Two ship lists have almost always been a thing in X-Wing. There are forum posts going back to 2014 discussing “Fat Han” builds in which Han ate up around 60 of the available 100 points at the time. First Edition was rife with two ship powerhouse lists, all the way up to the infamous Ghost/Fenn in the waning days.

When Second Edition launched, it was largely believed that the rolling back of the power creep that had plagued First Edition would mean the end of “combo-wing”, and with it, the death of two ship lists. The theory was that upgrades had been weakened to the point that taking many ships with few upgrades was going to become the obviously superior choice over taking fewer ships with more upgrade points sunk into them. That theory was almost immediately disproved at the first sizable tournament of Second Edition, the Gold Squadron Classic, where Matt Cary and I took identical Boba/Guri lists to a combined record of 11 wins and 1 loss. (And that only loss came from a first round mirror match between us, where one of us had to lose.)

From that time until now, two ship lists have continued to pop up in the meta. They range from fat large base turrets like “Handbrake Han” or “Double-Tap Dash”, to a thick ace plus a support/tank like Guri/Boba or Kylo/Tavson, or even two aces like Guri/Fenn or Twin Jedi. I personally enjoy the feeling of playing two ship lists; the feeling that, if I manage to do everything correctly, I can take on almost anything, but if I screw up once… that can be the end right then and there.

As fun as the challenge of riding the razor’s edge can be, I can’t help but wonder if the rising ship count that had been foretold before Second Edition had launched, and which has increasingly shown itself in earnest, will finally cause the time of the two ship list to draw to a close. It seems like the lists that I face at tournaments are becoming tougher and tougher to overcome with just two guns on the table.

But is that an issue with perception, rather than reality? At the most recent Hyperspace Trial I went to, out of a total of 25 people, there were four two ship lists. As I was looking around during the tournament, all of the lists I saw with 4+ ships felt like they would be really rough matches. It seemed like almost everything I saw on the tables was something I didn’t really want to see across from my two little ships. It felt like the tournament should have been extremely tough for a two ship list, but three of those made it to top 8 in the cut, and one went on to the final table to place second overall. Which is not a bad cut rate at all. Seems like the going is tougher, but they haven’t been pushed out yet.

Of course that’s only my personal experience – we can turn to World’s results for a wider perspective. Out of 98 people who made the top cut, there were a grand total of 4 two ship lists that had gone 5-2 or better to make it in. All them were scum lists. All of them had Fenn Rau. One was Phil GC playing a Guri/Fenn list. The other three were variations of Boba/Fenn. Only one of those made it past the top 32, and that was a Boba/Fenn that made it all the way to top 8.

A good showing for two ship lists, right? Just over 4% of the cut. But it says something about the state of the ship count meta that most people, including myself, were extremely surprised that any list with a ship count that low made it all the way to top 8 at World’s. Would anyone have been at all surprised to see any other type of list make top 8? The only other list I would have found as surprising would have been one with multiple large base ships in it.

So overall two ship lists probably aren’t in the very best place in the meta at the moment. But despite that, the general reaction that I get when I set my list across the table from someone at a tournament isn’t relief that I brought an under-powered list. Surprisingly, it’s much more along the lines of resignation. At the previously mentioned Hyperspace Trial, I played four rounds of Swiss to make it into the cut. Round one I was winning, but could tell that my opponent was getting very frustrated as he was futilely attempting to catch Guri. So I increased my pace of play to give him the best chance that he could have. While I am a competitive player, and I am going to play what I love to play, I know playing against Guri is frustrating. And I also would rather take the chance of losing a game and making a friend than I would ensuring the game win and giving someone a truly miserable experience. My second game I lost horribly. After my third game, my opponent had to go listen to music to calm himself down. Then when I set my stuff down across from my round four opponent and introduced myself, he said, “You’re the one playing Outmaneuver Guri?” I told him I was, and he replied, “I don’t want to deal with that. I concede.”

I was struck with the thought… “Am I the NPE?” I certainly have never set out to be. I’m simply playing the style of list I most enjoy, and playing the version of little plastic space ship I get the most enjoyment out of playing. It seems like a lot of X-Wing players don’t much like aces, or at least ace-centric lists. They seem to think that X-Wing should be a game of generics setting up across from each other and running together in a straight line. Obviously, that is a bit of hyperbole. I understand that there is always more nuance to the game than that. But the spamming of generics isn’t the version of X-Wing I fell in love with. If that were all the game was, I probably wouldn’t be playing it. And I’m far from the only X-Wing player to feel this way, or so I think.

I suspect the real issue with these lists, the true reason people hate to see them, isn’t that they are terribly powerful, or that they warp the meta. It’s that they tend to only be “fun for one”. In other words, if the ace player is playing well and achieving their win condition by getting shots in while not getting shot at all, their opponent is often not having any fun. Conversely, if the ace player screws up and loses about 50% of their list in a single turn, they are likely to be fairly upset with themselves.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been playing games where I’ve been doing everything right, getting my shots without getting shot, playing at the top of my game, while my opponent was obviously having a bad time. I fought and clawed my way to a decent lead, and then made one bad call deep into the game, then all of a sudden I’m behind on points, and I don’t have the time in the game to catch back up. Then, when they’ve won, they talk about what a great game that was. But for the first entire hour of the game, they were miserable. The game was always balanced on that razor’s edge, ready to fall to either side with the smallest mistake. They just didn’t see it. To be fair though, I get it, winning is fun and trying to catch repositional aces can be very frustrating. I just wish they could see the matrix – how fine that balance was the entire game up until that point.

