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I just wanted to make sure that I understand the order that sensor jammer works in.

I attack a ship with sensor jammer and get two damage, the defender uses sensor jammer to change one damage into a focus icon, I use my focus to turn it back into a damage. Is that correct?

That is correct. The fact that you can spend a focus token to modify the die is why sensor jammer turns it into an eye result instead of a blank.

It's to force you to make a decision that you might not want to make (or might not be able to make).

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:
It's to force you to make a decision that you might not want to make (or might not be able to make).

For example:

Soontir shoots at a B-Wing with Sensor Jammer, and rolls eye-hit-blank.
Defender modifies the attack dice first. The B-Wing uses sensor jammer to make the attack roll eye-eye-blank.
Attacker modifies attack dice second. Soontir has a decision to make: spend his focus token to convert the miss into two hits, or just save that token for defense (the B-Wing might be shooting back at PS2, and Soontir wants his focus token for defense).

If not for the sensor jammer, Soontir would probably not have spent the focus - there's a good chance the B-Wing would have taken a point of damage. And in return, Soontir would have remained tokened up (very hard to crack). Even in this worst case scenario for Sensor Jammer, where the attacker has a focus, you've forced Soontir to choose between undesirable choices, and probably avoided 1 damage. And if your attacker chooses not to take focus actions, then it acts as a persistent evade token, which is a very powerful effect.

Most important: this sequence of events happens every time the B-Wing is shot at, so it scales when your opponent attacks with multiple ships. The effect is subtle, but it adds up over the course of the game. Because focus actions are so important for piercing Sensor Jammer, you can more easily predict what your opponent will be doing.

I like slapping a sensor jammer (and juke) on my tie-phantom to keep it alive longer. It really helped in my last game where my opponent was running the scum y-wing with a turret that required focus to use but since my guy shot first I got to put him in a tough bing of either using the focus to avoid some damage or sucking it up and taking a pot shot back at him.

Oberron wrote:
I like slapping a sensor jammer (and juke) on my tie-phantom to keep it alive longer. It really helped in my last game where my opponent was running the scum y-wing with a turret that required focus to use but since my guy shot first I got to put him in a tough bing of either using the focus to avoid some damage or sucking it up and taking a pot shot back at him.

This is a really bad idea. Phantoms without VI are dead phantoms. Just pretend that they're really PS 8/9 with no EPT slot, it will save you a lot of trouble.

 Peregrine wrote:


This is a really bad idea. Phantoms without VI are dead phantoms. Just pretend that they're really PS 8/9 with no EPT slot, it will save you a lot of trouble.

This idea has less merit now that we pretend the most common and menacing pilot in the game is pilot skill 10 without an EPT.

Gone are the days of out pilot skilling every BBBBZ and Super Dash/Corran player and Advanced Cloaking Devicing your way to victory. You may as well have PS 6/7 as 8/9 while Poe Dameron exists. It does you about as much good. At least with SPA you get a free evade token with your two green dice when you decloak.

 bocatt wrote:
Gone are the days of out pilot skilling every BBBBZ and Super Dash/Corran player and Advanced Cloaking Devicing your way to victory. You may as well have PS 6/7 as 8/9 while Poe Dameron exists. It does you about as much good. At least with SPA you get a free evade token with your two green dice when you decloak.

Err, lol? VI on phantoms was never about low-PS generics (which you out-PS no matter what EPT you take) and VI Poe is nowhere near the only ship in the game. This is terrible advice all around.

 bocatt wrote:
Gone are the days of out pilot skilling every BBBBZ and Super Dash/Corran player and Advanced Cloaking Devicing your way to victory.

I take it you haven't played a Phantom in a while then.

Veteran Instincts and Advanced Cloaking Device is still all but mandatory on named Phantoms.

 Peregrine wrote:

 bocatt wrote:
Gone are the days of out pilot skilling every BBBBZ and Super Dash/Corran player and Advanced Cloaking Devicing your way to victory. You may as well have PS 6/7 as 8/9 while Poe Dameron exists. It does you about as much good. At least with SPA you get a free evade token with your two green dice when you decloak.

Err, lol? VI on phantoms was never about low-PS generics (which you out-PS no matter what EPT you take) and VI Poe is nowhere near the only ship in the game. This is terrible advice all around.

I only used BBBBZ as an example because it was part of the meta along with RAC and Whisper and Super Dash/Corran when I started playing.

It's also not advice. It's a suggestion of discussion on maybe an alternate way of thinking than yours. I know. Shocker.

VI Poe makes an appearance in many competitive rebel lists for a reason. If a player shows up to a tournament with Whisper set up the same way they always have, with their fingers crossed they won't see VI Poe they will be sorely disappointed

I think Sensor Jammer, SPA, Flight Instructor and EPTs with defensive benefits may have a place in keeping the Phantom viable even in a meta where Whisper isn't top dog anymore.

