The consensus among large swathes of the X-Wing community is that ships that deal damage with turrets and/or bombs are the most powerful force in the game at the moment and that ships that rely on lining up their firing arcs to deal damage are struggling to find a place in the meta. Indeed, there are many tournaments that have Lothal Rebel/Fenn or Nym/Miranda claiming the top spot.

The current big bads of the X-wing meta.

There are, of course, exceptions to this such as Jesper Hill’s continued success with his Control Bots, or Dale Cromwell’s monstrous record with Quickdraw/Ryad/Omicron pilot. These lists are able to leverage factors such as the large damage output of Quickdraw, the robust defense of Ryad, or multiple control elements to put up a fight.

One list archetype of the game that seems to have disappeared in recent times is large groups of generic ships, such as TIE swarms and rebel jousters like BBBBZ. As I see it, there are four main reasons for the decline of these lists:

Dash Rendar . Dash can lead swarms on a merry dance through an asteroid field delivering highly accurate four dice attacks that minces through a swarm far too quickly for them to adequately respond. This is true of other fat turrets also, but Dash is the main culprit.

This is the kind of positioning that Dash is able to easily create for picking swarms apart.

Bombs. The number of bombs in the game has increased hugely since swarm’s heyday and it’s hurt them massively. It’s now possible for swarms to be led around the board taking damage if they try to chase and engage their target. Nym makes this especially hard as he can control the engagement from turn one by placing and holding bombs to turn off firing lanes.

Splash/Spike Damage. The amount of damage that certain lists can put out in a single turn is too much for a swarm to deal with. Take the example of Nym/Miranda jousting a TIE swarm. It’s quite likely that the swarm is going to have to take two Harpoon Missiles and a bomb placed by trajectory simulator before they get to fire a single shot, probably taking out multiple ships before they have any impact on the game and leaving the swarm player with an insurmountable mountain to climb.

Nym can put out a staggering amount of damage in one turn.

Wookies. This isn’t as strong a factor as the three above, but reinforce can severely limit the damage output of ships plinking out a large number of low attack dice attacks.

This is not an exhaustive list, but these four things are the main offenders. If anyone has any conflicting opinions I would be interested in hearing them.

We’re not going out there! Nym’s out there!

Recently I have been experimenting with multiple different types of list to try and experience different aspects of the game and use ships in my collection that I’ve never used. Despite the hurdles listed above I found flying collections of low PS jousters to be the most fun I’ve had with the game in a long time. I really enjoyed the number of decisions I had to make and trying to navigate the large ships around the board. It made me consider things such as asteroid placement, order of activation, and general strategy in much more detail than I ever have before.

As such, I have decided to set myself a challenge. For the run up to UK Nationals I will try and “Git Gud” with low cost generics. With the impending update to X-Wings coming in the Saw’s Renegades expansion there is no better time.



The boys.

In future blogs I will be covering topics such as what strategies and tactics I’ve been employing and what success I’ve been having, what kind of lists I’ve been using, what I think my odds are against various match-ups, or if this archetype has been completely outstripped by the four-ship rebel lists that have popped up and done well here and there. The first list I’ll be using is that shown below.

It’s heavily inspired by one used by Blair Bunke of the Scum and Villainy Podcast in the past (Blair is one of the few people making a splash with swarms in recent times, racking up impressive results with his 7 Z95 swarm). Stay tuned to see how I get on!