The success of slimming down Kylo + Vonreg for the Lima Open and still having a good run kept me thinking. The bid war ensuing from both the release of Wave 8 and the meta still warping after the nerfing of the Nantex means that many lists can be slimmed down and still remain reasonably effective. 13 points of bid are impressive, but with the Mag Pulses not being fired every round, could I drop even them for a massive 18 point bid and still remain effective? If I could, then perhaps I would never have to worry about the bid war or just hope for certain matchups in larger events. It was off to Enno’s Endor 3-Round (cut to 2) TTS tournament to see if I could achieve it, functioning as this tournament’s token non-German speaker. Can it work while bidding so deep as to awaken a Balrog?
No. Let’s begin this cautionary tale of why you shouldn’t remove all the utility options only to better your chances in very specific and rare matchups.
Round 1: Rafter 2K
Tabletop.TO is down and ListFortress doesn’t have an entry for this tournament, so it’s either building the list myself in Raithos, or lazily listing:
Mace + Calibrated Laser Targeting + Sense, Anakin and Obi-wan both with Brilliant Evasion + Predator + Ion Cannon + Stealth Device.
This is going to be a rough one. Granted, Antonio hasn’t kitted out his Eta’s the way I do, as cancerous perfect information (one copy of Sense per Jedi) blockers + Autoblasters, but he has built them more open-ended, and thus probably correctly. Ion Cannon means a 3 dice base gun for the full arc and Brilliant Evasion allows you to go ham on offense with your force. Predator gives a passive second mod to your bullseye primaries and Stealth Device is a prerequisite. I use it as a softening of blows once someone catches me in arc, but one less paranoid about ill-fated greens can wield them to demoralizing effect.
Despite the intense defensive nature of the Eta-2, I typically like the matchup Kylo + Vonreg has, even when it is against a better player like Antonio who beats me in about 66+% of our games. If no R4 Astromech is equipped, the Vonreg ability forces force depletion in order to avoid strain, which stacks with Outmaneuver. Said Vonreg ability, as well as Outmaneuver shots, are easy to trigger with Afterburners, especially in snagging a Range 1 shot. I did have a little more trouble with the Mag Pulse Warhead variant of this list against the Eta-2, but the threat of the crit from the Mag Pulse makes Vonreg a little more of a control piece than a damage dealer. With its range bonus cancellation, the missiles allow the Red Baron to take things more slowly and to snipe a target’s tokens off so Kylo’s torpedo can land. True, I’ve never had Vonreg live past the first engagement against the Eta-2 save for 1 game, and that 1 game my opponent didn’t have Sense. As someone who’s dabbled quite a lot with Anakin and Obi playing Diet SuperKylo for Republic, I should know that once Vonreg’s dial is in range of Sense, he’s not escaping from any engagement. He has to fully trade and go in, lest he waste attacks.
Now, dear reader, you can see the problems I will face in otherwise a good matchup. With no Afterburners, Vonreg doesn’t have the speed, flexibility, or action efficiency needed to stack the damage high enough to break an average-rolling Eta-2’s defenses. And without Mag-Pulse Warheads, he’s only going to be effective at close range, where I know the Eta-2 does best with its pre-maneuver repositions and outmaneuvering knife-fighting dial.
Fortunately, Rafter’s Anakin, trying to punish a possible attack vector from Vonreg, clipped the gas cloud, gaining a strain and no actions! Although my Vonreg could score Outmaneuver and Range 1 (!) had he equipped Afterburners (as the correct “generic” move there would be a 3 forward and not a 2 bank, reacting to whatever Anakin does with either available order of Afterburners and Fine-Tuned Thrusters), it’s still a good opportunity. The barrel roll sadly can’t be finagled to arc-dodge and land some Outmaneuver to stack with the strain, but the bullseye means that Anakin has to conserve force on offense as not only is it shutting off Brilliant Evasion, but it opens Vonreg’s ability so long as Anakin doesn’t use Intuitive Controls. The Ion Cannon’s 1 hit meets double blanks, deactivating a shield on Vonreg. Vonreg rolls a hit. And rerolls the focus into focus and the blank into blank. Anakin is let off with 2 defensive paint.
