X-Wing : Going to worlds and Agressor manual

Hello guys,

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, SSD Gabriel came out of the shipyards and that meant relocating to a new space dock so no blogging for a while.

First I'd like to share a document I created to visualize IG88 possible maneuvers including premaneuver boost:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxfK7RsIRr_VNFRvVGVCaExqR0U/view?usp=sharing

In it you will find photos like this:

This helped me tremendously when I played double IG to estimate the final position of a tricky sloop, or when I was trying to determine wether I should boost before or after a maneuver. The PDF "should" be printer friendly, and is 8 pages long to help turning it into a booklet (with 2 blank pages at the end). You will also find on the last page the most interesting small ship guides from Osoroshii's earning-your-wings-a-guide-for-understanding-movment

The guide is nice but it will not help if you play too recklessly though as I found out at the Nantes regional. Playing a very aggressive game put me in trouble in round 4 against an atypical list of 2 gunner B-Wings and 3 Z95.
My lead IG took 5 damages at range 3 in turn 1 even with autothrusters (2 from 2 Zs and 3 from the Bs), and it went downhill fast as I had no back up plan beside going in gun blazing. I even rolled the 4 eyes dice roll!

After that I decided to go back to my trusty swarm for the Paris regional where I finished first after swiss (loosing to a Fat Han list in top 16 of all things...) with:

Howlrunner, PTL
Black squadron, wingman
Black squadron, draw their fire
4 Academies

I made the mistake of going after the Z95s, which then rolled enough evades to prevent me from dealing more than a couple of damage per turn. I lost that game 100-0!

Fast forward a couple of months to September, the French national is coming up and I still don't know what to play. On paper double IGs looked really strong, but I'd not been able to make them work for me.  I'd failed at the Paris regional with the Howlrunner swarm. What was I to play?

I played a last minute game with my friend and training partner Kansen the night before, dusting the 8 swarm against Dash/Corran and won, but I'd come to appreciate the Howl rerolls.

At the last minute, in the registration queue, I finally decided on the classic 8 swarm:
4 Obsidians
4 Academies
This is the list that won me last year French nationals, but would it perform in the wave 6 meta?

Boy was it the right choice! I finished undefeated after 6 rounds of swiss (while facing 5 opponents from the top 16) then managed to win my 4 top 16 games.

Worlds 2015 here I come!

PS: For my French speaking readers I have a small analysis of the swarm in wave 7 on the sw-xwing.com forum: http://www.sw-xwing.com/t4995-La-nu-e-en-vague-7.htm

PS2 : If you read the blog and would like to meet me, I'll be the guy in the blue hoodie with ICAREANE on the back!