Or we can just not talk about other options and keep telling people to only fly named phantoms with VI and ACD
And those people that take *that* advice will lose horribly to a hard counter pilot that not only exists as a fringe case but is almost an auto include in rebel lists.

 bocatt wrote:
I only used BBBBZ as an example because it was part of the meta along with RAC and Whisper and Super Dash/Corran when I started playing.

Ok? It doesn't matter what time you started playing, BBBBZ is a completely irrelevant example. Phantoms out-PS BBBBZ no matter what upgrades they take, so it's absurd to argue that BBBBZ was in any way driving the use of VI. If anything a BBBBZ-heavy metagame would be an argument against VI. If you know you're unlikely to face any PS 8+ opponents then you take a different EPT.

It's also not advice. It's a suggestion of discussion on maybe an alternate way of thinking than yours. I know. Shocker.

Oh, don't bother nitpicking like this. There's no difference between "advice" and "suggestion" unless you're deliberately posting things you know are bad just to get people to argue about them.

VI Poe makes an appearance in many competitive rebel lists for a reason. If a player shows up to a tournament with Whisper set up the same way they always have, with their fingers crossed they won't see VI Poe they will be sorely disappointed

And? I'm not disputing the fact that VI Poe is popular and difficult for many lower-PS ships, phantoms included, to deal with. But VI Poe is not the entire metagame, and designing your list to deal with a single pilot is just as bad as pretending that the pilot doesn't exist. The solution to VI Poe is to exploit his lack of mobility and/or bring other ships in your list (VI Vader, for example) that can handle him while Whisper takes care of other stuff.

I think Sensor Jammer, SPA, Flight Instructor and EPTs with defensive benefits may have a place in keeping the Phantom viable even in a meta where Whisper isn't top dog anymore.

...

No. Not at all. A SPA phantom is a dead phantom because an SPA phantom is a predictable phantom. Without ACD you're no more maneuverable than an academy pilot, and that's nowhere near enough for such an expensive ship. Flight instructor is garbage without ACD. You don't have enough dice to get much out of a re-roll if you aren't cloaked, and re-rolling an eye result against a single ace pilot is worse than just spending your focus token. Sensor jammer is marginal at best against Poe because he almost always has a focus token and gets a free mini-focus without spending it. Finally, just what defensive EPTs are you going to take? Lone wolf is mediocre with only two green dice, wired is even worse, and determination and elusiveness are just plain garbage. The only plausible option is stacking focus + evade with PTL (assuming you take ACD like you're supposed to, instead of SPA), but that gets you killed in the long run because phantoms don't have enough greens to out-maneuver any serious threat.

If you really want to deal with Poe start looking at the crew slot. For example, rebel captive is nasty against Poe because it completely shuts down his maneuverability. If he shoots at Whisper then you know exactly where he's going to be next turn and make him pay for it. If he doesn't shoot at Whisper you laugh as you wipe the rest of your opponent's list off the table while Poe hides in the corner. Or Mara Jade is even worse, if you can get into range 1 on that initial turn to start handing out stress. Once Poe is locked into green maneuvers (or white maneuvers while keeping stress) he's never going to get a shot again.

Or we can just not talk about other options and keep telling people to only fly named phantoms with VI and ACD

Sorry, but that's just how it is. If you want to fly Whisper or Echo you take ACD and VI. There's no point in wasting time discussing alternate ideas just for the sake of discussing alternate ideas.

And those people that take *that* advice will lose horribly to a hard counter pilot that not only exists as a fringe case but is almost an auto include in rebel lists.

First of all, Poe is not an auto-include. He's a good option, but nowhere near auto-include status. In fact, it's arguable if he's even the best T-70 pilot!

Second, yes, VI Whisper/Echo will struggle against VI Poe. But your proposed alternative is going to struggle just as badly, while being absolute garbage against the many other ships that aren't VI Poe. Even if VI Poe is an auto-loss for VI/ACD Whisper you just have to accept that as the price of winning your games against other opponents.

Didn't mean to cause a crap-storm here. I've been running SJ with SPA and juke on echo and have been doing just fine with it but then again I run a list that tries to force my opponent to take focus actions, it doesn't work against every list but for me I've won more then I've lost and was just saying on how I use Sensor jammer (the topic at hand). Might wanna start another thread and talk about phantoms elsewhere

It's no big deal. It just shows how the metagame doesn't always affect a lot of the community.
When you are comparing how a ship/list compares to others, you cant account for what is, in my experience, the most common decider of games. Players.
Outside of tournaments of store champs level and up, auto include upgrades rarely have to be a thing.

 jokerkd wrote:
Outside of tournaments of store champs level and up, auto include upgrades rarely have to be a thing.

