I’m a little obsessed with music, from a young age I spent much of my time listening to, watching and collecting music. My wife despairs of ever trying to get me to throw out old CD’s and records even though they’ve almost all now been copied into digital format and everyone now has spotify and a thousand others ways to listen to almost anything we want.

But one of the things I think my wife doesn’t quite get is the emotional resonance of the original physical CD, record or tape. She doesn’t understand that my copy of Blur’s “Modern Life Is Rubbish” will always hold as place in my heart and that every time I see that CD I remember a dozen different places I played it, from a languid Portuguese summer holiday to dreary afternoons after school on my mates cheap and rickety portable CD player.

Basically the physical product with all the memories attached to it still makes me happy and no matter what the innovations I’m probably going to hang on to it for the rest of my life.

It’s also a marker, if one that only I will probably notice, that I liked Blur well before their surge in popularity. That I was ahead of the curve (for possibly the only time in my life) and can claim some form of tenuous ownership over their eventual success.

And with X-wing 2.0 announced and soon to arrive it’s struck me that our little scene, here well beyond the outer rim of the X-wing “meta”, at least got in before the change. We may not be the biggest or most competitive X-wing group but we got to play the original, a little like remembering a Star Wars universe where Han shot first, Jabba was large and immobile and Jayden Christiansen hadn’t even been born yet let alone lost his eyebrows.

For what it’s worth I think all our players here are excited about 2.0, sure it’s another investment but as reasonably experienced gamers, even though new to playing X-wing and loving the game, we could also all see the cracks in the system.

To combat what we started to perceive as the worst excesses of the game we’d already started to play games with hard limits and exclusions on some upgrades even before 2.0 had been was announced. For a time we cut out some of the broken upgrades and combos (turrets to name just one) and just focused on trying to learn how to fly well.

Personally this has been great, my formation flying has gone on leaps and bounds and my first engagement as a result has been deadly. Watching some of the world championship games has meant all of us have started to work out how to time engagements and jockey for position from the start of the game.

And I expect that 2.0 will be a real leveller in our group, with newer players able to get stuck in on the new dynamics and play style and not feel massively out teched and frustrated from the very start.

But above and beyond all that, the rebalancing in 2.0 hopefully means that new players will be able to get into the game and play the ships and pilots from Star Wars that they want to play without getting their arse handed to them by players flying ships they’ve never even seen before.

No one wants to turn up to a table with Luke and Han and get beaten by a someone flying a space ship that looks like a bathtub (I’m looking at you Phantom II), a Wookie in a wooden ship which you’re not sure how to pronounce and a ship the size of a dinner plate.

Or to bring Darth Vader and a tie swarm and see them get whittled away and spanked by someone called Miranda flying a ship you didn’t even know existed.

I love the depth and support the EU has given to X-wing (my current favourite list is 2 ARC 170’s and Corran Horn, which I call the tabernacle because it’s full of arcs and fire!) and the ships we have because of it are amazing and varied and in true fan boy fashion I’ve bought most of them and definitely fly them.

But I’m also really excited about getting to play competitive lists that include the “greats”. And hopefully the new app based points costs will mean that if a particular card or pilot is unplayable that FFG can adapt its cost and bring it back into play.

Put simply I want to be Luke Skywalker, madly dodging through swarms of Tie fighters as Han swoops into save my arse and still stand a chance of not getting tabled by the latest meta jank. And I think that any new X-wing player wants the same and so my hope is that 2.0 will make that more attainable. I’ll definitely still get beat, that’s what balance means, but I’ll get beat playing ships that make my heart sing.

As we work to build our small community, 500 miles from the closest shop selling X-wing, flying rag-tag fleets generally far from home, my hope is that 2.0 will make it more fun, easier to access and ultimately bring balance to the force that is X-wing.

We’ll keep on keeping on together, setting our dials and rolling the dice in the brave new world that is X-wing 2.0. Carving out our meta and flying casual.

Or as another very old old indie band would say:

Together in this mad land

Far from truest of hands

Well I’ll carry you

If you’ll carry me, carry me, carry me, friend

Oh, carry me