Begun the Bid Wars Have

When building an X-wing squadron do you include a bid? Let’s assume you’re making a list which includes some I5 or I6 aces. These are the ships that benefit the most from getting to move last. When I make those kinds of lists, I’ll sometimes leave a few points open for a bid, if it doesn’t require me to drop something. And when I do, I rarely have a bid of more than 3pts. My highest ever bid was a 1.0 Thweek list which was 3pts, which is equivalent to 6 points in 2.0.

Since 2.0 hit, there has been a lot of high bidding going on in competitive play. Some bids were regularly exceeding 10pts. With the release of the Nantex, and the boogie-man known as Sun Fac, there has been talk about bids nose diving even deeper. Up to the point where you could fit an entire Vulture with those points. This got me wondering, is this a healthy thing for the game?

(Editor’s Note: This was written in the lead up to Worlds. Now that World’s is done, we see that most of the top lists only had small bids)

The first consideration, is whether this is an indictment of Sun Fac alone or the game in general? There were plenty of bids before Sun Fac. But not as deep and not as serious. Come the points revision, if Sun Fac (or Ensnare) goes up 10pts does the Bid War end?

Second, is bidding in and of itself, just part of the game or a bane? Sometimes bidding is used for more than just initiative. A steep bid combined with a hard to kill regenerating ship can lead to a decisive point advantage in a 75min round. A Delta-7b Anakin with R2 Astromech and a 10pt bid means there’s 100pts that your opponent has to work extra hard to earn. Many games will come down to those 100pts being secure even on a loss.

For me, if a list can dominate with greater than a 10pt bid it means elements of that list are undercosted. Bids under that feel like personal style combined with a potential lack of upgrade choices. Going back to the Nantex, they don’t have many upgrade slots. You fly the top three Nantex pilots with both signature Talents and the list is only 198 points and has no open slots. So you couldn’t make that list 200 even if you wanted to.

Beyond that, some slots lack a good low cost general purpose upgrade. The Modification slot is the most common open slot. There’s not really anything you can fit in there for under 5pts that are useful beyond niche ships. If there is nothing useful to equip you might as well use the points for a bid, even if deciding initiative isn’t that important to the list.

I heard an idea (apologies as I don’t remember where I heard it) for how a small tweak could throw a major wrinkle into the Bid War without drastically changing anything else. The idea: bid points automatically go to your opponent. This would change the calculus for competitive bidding.

Under a system like this, the only reason for a bid is to ensure you move last. That is still a powerful advantage so bidding wouldn’t go away. But it would make you think twice about how many free points you want to give your opponent. Would you really want to start a game an entire ship down in points?

Of course, a change like that would lead to its own form of wonkiness. If you start with free points you could just run the whole game and never engage. Imagine someone winning a tournament where they never fired a shot? They SLAMed their K-Wings around the board the whole time, using a GNK droid to regenerate any damage they happen to take. But they win because they received a few free points in each game from their opponents’ bids. That would be a bad time for everyone involved.

What are your thoughts? Are bids good? Bad? Just an indication something is too cheap? A sign of skill?