New Ships! Part 1

New Ships and Cards: Rebel Edition

It finally happened. Over a year of waiting and new ships are finally announced!

I am just has happy as these people.

After a long time of silence from FFG with news and announcements for the game, FFG revealed during GenCon 2019 two new ships. The Nadiri Starhawk and the Onager Stardestroyer, both completely unfamilliar to me...

This post will deal with the Starhawk and the Onager will get its own post in due time.

The Nadiri Starhawk

Blatantly stolen right from the source

From FFG's article it is said to rival even an SSD, built together from salvaged stardestroyers. Not much can be gleande from the preview since the angle of the ship is obstructing alot. What can be seen clearly is that this is not a ship for Ackbar. 2 Red, 2 Blue and 1 Black dice does not put it high on fishmans list of "usefull" ships, but alot of the cards are left to be revealed in the future. Having 4 shields on the sides and 5 in the front will certainly make this ship though to crack.

Maybe this will be the first rebel ship with 10~12 hull? More than that seems unlikely imho since it being a rebel ship and the hull game is a feature of the Empire.

Speed? I have no idea but I hope it has speed 3, and if not, a Support team slot at least.

Judging by the size of the model, it feels like the base is too small, even at a large base, but still not big enough to get the same huge base as the SSD. It is also a very nice looking model.

Having 4 Command dials puts it on par with the SSD, in terms of planning.
How much it will cost in points, how many squadrons it can push and Engineering value is left to be revealed in the future. I suspect it will land somewhere around 140~160pts. This ship will probably take up half the points, with upgrades, of a 400pts fleet, without a commander.

With only 2 versions mentioned in the article, this ship will not get the same treatment as the SSD in terms of non-competitive games and less fluff.

It feels fantastic that the Rebels get something big and aweinspiring, but it is not on par with how mighty the SSD looks...

New Defense token: Salvo

With it also comes a new defense token: Salvo. This defense token makes a ship with the token return fire when being attacked. Since the rules aren't explained in the article, one can only guess at this point exactly how it will work.
If it just works like a regular attack during the spend defense token step with all the dice available from an arc, it is insane how good it is. For example will this make going first less important since you still get to fire back at those nasty Admonitions or Demolishers before they engine tech away after firing. How this will affect the game is left to be seen, but when offense becomes a part of the defense, ships will go down even faster than before. The smaller, fragile ships will certainly feel the pain and this can be a step in the wrong direction for MSU lists considering how the release of Wave 7 brought back large base ships with a bang.

Rebel Commander: Kyrsta Agate

I have something in my eye...

The dev-team apparently came to the conclusion that some commanders are overpriced (Tarkin, Leia, Mon Mothma) for what they do and most people don't play with them at competetive events since they are trash, so this Rebel commander comes as cheap as it will ever get. For 20 points, one ship will get an extra non-scatter defense token and gives the other ships the ability to spend their tokens by discarding them to resolve their effect for bypassing the accuracies. All ships suddenly became Admonition (almost), ECM got a bit less of a must-have for some ships and H-9 got a bit less useful and BT Avenger not being that much useful against this commander. But I still consider all of the aforementioned useful and in some cases auto include as every opponent will not be this commander.

As of now there are probably only 2 ships that has Salvo by default, but Kyrsta Agate can give her flagship any non-scatter token. This is also true for the objective Hyperspace Assault if she comes in with that ship. I can only begin to Imagine the posibilities for different builds this opens up. The Empire has had Captain Needa since the ISD came out, and that made the TRC valid for some ships that before could not utilice it, Cymoon to be specific. But what this does for the Rebels is huge with this commander. From the top of my head there is:

• Brace on a MC30c for insane staying power
• Evade on MC80 opens up for TRC
• Another brace on an MC80 that will make it even more durable
• Redirect on a Nebulon-B that has the saddest sidearcs in the game

...other than the new Salvo token. The list can go on.