X-Wing: Lose and Learn
How do you take your losses and turn them into a learning experience? Here are some handy tips anyone can use.
Look, let’s face facts – we’re all going to have bad days and bad tournament performances. But what’s the best way to move forward with those losses and take something positive from them?
Now, it goes without saying that there’s a lot of general advice I can give about losing and how to take lessons from it, advice applicable to *any* game. So we’re not going to do that today. Instead, I want to focus on X-Wing advice specifically, and hit on three main points I want you to focus on after you had a bad day of X-Wing, starting with…
Don’t Blame Your Dice
Wait, wait, hold up! Hear me out! Yes, dice can cause a hefty swing in a game, but you know what will guarantee you never improve as an X-Wing player? Walking away from a loss grumbling that you only lost because your dice went cold. Even if you didn’t roll a single evade all game, blaming your dice will never get you anywhere. And honestly, I argue that even though dice luck can affect a game, you never win or lose because of dice.
I’ll show you what I think of the next person who tries to tell me the ‘Odds’ of that happening.
Instead, I encourage you to look at the rest of the game. Did you over-commit your flanking ship too early? Could you have boosted/barrel-rolled out of arc, denying yourself a shot, but also denying your opponent a shot, knowing you can re-engage faster? These are the kinds of questions you should ask yourself, rather than be angry that Darth Vader died when taking range 3 shots from 4 different ships.
This is where it would be a great idea to take notes immediately after a match, if you can. I keep a notebook with my X-Wing stuff, and after every game I write down 3 things I think went well, and 3 mistakes I think I made. Going forward, I actually recommend this to everyone that can, just remember to take notes after the match, instead of at the end of the day. I dunno about you, but my memory of Game 1 gets fuzzy at the end of Game 6 in one day.
Turn Zero
I feel like it’s no exaggeration to say that games can be won and lost on deployment and asteroid placement alone, and I’m far from the first person to suggest this.
Listbuilding
Last and least among these considerations is examining your list. Yes, I actually mean that this should be your last consideration. It’s very tempting to walk away from a day of losing and decide that your list is garbage, and throw it out, go back to the drawing board. I should know, I’ve fallen into that trap. But you have to keep in mind that by doing so, you lose out on the actual practice time you’ve gotten in with flying those ships. Often it can be the right idea to make tweaks to your list, replace one ship or a few upgrades, but replacing an entire list should only be done after carefully examining the first two steps in this article.
~ Lose and Learn my fellow pilots, lost and learn.
