The Poe Chronicles are series of blogs done by guest writer Mark Myers recording his love affair with Hot Shot Flyboy Poe Dameron and his favorite droid BB-8.

Hi, my name is Mark Myers and I have self-imposed restrictions.

I started playing X-Wing around October of 2016, and I immediately fell in love. The timing of my discovery of the game (Force Awakens, Heroes of the Resistance expansion just being released) also led to me gravitating to Rey/Poe as a list. Throughout my time playing 1.0, probably greater than half of my hundreds of games played were with Rey/Poe, specifically with BB-8 riding shotgun in Poe’s T-70.

I started showing up to smaller kit tournaments in January of 2017. I did fairly well in them, which led to me thinking, “Oh, hey, I might be decent at this game.” I began doing research on the game, listening to podcasts, and the like. I learned about “the meta”, but that didn’t really apply to St. Louis. We saw it some, but for the most part, we just didn’t glom onto meta lists. We had favorite ships/pilots, our own hubris when it came to list building, etc.

Then, I went to my first store champs that summer and ran into triple torp scouts…and got crushed. I’d played against and beaten locals running Paratanni, knew how to handle RAC/lo, etc cetera, but I was absolutely baffled by the triple Jumpmasters. I asked my opponent afterwards what I could have done differently, and he correctly told me “nothing”. I realized there’s a distinct difference between the jank we played or meta lists flown poorly locally and a meta list flown well.

I went to the Chicago regional in January of 2018, my first event outside of St. Louis and definitely my first event larger than 20+ attendees. I performed pretty much middle of the road. I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed, but also wasn’t terribly surprised. My failings at Chicago did make me waver a little on my commitment to getting better, but did absolutely nothing to change my mind about my own self-imposed restrictions (BB-8 Poe and/or sloopy Rey).

Adepticon 2018 was sold by my locals as an X-Wing holiday, and it turned out to be exactly that. I bailed on Poe for the main event, but stuck with Rey along with a cheap Miranda. I made the first cut, but flamed out when faced with tougher opponents and lists. I was a little sad, but not too sad, because that weekend was awesome. I got to meet a lot of people and had a fantastic time!

Next up for me would be GenCon 2018. Then Second Edition news hit. Oh, ****. Do I care about GenCon X-Wing anymore? Prize support showed Second Edition loot, including BB-8 themed templates. Oh, yeah, I do care a little about GenCon. Wave 14 hit. X-Wings looked great while Reapers looked terrifying. I stuck with my beloved BB-8 Poe because, despite the meta/community declaring R2-D2 as the clearly correct choice, I wanted to emphasize a point that others in the UK had already proven…BB-8 can work competitively.

Aaaaand… the point was kind of proven? A little? It was to me, if not the X-Wing community as a whole. I was #11 in Swiss and made top 32, possibly missed top 16 due to one silly, greedy mistake. I think I’d have had to make top 8 or top 4 to truly make a splash. I’d often heard throughout the event that it’d improve the list if I somehow got R2-D2 on Poe… but Poe never lost all of his shields all weekend, sooooo… okay, I’ll take it under advisement. Admittedly, match-ups helped. I really did want to win BB-8 templates with BB-8, though.

Fast forward to 2.0 official release. I had some sort of silly commitment to myself to cast off my self-imposed restrictions and play what was best. I’d only ever played Rebels in 1.0, but I bought into all of the factions. I told myself, though, that when the Resistance came out, I was going to try to be the best BB-8 Poe player in the world! The Resistance came out and BB-8 was expensive and Rey was expensive, and the plan just plain died. I can’t be bothered with playing stuff that clearly isn’t the best! No Resistance for me, certainly not if it doesn’t show up crushing stuff at tournaments!

I floundered around in that “try to be the best” fever dream for a while. Too long, in fact. I didn’t light the world on fire at events like Crossroads Classic 3, or Adepticon 2019. I kept glancing over at BB-8 and he’d woefully warble back at me. Campaign Against Cancer rolled around right at the same time I started reading the Poe Dameron comic series (how’d I taken so long to do that?!). I decided I was going to take a thematic Black Squadron list to CaC and just have some fun!

And fun was had. And, as it turned out, Black Squadron was better than I’d thought it’d be. I lost games, but I felt more due to my laissez-faire approach to the event than the list itself. So I started playing it…a lot. I took it to a Hyperspace Trial in June and made top 8. That felt pretty good!

And then, what did I do after that top 8 Trial performance? I promptly dropped the list because L’ulo went up in points. That was kind of dumb. I spent the next several months chasing the meta (again). I had fun along the way, to be sure, but I felt like I could have ended up with the same (middling) competitive results with the list that I loved. Despite buying a Worlds LCQ ticket, it wasn’t in the cards for me to go, which might have ended up being a good thing.

I was incredibly sad to not go to Worlds, for myriad reasons. But, with so many highly competitive players off at Worlds and the general Hyperspace Trial malaise that had set in, it did mean I could try to take advantage of what looked to be a small Trial the same weekend as Worlds. Less than a week before that Trial, I still wasn’t back on BB-8 Poe. I’d been playing him with Rey, but I wasn’t nearly consistent enough with that combo to have confidence to win a Trial with it. I had been hive-minding a Republic list with a bunch of folks, local and otherwise. Then, I hit a test game where things didn’t go my way, which got me thinking, “If I take this Republic list to the Trial and I don’t win the whole thing, will I be disappointed that I didn’t bring BB-8 Poe?” The answer was a resounding “YES”. So back to Black Squadron, it was! I ended up winning the #tinytrial and got a Worlds 2020 invite! Huzzah! Lesson learned there was don’t drop a list you love, with which you’ve had success, until/unless any changes to it are proven to hurt it….on the table, not in a headsim.

So, now I feel like I’m playing with house money. I have roughly a year to try to become the best BB-8 Poe player in the world and prove it at Worlds 2020. Happy beeps there, buddy.

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