When people stop experimenting, creativity suffers, and the meta stagnates.
As I write this, the North American Championship for X-wing looms over everyone's head. This is one of a handful of major tournaments that is coming shortly after two major events in the "competitive meta:" The rise of Dengaroo, and the arrival of Imperial Veterans. One of these was great for the game as a whole, and one of these was terrible. I'll let you decide which was which.
Dengaroo
The arrival of Dengaroo did not surprise me. I had the "joy" of fighting it in the Ohio Regional back when the list was a mere whisper. I had the fortunate misfortune of seeing a lesser version of it flown poorly the round previously, so I had an idea of the score (As seems to be the pattern whenever something scary is coming). However, the way I saw the Dengaroo build this second time, I knew this was good. I walked away from it with a win, and no real understanding of what led to me winning.
That was the end of "The Dengaroo story" for me.
That was for everyone else where the story began.
Nobody had serious or even passive discussions about Dengaroo itself until after the US Nationals when the list took second place. Nobody treated it like the offensive powerhouse it was until it had a significantly strong showing in Australia.
As I watch people talk about counters for Dengaroo, the "counter Dengaroo" meta has turned to killing its focus token. People have turned to pilots like Carnor Jax, Wes Janson, Palob Godalhi, and even sometimes the Omega Leader himself, though he sees much less game-play than I believe he deserves.
The aforementioned CounterDengaroo seems to fail pretty badly however when Manaroo opts to trade out Gonk for a Recon Specialist. Aside from Carnor Jax and the Omega Leader, the recon specialist counters your evaporating my 1 token because I have 2. I like to refer to the existence of recon specialist on Manaroo as "CounterCounterDengaroo" mostly because I like names getting absurd, but also because it explains the list perfectly. It counters the counters.
I would like to argue that Dengaroo caught us off guard as much as it did because it was so creative. I honestly doubt anyone knew what countermeasures even looked like before Dengaroo came along. Almost nobody among us looks at a list that FFG gives in a spoiler article and says "That list is going to win worlds." However, at the same time, I see tons of rebel players saying rebels are boned even though they refuse to evolve or change. Its like someone told them "only these 5 ships are of any value." Other people were taken at their word, and right now all I want is to see Dutch on the table again in an alpha strike oriented list.
Imperial Veterans
Bombers were the unsung hero of the Imperial Veterans pack. People couldn't make a bomber feel good in a Palpatine's aces list or a triple aces list, and ultimately I felt people walked away from the new bombers not getting the point. People opted to give up on Long Range Scanners because they couldn't translate that into damage the same way they could Guidance Chips even though low PS bombers have usually been marked as terrible for being able to get target locks where they wanted them in the first place. One of my more controversial assertions was that there was nothing in the world that Tomax Bren wanted more than Adrenaline rush. Again, the problem here was that people can't translate Adrenaline Rush into damage the same way they can translate Crack Shot into damage.
About 7 months ago, I started getting fed up with the game. I was having a hard time winning games, and the games I won just weren't enjoyable. My lists were feeling identical, and generally weren't fun to fly. I had to have a fundamental change with how I played the game. While my opponent and I played by the same ruleset, my lists had no interest in the matter. I challenged myself to start finding ways for the game to interact in ways that just look plain wrong. My favorite to date was still my first list. I made a scum list, 3 ships all pilot skill 5, and, I got to use Squad Leader. In all the vassal games I flew with it, and some games on the physical table, people argued that I can't use squad leader since everyone is the same pilot skill. What they overlooked however, and part of the puzzle I didn't give you (My apologies) was that I gave Guri, the PS5 starviper, Enhanced Scopes. That meant that for the ENTIRE activation phase, she is PS0, so yes, she can be Squad Leadered.
From there the list evolved. I think it ended up having somewhere in the area of 3-4 iterations of changes before I took it to a store championship and won with it. That was its second time in a Store championship, and the first where I hadn't had a collapsed lung the week previous. I took very minor variations of the same list to other store championships, and got 2nd and 4th places. Whether or not the list was that good, it countered the meta strongly, or my opponents were sub par, I honestly can't say. I will admit though, having the final showdown be a a YV-666 doing strafing runs on a TLT hwk is going to go down as my favorite moment in X-wing games I have ever gotten to play, even if I had no right to get as far as I did.
"Wrapping up"
I'd call what I'm doing criticism, but it would probably be more accurate for me to call it complaining. I think what has happened is that people have locked Rebels, Scum, and Imperials into these tiny little boxes of what makes them "good" and "bad." People said "look how good the party bus is" and people stopped looking for anything else. Paul Heaver in 2015 built a a list for Worlds that was well rounded and could take on any challenges at that point in time. For some reason unbeknownst to me, it fell by the wayside, and I actually think it would be good in the meta staring at us now.
So what are the takeaways here?
The first is to not take anything second hand. Its one thing for someone to tell you that an upgrade is crap. Its another to play it yourself and understand why its crap. I'm not going to tell you to not listen to podcasts, because I still think they are important and valuable resources, especially for newer players. I will however say that when I heard a handful of podcasts say that they "didn't get" Attanni Mindlink, or "couldn't place it anywhere," I almost cried.
The second major take away is to try to understand why people choose to do things differently than you. I love playing against newer players because their thought process is so wildly different from what I would see coming from anyone who has played for a few months. List building, actions, and dials are all things that people could make choices you wouldn't, and learning the thought processes of others adds layers and dimensions to how you think and play, which ultimately leads to being better at the game.
The last take away I'm going to mention is that if you find the rules of the game as they are written don't work for you, doing something crazy within the ruleset will not hurt you. However, if you have found a wall to only have spikes on it, repeatedly bashing your head against it will only do you harm.