I’m in a bit of a bind here now. Anakin is still fully operational, and the Sense carrier approaches. Again, without Afterburners, I lack both the speed or wherewithal necessary to just yeet away from the fight, especially with a juicy 5-forward through the cloud and a boost. As such, Vonreg’s only real option is to engage somewhere, so I turn him in towards Anakin. With Anakin’s Koiogran Turn, I could attempt to power through 4 dice with full mods on red dice, but I decline and disengage behind the cloud. Even if I didn’t immediately blankout on the opening engage, I don’t like putting faith in greens. This unfortunately frontloads my hopes on red dice holding up, which they sometimes can fail to do.
Fearful of the 5-foward boost from Mace scoring a cheeky shot at Vonreg, whilst also hoping to catch Anakin at Range 1 should he have cheekily turned and used the ability to remove the stress in order to roll starboard, I performed the 1 hard with Vonreg around the cloud. I hoped this would catch Rafter off guard as I do perform corner-reaching Koiogran-turns with Vonreg against him. It did not, which now means that Vonreg is now in Sense Range and without a shot, also prevented from boosting as he’d lose his obstruction from Obi-Wan’s Ion Cannon. Sure, Anakin’s Ion Cannon would have caught only 1 of the Segnor’s Loops and not the 5K, but as another reminder of my lack of Afterburners, the 5K and boost would have offered Vonreg a few options.
Knowing full well that Rafter will have perfect information on Vonreg this turn, I dial in the hard-1. Given the positions of each of the Jedi, each disengagement route, if it isn’t blockable, can still have multiple guns on target. Since this is the end of Vonreg–either the short way of engaging or the long and ineffective way of running–it’s just best to admit it and engage. After Anakin’s boost, Kylo rolls back from his 2-hard and focus in order to catch him Range 1 in bullseye with no escape save a roll to Range 2. Perceiving this as a means of messing up Anakin’s engagement, he focuses for offense/defense, not wanting to lose output by taking the evade. Vonreg locks Mace, and hoping for a dodge, boosts in.
Obi-wan barely clips his base, but the single-modded Ion Cannon inflicts only 1 hit, which is dodged; Rafter doesn’t want Obi-wan to get rekt by a torpedo from Kylo. Vonreg rolls 4 dice, and rerolls 3 dice, but shows only 2 hits against Mace’s natties. Mace missed the bullseye for a free focus result on CLT, but that won’t stop his 3 hits from dealing the 3 damage needed to kill Vonreg. As a little consolation, Kylo actually miraculously paints out on his offense…to deal 1 crit to Anakin: Wounded Pilot.
The variance has been mismatched here, but as I continue to play the game, I further deepen my realization that my Vonreg “build” here is a worse version of Quickdraw. Sure, it’s fine for a 3-ship Super Kylo, although I’d prefer to include Quickdraw in a 3-ship build, but he doesn’t have the tools needed to perform the damage-slugging trade role I need him to perform in a 2-ship build. When Kylo’s range 1 full mod shot on an obstructed 1 force Mace fail from not being able to generate more than 3 hits, I am reminded that my reds have been rather suboptimal for the clear majority of the match, but that’s the issue. Lean Vonreg has been forcing me to merely hope that modded reds generate results and if they don’t…I just don’t have a contingency plan now. In a foolish bid to win the bid war, I lost the best attribute of my list: variance resilience.
One benefit I suppose from making Vonreg too lean is that this Obi-Wan is actually more expensive than him, so if I kill the Obi-Wan and not get halved, then it is perhaps a feasible victory. The problem is that there will be shots coming Kylo’s way during the engagement, so I have to wait it out until I can generate a decent turn where Kylo loses a shield or two at most and still fires a fully-modded torpedo. I’m not going to YOLO at the first opportunity; in a casual pickup game the previous day with Timo Hetzel, one of the day’s participants, I let me greed get a hold of me and YOLO’d, hoping for average results while feeling lazy. It did not go well.
Things start to turn brighter as the torpedo lands on Obi-Wan, but with the crit being a Damaged Sensor Array, I still need to work very hard to turn this around. Damaged Sensor Array is one of the reasons (along with Direct Hit!, Loose Stabilizer, Damaged Engine, Structural Damage, etc.) why I never show the Dark Side to the Eta-2 as it shuts down both Intuitive Controls and the evade action. But that’d help me a lot more if it were on Anakin instead of the Wounded Pilot. Who cares about Obi’s repositioning or evade? Anakin has to be shaken off from Kylo before he can reengage without having to sacrifice a casino owner in order to please the dice gods.
