2018 Invader data wrap and Yavin Base Team League lists

Invader League Season 2 came.  Invader League Season 2 went.  We hardly knew ye, Invader League Season 2.

Another season, another champion.  Um, actually, the same champion.  Congrats to Kingsley on the repeat!  Kingsley did it with another highly efficient Wonder Twins list, which we will talk about briefly below.  The runner up was Garnanana, who played a great season and ran a very solid Veers/Boba list.

This is primarily a data post though, so after we talk briefly about the top 2, we’ll dive into some nitty gritty details.

We will also look at some early data from Yavin Base Team League, because this is the first sizable event with the new Key Positions for which we have list data.  Spoiler alert: the bids are really interesting.

The Champ

Kingsley did it again.  You can watch the finals match over on Yavinbase, if you have four hours to kill.  If you don’t have four hours to kill, Garanana also did a recap of the match on his blog, which you can find here.

Here is Kingsley’s list:

Still Playing Rebels, I Guess’ 783 points

Luke Skywalker 160 – Force Push, Emergency Stims
Leia Organa 90
Rebel Troopers 40 – Z-6 Trooper, Rebel Trooper, Impact Grenades
Rebel Troopers 40 – Z-6 Trooper, Rebel Trooper, Impact Grenades
Rebel Troopers 40 – Z-6 Trooper
Rebel Troopers 40
Rebel Troopers 40 – Z-6 Trooper
Rebel Troopers 40 – Z-6 Trooper
Rebel Commandos (Strike Team) 16 – DH-447 Sniper, Grappling Hooks
Rebel Commandos (Strike Team) 16 – DH-447 Sniper
Rebel Commandos (Strike Team) 16 – DH-447 Sniper

Kingsley has a very strong 17 point bid, and this thing is built for efficiency.  Wonder twins, Z-6s, and snipers.

This is a solid list.  If anyone owns Wonder Twins, it is Kingsley.  Luke and Leia together was already developing as an effective build in most places simultaneously after Leia’s release back in May, but Kingsley was the first one to popularize the idea and put it to good use in Invader League season 1.  Kingsley makes very few mistakes and knows how to run his twins.

We also talked to Kingsley about his list (and a lot of other things) on our podcast.

Runner Up

Garnanana is a very solid Empire player, who burst onto the scene in Invader season 2.  He crushed my dreams on his way to becoming the top Empire player (which he also wrote about).  I’m still not entirely sure how many syllables to use when pronouncing his name, but here is his list.  Garn also writes about his list.

Garnanana’s list 799 points

General Veers 80
Snowtroopers 48 – Flametrooper, Imperial Officer Upgrade, Impact Grenades,
Stormtroopers 44 – DLT-19 Stormtrooper, Imperial Officer Upgrade,
Stormtroopers 44 – DLT-19 Stormtrooper,
Stormtroopers 44 – DLT-19 Stormtrooper, 
Stormtroopers 44 -DLT-19 Stormtrooper,
Boba Fett 140 – Hunter
Imperial Royal Guards 75 – Electrostaff Guard,
Scout Troopers (Strike Team) 16 – DLT-19x Sniper,
Scout Troopers (Strike Team) 16 – DLT-19x Sniper,

This is a very solid Veers/Boba list.  The IRG provide an annoying Luke tarpit. which when combined with the potential for whipcord means you have to be very cagey with Luke.  Garn did a good job of isolating and managing Luke in our matchup with Boba and the IRG, without ever doing any wounds to him.  Garn has a defensive, opportunistic style that plays into the strengths of his list.

Since there is so much coverage elsewhere on these lists and the matches we’ll just go ahead and dive right into the data.

Invader League Eliminations Round

The Invader league elims were tense and competitive.  23 total games were played, which is a rather small sample.  Let us take a gander nonetheless.

Cross-faction matchups

This is always one of the most discussed and hotly debated data points.  Which faction is better?

In the Round Robin there was a clear skew towards Rebel wins in cross-faction matchups.  However, snipers weren’t legal, and only one of Palpatine’s command cards was.

Eliminations saw the addition of snipers, which I personally believe helped Empire players significantly.  I wrote in my last Invader League post about the eliminations lists and the list building trends, so I won’t repeat them here.

You will be happy to note that the Rebel/Empire record in cross-faction matches was a perfectly boring 5-5.  Yup, 50/50.  The finals match even featured one of each.  10 games is a very small sample, but these were matches between very good players with optimized lists, so one could hope it is more meaningful than 10 other random games.

Setup cards

23 games is an incredibly small sample, but here is the data anyway.

