fearless Fangs, CIS swarms, etc. We, collectively, don’t even know where the meta will go. New stuff will spring up. It’s just nice to feel like I’m starting on equal footing instead of pushing a boulder up a mountain.

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