Sorry, have to disagree with this. Many, if not most, of the things labeled "mandatory" are still just as powerful regardless of the metagame. In a less-competitive metagame you might be able to get away with taking bad upgrades because you're only playing against low-skill opponents and/or weak lists, but the "mandatory" upgrade is still a better choice. It's fine if you want to take a weaker list, but you shouldn't pretend that your strategy is somehow better than the standard one just because your metagame lets you get away with it.

This is certainly the case with VI/ACD on Whisper and Echo. The ability to recloak every turn, and do it at as high PS as possible, is just way more valuable than anything else you could take in those upgrade slots. At PS 6/7 there are too many pilots that will move after you and shoot before you can recloak. For any other EPT to be viable you'd have to have a metagame where PS 7+ ships are virtually nonexistent, and that would be an incredibly skewed metagame compared to the average tournament. In fact, playing less competitively would make it less likely to have that kind of metagame, since many "casual" players are drawn to the unique pilots instead of the boring-but-mathematically-efficient generics.

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely agree that there are always objectively better choices.

What you just said is basically what i meant. In a lot of communities and gaming groups, you can get away with not playing to the meta.

VI Poe is nowhere near the only ship in the game

No, he isn't. But if you plan on making a 'competitive' list that you're taking to a tournament, crossing your fingers and hoping you're not going to face either a PS9 Soontir with a better initiative bid than you, PS10 Poe Dameron or a PS11 Darth Vader is wishful thinking in the extreme.

As a result, there is some argument for accepting you're not going to win the pilot skill race and building from there.

Juke, Stygium Particle Accelerator and Agent Kallus are not bad at all - and Juke and Sensor Jammer are a very nice pair because your opponent is therefore going to need that focus token both to attack and defend. Equally, if facing high PS, action-dependent aces, Rebel Captive remains the good option it always has been.

Note - does not work against Poe!



Sensor Jammer is a very good card - as noted, it's good for making people make choices they don't want to. It especially excels at cutting the teeth of attackers without a focus token - Twin Laser Turrets (already 'a thing'), and people using missiles/torpedoes. Once Guidance Chips come in, that's a non-trivial thing to consider.

Finally, it's also very good in epic games because as a rule, huge ships lack ways to change focus results. I've had Captain Kagi draw off and soak the entire broadside of an ordnance tubes raider for three turns, whilst a TIE swarm calmly wandered behind it and blew the reactor up.

locarno24 wrote:
As a result, there is some argument for accepting you're not going to win the pilot skill race and building from there.

But you haven't lost the PS race. You can almost guarantee that you will face ships that out-PS you, but there are still quite a few ships where VI is relevant. At PS 8 you have Corran, Miranda, Omega Leader, Carnor Jax, etc. VI takes you from moving before and recloaking after those ships shoot you to moving after and recloaking before they shoot. Then at PS 9 you have Jake, VI Ello, non-VI Vader and Fel. Even if you expect to lose the initiative bid some of the time you MUST at least force them to choose between moving second and shooting before you can re-cloak. You can't afford to let those ships get both sides of the PS advantage against you.

In short, what you're saying here is essentially "you're screwed if you face VI Poe or VI Vader, so you might as well be equally screwed against Corran and Fel".

Juke, Stygium Particle Accelerator and Agent Kallus are not bad at all

Strongly disagree about the first two.

Juke is garbage on phantoms. You don't really want to be taking an evade action (spending a focus on offense to get more hits is generally better than forcing your opponent to spend a focus on defense since a dead ship usually doesn't shoot back) and you can not afford to give up VI. Forcing Corran to spend a focus token on defense doesn't really help much when he lines up a range-1 double tap from outside of your arc.

SPA is even worse than juke. A free evade token gives you one turnof improved defense (or one turn of weaker defense, if you're getting shot at by lower-PS ships that you could have recloaked against with ACD). After that turn you die horribly because you're as predictable as an academy pilot. Even if you aren't going to be able to get the defensive benefits of cloaking against a high-PS threat like VI Poe you absolutely need the unpredictability of that decloak maneuver. Your only chance of survival is to set up a situation where you have viable decloak options in multiple directions and hope your opponent guesses the wrong one.

Kallus is not bad though, in the right metagame. He's obviously terrible against generic spam, but against lists that bring a single key threat it's a very powerful ability. And sensor jammer is a valid option on phantoms. FCS gives you much better firepower (if you keep shooting at the same target) and a dead ship is one that can't shoot at you, but sensor jammer is just crippling against TLTs.