X WING: New Tie Fighter Aces
The new Tie Fighter aces are in a gaming store near you. Lets have a look at Wampa and friends.
What’s in a name?
Tie fighter aces are out and the pack also comes with a free Epic ship too, the Gonzo to compliment the rebels ‘Whale.’
Yeah, so the Gozanti Imperial assault carrier set, (The Tie rack?), maybe doesn’t come with some tip top names like the barrel scraping Chaser but do the TIE fighter Aces in the set have potential? Without repeating too much of the FFG article, here is what I feel they may have missed.
WAMPA
Apart from a slightly cringe worthy name, (although I do recognise it is a much loved ice monster), his pilot ability could be very tasty against low hull, high shield ships like B Wings. What I felt they missed was to point out two nice synergies that could go with him, Lt. Colzet and the big man himself, Emperor Palpatine. The tricky bit with Wampa is getting his ability to trigger. You need to get a crit, then you cancel all results and deal your opponent a face down damage card.
One list I thought of could be:
Darth Vader with Veteran instincts, title and ATC
Colzet with title and ATC, (I like the higher damage output)
Wampa
Omnicron Shuttle with Palpatine
98 points
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There is still room to maneuver like giving either accuracy corrector or fire control to Colzet or giving Vader a different EPT. It’s annoying to drop the engine upgrade on Vader but you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. The handy thing about this is you can use the emperor to give Wampa a guaranteed crit, and then use Colzet to flip it face up. WAMPA!
You must shout WAMPA when doing so. It’ll be in the new FAQ.
YOUNGSTER
Surely Oldster or Wise old Owl would be more appropriate given the pilot ability which is any TIE fighter within range 1 -3 may use Youngster’s EPT if it is an EPT with the Action header. This causes what could be a good ship to be limited to effectively Expose or Marksmanship. There is dare devil but that could be somewhat disastrous for a ship without boost and three hull.
I would only plump for Expose but the negative effect of that is making the ties a bit squishy to return fire.
CHASER
This is when I had a bit of sick in mouth. My initial reaction was that like the name, the ship was garbage too. To be fair, the way that they suggest using Chaser, who can get focus tokens assigned to him if a friendly ship within range one spends a focus, is reasonable enough. Throw him forward, ideally in shooting range one and evade and make your opponent take decisions on who to shoot.
One option of combining Youngster and Chaser could be:
Howl runner
Youngster with Expose
2 Black Squadron Push the Limits
Chaser
Night Beast
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The theory would be that it would allow you to fire with four ships that are exposed and focused with Howlrunner’s re roll. The downside is that you have a lot of different pilot skills which can make maneuvering hard and that you only have two defense dice.
SCOURGE
Decent name, decent ability but is the PS 7 too high to really consistently work? Scourge gets to roll one extra attack die if the defender has at least one damage card. This means initially in the opening phases of the game scourge wants to be firing lower down the order. Scourge does have an EPT which could be a place for either Swarm Tactics or Decoy but I cant help but feel Back Stabber is a better investment.
You could combine Scourge with Wampa, but first you have to make Wampa work which could mean quite a complicated build built round a chain of synergies which if the lynch pin of that is removed, the rest of the list could fall apart easily.
Conclusion
The new TIE fighters, with the exception of Scourge to an extent, all require some sort of synergetic list build to function as effectively as possible. One of the issues I feel about overly synergising any list is that it can all start to go wrong if it is overly complicated or a key ship is removed early in the game.
Youngster could be very good if new EPT Action cards come out in later waves but in the meantime I feel he is limited to the Expose EPT to be most effective. On the tournament circuit I expect we may see Wampa and the Palpmobile with sprinklings of Chaser and Scourge. Youngster will probably make an appearance in a swarm but two agility TIE fighters might be too easy to remove.
Overall they are perhaps a little underwhelming but not terrible.
~What’s your thoughts?
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