Hear ye, hear ye, X-Wing community! Matt Cary is issuing a challenge!

Sooooooooooo… I’ve been known to malign the 2nd Edition Jumpmaster 5000 from time to time, as seen here and here, but it has always been out of love. The ship was punished so fiercely for its hyper-competence back in 1st Edition, and it hasn’t recovered… or has it?

In those two articles, I proposed several different ways to potentially fix the JM5K which FFG lovingly, respectfully, and passionately ignored. Configurations – ignored. Sensor slot – ignored. Astromechs – ignored. Errata – ignored. But that’s because they were stewing up something good: a cannon slot. It’s great for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it addresses the problem of the single 2-die turret arc. It can now take an Ion Cannon for control/damage, Autoblaster for a cheap arc, or Jamming Beam for… uh… free. Secondly, it addresses the cannon on the model and all of the art.

Thanks to this, along with the super cheap Nom Lumb dropping in the Hot Shots and Aces pack and the fact that the JM5K is one of the few ships in Hyperspace, the ship actually has a shot at making a showing. Since it actually could win a game or two and since I want to see the ship do well, I am issuing a bounty to the X-Wing community. The first person that can win a System Open or a Grand Championship with a Jumpmaster 5000 in the list before the next points change will win a Midwest Scrub acrylic template set and template tray that I will pay for out of my own pocket. We, the members of the Midwest Scrubcast, don’t even have our own merch at this point, so even we will have to be jealous. I’ll reevaluate the bounty after each points update, but I imagine I’ll keep it intact until someone actually claims the bounty!

And because I want someone to actually win this, I’m going to help out and suggest a few builds to get things moving along. The first is gonna be the one that FFG actually suggested in the preview for Nom Lumb.

This combo is brainless goodness, clocking in at a criminally cheap 44 points. This gives your opponent the annoying choice of either ignoring Nom and letting him run around taking whatever shots he wants, or shooting at Nom who then, due to his ability, will rotate to an arc to allow him to not only shoot back, but also trigger Dengar Gunner, who will either strip a green token from the attacker or potentially do damage. If they drop the token, you can shoot at their tokenless foreheads for a shot that’s more likely to hit, or they choose not to not lose the token and take a 50% to take a damage (which is probably more likely to hit than your 2 die shot).

Nom Lumb is probably the best route to get this bounty done since he is ridiculously cheap, but Manaroo can have some tricks up her sleeve as well.

Manaroo with 0-0-0 crew has an interesting timing window exploit. She can toss a focus token to a friend at 0-1, and then trigger 0-0-0 to potentially get a calculate token. Alternatively, she can trigger 0-0-0 first and then transfer both the calculate token and the focus token to a friend. Having BT-1 gunner has obvious synergy with 0-0-0 as she will either get the calculate or the enemy ship will get a stress which lets BT-1 change a hit to critical. Autoblasters will then not only be adding an arc, but the stress from 0-0-0 will generate crits that cannot be evaded if Manaroo shoots from outside the defender’s front arc. In Extended, you can add the spice of Marksmanship to try to generate some more uncancelable crits.

For Dengar, I recommend keeping him as cheap as possible. In Hyperspace, you should probably limit yourself to either Autoblaster or Ion Cannon as your cannon, and staple Contraband Cypernetics to every Dengar build ever.

But for Extended, Greedo plus an Autoblaster seems like a “go to” combination. Automatic crit generation is great, and those crits are uncancelable out of arc. Just be certain to always remember that trigger, as it is a “may”, and that “may” will be shot after shot with a free crit lovingly added to each laying into Dengar if you don’t.

So there are my recommended builds for getting this bounty done. So go forth and conquer! Claim this bounty!

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