I think they probably wanted to introduce the Scum faction in an eye-catching way. FFG has released several X-Wing products that don't contain models, and as you've pointed out, there's a precedent for including bits for ship models that aren't part of the package. The most official word I've heard on this is now a couple of years old, and it was something to effect that it was "very unlikely" that we would see card-and-cardstock-only packs. It definitely didn't rule out the possibility, and FFG has done a lot of surprising things with this game since then. At this point, it seems like an obvious and easy thing to do. And popular and profitable, too, I'd say. C&C expansions would appeal to players who are already deep into the game and don't need a model blister to consider this sort of thing a must-buy. They could release new C&C expansions for each faction every other year to keep up with power creep. Assuming that the packs are well-designed, new players would be encouraged to pick them up as a way to get their favorite early-wave ships into competitive shape. And if you want to fly as Chewbacca in a Lambda shuttle? Well then you want the X-Wing Rebel Command Pack #1, my friend!

Expansion packs that don't include any ships, just cards and cardstock.

I'm sure they are aware of it, and will almost certainly address it in the next update to the tournament rules. Until then, talk to your tournament organizer ahead of time if you're not sure what's going on with the game mats at their event.

Small ship only, maybe.

I know.

That's more like what an X-Wing racing track should like, based on my experiences running these sorts of things. Wide lines, simple turns. I'm thinking about running another race soon, and I think I'll use a similar layout to what you're using there, but starting in one corner and having the ships follow a Z-shaped course, no loop. Instead of package tokens, I'll probably designate special zones on the track. In the red "stress zone" any ship that ends its maneuver overlapping the zone receives 1 stress. In the green "boost zone", you get a free boost if you land there. In the yellow "charge zone" you get a token that you can spend to make a full-power attack (because you can't attack without one). For the ships' Pilot Skill, I want to try letting the players choose their PS each round. As you've probably noticed, there are sometimes racing advantages to be gained by having a low Pilot Skill, so I think I might give each player a D6 (maybe D8 or D10) and let them secretly choose their Pilot Skill while setting their maneuver by indicating it with the faceup side of the die. At the end of the Planning phase, all players reveal their Pilot Skill settings. Initiative order would be used as a tiebreaker. This would prevent the weird situation in which players who choose a high PS think they deserve to win the race if they cross the finish line later in the same round as a pilot with lower Pilot Skill. To give the players something to shoot at other than each other, I might distribute some satellite tokens around the track. The racers' weapons are set to low power, making them useless against enemy ships (unless charged up). The satellites will self-destruct when a harmless targeting beam strikes them in just the right place, if you need a plausible explanation for how this works. The satellites would have stats like maybe agility 1 and hull 1, and when they pop they splash some damage or stress tokens or something like that to everything in Range 1.

I was not expecting that.

Turrets are overused generally. I think they're the main reason tournament play is so different from the starter game. I might go so far as to establish a 1 turreted ship limit for the 100/6 tournament format. I think turrets would still be a major factor in the metagame, but not auto-includes, which I think they are for Scum and Rebels that really want to make the elimination rounds at large events. (That Rey + Jan Ors HWK list with the 5-6 damage attacks is the tipping point for me. A turret should be a support mechanic or your one big hitter, but not both. RIP Miranda+Dash, Galaxy Note 7, Parattanni. I'd remember them as fondly as I do pre-nerf Whisper + mini-swarm and point-vaulting Fat Han. All great squads in their time, and the first players who arrived at those designs and won big tournaments with them are awesome X-Wing players no doubt. The rest of us are netlisting hacks who will work with whatever 1-turret squads the really good players cook up for us. It's normal, it's fine.) Beyond that, I think some minor nerfs are needed: Palpatine (Range 1-3 only), Zuckuss crew (only works when unstressed), Biggs (only once per round), and to make TIE/x7 unique (because it's currently just a bit overpowered, but it would murder everything in a 1-turret-max meta). I think a 3-card limit on generics would be totally workable, and would prevent some of the squads that tend to eat up a lot of the clock and have a low fun factor. They're also not very good, so preventing new players from heading down the path to the spam side is probably doing everyone a favor. In the interests of encouraging more well-rounded squads that have fewer hard counters, a 2-card limit on generics is not out of the question for me, but it's probably going too far. There are only some generics that are overused to such a point that I think they deserve that distinction.

It's not hard to come up with a lore explanation for why things are limited or not, but there's no point trying to do that with Tactician because it wasn't limited to begin with, but was later changed by FFG when it was realized that it could be abused. The 100 point cap couldn't fix it. There were already ships in the game with two crew slots when Tactician was released, so right out of the gate it was possible to spam them. It wasn't until players figured that K-Wings and stresshogs could pile up obnoxious quantities of stress tokens on their targets that FFG took measures. Rebel K-Wing-based control squads got nerfed, but probably just enough to keep them balanced -- if not for turrets (and bomb spam from those very same ships, hmmmmmmmm). My point might be getting lost here. I think there's ample evidence that card quantity controls like 2- or 3-of-a-kind limits don't have to be supported by lore. Like what's the lore reason for us always having 100 points worth of ships? How many times does Biggs have to die fighting Kylo Ren before we come up with a plausible lore explanation? And why, uh, are we trying to kill each other, regardless of faction or clones? (Okay, if I saw my clone I would kill it, so that's fine.) If FFG looks at TLTs and agrees with me that they're a little obnoxious, but not so bad as to be made unique, where do they go to better balance those things? They can adjust card prices, which I think most of us would not want to see. They can errata the card texts to do something different, which in the case of TLT isn't what I want (I think it's a good card that is priced correctly, it's just overused). Introducing 2/3 limits would just be a continuation of what they've been doing, and seems to me that it's about the easiest way to rebalance a few gameplay elements.

