billiv15 wrote:
A&E likely had the most representation overall with different figs as we had two Han SC squads and a Landspeeder squad in the finals.
Plus Wicket, Aurra JH, WFFs, and Boba Enforcer.
The statistics are certainly interesting. But Bill is right when he says that the overall diversity for the tournament was pretty vast. I saw a LOT of different stuff. Heck, I almost got beat on the first round by a squad with 20 some odd Ewoks.
I do believe though, that there is a small factor to be considered here, and that's not necessarily who plays with the newest (potentially more powerful) figures, but who KNOWS how to play with them better. To me, that seemed to be a huge difference in the 3 San Hill squads I faced that day. TimmerB was the only one that really had a grasp on the characters. The other two guys I played did a decent job, but neither of them really grasped the correct concept of how to run the squad, and how to utilize the character's properly. I also find that people who are not familiar enough with the new pieces lose more easily as well because they just don't know how to properly counter them.
For instance, we had a guy at our LGS last week who hasn't been out to play in probably close to a year. He brought mostly CS pieces, including two Destroyer Droids. I absolutely shredded him. Was it because the DDs are that much worse than the newer pieces? No. In fact, he rolled pretty decently on most his shield saves. It was just that he had very little idea of how to properly play against the characters I was running.
So, while I do think there's definitely some merit to the statistics here, and it does seem to show that the competitive scene favors the newer sets, there's certainly more involved here than just the pieces that people used.
Besides, it seems obvious to me that WotC would want players at GenCon to be using the latest and greatest every year anyway. GenCon would get boring if the same squad won every year. In order to combat that, new pieces have to be released that shift the power combos around and such. Perhaps next year JWMs won't be much of a threat at all!