X-Wing: Wave 13 Rampant Speculation Time
FFG just teased some new X-Wing ships. You know what that means… it’s time to discuss all the content we can’t see.It’s always fun when new content is teased. We get to salivate over the spoiled new ships and upgrades, and speculate freely on the unspoiled content. Between those two activities, the latter is more fun. FFG’s teasers for the late-breaking Wave 13 ships– new movie ships!– allow us to do both.
Resistance Bomber
Let’s look at the pilot cards. Three unique pilots, one generic. We can count on two things here: even the unique pilots will lack actual names, and none will have access to an EPT. Generally, if your top ace doesn’t have an EPT, no one does– which follows in the pattern for the bombers, as we’ve seen with the K-Wing and Punisher. (Yet the Scurrg does, for some reason… that was a mistake.) As for the names, we can take our cue from the Episode Seven ships: only Poe had an actual name in the TFA Starter set, with the other names all being genericized to avoid spoilers. You can see “Crimson” as the first word for three of the four ships; the other sure looks like “Cobalt”, which is in keeping with the Good Guys’ color-based naming conventions. (Join us next movie when we’ve upgraded to “Ruby” and “Azure” squadrons.)
Now the upgrade cards. A bunch of them are reprints, but in some cases they’re reprints of previously sole-sourced upgrades, like Thermal Detonator and Targeting Synchronizer. That’s nice, but not really what we’re here for. Let’s look at the new ones. Ordnance Silos and Trajectory Simulator were already spoiled. (I’m obliged to say at this point: “Maybe *this* will be the card that makes the TIE Punisher playable!” Ha ha ha. Moving on.) The new “Rattled” condition card can be clearly seen, so that’s no fun. And we’ll have a better look at “Adv– Op–” later on.
That leaves us with two obscured upgrade cards. Both are BSF-17 only. First, “Def– Pl–“. Between the art, Star Wars terminology, and the word “defending” in the card text, I’d wager it’s a modification, probably defensive in nature, with a name like “Deflection Plating” or similar.
The other one is “Cros– Form—“. It has no upgrade icon in the corner, meaning it’s either a title or modification. It’s uncommon, but not unheard of, for FFG to release mutually exclusive ship-unique upgrades, so it *could* be a modification that competes with Def– Pl–. That said, it would fit into the Rebels’/Resistance’s theming of defense and teamwork for that to finish as “Cross Formation” (or Crossed, perhaps), especially as the first words seem to be “When defending”. This would make Cros– Form– a title, since a formation isn’t a physical modification. UNWARRANTED GUESS AT CARD TEXT: “When defending, if there is at least one other Resistance ship at range 1-2 of the attacker, add 1 evade result” (bolded words are the visible ones).
As for the dial, they show us a white 3-bank, but that tells us little. Most ships have a white 3-bank, even in the Rebellion. You have to be a HWK or a B-Wing to have a red 3-bank. So that’s all we know about the dial right now: Better than a HWK.
TIE Silencer
I’m amused that the lowest PS pilot available for this ship is PS4, the highest floor we’ve seen to date. I’m guessing the PS4 has no EPT, but the PS6 generic does.
As with the Bomber, it’s nice to see previously sole-sourced upgrades being made more available (in this case, Sensor Jammer, Primed Thrusters, and– alleluia!– Autothrusters). Never again will someone be guilted/compelled into buying an unwanted and unloved Star Viper!
FFG throws down the gauntlet with the dial reveal. Green two turn? Okay, so this is TIE Interceptor 2.0, got it. (Though it probably says something that an arc-dodger needs six HP to survive in this day and age…) Probably a similar laydown of greens to the very-generous TIE Interceptor, but swap the 3K for some S-Loops. But then, Kylo is 35 points naked, the same as Soontir fully involved. If we go with the obligatory PtL+Autothrusters, we’re 40 without touching the systems or tech slots.
Speaking of tech, two of the three unspoiled cards from the Silencer are tech upgrades. The one on the left, “Th– Tra–“, tells us basically nothing more, other than that it’s small ship only. Given the art, we can expect it’s probably offensive in nature, but that’s as far as we can go for now.
“Adv Op” is a different story. Now that we can see it more clearly than in the Bomber photo, we can see that the text looks eerily familiar. In fact, it looks nearly identical to our old friend, Comm Relay– but the “fo–” word is almost surely “focus”. That’s it then: this is probably Advanced Optics, and it’s probably the focus token equivalent to Comm Relay.
What about that EPT, “Debris [something]”? First off, there are two copies– generous, maybe? Small ship only, we can tell, and it has the action header. This is where context matters: the Silencer does not have an evade action (!), but it’s packaged with two evade tokens. UNWARRANTED GUESS AT CARD TEXT: “Action: Assign 1 evade token to your ship for each obstacle at range 1, to a maximum of two”. Probably FFG’s thought is that you give Kylo Advanced Optics so he can hold a focus token going into battle, then use Debris (Runner?) to load up evade tokens to survive the initial pass, then turn inside your enemy and mulch him. Or not. Who knows!
~Of course, I could be completely off-base with all of this, but with any luck, you’ll have forgotten by then.