FFG didn't announce or release anything for X-Wing on Force Friday 2016, did they?

I really like the all-unique-pilots approach that we're seeing with some of the new ships. Now imagine if Blue Squadron Pilot (PS 2 B-Wing of BBBBZ fame) had been unique, or limited to 2. Would B-Wings have all but replaced Rookie Pilot X-Wings as the best choice in that price range? We'll never know, but with hindsight, it seems like finer controls over card quantities might have been wise, even in mundane areas like generic B-Wings. What if X-Wings were the only Rebel ships that had generics? Would it have been easier to maintain its status as the workhorse for the fleet? Nah, probably not. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Tangent time: The YT-1300 is a weird beast when viewed in terms of in-game scarcity. There's no logic to Han Solo and Lando both flying two different Millennium Falcons -- well okay, only one of them can carry the title, but what exactly is the story with the other YT-1300? You can make up all sorts of stories, but both ships are intended to be the Millennium Falcon and we all know it, and it's weird that they can fly together in the same squad. But it's not a broken squad, it's just thematically totally bonkers. The casual side of me really wants them to fix that, to make all of those Falcons impossible to fly together. But it doesn't do anything to help game balance, so I wouldn't bother.

Works okay for WFB/40K and a lot of other miniatures games, or at least it used to. Your army could contain"0-2 Trolls" or whatever. I'm not holding up those games as examples of great game balance, but certainly it's very easy to simply write "you can't take more than 2 of these per squad" without any need for explanation. I think the fact that Outlaw Tech is limited defeats any "but lore" argument and makes any "thematic scarcity" explanation unnecessary. Is there really some good lore reason why I can't have two outlaw techs on my ship, assuming I have enough slots? Of course not. It's just a card effect that would be obnoxious if you were to double up on it. If TLT had been printed with limit 2 and a rule card explaining what that meant, no one would think that was crazy. It would help explain why it's a breezy 6 points, and would've stopped Thug Lyfe before it became a dull-as-rocks entry point into tournament play. That didn't happen, but I think it probably should have. If only there were some way to correct that! Well of course the limited rule wasn't part of the original rules. It was a later invention. Tactician was actually made limited through the FAQ. Does anyone still think that FFG would never consider 2- and 3-of-a-kind limits? It isn't a screw-you when something gets nerfed, buffed, banned or whatever if it's in the interests of game balance. I see it as the total opposite, as a way to potentially liberate a whole host of squad types that haven't had a real chance to see competition for a couple of years. The problem I see with the current options we have -- unique, generic, limited, faction-restricted -- is that they're not subtle enough to address some of the balance problems that arise in tournament play. I don't think TLT should be unique, but quad TLTs are obnoxious. There's a middle ground, and it wouldn't be hard for FFG to implement it.

Epic has an artificial limit on the number of ships of certain types, regardless of points. There are lots of ways different formats restrict certain cards beyond the unique/generic/limited tags. I'm not really breaking new ground here. I'm arguing for these sorts of card limits for purely game-balancing purposes, which would need to be adjusted for different formats. I think TLTs and many other cards are properly priced but still overused (or underused) in the standard tournament format, so natural limits imposed by squad point totals aren't always enough. The standard tournament format allows mirror matches where Poe Dameron kills a different Poe Dameron, and Biggs dies 32 times in one day. Gameplay > fluff, which is the argument that "the game is fine the way it is" players are always defending. I agree that gameplay > fluff! So let's limit some cards in the interests of better gameplay even if it doesn't make that much sense in the lore. Kylo Ren wants to give Emperor Palpatine a ride into battle and that's normal, that's fine, we're all okay with that.

I know.

We have the concept of uniques and generics, but it seems to me that there should be a middle ground, where some cards are limited to 2 or 3 per squad (at least in the standard tournament 100/6 deathmatch format). Twin Laser Turret would be on my "limit 2" list, just for starters. Do you think the game would benefit from fine-tuned limitations like that? Would you limit any cards this way?

I usually bring the three smallest asteroids out of sheer laziness and ease of storage. But I see a lot of debris clouds on game night, and have at times caught myself thinking that it's surprising how often my opponents use them. Laziness prevents me from trying to figure out why. It's those players who bring one big debris, one tiny rock, and one medium rock, that I worry about.

