YMMV / X-Wing Miniatures

• Fan Nickname: Not surprisingly, popular lists and builds tend to be given nicknames, with some being more creative than others.
  • Arc Dodging: Focusing on avoiding damage by getting out of enemies' firing arcs as quickly as possible.
  • Bossk's Party Bus: Bossk piloting the YV-666 (one of the largest Large ships, and boxy like a bus) with Dengar, Zuckuss and 4-LOM as crew. A YV-666 with a generic pilot is still a Party Bus if full of bounty hunters.
  • Brobots: Any combination of two (or more, in an Epic or other greater than 100 point game) IG-88 variants using the IG-2000 title to share pilot abilities. Because they're robots who are "brothers".
  • Dengaroo: Dengar and Manaroo piloting JumpMasters, with Dengar loaded out as the attacker and Manaroo hanging back in support, using her ability to pass all of her focus, target lock and evade tokens to Dengar. A Portmanteau Couple Name is used because they were married in Tales of the Bounty Hunters.
  • Fat Han: Han Solo with all the best upgrades available for every slot and supported by a T-70 X-Wing. Han is made "Fat" by eating up the great bulk of the 100 points available to a standard squad. Often paired with a single Ace, most prominently Wedge Antilles or Poe Dameron.
  • Guidance Chimps: Guidance Chips. Apparently originated with a typo that everybody found funny. Often shortened to just Chimps.
  • Jousting: Flying straight at the enemy without regard to their firing arc, in hopes of killing them quickly so they can't take advantage. The opposite of arc dodging.
  • Palp Aces: Palpatine riding a Lambda Shuttle, Soontir Fel in a fully upgraded TIE Interceptor and Darth Vader in an upgraded TIE Advanced with the /x1 title. Other pilots can be substituted in like The Inquisitor in the TIE Advanced Prototype, Carnor Jax in the TIE Interceptor, Whisper in the TIE Phantom and Omega Leader in the TIE/fo. But Soontir is almost always included, and both fighter pilots need to be high Pilot Skill (hence "Aces") and loaded with upgrades that help them arc dodge. One of the dominant lists in the current meta.
    • Doomshuttle is a variant where the Lambda takes a more active role, substituting Crew! Vader and a Gunner in for Palpatine: Each time the Lambda attacks, Vader can cause it to suffer 2 damage to deal 1 Critical damage to the defender; this combines with the Gunner's extra attack, meaning the Lambda is all-but guaranteed to cause 2 damage a turn. This means that Vader can't be used in the Advanced/x1, so Soontir Fel is usually paired with another Ace like Omega Leader or a Tie Defender.
    • Palpimator: Another, much rarer, variant where Palpatine is placed on a Decimator along with another Crew (often Ysanne Isard). Usually paired with a single Ace, often Vader. Somewhat of an Empire counterpart to the Fat Han build.
  • Pancake: Any Large ship with whose primary weapon is a turret. Especially the YT-1300 and YT-2400, the original "pancakes", because of their flat saucer-like main hulls.
  • Stressbot: R3-A2, a droid that assigns stress tokens to both its own pilot and whoever in their firing arc they declare an attack against.
  • U-boat: The JumpMaster 3000, because of its U-shaped hull.
    • Wolfpack: A group of 3 U-boats piloted by Contracted Scouts, with every upgrade slot dedicated to delivering a massive early-game torpedo barrage and making the torps actually hit. No longer a viable build, since Deadeye was errata'd to be "SMALL SHIP ONLY" (Deadeye was the key to this entire build working at all) and made extra super not viable when the U-boat subsequently lost its torpedo slots to further errata.
  • Thug Life: Four Syndicate Thug Y-Wings equipped with Twin Laser Turrets and Unhinged Astromechs.
• Funny Moments: The Bombardier crew upgrade card depicts a Rebel pilot carefully writing "Special Delivery" in Aurebesh on the side of an explosive.
  • One update added an ‘astromech’ version of Chopper (there was already a ‘crew’ version) that can discard an equipped upgrade to regen a shield. The same pack also came with a Courier Droid crew, who’s only function was to modify the ship’s initial deployment. The art for the latter has in the background, Chopper peeking around the corner, waiting to pounce.
• Game-Breaker: TIE Phantoms were strong enough that Fantasy Flight changed the cloaking rules to stop it.
  • The Jumpmaster 9000, a Scum ship, is considered, even by fans of it, to be completely undercost for what it offers: a Large, turret-firing, Barrel-Rolling ship with 2 Agility, 9 HP (5 Hull and 4 Shield), 2 Torpedo slots, an Illicit slot, a Crew slot, an Unhinged Astromech slot, an EPT slot on **every** version of the ship (even the 25-point PS-3 vanilla), AND a White Segnor's Loop (a bootleg turn) on its dial. The combination of Deadeye + R4 Agromech on a ship with 2 Torpedo slots was bad enough... allowing it on a ship with 9 HP, 2 Agility, a Crew slot, and Guidance Chips was even worse... but making its price so low that THREE such ships could be flown in a single squad was what really destroyed the game's meta immediately after it was released.
    • "Triple U-Boats" became so dominant that some players wondered if the Contracted Scout would become the first Pilot to EVER be banned in tourney play, if not the Jumpmaster as a whole. Thankfully, FFG decided to just enact power-level errata and reclassify Deadeye as a "SMALL SHIP ONLY" upgrade. Dengar and "Dengaroo" still see plenty of love in Scum lists, but "Triple U-Boats" no longer exists as a result.
    • That being said, even after being nerfed four different ways (deadeye, Manaroo, R4 agromech, and Zuckuss crew) Worlds was still won by a double Jumpmaster list, and they are still on top of the Meta, leading to more people calling for a massive nerf.
    • And they got it. Another round of errata has meant that all Jumpmaster pilots lose their salvaged astromech slot and their two torpedo slots.
  • The latest round of nerfing targeted the X7 TIE Defender title for being horrible for the action economy (it is now actually an action and thus can be interfered with), Manaroo for being able to share tokens with anyone on the board (she now has harsh range limits), Zuckuss for being too abusable (his stress-for-forced-rerolls effect now only works if unstressed) and Emperor Palpatine for being obscene (now you have to declare that you're using him before you roll).
  • One more ship archtype seeing a lot of play are Rebel bombers now. It's a combination of the k-wings slam action granting them incredible manuverability, the ability to drop a mine after doing a SLAM, and Sabine crew adding extra damage. The top k-wing pilot having regen doesn't hurt either. As such, it being instant unblockable damage has killed Imperial aces, who are fragile speedsters.
    • The SLAM bomb has been errata'ed out of existence in the latest update.
  • Prior to errata that limited his bullet-catching stunts to one round, Biggs Darklighter was powerful enough that it was almost impossible to release a solid X-Wing fix - otherwise, he'd be just too durable. One top-tier list had him accompanying the Ghost with Kanan Jarrus, whose ability to debuff enemy attacks kept Biggs safe while Kanan opened up on them with his four-die main gun.
  • Veteran Instincts was added as a seemingly innocuous upgrade early in the game's life; it increases pilot skill by 2. In practice, the ability to make pilot skill levels flexible proved to be a game design nightmare as it meant any elite pilot could be given near-universal priority, and some pilots such as "Whisper" appeared to possess relatively low skill values simply because they would be completely broken if Veteran Instincts was applied to them otherwise. There's a good reason this upgrade was axed in Second Edition.