Three nights ago I got back from a six-day trip to Schaumburg and Chicago, IL, most of which was spent at Adepticon 2024. I was part of close to a dozen Austin, TX folks traveling to compete in the X-Wing World Championship, and/or several of the side events. We weren’t alone. Per rollbetter.gg, there were 104 players in the Last Chance Qualifier, and 311 at the World Championship. Since only 7 invites were given out at the LCQ, that’s a total of 408 players. Add in streamers, judges, spectators, and you had one hell of an event. I’ve already talked about my list. One thing I’ve learned is t ..read more

*Not a legal document. List may change for any and all reasons including and probably limited to anxiety and abject cowardice. In my last post, I alluded to various harmless yet unpleasant illnesses my perfect beloved angel-child insists on bringing home from daycare. So despite my best efforts, my in-person PvP practice in recent months has been close to nonexistent, especially since the Battle Over Endor points dropped. It is what it is. That’s the bad news. The good news is, I’m going to the X-Wing World Championship at Adepticon to have fun and I expect to have a lot of it! After weeks of ..read more

Rough roll of the dice for me recently–picked up a nasty bug from my kid’s daycare that has precluded in-person play. I was hoping to be able to talk more about my testing process for Worlds, but I’m stuck in that terrible doldrums of having infinite capacity to make lists and oh-so-limited time to fly them. So here’s me trying to channel this frustration, and I finally got my brain wave by reflecting on both my almost-certainly-Imperial list for Worlds and my Scum list (long story) for NCX Draft League on Tabletop Simulator–one of the issues they have in common is getting the most value out o ..read more

Hopefully all of you following my listbuilding for Worlds will take it at least as well as I have that, uh, most of my ships got nerfed. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the top. The Battle Over Endor pack is hitting stores just before Worlds, and AMG released points yesterday to prepare. Unexpectedly, they also made several long-requested balance tweaks across the board. So let’s just…take it from the top, yeah? So on the one hand, I can be satisfied that I called the correct points for Yorr and Jendon. They are gonna be hot commodities, particularly Jendon, but fair I think ..read more

With Worlds about 2 months away–which is almost the same amount of time it’s been since I’ve gotten serious practice–I’m managing my expectations and right now it’s somewhere in the vicinity of “make some new friends and have fun.” I am at least not starting from scratch–I have been practicing with the Empire faction, quite deliberately, all season, with the result that I’m pretty comfortable flying Darth Vader and the TIE Bombers. I’ve been going through permutations of the Bombers as fast as I practically can, using the new Standard Loadout cards for Tomax and Deathfire, different combinatio ..read more

I wasn’t necessarily planning to double-dip on Endor so soon, but it looks like it’s almost here and ready to blow up the metagame JUST before Worlds! Star Wars: X-Wing – Battle Over Endor Scenario Pack Naturally, the new art features Red Five and a bunch of Y-wings that you can’t fly in this pack So just for fun, I’m going to speculate wildly on point values and viable lists that incorporate ships from BoE. And to organize my speculation, I’ll be using my theory on what the new “archetypes” are that are emerging from 2.5 play…3-ship, 4-ship, 5-ship, and 6/7/8-ship lists. Note: I am not specul ..read more

It’s been a whirlwind of a holiday season that essentially had me out of regular X-Wing play for a month. I’ll spare you (for now!) the terror and imposter syndrome that results from feeling as rusty as I am whilst traveling to the world championship in 2 and a bit months! Instead, I’ll focus on what I’m good at–tracking down the all of the canonical inspirations behind the pilots in the X-Wing game, however obscure. As we look at 2024, the only products that are confirmed to be in the works are the Battle Over Endor Scenario Pack and the Alpha-class Star Wing Expansion Pack. With the last add ..read more

Hello readers! I’ve been struggling with inspiration lately, which coincides with my main focus in X-Wing lately being to, well, improve on my flying so I at least make a good accounting of myself at Worlds. Not all thinking about X-Wing necessarily lends itself to writing about X-Wing, especially since this blog has ostensibly been about helping newer players get their heads around the lore and metagame of X-Wing. There was also a bit of drama regarding my Worlds invite after AMG’s announcement last month that, fortunately, I was able to resolve, but that bled off some of my writing energy as ..read more

Recently I had the pleasure of attending the “Heart of Texas” store championship at The Game Closet in Waco, Texas. The event was exceptionally well-organized and attracted people from all over central Texas, including a large contingent of my local Austin crew. A couple interesting things happened while I was there–I got several kind compliments on my last entry, which was a “batrep”-like summary of my time at Lone Star Open. And, I flew a “just for fun” list that ultimately surprised me with its strengths and weaknesses, enough so that I’ve been reflecting on list-building ever since. Anywa ..read more

Hello readers! Just returned home from a whirlwind weekend in which I went from Austin to Dallas and back and played just a whole ton of X-Wing inbetween. But to properly tell this story, I have to fall back in time to June 3, where my friends and I in the 512th Squadron played in our first local Store Championship. AMG has been managing the return of Organized Play this year with the very exciting offer of World Championship invites to the winners of any official Store Championship. Inspired by the return of TIE Bombers to Standard play, and by the drop in the cost of Rear Admiral Chiraneau ..read more