Elims turn 0 data:

That probably isn’t enough games to draw any meaningful conclusions…. so let’s add it to the Round Robin data, shall we?

120 games should be sufficient I think.

Round Robin + Elims Turn 0 data:

120 games and 58 cross-faction games is much more interesting.  Looking at setup card trends is a little bit of an exercise in squinting to find a practical application, but there are couple of things worth noting.

Key Positions

There were only two games of Key Positions played in elims, bringing the total to 12.  I can confirm that every single one of these games resulted in a blue player win.  Luckily, FFG is paying attention.  It has been changed.  Let’s move on.

Major Offensive

Major Offensive seems to be the least objectionable deployment.  This makes sense as it is basically ‘table quarters.’  All of the other deployments favor particular builds to one degree or another.

Breakthrough

This is a vehicle objective.  Hardly anyone took vehicles, so logically this would be excluded or not actively chosen frequently.

Disarray (and other stuff everybody hates)

Everybody hates Disarray.  This might be my most practical takeaway from this info.  Why?  It is basically a veto in your deck that you don’t have to remove, if you happen to dislike another deployment as much or slightly less, because your opponent probably hates it too.

Let me give you an example.  Suppose you have a list where you are running 3 flame AT-RTs (who does that?  Seriously).  Long March is bad.  Disarray… not ideal, but also not terrible.  But you know what?  No one is going to force Disarray on you anyway, since they hate it too, so cut Long March.

This same bit of advice loosely goes for the other ‘unpopular’ options as well: Breakthrough and Hostile Environment.

Seeding

The Eliminations round of Invader League has an interesting wrinkle that is absent from most other Legion tournaments: a cut after Round Robin (from 60 down to 24) and seeding, based on how each player did in the Round Robin.

How accurate was the seeding and how did lower seeds perform against higher seeds?

13 times, the winner was the higher seed; 10 times, it was the lower seed.  That strikes me as more lower seed wins than I expected.  Part of this was Garnanana; somehow he ended up as an 18 seed (thanks Round Robin!).  Obviously he trounced each of his higher seeded opponents except Kingsley.

The second round was particularly interesting, since this is where the seeding gap would have been largest.  This was the first game for the top 8 players (the top 8 got a bye), and they were each paired against an opponent that had to do a play in game to make it to round 2.  Of these 8 games, the lower seeded player beat the higher-seeded player 6 out of 8 times.  If you are curious about the bracket you can find it here.

Yavin Base Team League

Today is gone, today was fun.  Tomorrow is another one.

League, that is.

Yavin Base Team League is wrapping up its first round.  The format is quite an interesting one: teams of three face off in a Swiss style bracket.  The League has 16 teams (48 players), which gives us plenty of list data.

If you want to look at every single list, you can find them here: YBTL round 1.  My apologies for the sloppy-ass format; I’ll make sure I get all the lists in standard formats from the captains for Round 2.

There are some interesting tidbits here.

Bidding

One of the largest questions I had is how bids would change after the Key Positions changes.  This is the first sizable tournament post-KP fix.  The format is a little unusual, since it a is team tournament and players have some control over matchups, but we are still looking at 48 lists here.

Below are the Invader League eliminations bids compared against the Yavin Base Team League bids.

Well that is… quite a difference.  In Yavin Base Team League, 33 players (more than two thirds) bid 2 or less.  Its hard to say how much of it is the team format and how much is the KP fix.  I am inclined to say it is a little bit of both.

Las Vegas Open will be the really interesting data point on bids.  Personally I expect them to be in the 0-6 range instead of the 0-2 range.

I have a feeling this is going to come back a bit.  There are still advantages to being blue.  Clearly Key Positions was creating a big distortion, though.

List Diversity

There was quite a bit of diversity in list construction.  I broke down the commander/operative pairings and summarized them in the larger graphics below.  The breakdown of Rebels and Imperials is 18 Rebels and 30 Imperials.  Here are the counts of the various commanders, operatives, and vehicles:

Rebels

Leia is still the most popular Rebel commander, but she was paired with the other Rebel characters.  Han was frequently paired with Chewie.  There were three triple character lists (one Luke/Leia/Chewie and two Han/Leia/Chewie).

I included lists with Flame AT-RTs as their own separate thing, because I was a little surprised how popular they were.  Maybe a little counter meta after the total absence of armor in Invader season 2?

Empire

Very diverse.  I was actually surprised to see so much of Vader.  Veers is still the most popular Empire commander by quite a margin.

That’s all for now, folks.  Once we get some more Yavin Base Team League games in I will post some more updates.  Also some more unit guides coming soon, hopefully.