I hope that we can get past the “fun for one” problem, but those who don’t enjoy facing aces lists may see some relief regardless, because there are a few aspects of Second Edition that will inherently provide a challenge to small ship counts going forward.

Part of the reason that I believe the smaller ship count lists are suffering stems from having final salvo as the main tie breaking mechanic. The ace player only has around a six die final salvo and is almost always significantly down if no points are scored before the end of time. Granted, no one wants to play X-Wing with the goal of not engaging, and that’s particularly not the correct choice for the two ship player. However, because of that built-in turn zero disadvantage, there is even more pressure to get damage in whenever you can, to get the slightest advantage. First engagement becomes critical: if you screw up that first engagement and take damage without getting enough damage in yourself to actually make it worthwhile, you are already hugely behind and very likely will never recover. With only two guns available, and while often having to prioritize not getting shot over your own offensive shots, it can be very difficult to do a meaningful amount of damage to the opponent, especially in the amount of time allotted for the game.

This issue is compounded by the fact that more ships on the table often means longer round times for setting dials for all those ships, and then for carefully moving all of them. If your opponent isn’t in any particular rush, or is flat out slow-playing, it’s not unheard of to be limited to a total of six or seven rounds in which to try to get ahead in the damage race. Often, that’s simply not enough.

As I was sitting at the Springfield, Illinois Hyperspace Trial pondering my future playing two ship lists, I realized that the biggest threats that I see facing the more traditional aces in the game (the Soontir Fel’s, the Fenn Rau’s, the Wedge’s, and the like) isn’t the rising ship count of the meta. It’s the rise in prevalence of two upgrade cards that interact with the bidding mechanic. I know lots of people don’t like the bidding to determine first player and I understand why, but it is the mechanic the game developers chose to use and I have yet to hear of any other options that make practical sense. So for now, it’s the system that we have to work under. So I purposely don’t take upgrades that could potentially be useful to my ace lists in order to give myself an edge in ace v ace matches.

The first problematic upgrade, Passive Sensors, is only an issue on the Dark Lord of the Sith. The capability to “link” off of the passive sensors trigger to reposition during the engagement phase turns him into an I6 ace killing machine. In a recent game, I pulled off a series of maneuvers that my opponent didn’t see coming at all to place a Fearless Fenn range one in front of a Passive Sensors Vader who didn’t have a target lock on Fenn. When Vader engaged, which was before Fenn, he was able to take his target lock, then spend a force to link into a barrel roll out to range 2. In doing so he turned off both Fenn’s offensive and defensive extra die, and Concordia Face Off. In the following exchange, Fenn was essentially crippled by the crits he took. That 3 point upgrade on Vader allows him to circumnavigate the entire bidding mechanic, while also allowing the Imperial player to build their list all the way up to 200 points without fear of ever losing the ability to reposition their ace last. It’s possible that the developers intended for this interaction to be a thing, maybe even to use it to explore ways to lessen the impact of the bidding wars. However, given the amount of language included in the card to prevent the passive sensor ship from getting extra actions from other sources, I rather expect it was much more likely an oversight. And one that I hope will be corrected soon.

The second upgrade card that I think will start causing major issues for these aces is the force power Sense. Those who have been playing X-Wing competitively since First Edition remember very well what a bad experience it was to play against lists with the Intelligence Agent upgrade. It initially only made its way into Second Edition in the form of Informant, which allowed you to only look at a ship’s dial if you had chosen it as the target of the Informant before the game even started, and the ship was within range two of the Informant carrier. So it is much less useful, even to the point that it has hardly seen any competitive play. The general feeling when that card was revealed was one of relief that FFG had significantly dialed back the power of those “perfect information” upgrades. Then Sense came onto the scene. And all of a sudden, Intelligence Agent was back.

It was slightly nerfed in some ways, in that it only worked for free at range one, but also was buffed in another way, in that it was able to reach any target all the way out to range three for the small price of a regenerating calculate. Now already predictable aces become that much more vulnerable to being blocked by opponents with perfect information. And a blocked ace is very often a dead ace. Perhaps my First Edition PTSD makes my mind immediately overreact to any hint of an Intelligence Agent-like ability, but I fear the possible impact.

It will be happy for some and sad for others, but given the prevalence of these two upgrades, in addition to the advent of the long ago foretold rise in ship counts, I fully expect to see the number of two ship lists in the meta diminish even further than it already has. Because, as fellow Arch Alliance member Mark Myers recently said to me in reference to his efforts to revive his love affair with a Rey/Poe list, “2-ship is nothing but pain.”

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