X-Wing Tournament Report(s): Part 2B - Bangor Assault at Imdaar Alpha Pre Release Event 31st May, 2014

This is the final article in the second part of my two parter tournament report. (See here for Part 1 and here for Part 2A).


X-Wing 2014 Assault at Imdaar Alpha Pre Release Tournament

Game 3

I left off my last article at Game 3 with Jenny. As previously mentioned this game was pivotal in deciding who was going to go through to the final round.

Jenny was running Chewie with Gunner supported by two HWK-290s with Blaster Turret. Any list with a Falcon is always tough to get through especially in the hands of a player that know their stuff. And Jenny definitely knew her stuff.

Again asteroids placement and my opening formation is the same as last game. Jenny set up in a corner to my left.

I shot straight up with my swarm while Jenny moved the HWK-290s behind Chewie.

Knowing that the HWK-290s were relatively slow compared to the Falcon I continued with a five forward to try to catch the two HWK-290s out of position.

Jenny got the jump on me with Roark's ability giving Chewie a PS of 12. I weathered the storm and retaliated. I traded a few hulls for some of her shields.

In the next round I did a K-turn to come back around with the swarm. Here Jenny flew one of the HWK-290 to block my higher PS ships and successfully stopped Dark Curse in his tracks.

However this left the single HWK-290 isolated. This was my opportunity to get ahead and I focused fire on the unfortunate Roark and left him to sleep with the fishes.

In the next round I tried to keep my swarm in formation and within range one of Howlrunner. I sent Dark Curse to go after the other HWK-290.

Chewie continued to move forward and started to make a turn to come back around all the while firing at full effectiveness. Jenny finally took down one of my TIE fighters while I struggled to take down the HWK-290. Those guys are pretty tough.

In the next round Jenny again plowed the HWK-290 into my formation and this time she was successful in breaking up my swarm.

With only two TIE fighters with firing arc on the HWK-290 I struggled to take it down.

I send Dark Curse to go after the HWK-290 and after some nice rolling on my part I finally shot it down. This still left Chewie with nearly full health right up in my grill with my formation broken. I was getting very worried at this sage.

In the next few rounds I threw everything I had at Chewie but with his pilot ability allowing him to ignore crits I struggled. On the other hand Chewie was taking chunks out of my squadron downing another TIE Fighter.

Time was running out and the game was still very close.

In the last round I took Chewie to one hull but made a massive mistake: I put an evade token on one of my TIE fighter instead of a focus. Without it I wasn't able to take the final hull off the Falcon. Aarrgh!

Time was called and we tallied up the points. I just about scraped a modified win by 3 points. That was really close! Thankfully my late screw up didn't cost me the game. Well that's the last time I'll make that mistake!


Final Round

With two wins and one modified win I was through to the final round. Didn't quite expect this at all!

My opponent was none other than Richard. The same guy I played my first ever X-Wing tournament match against (see report here). I think he's setting himself up to be my nemesis...

We broke out the Wave 4 ships (with care) and started making our lists.

Richard had more points than me and so had first pick and decided to go for Imperials. This left me in a bit of a bind as apart from the Falcon I never flew any other Rebel ship. This is not starting well!

Richard took a TIE Interceptor in addition to the TIE Phantom and TIE Defender.

 I went with what I know and took Chewie in a Falcon with the E-Wing and Z95 Headhunnter.

 The Game

Asteroids were placed more or less in the middle leaving room around the edges.

I set up on my left corner while Richard set up on the opposite corner.

Using Chewie as the meat shield I sent him forward with the E-Wing and Z95 coming up behind.

Richard flew the Defender and Phantom directly towards Chewie. 'Echo' the Phantom pilot activated his cloaking device. The Interceptor flew down the flank at speed.

Recognising Richard's intention to flank me but trying to turn it to my advantage I swung my entire squadron around to attempt to take out the Interceptor before his cavalry arrives.

Unfortunately I didn't take account of the outrageous movement that Echo had up his sleeves when uncloaking. He was able to come right up to Chewie when he uncloaked. Wowza!

Here I also showed a bit of my own inexperience and had both my E-Wing and Z95 going over an asteroid and losing a shield off the Z95.

I took shots at the Interceptor but failed to destroy it. I must mention here that Corran Horn was awful. The guy couldn't hit anything!

Richard meanwhile picked up five attack dice for the Phantom alone and started to single handedly take massive chunks out of the Falcon. Five attacks basic at range one! I was in real trouble.

Leaving the Falcon to Echo, Richard used his TIE Defender to take pot shots at my Z95 and managed to take him out in two turns. Oh dear.

Things were looking grim.

