Here is another blog by Midwest Scrub editor, Matt Cary.

Soooo, this weeks blog was supposed to be part two of my Turn Zero guide, but then the Arch Alliance crew headed out to Murray, Kentucky for a Hyperspace Regional (Cup? Trial? I don’t even know which is which.) And the blog team decided we should write about it while the tournament was still fresh because of reasons (no spoilers!).

So on Saturday morning about 4:30 A.M., what is becoming my regular traveling crew of Dan Peterson (the Midwest Scrub), Emily Rastl, and Clint Hewson met at my house to head out to Murray. I was operating on about 5 hours of sleep since I was playing at one of the regular St. Louis X-Wing joints, the Collector Store LLC, late the night before. Playing that night, however, would be essential to my games in Murray.

Up until Friday night, I had not settled on a Hyperspace list. I had been running Nien, L’ulo, Tallie, and 2 Blue Squadron A’s, since Nien is a powerhouse and the A’s are ridiculously good for their price point. But flying the A’s versus anything with 3 defense dice means no damage done, and if you come up against other Resistance A’s, the list that moves first loses. So I had to abandon that. Going into the Collector Store I had two lists that I was going to try for the tournament Saturday: an FO list and the Rebel list that I eventually chose. The FO list crashed and burned hard, but the Rebel list fared well despite me losing with it. Thanks to Mark Sanford for helping me test both of these lists out.

The Rebel list is fairly simple: Wedge with foils, Luke with foils, Dutch naked, and a Partisan Renegade with Pivot Wing and Leia crew (YASB 2.0 Link). The Partisan acts as a blocker, and with a 3 die primary it’s no slouch for damage dealing either. Dutch can block some things as well, and is really just there as a pseudo-coordinate machine, pumping out target locks to either Wedge or the Partisan. Wedge and Luke just punch and punch and punch. Almost every shot that the X’s take is fully modded since Wedge has a Dutch-lock and a focus from his action, and Luke has the force to back his lock action.

But back to the tournament. We hopped in the car about 4:30 and drove from Saint Louis to Dragon’s Hoard Gaming in Murray, Kentucky for our about 230 mile adventure. I still hadn’t solidified whether I was going to fly the Rebels or the anti-Y double Firespray list the Phil GC had blogged about here, since I love Boba and the Y-wing meta is real. But I don’t know how to fly it against anything else. Sitting in the parking lot outside the store, I grabbed the Rebel list and we began a long day of X-Wing.

My first two games were against a Rebel XXXXY I2 swarm flown by Anthony Marchand and a First Order 5 TIE/sf I2 swarm fly by a person whose name I lost somewhere. On both I managed to PS kill (or whatever we call it now) a ship in the first and second engagements while at least one of their ships was beyond range three, meaning I took less than three shots at me per round. The XXXXY had a particularly wild first engagement where both sides rolled all paint on all of our red dice for an absurdly high damage round, but with an X-wing PS killed and the Y-wing out for the turn, that engagement swung hard my way. Both matches ended in a fairly high MOV win for me.

My third match was against the current meta degeneracy, the 5 Ion Y-Wings (Yion) flown by Sam Talley. I flew this list the week of the points change and knew it was going to muck up the meta, but the list is far too boring for me. Plus, several of the Arch Alliance members chided me for flying a low-skill-ceiling list, so peer pressure played a part in my decision to not fly it as well. I managed to take out 2 Y’s and get half points on the remaining 3, but Luke double blanked a few too many times, and was ioned to death too early for me to get control of this match. This was my only loss for the day in Swiss, and (spoilers!) this list made it to the top cut. Fortunately, the other meta problem of super-cheap Resistance A-Wings are going to knock most of these Y-wing lists out of cuts.

Sadly, my fourth match was against the Midwest Scrub himself, Dan Peterson, flying Poe, Nien and L’ulo. It seems that he and I can’t go to a tournament without playing each other. This had Dan on tilt when he played this match, since he has never beat me at a tournament despite being a good pilot. On any other day, it’s a 50/50 toss up as to who will win, but at a tourney, it seems to always go my way. Poe got in a bad spot early and got wrecked before he had half points on any of my ships. I believe the game ended with all Resistance pilots toasted in exchange for half points on Wedge and Dutch.

My fifth match was against another Missourian, Anthony Lutz, flying Fenn Rau, Captain Seevor, L3-37, and the generic Firespray with Proton Bombs. The match was recorded on Gold Squadron Podcast‘s stream here. He had to drag his ships through the asteroid field giving only Fenn a shot at first engagement. Wedge and Luke lit up Fenn, eliminating him for poking out too soon. Seevor fell next, followed by L3, and then finally the Firespray for only half points on one of my ships.

