From Cobra –

Like you, I have been super excited to start playing X-Wing 2e. Being the only pure Scum player amongst The Sand Brawlers, I feel it’s my responsibility to cover some of the things you can be doing with scum now a days. Today we are going to take a step away from the aces for a bit, and focus on the base Trandoshan Slaver for the YV-666. For this week, I decided to try flying it with Jabba, Lando, and Contraband Cybernetics (“CC”).

The combo of Jabba and CC work really well together on the YV-666. It allows the ship to have 5 rounds where you could perform red maneuvers and take actions even while stressed. This gives you so many more options to choose from when dialing in a maneuver. Lando gets used for damage control and offense. Now that the YV-666 has the reinforce action, each turn you should reinforce the front and wait to shoot. Since the Slaver has such a low Initiative value, it is likely that the majority of your opponents team would have already shot by the time the Slaver rolls around. As you won’t be needing the reinforce token for defense anymore, you can feel free to spend the reinforce to reroll 2 red dice.

I would fly the ship off to one side and fly it straight toward my opponent until the turn before engaging your opponent. The next turn, change facing to make a 45 degree turn towards the opponent and reinforce. The following turn use CC and the stop maneuver to reinforce again. Use this loop until your opponent either tried to pass on the left or right of this ship and then turn accordingly. The goal is to be at a 45 degree facing when you first shoot to allow you to easily pursue. With CC and a 180 degree arc it is much easier to keep enemy ships within your arc.

PROS: Overall this ship performed very well having 5 CC at your disposal (with Jabba’s extra charges), which makes the Trandoshan Slaver a much more flexible option. Lando provides very consistent dice modification for both offense and defence. Jabba also has extra utility with the remainder of your list since you can recharge other friendly ship’s illicit upgrades as well.

CONS: The disadvantage to flying this build is that you will eventually run out of CC and you will have a pile of stress, making any remaining turns difficult to manage. In addition to that, the ship is very susceptible to crits since it has a hull value of 9. Especially at I2, there will be plenty of ships that will fire early enough to have crits take effect before the Trandoshan gets to shoot. Finally, this combo is rather expensive, tieing up around 21 squad points.

COUNTERED BY: Flying this thing against a I1 swarm would make the choice of spending the reinforce token far more difficult. Because this ship moves so early, it could be arc dodged by high Initiative aces, but the full front arc does mitigate that to some extent. BT1, Admiral Sloane, and Seventh Sister could also pose some issues for the YV in this build, since they’re abilities trigger off of an opponent being stressed.

COUNTERS: Other than the issue of spending reinforce, this build covers so much ground that it will break up a swarm formation and pick them off one by one. A small 4 ship block would be unlikely to kill the YV, but would also have issues getting behind that large base.

Over all I really enjoyed this variant of Trandoshan slaver. While it is not as offensive as its 1e counterpart known as “the Party Buss,” it is much more maneuverable and survivable.