These sorts of formats are all ban lists, basically. And I think it's important to recognize that the game's design wasn't rolled out in a consistent way, so you don't get great results with restrictions on broad categories of game components. But I feel like the Golden Age for X-Wing is actually embedded somewhere in the card set we currently have available to us, and it's going to take ban lists (or something like them) to figure out the right balance of jousters, turrets, Emperors, Zuckusses, TLTs, Biggs and all the rest. I mean, 2012 me was just waiting for the day to come when I could build squads with a dozen ship types for Rebels and Imperials and holy cow Scum too? That day is now, and I'm looking at all these doomsayer X-Wing players who think the tournament gameplay is in the garbage (which it is), but that shouldn't come as any surprise. We're allowed to play with every single card from every single expansion, and every season we end up with the most abusive squads because that's how ya win. Players will still do that no matter what card list you let them draw from, but if you want Wedge Antilles and Darth Vader and Talonbane Cobra to be apex predators in your ecosystem, I'm certain you can develop a ban list that will get you there. Might be a really long ban list, so an allowed list might be easier. And I think you'd want to more carefully restrict how certain cards are used, because unique/generic/banned isn't granular enough. We need more subtle card limits than just unique (2 of a kind maximum, 3 of a kind maximum, some generics should be unique and maybe vice versa) maybe a limit on the number of turrets allowed per squad, some cards should and should not have faction limitations, and so on.

I've experimented with that sort of thing, but it doesn't quite work as simply as that. You'll end up with a bunch of pilots all getting rejected because they can't access some must-have card like Autothrusters, and Attanni Mindlink is useless without a partner. So you end up making some artificial edits no matter what, like throwing in some extra Chardaan Refits or whatever. And I figure once you start doing that, you might as well get what you really want and just deliberately suppress and highlight certain pilots and upgrades.

Something like this might revive 2-attack generics with EPT slots, like Green A-Wings and Black TIEs. Deflection Shot; elite pilot talent; 1 point; When attacking in your primary firing arc at Range 2-3, if you are not in the defender's firing arc, you may roll 1 additional attack die (to a maximum of 3). Or this sort of thing if we're trying to keep ships in formation: Coded Transceiver; modification; 1 point; When defending, if you are at Range 1 of another friendly ship equipped with Coded Transceiver, you may spend its focus tokens as your evade tokens.

You arrogance is undermined by that sort of thing, guy.

TLDR: Booster drafting is another way to do Legacy-type gaming, and other themes as well. I've been testing out a drafting format that can be used to create these sorts of themed tournaments. It works best with a relaxed group of about 4-12 players who are willing to loan ships to each other, and the organizer will need a large collection of their own cards in order to create the draft packs. Players sit in a circle, each player receives a draft pack containing 8 ship cards and 16 upgrades, each player selects 1 pilot card and 2 upgrade cards, then passes their pack to the player on their left. This continues until all of the draft packs are empty. Players assemble their 100-point squads from their pool of drafted cards. Players are paired up randomly (or in such a way as to avoid mirror matches), and play commences. (So far, we've played one match and called it a night, but you could run multiple rounds or whatever.) The Legacy-ish part of this is in the creation of the draft packs. I'm only making 8 packs for my events, since that's the largest number of players I'm likely to involve in this sort of thing on our casual game nights. That means I need (just) 64 pilot cards split roughly into thirds by faction, and (just) 128 upgrade cards which should be of the types that are useful for the pilots that end up making the cut. After settling on the final mix, I shuffle all the ship cards, and shuffle all of the upgrades, then distribute 8 random pilots and 16 random upgrades into each of 8 envelopes. For our first draft event, I used Wave 1-3 ships, but included upgrades from Waves 1-10. The verdict was that it was fun, but it did show the limits of those older ships. Big furball, bumpfest. No Scum. We needed more variety. For our second draft event, I went weird and decided to created a "wave 2 meets wave 10, with Most Wanted stuff too" theme. I thought it was a good idea to see if the format would hold up when mixing old and new stuff, plus basic Scum, and it mostly did. Since this really sloppily-assembled card pool still produced decent and interesting squad options, I feel pretty certain that a more carefully curated card pool will work just fine. So I'm working on my third draft event card pool, and I'm hand-picking every card, because the game really doesn't break cleanly along category lines. If you just go with Wave 1-3 ships, you lose some stuff like ARC-170s and TIE Strikers that would be fun mixing it up with some of the stuff that was released earlier.

-Reserved for later maybe-

· Twin Laser Turret · Push the Limit

I think you're looking at options like these: Modification. 3 points. Limited. Add [crew] icon to your upgrade bar. [Probably to a maximum of 2.] Modification. 2 points. Limited. Large ship only. Add [crew] icon to your upgrade bar. [Maximum of 2, maybe max of 3.] [Not necessarily a modification.] 1 point. Limited. Add [crew] icon to your upgrade bar. [Probably with some tight restrictions and conditions.]

I think the big difference between BBBBZ and XXXXZ is the B-Wing's barrel roll, which makes it a better blocker, a better slow-roller, and better at casting a wide enough net to catch slippery enemy ships.