It’s an epic month ahead and there are store champs aplenty coming up in the run up to UK Nationals at the tail end of August. Like a lot of people I’m kind of sad that we have all these great events still with the current rules set, but it is what it is.

My mileage over the next few weekends is going to be pretty crazy. Visits to Cardiff, Bristol Canterbury and Woking all reside in my immediate future. This weekend I’m visiting my good friend Nick Binding at his shop (Incom Gaming) in Cheltenham for their store champs. The first I’ve been to since the kits actually arrived. I’m looking at a minimum of a four hour round trip every weekend this month to play with tiny space ships. Oh well. I do love a visit to Cheltenham, it’s got a good crowd and the venue is great. This weekends event is sold out so there are 28 of us competing for some shiny 2.0 related cards.

I’m running a new list, something that Rasta and I came up with on our drive home from Paris a couple of weeks ago. I’m not going to share the entire list, it’s like our pet project so we’re keeping it under wraps at least a little. It’s called the Rey-Wings and as the name suggests it’s Rey in the Falcon with a couple of A-Wings.

Rasta has run it at a couple of events and done pretty well, this is my first outing with it actually on the table top, so I’m not anticipating doing brilliantly. The first time you put a list on the table is when you find out if you actually have a feel for it. A couple of games on vassal aren’t going to give you the same dynamics as seeing the list on the table properly.

But before we get on to actually playing X-Wing, with wave 14 being a whole 10 days old I wanted to take a little bit of time to look at how it could influence the last three months of the game.

Last weekend I flew against Martyn Chivers running 5 U-Wings, Alex Birt was running 5 Rookie X-Wings. Lots of red dice covering lots of table space is bad news for things likt the Ghost or the Decimator. They can’t burn ships down fast enough to it will be interesting to see what these high health swarms bring to the game in the next few weeks. RAClo can only blind one ship which means that 3 or 4 of the others are going to hammer dice into him,. The Ghost is probably killing and X-Wing every other turn which means that it has a limited life span with all those other red dice coming its’s way. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not auto wins for the rebels swarms by any stretch of the imagination, but 15 red dice vs agility 0 does make life interesting for those 0 agility ships.

The Reaper though is going to be the star of the wave, and brings a lot of threat to the table. Firstly Krennic makes one of your ships super efficient during the early stages of the game with the prototypes ability to chew through shields. But the Reaper itself with the jam action is going to be huge against the many list in the game that love tokens. Whether 2 Reapers and an ace are better than 2 aces and a reaper remains to be seen but I think this will very much be a thing.

One of my favourite lists, Intensity Poe and Dash is in real trouble. Hotshot Co-Pilot was bad enough against it but with all those tokens being stripped away by Jam if you get it wrong then the list’s action economy is going to be significantly reduced. The same goes for Palp aces. The Inquisitor without tokens get’s hurt fast and Krennic stripping shields without even hitting makes his life even more miserable. The effectiveness of Fire Control System on Quickdraw takes a battering from Jam too.

I think the biggest victim of Jam is going to be Nymanda. The list works as a kite list, flying round, dropping bombs and firing TLTs, but the real threat and control of the list has always been it’s ability to deliver a massively consistent 9 dice alpha strike to anyone foolish enough to park in front of it. With no locks and focuses the TLT becomes its main attach and that can be handled by ships like Soontir with ease.

Don’t get me wrong, these established lists are going to be around until the end of 1.0, but there are more things out there now that have the capacity to make them sad. I know a lot of pilots will be made happy by this development, but others are going to be significantly less cheery.

The only lists that don’t care about this stuff are those with inbuilt action economy. (Expertise, Dengar, that kind of thing) but then they are still going to struggle against other lists in the game. In the inevitable round of Rock, Paper, Scissors (Lizard Spock) that the competitive environment reflects I think it’s great to have viable new options that are going to bring greater diversity to the list you’ll play at events. That can only be a good thing as I know many people who have been put off playing by the dominance of Palp Aces, Ghost Fenn, Nymanda and RAClo over recent months.

But enough of that, we’re here to talk about playing X-Wing. It’s why my alarm went off at the ungodly hour of 5.45am on Sunday morning (there’s a 5.45am?) to drive two hours to get here for an event starting at 8.30am. I’m getting my excuses in early for when it all goes wrong today!

My first game was against Chris Thursten, a player who has had a few months out due to utter boredom with the Meta, but 2.0 has got him back and he knows how to write a list. He was Running RAC with a Reaper, and the Reaper had the prototype condition, and a gunner. Oh my word, what a horrible ship. At PS 8 and Jamming, and then cause you have no tokens changing a focus to a crit… but thats not the worst of it! Palping a blank so that he’s less likely to hit, and then removing a dice to remove a shield, followed by gaining a target lock from Krennic who’s sitting on the Decimator, then gunner triggers… very clever… very WHAT? Obviously only one shield gets removed a turn, but essentially that means the 3 dice primary can do 4 damage a turn.

A great fun game but I was not prepared for the interactions. New toys cause problem, it’s good to learn these lessons.

Game 2 was against Alex Bolton, a good young player, running the same list I played him with at Kirton Games regional a few months ago. He knows what he’s doing with it. It turns out though that Defenders don’t like 6 dice attacks in Arc, and then a 5 dice attack out of arc when they don’t have the X-7 Title. As the A-Wing died a heavily injured Rey (only 4 face up damage cards) was left to take on two gun boats on her own. I had to clear some stress, then clear my Console Fire, then clear my major hull breach then do this to the last gunboat. Saw is a bad man… but when do you ever roll 5 focuses!

My Third Game was against Andy Robinson, a hugely brave man flying Whisper and Kylo, and who mis-read my very aggressive opening and in turn two parked Kylo is just about the worst place imaginable. Had I continued moving fast this would have been an amazing move, as it was it gave me such an advantage early on that as good as whisper is, 3 ships hunting her, two prepared to be dedicated blockers is too much to take on, so this one chalked up a win.

My fourth and sadly final game of the day was against Guy Wilson, flying the list that he used to knock me out of the European Championship a few weeks ago. Quickdraw, a Ruthless Backdraft and a harpooning Nu is a good little list. At Euros I didn’t assess what it did properly and got rightfully punished.

Today was a different story, I got the opening engage about as good as I could, the plan to hammer Quickdraw with Rey and frop the shields as fast as possible. 6 red dice into Quickdraw, with two re-rolls and mods… and the First Order ace took a shield. Oh well. That was the key moment, and once the initial joust was over it was only a matter of time before the resilient FOs put too many consistent red dice into Rey. I did kill the pesky Quickdraw, but it was very much a consolation prize as to the make the cut 3-1 was the minimum objective.

A great day, good people, a great burrito a long drive. No Ghost Fenn, no “classic” RAClo, no Nymanda, no 100 point Miranda…. maybe just maybe jank season is finally upon us.

The Rey-Wings are sensationally fun. I just love rolling red dice, how good the list is I’m not sure, but it is as fun as anything else I’ve ever flown, for the 13 minutes that a games with it last! I might give it another whirl….

Next Time: I FLY SOMETHING IN CARDIFF

If you’re looking for X-Wing events around the place then head over to the 186th Tournament Calendar to see what you can get to.