The Poe Chronicles are series of blogs done by guest writer Mark Myers recording his love affair with Hot Shot Flyboy Poe Dameron and his favorite droid BB-8.

The other weekend was kind of a big deal for those of us in the St. Louis competitive X-Wing scene, Warfaire Weekend. Prior to this year, this gaming convention was named Warmachine Weekend and primarily featured the Warmachine miniatures game. The main organizer who ran Warmachine Weekend bowed out this year, with some of his partners taking over in his stead. Someone knew someone else who knew someone at FFG and, boom, St. Louis was now hosting its first competitive X-Wing event larger than a store championship! A Grand Championship is born! Given the timing of this, less than a month after Worlds, we suspected we’d have somewhat light attendance. I think that turned out to be fairly accurate, with total numbers being somewhere in the mid-70’s, definitely lower than one would expect for an event of this level held in the United States. That’s a logistical detail that Warfaire Weekend hopes to work out in the future with FFG, because going forward, the Warfaire folks really want X-Wing to be a mainstay of their convention.

But now, back to me! And Poe! And Black Squadron!

Poe Dameron (68)

Heroic (1)

BB-8 (8)

Integrated S-Foils (0)

Primed Thrusters (10)

Black One (2) Ship total: 89 Half Points: 45 Threshold: 4 L’ulo L’ampar (43)

Heroic (1)

Crack Shot (1) Ship total: 45 Half Points: 23 Threshold: 2 Temmin Wexley (54)

Composure (1)

R2 Astromech (4)

Integrated S-Foils (0) Ship total: 59 Half Points: 30 Threshold: 4 Total: 193

People joke about traveling X amount of miles and/or hours only to get paired against local friends with which they traveled. Arch Alliance didn’t have much traveling to contend with, but there was some serious Arch on Arch violence at this event. There were probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 25+ of us. In the Swiss rounds, half of my games were against locals, and I know I’m not the only one to suffer a similar fate.

I’m not much of a bat-reppy kind of person, so this part will be fairly brief. (Lucky you!) Half of my games were against out-of-towners, half against Arch Alliance. I defended home turf against the filthy invaders (who were all great to play!), and got resoundingly thumped by my locals (who are all terrible monsters!), for a 3-3 Swiss finish.

Game 2 question: What happens when you dial in a maneuver for Snap, with the intention of barrel rolling after his free boost, and forget to flip your foils?

Answer: You land him in an I5+ kill-box and he dies.

Game 4 question: What happens when you completely change your approach because you’re playing a local whom you play a lot and figure you need to “do something different”?

Answer: You end up accidentally jousting against a list you can’t out-joust.

Game 6 question: What happens when you fail to even consider what your win condition is for a cut play-in game?

Answer: You shoot a bunch of different ships, killing none and netting yourself a whole 17 points with zero hope to win.

Sad trombone. All of my mistakes were preventable. That doesn’t mean I’d have necessarily won any of those games had I not made those mistakes, but those mistakes did mean I was going to lose those games. I can’t say that I was really locked in at any point during the day. As I talked about in the first episode, I didn’t feel like I had anything to lose. In retrospect, I realized I did have something to lose: my pride. I feel like I could have done better. I know I could have done better. I hear learning from one’s mistakes is a great way to get better. I’m skeptical.

I’d like to extend a huge congratulations to MoKan Moisture Farmer Doug Howe for the win and Arch Alliance Jedi Master Clint Hewson for being runner up. Doug finally got a major event win for the Nantex, so I really appreciate him helping to put it in the sights of the January nerf bat. Our homeboy Clint had to fight through some really big X-Wing names in the cut (Duncan Howard, Nick Tobin, Alex Smittle, Michael ‘BioPhysical’ Simon) to make the final table, and I couldn’t be more proud of him.

Next up? Probably a LOT of Rey/Poe.

For more Midwest Scrub content, you can also find us on our podcast: The Midwest Scrubcast. A more conversational take on X-Wing topics, featuring all the same scrubs, but in your ears!

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