The Interceptor made its fly past and tried to hightailed it out of there. Fortunately after some softening up of the Interceptor in earlier rounds, Chewie finally got the Interceptor under his sights and blew it into smithereens.

The Phantom continued to slaughter Chewie with its ridiculous quantities of attack dice and the TIE Defender contributed with its own attacks.

Chewie was down to his last couple of hull points.

Echo was really difficult to deal with as he was PS 6 which is higher than Chewie's PS 5. Together with his Advanced Cloaking Device he was able to re-cloak after his attacks to avoid the worst of Chewie's retaliation. Things were looking very bad.

I did a K-turn with Corran Horn and to his credit, he grew a pair and one shot Echo when he had his cloak down! Alright that's what I'm talking about!

My elation was short lived as his Defender then finished off Chewie. Now it was just Corran in his piece of junk vs. Col. Vessery in his state of the art warship.

Things were getting very tense.

The two elite pilots dueled. Mano-a-mano.

However Corran being Corran couldn't land a hit to save his life. Nor could he evade any of those hot lasers coming his way. The guy probably couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery! That's how bad he was.

Also the Defender had this little trick whereby he could do a four Kiorgran turn that wasn't a red manouevre. Wut!

Every time I did a K-turn I had to forego an action while he did not. This quickly took its toll.

Corran's antics finally came to an end when he failed to dodge Vessery's mean laser shots.

A loss at the last hurdle! T_T

Man that was a great game though! Turned out to be a much closer game than anyone expected.

Richard is not known for flying small ships (he likes em big) but he flew brilliantly here, especially the Phantom. Well played sir, well played!

With the win, Richard had first pick and went for the TIE Defender. It made him nostalgic apparently. This left me with second choice. The E-Wing was definitely out of the question. That Corran Horn guy is such a jerk and I had no plans for a single Z95 so I chose the ship that impressed me most, the TIE Phantom.

Ermagurd. The TIE Phantom is so awesome!

In Closing

This was a great event. The format of the final round is actually pretty neat as it gives people a glimpse of what Wave 4 had in store for the game once it finally hit stores.

I was gobsmacked I did so well. Never expected it. Although I did secretly wished for a top four placing. Finishing second was unreal. 

In addition I really felt like I've made vast improvements to my game. I still committed a bunch of stupid mistakes but definitely a lot less of the game changing ones. I'm still pretty inexperience mainly because I've only actually able to play a small subset of ships from my collection. I must make a point of playing more rebels. I've absolutely zero experience there (not counting the double Falcon list).

All my opponents were real sound. Not a rules lawyer in sight. A great X-Wing community they have up there in the north. Thanks all for the great games! Also congrats to Richard for the win. The better player definitely won on the day. I'll take you down next time though!

The event was well run so thanks a mill to the guys at Replay Games. My only beef would be the playing mats. They look real nice but very difficult to actually make out gaming components like asteroids and tokens during play. Still it's probably better than no mats!

Well if you're with me this far thanks for reading. I hope it was enjoyable. I have more X-Wing tournament reports in the pipeline so stay calm and keep gaming!

X-Wing Tournament Report(s): Part 2A - Bangor Assault at Imdaar Alpha Pre Release Event 31st May, 2014

This is the second part of my two parter tournament report. (See here for Part 1).


X-Wing 2014 Assault at Imdaar Alpha Pre Release Tournament

Assault at Imdaar Alpha (AaIA) is an official FFG X-Wing tournament held to promote the release of Wave 4. The main draw of the tournament is that if you make top four you get to go home with one of the new Wave 4 ships before its official release. How cool is that.

The AaIA was held in Bangor, Northern Ireland, on 31st May hosted by Replay Games. My first ever X-Wing tournament I attended was a Store Championship that was held in the very same town back in April. (See here for the report). As such I knew many of the players that turned up for this tournament.

The format of the event was that every player plays three rounds. The results of these games will then determine the top two players who will play a final round using two of the four ships from Wave 4. The winner will then get the first pick of which ship he/she would like to take home as the tournament prize. Pretty Neat.


My List

With over 15 games under my belt and a top 8 finish in my last tournament I felt I was getting to a stage where I would not consider myself a noob any longer. Maybe barely competent would be a better description. Either way I wanted to continue to improve my game fast.

Playing a double Falcon list in my last tournament taught me some very valuable lessons. Unfortunately flying was not one of them. When you have a 360 degree firing arc, flying is really not a skill required to run the list.

As such I thought there was no time like the present to give the beloved/feared TIE swarm a go.

After some play testing I decided to go for a Wave 1 TIE Swarm. No better list to teach me how to fly like a 7 TIE Fighter swarm list. Well I was also a bit constrained with my collection as there appears to be a nationwide shortage of TIE Interceptors! Couldn't get my hands on em anywhere!

