Battle report - Marquee Models - Harlow - 24-04-16

Marquee Models in Harlow! The good thing about going to tournaments is that you get to scope out lots of different shops and venues. The big bonus of today was that I’ve actually discovered my most local FLGS. At a paltry 20 minute drive away, it’s closer than all the other shops I’ve been visiting, plus the stock of X-Wing products was great. Thoroughly recommended!

So anyway, this was another trip for me and my best mate and wingman, Joel (who’s blog you can find here)  I was running Chewie with a Lothal Rebel and Joel was running DenBot (Dengar and IGB)

My list:

Chewie – Lone Wolf / C3PO / Gunner / title

Lothal Rebel – FCS / TLT / Hera / Ezra

Chewie is fairly self explanatory, I have been running him with predator for a while but due to points being at a premium, I’ve had to relegate that down to Lone Wolf… which I actually love! Lone wolf does require you have to give a bit more thought to deployment, however it also makes Chewie a great endgame ship for a few reasons.

1)   it’s obviously a reroll on offence, so long as you get a blank (and let’s be honest, with 3 dice, you almost always get at least one blank!)

2)   there is some great synergy with 3PO. When you roll a single die, you call 0 for 3PO, if you get an evade on the dice, you have your evade, well done! However, if you get a blank, you get your evade from 3PO, THEN you can lone wolf reroll potentially getting another evade! That’s 2 evades from one dice, an impossibility made possible!

The Lothal Rebel, otherwise known as the stress-boat. Get yourself stressed and you can turn an eye to a crit with Ezra AND you can still have access to your entire dial due to Hera! Fantastic! An odd side effect of this is that I have actually had to AVOID green moves once or twice because I only have one stress token and doing the green move would bump me and clear my stress resulting in one less modified eyeball. TLT and FCS are obvious inclusions really.

So, onto the matchups…

Match 1 aka Lucky Crits!

Kyle – Rec Spec / TLT

Miranda – TLT

Poe – R2D2 / Integrated Astromech

I had a fair amount of trouble at the start with ranges and arcs etc. and the Ghost took a bit of a battering. I managed to get Kyle off the board after a few rounds of shooting. Kyle’s inclusion in this squad allows Poe to do red manoeuvres or take Target Locks and still be assigned his customary focus… pretty cool! Fast forward a few rounds and Poe is in pretty good shape; 1 shield left. He takes a face full of red from the Chewie (the Ghost is well gone by now!) and suffers a hit and crit. The hit kills the shield and then the crit comes up as major explosion, the red from major explosion comes up as a hit and the crit taken from that? You guessed it, Direct Hit! Dead Poe! I couldn’t believe my luck! (We later realised that Poe had Integrated Astromech so could have saved himself but as we were both so into the engagement, we had both forgotten!) Miranda vs. Chewie. Could be anyone’s game. In the end I snatched it… just! (With another lucky Direct Hit!)

Paul probably flew better than me in this match but because this is (partially) a game of luck I got the win in the end!

Win 100 – 47

Match 2 aka Triple Jumpmasters L

3 x Contracted Scout – Deadeye / R4 Agromech / Plasma Torps / Extra Muns / Guidance Chips

The most dreaded list in X-Wing currently! Half the reason I took the Ghost and Chewie was the fact that 29HP is enough to eat a fair few torps.

I actually think, flying wise, this was my best game of the day. I couldn’t pull off the victory though. There’s just too much damage output for a player of my calibre to weather.

Probably the most interesting moment in the match came about the quarters of the way through the match. I had taken out a Jumpmaster and my Ghost had bitten the dust. I was faced with the decision of rolling to destroy the second Jumpmaster OR rolling to cause one damage against the third Jumpmaster, giving me half points on it. I went for the kill shot, destroyed the second Jumpmaster and promptly got blown to smithereens the next turn.

Still a very fun match and I’m happy with that result, as I’ve never faced the triple Jumpmasters before.

Also, question: how good are these tokens?

Answer: freaking awesome!

Loss – 66 – 100

Match 3 aka "Oh yea! I’ve got gunner!"

Soontir – Autothrusters / Stealth Device / Royal Guard / PTL

Carnor - Autothrusters / Stealth Device / Royal Guard / PTL

Omicron – Palp / FCS

Now, if I’m right, this is supposed to be a bad matchup for my list. Imperial Aces with Autothrusters should destroy me, right?

Well, I must have got lucky! The first part of the match was me dealing with the shuttle. By the time that had been destroyed the Ghost was on one hull… then it died (I’m beginning to see a pattern here!) So, full health Chewie vs. full health Soontir and Carnor.

I got a lucky crit on Carnor. Major explosion again! Then a hit again! Console fire… it’s not a direct hit but it’s good enough! Next turn, console fire procs a hit and Carnor goes down in flames. Then it was Chewie vs. Soontir and we went round and round and round 3PO-ing, Lone Wolfing, Stealth Device-ing and Autothrusting basically resulting in no damage whatsoever! About 5 minutes before time was called I glanced down at my cards and noticed one that I didn’t recognise… I picked it up and blew a thick layer of dust off it. Underneath, it read G.U.N.N.E.R… OH FOR F&*K SAKE! Yes, I’d for gotten to use Gunner this entire match, all those times when Soontir’s green dice had whiffed and he’s had to use his stack of tokens to get out of trouble… I could have shot at an untokened Soontir…

We flew on and eventually time was called. A win, but it could have been better if I’d remembered Gunner.

“Joel, have you got a marker?”

“Yea, why?”

“I’m going to write Gunner on my hand!”

So I did.

Win 65 – 47

Match 4 aka The Swarm

5 x Green Squadron Pilot – Adaptability / Crackshot / Autothrusters / refit / title

I’d only ever played against one A-wing swarm before… I’d got royally mullered by it so when I saw this I wasn’t too hopeful really. I messed up the initial engagement and got many crackshot-ed hits landed on my Ghost (good job there was that debris field in the way that allowed me to roll the one green dice that prompted the crackshot spend) So… round about turn 4 or 5, the ghost had died and so had 2 A-wings.

3 A-wings vs. Chewie! It. Was. On.

Actually, it wasn’t really on that much, lots of flying around not much focused fire. I got the odd shield off An A-wing here and there and pretty much deflected everything that was thrown at me. We ended with Chewie on 2 shields and the three 3 A-wings all on 1 shield or less.

Here's a picture of Chewie pulling a wheely! (what is this move called if you don't have wheels?)

Before I wrap up this match, what of my Gunner problem? Yea, still forgot to use it a fair few times. Better than last match though. Also, I’ve realised that writing things on your hands doesn’t work… because, erm, you don’t look at your hands that much… at one point I whiffed a roll and facepalmed myself with my ‘gunner-ed’ hand prompting my opponent (very generously) to say ‘Gunner?’

A modified loss for me (do they exist? Well, a modified win for my opponent, anyway)

40 – 47

So I went 2 – 2 for my troubles and came 6^th of 14 players (don’t have to change the name of the blog just yet. lol) and got a lady rebel VI (badass!) and some acrylic ion tokens. Happy with that!

Did I learn anything? Yes, study initial engagements! Also, REMEMBER .TO. USE. GUNNER! I have another tourney in early May at ibuywargames and I think I’m going to keep the same list! Just got to get some more practice in with it beforehand (helllllooooo Vassal)

Ok well, this is Red XIII signing off. (I made myself a callsign, squeee!) Until next time, fly casual!