And thus, I disengage. Or at least try to. Obi’s Talon Roll (yet another 50/50 that I failed to guess properly) means that Kylo’s only disengage route is through a cloud, hoping that Anakin doesn’t gain an unobstructed shot. The shot is clear, and deactivates Kylo’s last shield.
Things spiral out from “possibly barely winnable” to a lost cause. Anakin still fully operational means Kylo is put on the run and unable to land a good shot. He gets halved, which now means he has to kill both Obi-Wan and Anakin (or half of Anakin + half of Mace) in order not to lose. Killing just Obi-Wan and Mace would lose the game by a point. I try to start the damage on Mace, but get just a shield. Even though Mace was strained, Kylo’s 4 dice modded by a focus generate only 2 hits. Wanting the pain to end, I rammed Kylo to Range 1 of Obi. If Anakin rolls as per expected (assuming he didn’t chase the disengage route), then the game ends unless Kylo can pull a miracle paintout on defense in addition to no crits rolled. If Anakin has his reds suddenly go bad, then I get a free shot on Obi. The reds did not go bad. 0 – 200 tabling defeat.
Round 2: Totem
5 Khiraxz’s with Predator.
With no Mag Pulse Warheads to land depletes + jams or Afterburners to generate interesting engagements, my plan with Vonreg is to engage such that he’s an easy kill, but not too easy of a kill. If it takes 2 turns for Totem to kill him, then Kylo would in all likelihood have punched in a lot of damage. This, in tandem with Vonreg dealing some damage himself on his way out, would give Kylo an easy endgame. Sure, it’s not nearly as impressive as 2 uncatchable damage dealers biting throughout the game to nab some points, but I don’t want to rely on greens in that sort of endgame should I make a mistake and get caught.
It doesn’t really work out that way. Vonreg’s unretaliated opening Range 2 Outmaneuver shot (no mods as a result of boost needed and no Afterburners present), likely to score a damage, deals none. That’s a wash, as it’s not the attack I was looking for. That attack, in the screenshot above, saw Kylo use lock + focus to land: hit and crit. The only reason that attack landed was because Totem blanked out on defense. Fortunately, the 2 meaningful shots on Vonreg don’t kill him, so the diversion is still out there.
Kylo gets caught at Range 1 despite having a disengage route. I’m currently suffering from target fixation after seeing that Proton Torpedo miserably fall flat. And miserably fall flat the modified attacks would continue to do, with Vonreg rolling not a single hit on his 4 dice attack, rerolled with the lock into…not a single hit. Kylo’s torpedo lands only 3 paint, so it only deactivates the shiel on Blue. I was fine with Vonreg dying up there, but was hoping for maybe some more damage inflicted thus far. Luckily, my target fixation is not punished as Kylo dodges Yellow’s shot.
Despite not able to punch in some initial damage, the game state is still workable should I just not get halved. As I’m saving my mods for defense against the two potshots facing Kylo, I’m only able to land another hit on Green, but hey, every little is a gain. Especially now that I finally scored points.
Taking only shots obstructed by the upper left gas cloud, damage is agonizingly slowly plinked into the easiest target. Repositioning to strafe around the cloud for protection while the Khiraxz’s try to regain position and deny area is the easy part, but damage just seems to be impossible, as any Range 3 defense is blocked whilst even Range 1 attacks are just not delivering the hits needed. Unable to think of much else than trying to maximize my number of attacks and just hope that the modified reds can be….modified to something useful, my screenshotting became more lax than usual.
Fortunately, I’m able to eventually completely remove Blue, again while defending only against obstructed shots. That now puts my score up to 60 points, just one point shy of Vonreg. Yet, it is a tricky situation, as I don’t want to defend against many more shots, even if the vast majority of them thus far have been obstructed. Thus, even with a few tempting Range 1 shots on Green open, I’m not going to engage with some Range 2 shots on Kylo. Especially considering how weak most of my attacks have been.
Eventually, an opening came up such that Kylo could attack a target with either a force or a focus, and save the other mod for defense. Even if the ship maxed out on hits, as it did have a target lock, simply one paint would prevent half points from being scored. I jumped on the opening, as time was starting to run low and I didn’t want to be forced into less pleasant defensive positions. A shield was plinked off of Brown, who naturally nattied 2 hits and a crit, punching all 3 damage into Kylo’s blankout. The odds of not needing to spend a lock on that and score that much damage were 0.24%. I guess it happens.
