LoboStele wrote:
Nice job! This is precisely what many of us were talking about right after the French Championships in October, and we were surprised that something like this hadn't happened then. Granted, General Skywalker wasn't out at that point, but Yobuck was still a dangerous matchup for the Cad Bane swap squads. Well done.
I'm interested to know what the deal was with the Mara/MTB squad, and why they didn't have an exit strategy. Wonder what happened in the game where the other player just kept turning pieces until the MTB killed everything? Did the MTB player run out of Ugnaughts or get Override locked into a room or something? Very curious. Plus, wonder how that should have interacted with the '5 round, no action' rule? Does the MTB overrule that '5 round' rule, lol?
Anyways, great report. This is a good lead-up to Regionals too, though I'm surprised they chose to stick to 150 with the US groups doing 200 this year.
Well to answer some of your questions.
1) To correct you General Skywalker was just but already released (naturaly given the fact he was in the same expansion as Cad) at the French Championship and I played basically the same squad.
Unfortunately that event was rather big, with only a few Bane Swaps participating which managed to successfully dodge my Momentum Buck.
Especially in the Final 16 where my Momentum Buck had to face Kyle/Mara first round. A match-up, which took me out of contention and I think is even worse than Slow Cannon.
2) I don't know the exact facts what happened. I know that it was ruled that MTB overruled the 5 round rule (don't know if this is correct).
Fact is without an exit strategy and 22 activations you can't score more than 110 points of gambit which isn't enough and with 19 activations you can build a bodyshield for your 4 central pieces
(Mas, Thrawn, Ozzel, Cad) especially on the map they played Train Station.
The Problem is that MTB was needed to counter Thrawn or without MTB Bane could use his stealth and the certainty to be swapped to safety at the beginning of the round to score points against Mara with ease.
And with MTB he slowly looses pieces and can't get to Bane with Mara, because the way was blocked with activations, while Bane with Mobile Flight kills Mara quick if she dares to advance cause she won't get away fast enough.
My guess with the exit strategy is that the squads tend to get slower and slower and more fragile to beat the other squad, so an exit strategy a) couldn't be implemented and b) wasn't needed unless there was no time limit.
Eg the Bane Swap in the Finals forgoes Lobot for 9 activations to squeeze an additional 2 activations into the squad, which generally weakens the squad imho but is an advantage in the mirror. This is exact what makes Momentum Buck so strong, the ability to destroy the fragile structure of some Top Squads. The problems for Momentum Buck are "robust" squads (eg. Slow Cannon, Kyle/Mara). But these robust squads have bad match-ups against the fragile but "overcharged" squads like Bane Swap.
This is imho a healthy meta we have at the moment using a comparison with M:TG where in theory Aggro struggles against Midrange which struggles against Control which struggles against Aggro.