FFG has a zombie problem

After being out of the loop for several weeks with the birth of my daughter, I checked in to the Armada World's tournament to see a startling sight.  Rieekan zombies bubbling up everywhere in the top half of the tournament and claimed three fourths of the Top 8 and Top 4 slots. Its even more concerning that an unconfirmed report said roughly half the field might have been Rieekan Aces.  Any time a top tournament sees such a massive domination by one archetype, it warrants game designers to look at what exactly is going on.  This archetype for those unfamiliar is a list with five activations.  Two of these are combat ships (Yavaris Neb B + either a Pelta or and AFMk2) and three flotillas to pad activations and support squadron play.  

The Zombie Lord himself

We first must examine how we came to this place over the past year since Rieekan was introduced to us.  The largest change since the General's introduction in the Star Wars Armada: MC30c Frigate Expansion , is the pure number of unique squadrons.  At his release, FFG had introduced only 9 unique squads through the Core, Rebel Fighters 1 and Rogues and Villains.  For the Worlds this year, that number had ballooned up to 21 possible fighters that could be involved.  This includes the nearly generic priced Unique squadrons from the Corellian Conflict. The number of excellent choices now for building a fighter wing of nearly all uniques to maximize the zombie ability makes Rieekan much more potent than before when there were just a handful of heavily overpriced uniques.  Going hand in hand with this explosion of fighters is the interaction between Flotillas and the new fighter keyword Relay.  Flotillas have become the most point efficient carrier in the game, and are easily the best methodology for delaying activation.  Relay also has allowed these carriers to sit far beyond the action, and face no sincere threat unless the opponent can either specialize a ship for hunting them down (H9 Turbolasers for instance) and possibly send it far afield.  This specialization is at best an even trade off against Rieekan Aces, because it effectively will remove that ship from doing anything besides chasing down flotillas.

What should FFG do to solve this issue?  Some argument can be made to wait for the next several waves to introduce counters to Rieekan (potentially the Quasar with its Red AA dice?) and force players from taking it.  The issue I see with this is the possibility of the spiral affect with these lists.  Introducing a hard counter to it just means that list becomes the meta archetype.  A reddit thread has suggested its time to ban Relay and potentially other cards in this combination.  This is unlikely to happen in Armada, especially after FFG just released Relay in this last wave of Fighter expansions.  The answer to me seems to be in a few potential places.  First, is Rieekan should not affect squadrons.  Its a hard nerf, but I still believe it allows him to be a useful commander, just not overly powerful in comparison to every other Rebel Commander.  A second suggestion (that I feel is for the good of the game regardless) is to reduce the squadron value of the GR75 by 1.  It still can operate as an excellent support, but not the best carrier in the game fr its points.  A tird option is requiring the Relay fighter to be in activation range of the ship that is using Relay.  The keyword is still a powerful distance buff, especially with Boosted Comms.  A final solution in errata is to increase the capability of AA fire from ships.  Allow Crits to count as damage at all times against fighters.  This is a fairly dramatic change, but it would give ships a real chance at surviving a bombing run.

Several of the above changes affect more than the Rieekan Aces lists.  But, besides one changing Rieekan himself other fighter based lists will likely have to be moved down a peg on the power curve to balance the game.  I think FFG will act fairly quickly to counter these lists as they did with both Imperial Assault and X Wing when strong Archetypes began to dominate tournaments to such a degree the game felt very stale. I'm hopeful its already been a bit in the works, and that was part of what had delayed the FAQ for so long, and that they are able to give us a re-balance between fighter carrier wings and ships battling it out with turbolasers.