This past weekend I got to play in a small local tournament. I didn’t do very well overall, but I had a good time. More importantly, I got the chance to play against a Nantex for the first time, and it was against the recent Kansas City Hyperspace Trial winner, Doug Howe. Doug was playing a near copy of his winning list: Sun Fac with Ensnare and six Grappling Strut Vultures.

I’m not going to “Bat-Rep” the game, because I hardly ever enjoy reading other people’s Bat-Reps, and I don’t have the awesome talent that Phil GC does to actually make the Bat-Reps of a person the reader has never met before entertaining. So I’ll try not to bore you with the details. I do, however, want to share a few of the insights I gained in my play time against the Nantex, in the hopes that someone might find it useful.

For the past month or so I’ve been playing a Guri/Fenn list with a ridiculously thicc 104 point, TIE-Defender-level Guri. During that time I’ve gotten to play against several iterations of CIS lists. And, generally speaking, I’m not too very worried about them. Both Outmaneuver Guri and Fenn have the ability to one-shot Vultures under the correct circumstances, and a well-flown Guri is like a bloodthirsty wolf among sheep when she gets in the midst of those three hull, two agility droids.

But Sun Fac… well, he changed the equation. He took the CIS matchup from something that I was reasonably sure I could win (outside of a terrible mistake on my part or absurdly bad dice variance) to something I wasn’t entirely sure I had a win condition against with my two small base ship list. So when I set up, I did so in such a way as to have options left open to either engage quickly or to disengage even faster, depending on what Doug decided to do. I calculated what my one chance was: I had to take Sun Fac off the board before Fenn died. But I had built that little goose-beak-looking ship up so much in my head that I took the less aggressive options with Fenn for the first few rounds. Instead of using my I6 Fang Fighter like the four hull Advanced Proton Torpedo that he was meant to be, I held him back. And I’m reasonably sure that trepidation cost me the game. I should have pressured Sun Fac with at least Fenn, if not both of my ships, straight out of the gate. I should have relentlessly pursued his destruction. But I let him get to the end game and lost because of it.

So, on to my lessons learned from the game.

1. Kill Sun Fac ASAP. Seems obvious. If only I had managed to make myself stick to that game plan. He is 78 points sitting on 4 hull with no shields. But more than the points off the board, his presence is a giant bubble of unblockable control on your list. With him gone, your opponent’s list gets substantially weaker.

For more imagery of how hard it is to get out of Sun Fac’s arc, see this thread from the FFG forums.

2. Guri (along with Jedi and a few others) is squirrelly enough to give Sun Fac some trouble. Pay attention to the way his turret is currently pointed to guarantee not getting tractored. He has to move his turret in order to set off the chain of events that leads to you getting tractored, and you can, at times, leave him in a position to be unable to move his turret arc and still have you in arc. So there is counter-play there. It just kind of sucks. Because he will be shooting you if you position correctly. Fortunately, his turret shots tend to be rather lackluster if you are not tractored.

3. The fact that you can’t bump him to turn off the tractoring shenanigans is the worst. Like many ships of the ace archetype, he hard turns. It’s what he does. I know that he’s going to hard turn. He knows that I know that he’s going to hard turn. But it doesn’t matter. And that feels really bad. Soontir and Fenn can have their hard turns blocked and their actions removed, but Sun can be blocked, still reposition, and still get a modified shot out of it.

4. I should probably be playing CIS. Sun Fac looks super fun for the person playing him.

5. There seemed to be more 50/50 situations that came up in this game than is even remotely average for my games. So many times, I had to take what felt like a complete guess as to which of two likely ways he was going. If I was right, I lived on. If I was wrong, the game would come to a swift conclusion. Most of the game I guessed correctly. Then I didn’t one time and the game went downhill remarkably quickly. Which leads me to:

6. Getting tractor beamed and having your opponent use the StarViper’s bendy barrel roll against you is brutal.

Despite all of that, I have to say that I don’t think that the Nantex, or at least not Sun Fac, is quite the Negative Play Experience that I had worked it up to be in my mind (despite the click bait title). It’s really good, but even with a two small base ship list, I actually came fairly close to winning the game. A few different decisions, a few swings of variance, not self-bumping Fenn to leave him tokenless and at the mercy of Sun Fac (scrub is in the title, after all), and the game could easily have ended a different way. Granted, this was just one game; however, I don’t think the sky is falling quite yet. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s just another good tool with some crazy, interesting game design. Though I would dearly love to see the words “fully execute” added into that card text.

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