Hi, my name is still Matija, but most prefer Mojito at this point. I still suffer from a fixation on efficiency, unrequited love of spreadsheets, and an annoying competitive streak. I am writing this after winning the Sith Takers Open and as a person who will never let a good soapbox go to waste, I have decided to use this opportunity to talk about an archetype that I have played with for almost two years. While the previous article focused on Resistance Triple Aces, this one will focus on Resistance Beef, roughly speaking four to five ships focused on taking and giving out damage above all el ..read more

Hi my name is Matija, and I am a Resistance addict. In addition to that, I suffer from a fixation on efficiency, an unrequited love of spreadsheets, and an annoying competitive streak. I have struggled with it for the better part of my adult life. Last Sunday, I won a 64 player X-Wing tournament called Women of Star Wars, a charity event with a custom list building requirement of having a minimum of two female pilots in the list. If at this point you are asking yourself why you should care, you really shouldn’t. Events of that size have become a monthly occurrence in the online X-Wing communit ..read more

In the past few months, we have seen several blog posts going back to the same old question: What is an ace*? I started writing this piece back in 2019, last touched it in August 2020, and felt it might now be time to finish and post it. First, I want to compile some answers, then give my own understanding, point out some consequences, and finally break down aces* a bit further. If you go far back, you will find the RamblingsOfAWargamer blog from October 2019: An ace* is usually high initiative, has double reposition, or can repo + get dice mods. He already mentions the important observation t ..read more

Galaxy event number six! Set in Dallas, Texas, Mustafar, it is the first and last Galaxy event using the Hyperspace format. That means two things for us: We have no clue what to expect in particular, and we kind of have a good idea what to expect in general. Hyperspace was the more balanced and due to that the better competitive format. The ship count per list is usually higher, we see more generics, fewer pre-movement and post-movement reposition, fewer passive modifications. Or that is what we could expect in the first half of 2020. Let’s see if that still holds true in this one event. Swiss ..read more

The 5th Galaxies Qualifier event, Ryloth, happened this weekend. Usually, I would have done the fast meta analysis. But this time I participated, and despite playing against two-time champion Faan and one-time finalist/one-time semi-finalist Daniel, I somehow stumbled into the cut. So instead of the timely meta before cut, you get this battle report. My list I played R-AAA-y Wings: 72: Rey (68), Contraband Cybernetics (2), Rey’s Millennium Falcon (2) 46: Zizi Tlo (41), Heroic (1), Advanced Optics (4) 41: Tallissan Lintra (36), Heroic (1), Advanced Optics (4) 41: Greer Sonnel (36), Heroic (1 ..read more

Event number four! Crait, based in New York, United States, on 3.-4. October. The timezone is easily playable for a huge playerbase and we see a massive 264 lists. The top 32 will get an invite to Coruscant and can also fight in the cut for more fame and glory. Also, more Spamtex. Time to spit the salt out and enjoy the rest. This time we see a big shift though, and some expected lists finally break through while others went missing. It’s definitely an interesting event! Fig. 1: Players per faction and event Adding another ring, even though it starts to get confusing. I want to highlight a fe ..read more

This weekend sees the third Galaxies event. Concord Dawn happens at the timezone of Sydney, Australia, 19.-20. September. A total of 124 players showed up to play games. 32 got an invite for Coruscant, but only 16 will enter the cut. By now, we’re laserfocused on Spamtex. The splash at Dathomir exceeded the initial showing at Corellia. What does Concord Dawn bring? Fig. 1:Player attendance for the three events Again another ring was added, and we can now compare the entire field for all three events. Outside is Concord Dawn and there were some clear changes. Rebels and FO increased a bit (18 ..read more

And the second Galaxies event is on, this time with the time zone of Dathomir, London, 5.-6. September. 172 players tried their luck and 32 made cut for later today. Unlike Corellia, we had clear expectations: Spamtex, Sloane-lists, Imperial Aces. That was mostly what we see here in Dathomir, but we have also some surprises, to be sure, but welcome ones. The outside ring is Dathomir, and the inside ring shows Corellia for comparison. The changes are mostly small, with two important exceptions. First is Resistance, which went down by 4% or roughly a third. Put a pin in that, because I will get ..read more

In other articles, I have written about a way to approach the pregame: Turn 0, to identify target priorities; thinking about plan blue and plan red, deployment and obstacles are in every battle report. I’ve also touched on principles and examples for your after-action-review. Every training is only as good as the lessons you draw from it, after all. But inbetween, for those 75min of game play? I hope to add something here to help during the game. If I look through my battle reports, my most impactful mistakes are misidentifying my win condition, followed by choosing the wrong maneuver (includi ..read more

Currently, the first Corellia by Gold Squadron Podcast and Fly Better Podcast is ongoing. Yesterday was the swiss with 217 players, later today will be the top 32 cut. We have no real feeling for the current meta, and this is the first large event. With nobody knowing what to expect, my own expectation is that we can’t conclude too much from this one event. I will keep doing these and hopefully we can compare once we have seen more games. So with that being said, here is a really small breakdown of the conversion rate and the different lists. You can see here how many players started per fact ..read more