For those coming in with little-to-no knowledge of what we do at TheHyperloops.com, we’re aiming to do with X-Wing what made us successful in creating Destiny coverage. One of those things is our Gauntlet page which we launched yesterday. Updated periodically, the Gauntlet will feature staple lists from the meta that any player going to a tournament should be prepared to play against. Another thing we like to do is cover what won big events over the course of a weekend, and this past weekend we had four: French Nationals, Australian Nationals, Mexican Nationals, and the Poland System Open.

Click the event title for a link to the streams and/or click the Pilot Names for a link to the list on YASB.

As of yet, only the Australian Nats are on List Fortress, but I’ll update this post with links to all of the tournaments on ListFortress.com whenever they become available

As someone who has flown a ton of Lando in the Falcon I’m pretty impressed by this list. The scum falcon is so damn cheap it’s hard to ignore. I’m torn on the title, I’m not sure it’s worth the six points, but there are a ton of ships that stress themselves, and it’s hard to argue with teching against the best Gunner (maybe the best upgrade?) in the game. We see that Han Gunner in this very list, and Mariusz is all in on Debris Gambit, featuring it on both Boba and Palob. I like that inclusion here, bringing each ship into combat with an evade token will push these ships into the late game (especially Palob who I’m otherwise not a huge fan of – mainly because he’s easy to tech for and he dies very, very quickly even with all of those tokens).

This list is cool because it brings heavy mods to the playmat. Palob can get in there with three total tokens, Lando rerolls his blank allowing him to stay taking a focus action; he and Boba can use their abilities on offense or defense (though Lando can only use his once, the scrub) to make things super difficult on the opponent. I really do love the scum falcon, and while I appreciate the i6 of Han, there’s no doubting the re-rolls Lando provides to make his attack hit hard, especially in range 1 and against a stressed ship. I’ve been saying in our Discord channel for a while that the scum falcon is the most criminally underplayed ship, and I expect to see it on the rise starting now.

AC Yager is a hero of the people, and piloted Rebels to a national championship. AC drops on us a hot-take on the Fair Ship style of four-ship rebel play that pits two i6 ships in Fenn and Wedge, and Swarm Tactics which lets Dutch also fire his Torps at i6, allowing us to obliterate a ship before firing. Also, it seems that everybody forgot that Fenn was the most played Rebel ship at the end of 1.0 and that his ability is straight up ridiculous. Fenn hasn’t missed a step and can make Redline feel ultra stupid if he’s even alive long enough to shoot at you.

Because we’re coordinating with Fenn, we can get two double-modded proton torps at i6, but the real brokennness of the list comes from R3 Astromech + Dutch, which lets us get FOUR target locks since it double-procs Dutch’s ability (Both R3 and Dutch’s ability are “after” abilities which lets you stack them any way you want [read: advantageously], so you can get two extra locks whilst giving Dutch 2 locks for himself), which is pretty good I hear. [Full Disclosure – after getting some feedback and re-reading, this might only get you three locks, either way, the list doesn’t need the fourth lock, the crux of the list is that we get two fully-modded Proton Torps at i6, but I didn’t want to delete what I originally wrote] The one questionable call is the Bandit, but what else is one going to do with 23 points in the Rebel Faction? Even with the 2 point bid there isn’t much to be gained by upgrading to a naked Tala and we’re a long, long way away from upgrading to a ship above that. We’ve seen Z’s work as nice filler ships, either getting blocks or hovering around the outside of a fight taking a pot shot when it can do so without trading shots. All in all the i6 Alpha is showing it’s prowess here, and as this strategy is my backup list for the system open at PAX unplugged this weekend, has me mildly intrigued.

Big ups to AC for messaging me back on Facebook to get his exact list!

This is a pretty interesting list. Though, like many of us, I spend too much time clicking through YASB and all of the different list-building options so there aren’t too many lists I haven’t scanned through, this one has been intriguing me more and more. If the concession is to put Advanced Sensors on Redline but we still want to chuck tons of bombs, then adding Deathrain and more torps to the mix seems like a fine way to do it. I watched the finals and I really liked how Francois would Adv Sensors Focus/Lock with Redline and then bump him into the back of Deathrain to keep range (and to protect him from the bombs he tossed; that strategy seemed especially strong.

Obviously this list features Whisper as the closer, and I like that Francois had a 7 point bid here. We focus a little too much on the Mynock Open most likely, but that’s the event we have the most/best stats from, and the bid analysis done on this spreadsheet shows us that the median bid for a list with an i5 was 4 in the Scum and Empire factions in the top cut (and 1 & 4 in the swiss, respectively).

The deepest bids went way deeper, obviously, but 7 seems like you can get ahead of most lists, and will only lose the bid to the Redline/Whisper/Soontir lists like the one we’ll discuss below, or something like Boba/Guri. If we had a decent read on the meta and could cut down one set of bombs from Deathrain then adding something like Collision Detector could help our Whispers better contend with other Aces by going places they can’t, but the list seems strong as is too.

Australian Nationals on List Fortress

Some rando took down the Australian National Championship with the boogieman of the format. This 15 point bid is the same bid that Andrew Bunn took when he top 4’d the Mynock Open with a similar list that featured Trajectory Simulator and Seismic Charges. Here we see Travis Foss take that bid and pair it with the feedback Chris Allen provided on the Carolina Krayt’s podcast following the Mynock Open that Advanced Sensors on Redline helps close the gap in a mirror in which you lose the bid or the roll off and end up as the 2nd player. I *think* the lack of bombs makes you a dog to the swarmier lists that are out there, but those lists have strategies to mitigate those bombs. Also, the ubiquity of other bomb-tossing Punishers will help keep those swarms out of your face in top cuts, which Travis Foss was surely the odds-on favorite to make here.

Not much else to say about this list that has been discussed ad-nauseam over the course of the Second Edition meta.

That’s it for today, be sure to check out our other X-Wing coverage as we go full throttle into the 2019 System Opens!

Thanks for reading,

BobbySapphire