Howlrunner and the four Academy Pilot forms the core of the swarm. The Black Squadron Pilot (BSP) is there purely so I can daisy chain Howlrunner's Pilot Skill (PS) 8 to three ships with Swarm Tactics. Swarm Tactics is an upgrade card that allows you to transfer Pilot Skill from one ship to another ship at the start of the Combat phase. This combo gives me three ships with PS 8. My tactic with this is that I always pass on the PS 8 to one of the Academy Pilot closest to my opponent so that it gets to shoot before being killed. Pretty nifty.

Dark Curse is there to run interference and provide a distraction to my opponents. When defending, opponents shooting at Dark Curse cannot use any Focus action or reroll any attack dice. As such I run him very aggressively into enemy formations as a bait. Any ship shooting at him is not shooting at Howlrunner which is a win win scenario for a TIE swarm list. This tactic effectively turns him into a Biggs-equivalent for the Empire.

I'll do an in depth article of my take on the TIE Swarm in a few weeks as it definitely deserves one. There is a lot of nuances in tactics of swarm lists that I don't think a lot of beginners appreciate. They think a TIE swarm is one list which it is not.

Anyway I'm getting off topic. Let's get to how your's truly faired!


The Tourney


Game 1

My first game was against Gordon. I've met Gordon previously during my last outing in Bangor. A very nice chap. Unfortunately he was also running a swarm list. Eeek!

I set up asteroids such that I had a nice wide corridor for my swarm to fly into.

I had the lowest PS ships so I deployed first. I set up my swarm centrally using the standard Piqsid Opening set up. He deployed his swarm directly opposite mine while his Interceptor was in a corner to my left.

I moved up forming a three rows long formation while he moved with his four TIE fighters in a square formation. My Dark Curse moved up along the formation to my right while his Turr Phennir moved up my left flank.

We traded blows resulting in no casualties. On the next turn we crashed forming a huge blob of TIE fighters.

 His Interceptor flew in on my left flank and let loose. Similarly on my right, I plowed Dark Curse into his formation.

We let fly with all of our weapons. He took Howlrunner and the BSP to near death, however I came out on top and decimated his formation with my superior numbers.

We eventually broke apart but at this stage he was out of the game. He only had his Interceptor and one TIE fighter left after the exchange of fire.

Win for me with no losses. Hooray!

Game 2

My second game was against Adam. Adam was new to X-Wing but a Warmachine ETC vet. So definitely not new to the competitive tournament scene.

He was running a neat Interceptor list:

My asteroid placement and opening moves was exactly the same as last game. He had his Interceptor on one corner facing the centre of the board while he set up Vader to my right.

I moved up as a column while his Interceptors came right at me on my left flank. On the other side Vader shot right past my formation in his TIE Advance.

His nimble Interceptors were taking pot shots at Dark Curse who was protecting my flank while they navigated around the asteroids. I did like wise but neither of us had inflicted any lasting damage.

I was getting a bit worried at this stage as I can see Carnor Jax was getting very close to my formation. Carnor's pilot ability meant that any enemy ship within range one of him cannot use any focus or evade tokens. A TIE swarm works exponentially better when every ship can focus so this was really really bad news.

On the next turn I did a Kiogran turn with my formation including Dark Curse while Adam tried to turn his Interceptors and Vader to get firing arcs on the swarm. I think this is where Adam's inexperience showed as he set up his ships beautifully to come up behind me however by performing a syncronised K-turn all of his ships were sitting ducks right in front of my entire swarm.

I unloaded all I had at Carnor and he promptly exploded. Adam's return fire took a few hulls from my ships.

On the next turn I moved up with a 2 green to get rid of my stress and performed a focus on all my ships. Adam completed his turn and had his remaining ships pointing right at my formation.

I unloaded all I had at Vader and to my surprise survived. The force was strong with that one!

We continued to trade fire and I eventually took down Vader and one of his Interceptors. However his ships didn't go down without a fight and took out two of my TIE fighters.

With only a single Interceptor left he was effectively out of the fight. Another win for yours truly. So far so good!

Adam flew really well but ultimately loss as he didn't force me to fly. A very good game.

Game 3

My third game was against Jenny. I've played against Jenny before back at the Dublin Regional Championship which I managed to get a win. However this time around she was running a much more dangerous list:

This was a crucial game as the winner would secure their place into the top two.

Ok I'll have to leave it at that for today as I need to get to bed! Plus there is still quite a bit of content to go through.

I will post the rest of the tourney report in Part 2B which will follow tomorrow (hopefully). Everyone likes a cliff hanger anyway right? :D

Stay tuned.