Rogue Squadron- I Can Hold It!

Welcome to Rogue Squadron, pilot! In this series we will be looking at different squadrons you can fly in Fantasy Flight Games X-Wing miniatures game. We give you the squad, what expansion pack all of the upgrades come from and then give you the low down on how best to fly it. Strap in and get ready to fly…

All Wings Report In

A-Wing “Tycho Celchu” (A-Wing Expansion) (30 pts)

You may perform actions even while you have stress tokens.

Title– A-Wing Test Pilot (Rebel Aces Expansion): Your upgrade bar gains 1 Elite Pilot Talent upgrade icon. You cannot equip 2 of the same Upgrade cards. You cannot equip this if your pilot skill value is “1” or lower.
Elite Pilot Talent- Push the Limits (A-wing/Imperial Aces Expansion): Once per round, after you perform an action, you may perform 1 free action shown in your action bar. Then receive 1 stress token.
Elite Pilot Talent- Adrenaline Rush (TIE Bomber Expansion)- When you reveal a red maneuver, you may discard this card to treat that maneuver as a white maneuver until the end of the Activation phase.
Modification- Autothrusters (Starviper Expansion)- When defending, if you are beyond Range 2 or outside the attacker’s firing arc, you may change 1 of your blank results to an evade result. You can equip this card only if you have the boost action icon.
Missile- Chardaan Refit (Rebel Aces Expansion)- This card has a negative squad point cost.

B-Wing “Keyan Farlander” (Rebel Aces Expansion) (34 pts)

When attacking, you may remove 1 stress token to change all of your Focus results to Hit results

Elite Pilot Talent- Stay on Target (A-wing/Imperial Aces Expansions): When you reveal a maneuver, you may rotate your dial to another maneuver with the same speed. Treat that maneuver as a red maneuver.
System- Advanced Sensors (E-Wing/Lambda Shuttle Expansions)- Immediately before you reveal your maneuver, you may perform 1 free action. If you use this ability, you must skip your “Perform Action” step during this round.

X-Wing “Jek Porkins” (Rebel Transport) (36 pts)

When you receive a stress token, you may remove it and roll 1 attack die. On a Hit result, deal 1 facedown Damage card to this ship..

Astromech– R5-D8 (Y-Wing Expansion): Action: Roll 1 defense die. On a Focus or Evade result, discard 1 of your facedown Damage cards..
Elite Pilot Talent- Push the Limits (A-wing/Imperial Aces Expansion): Once per round, after you perform an action, you may perform 1 free action shown in your action bar. Then receive 1 stress token.
Modification- Engine Upgrade (Millenium Falcon Expansion)- Your action bar gains the Boost action icon.

Lock S-Foils in Attack Position

This squadron does not care about stress. These pilots see you stressing out and they’re just like, whatever man, I’m good. They are a good counter to things like Panic Attack or anything with Rebel Captive, Flechette Torpedoes, Tactician, Debris Fields or any of the other myriad ways to dish out stress these days. As such, you’ll probably want to take Debris Fields as your obstacle of choice.

Moving at PS7 or 8 and all with some repositioning ability they have a reasonable shot at arc dodging as well. Tycho lives and breathes on being hard to pin down. Being able to Boost and then take another action allows him to not be ignored despite his measly two attack. With the addition of Adrenaline Rush he also has the opportunity to take a K-turn once per game, something no one expects Tycho to ever do.

Keyan with Stay on Target, Advanced Sensors and his Barrel Roll ability can end up in a wide range of locations, that you can decide after many other ships have already moved. This gives him a good arc dodge potential, something B-Wings aren’t known for. Being able to use his stress to change focus to hits means you either want to barrel roll or target lock before you move using those Advanced Sensors. Most often you’ll want to set your maneuver to your 2 K-turn so that you can SoT to any of your two maneuvers.

Porkins, ah Porkins. You could easily kill yourself. Never forget that. But if you use his ability to ignore stress wisely, you have the potential to K-turn, not get stressed and then Boost, something you almost never see. The astromech droid is there to help recover from those times when your ability hurts you.

The biggest weakness of this squad is higher PS arc dodgers, turrets and flying poorly. Keyan is great but if you use Stay on Target to fly into a Debris Field and have no target, leaving yourself double stressed and out of position, that can go very badly for you. Likewise, if you decide to use Porkins to K-turn, through a Debris Field and then PtL, removing the stress each time and get bad die rolls, you could kill yourself in a single turn.

Variations

There are quite a few minor tweaks you could make to this list and change how it plays out. First, dropping Engine Upgrade off Porkins for a Hull Upgrade gives him a little more safety cushion for misusing his ability. You lose his reposition ability but gain a point. You can use that point to give Tycho Expert Handling, giving him a Barrel Roll and making him even harder to pin down.

Likewise, to save some points you can opt for Fire Control System on Keyan. If you do both, Tycho can end up with Daredevil which is very useful for him. Alternatively, you can drop a System slot entirely, give Keyan Opportunist and then he can gain a bonus attack die and get a reroll at the same time. He loses some of his evasiveness this way though.