My final Swiss match was against Mr. Gold Squadron himself, Dion Morales flying Wedge, Luke, and Lando. A couple of game state errors were made in this game that could have turned things around for Dion. First his Luke forgot to open his foils on the opening engagement giving him less of a punch. Second, when Dion’s Wedge started taking damage he must have had Wedge’s shields sitting off to the side, because he dealt all of his damage into the hull. Dion didn’t notice this until about 2 turns after Wedge had been removed from play, when he wondered why he had 2 active shields off to the side of Lando’s cards that weren’t Mr. Calrissian’s. Having moved too far along, we just considered Wedge dead when he would have actually been alive on 1 hull. Despite this Dion did some serious damage to my list, taking down Luke, Dutch and half of the Partisan Renegade.

After Swiss, the standings looked like this.

My first cut match was against Bryan Ballard flying the Resistance I5’s: Nien, Ello, Tallie, and L’ulo. This game went hard in my favor with Nien and Ello getting bumped several turns in a row by the U-Wing. Lacking their actions, Bryan consistently rolled abysmal dice. If he’d had Heroic, it would have triggered about 10 times this match. Both T-70’s got lit up and L’ulo took a range 1 shot from Wedge while stressed, leaving L’ulo on one hull. L’ulo died shortly after, leaving only Tallie alive when time was called.

The second cut match was against Arch Alliance’s own Bob Howe, the Falcon King. Proving true to his nickname, he flew Han Solo in his YT-1300 accompanied by Wedge and Luke in their T-65’s. It can also be viewed on Gold Squadron which will be linked when it is uploaded. Opening engagement traded Dutch for most of Han’s health. The next turn, Bob forgot that his Luke moved first and 4-K’ed him into the side of my Luke, giving him a shot at my U-wing but not my T-65’s like he wanted. Both his Han and Wedge also bumped, leaving them with un-modded shots while my Wedge got a white Leia 4 K-turn and eliminated Han. Next, his Luke went down to a couple of shots from my Wedge. Wedge is great against Luke since the space farm-boy can only evade a maximum of 1 shot. That left his Wedge alone to take on my 3 ships, and he fell shortly thereafter. Great job making top 4, Bob, I wish it could have been at the top table.

The final match (also streamed by GSP) was against Jordan Struckenscheider from the Atlanta HWKS, flying Poe, Tallie, L’ulo, and a Blue Squadron A-wing. With a 9 point bid, His I6 Poe and I5 A-wings moved after my Wedge and Luke respectively, meaning pinning these ships down wasn’t going to be a thing that I could do. Chasing him would not work, he was going to have to come to me. What ensued was 40 minutes of boring X-Wing in which Jordan and I fluttered around on our sides to avoid taking shots. Eventually, though, an A-wing committed and ready to finally make something happen, I pounced, leaving Wedge pointing at Poe, hoping to make the trigger happy flyboy run off or suffer shots from Wedge. But then, Poe did the unexpected and BB-8’ed his way into range one of Luke and also in arc of Dutch and the Renegade. I dropped Poe down to 2 hull in exchange for some damage on Dutch from flanking A-Wings, and suddenly the onus was on Jordan to get points; he could no longer refuse engagement.

Poe ran off to try to survive while the generic RZ2-A took shots and the I5 A-wings flanked, taking more shots at Dutch. Wedge laid into a stressed L’ulo, hurting him badly. Wedge does love shooting a 1 agility A-wing. The A-wings bit it one by one while Luke kept Poe honest by keeping guns on him and shoo’ing him off. At that point, I had four ships against a two health Poe, making it only a matter of time. After over 15 hours of playing X-Wing, I had won my first Hyperspace Trial.

Special note should be made that Jordan had never played any Resistance lists until that day and was actually borrowing all of his game pieces from a friend. He won 7 out of 9 games played that day, with an unfamiliar list. A heck of a showing. Great job, Jordan!

So it looks like I’ll be going to Minnesota in October. I need to thank a few folks specifically for my victory: Mark Sandford for practicing with me the night before, Mark Myers for being the best Resistance pilot I know and showing me how to engage (or rather not engage) A-Wings, Clint Hewson since my list is a tweaked version of his, and also Dan, Emily, and again Clint for sticking around for several hours after Swiss since they rode in the car with me.

But victory is not without its costs. The match ended after 12:30 in the morning, and I still had to drive 3 1/2 hours back home after only having 5 hours of sleep the night before. Finally getting to sleep after a full 24 hours of being awake was wonderful. Even now, I am still dog-tired and I have a headache, but it was totally worth it.

If you are in the St. Louis area or coming to visit, reach out to Arch Alliance X-Wing on Facebook to find out where we are playing on any given night.

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