At this point, not stunned at all for rolling the very reason why I only play the Eta-2 casually, I try to land some unretaliated shots, but they are all coming up short and not going to be enough. In this game state, I have to leave only 1.5 Khiraxz’s on the board, but I was able to only remove 2.5 of them (the score was incorrectly entered as 80 points scored instead of the 100, but I don’t care). Cornered and forced to defend after I dialed a desperately greedy maneuver, Kylo was eliminated with more rough breaks. 100 – 200 fiasco.
Not feeling it after a -12 variance loss preceded by a -8.5ish loss, I called it quits and dropped. But that’s the thing: neither of those “atrocious” dice scores are typically enough to do in Kylo + Vonreg. The problem is that by removing Vonreg’s utility for extra bid, those scores are now very relevant. Not able to deal meaningful damage while going slow without Mag Pulse Warheads yet not able to escape or pounce better without Afterburners, Vonreg is just bad Quickdraw. These problems are further compounded by how poorly I was fielding him, as I was flying with the intent of the trade role without the necessary equipment. Furthermore, I’m quite certain that my intent of not trusting greens and sending Vonreg to his death to cause maximum damage is more or less made apparent by the lack of escape or damage mitigating utility. I suppose in retrospect, it’s not surprising how poorly I fared, with forced and limited options, all of them bad.
Despite only playing 2 games and not seeing how this variant would do with positive or mild variance, I would consider this experiment with all its limited data very indicative. I turned a rather positive matchup into a hopeless one, while very much limiting my options in another one, thereby rending it the same fate. The ultimate lesson thus is: if you race too hard to the bottom, you might just bottom out.
Since it follows that the most Kylo + Vonreg can reliably bid is 13–how deep I bid for the Lima Open and making it to 4-2 and 19th–I believe the ultimate decision in loading out the list lies between Afterburners or Mag Pulse Warheads (and obviously not in neither). Personally, I’d prefer the Afterburners on Vonreg and not just as it was the loadout I used for Ryloth. Every game in the Lima Open, I felt like something was missing even when clutch Mag Pulse shots were doing work. Vonreg just isn’t a true interceptor without the Afterburners. But with Afterburners, there’s a lot he can do, even if for just 2 rounds. 11 points of bid gets you places against the single-digit bidders, but it loses you the bid war.
I can’t play in the TTS Polish Nationals, but were I to do so, I’d probably fly the Afterburner Vonreg version and hope I don’t run into a deep bidder. If the prerequisite all-nighter would seem a bit rough, especially given how exhausted I felt pulling them for both Dathomir and Ryloth, then I’d probably field Silencer + 2U. The Kylo+Tavson+Starkiller/Thannison version is very good and has been proven, especially by the list’s originator Brad Stryczek, but ever since Trej (my Round 2 opponent for Dathomir) made cut at one of the Galaxies Qualifiers (Crait?) with Holo + 2U, I’ve been wondering if Kylo’s little brother could work out. You lose 2 force and rigging the opponent’s damage deck, but you can mitigate that force loss through Fanatical and Terex while gaining Advanced Optics and an ability that will let you punch damage through obstacles. I don’t know if that’s better than just dropping the Optics for Phasma for that synergy with Thannison, but it leaves open interesting choices. Maybe I’ll give it a go for the first tournament next year. (Yes, I know that there are no Biohexacrypt Codes, but the presence of a second shuttle as well as Terex mitigate that. Terex is most flexible on Tavson if the jam starts off on the shuttle without being lost).
“Blackout” (63)
Fanatical (2)
Advanced Optics (5)
Ship total: 70 Half Points: 35 Threshold: 3
Lieutenant Tavson (64)
Agent Terex (7)
Ship total: 71 Half Points: 36 Threshold: 6
Petty Officer Thanisson (59)
Ship total: 59 Half Points: 30 Threshold: 6
Total: 200
View in Yet Another Squad Builder 2.0: https://raithos.github.io/?f=First%20Order&d=v8ZsZ200Z237X181W186WWY289XWW324WWWWWY281XWWWWWWW&sn=Unnamed%20Squadron&obs=
That will do it for today. And if you are flying in the Polish Nationals, FOR THE LOVE OF THE FORCE, LEARN FROM MY EXPERIMENT TODAY AND EQUIP MAG PULSE OR [and let’s face it, the correct answer:] AFTERBURNERS ON YOUR VONREG!!!!!
Screaming into the Void 