Armada Preview - Garm's Exodus

With the end of the quarter upon me and 43 student commentaries to write, I went ahead and made the poor decision to go meet up with friends in Kansas City this weekend for the Renaissance Fair! On top of that, I am headed back to the Geekery on Sunday for another store tournament of Armada before heading home, this time only a 400-point game.

Needless to say I'm more excited for this format than I was for the 600 point, although I still expect to see a lot of SSDs running around. The other big news in the Armada world is the release of Rebellion in the Rim! So now I finally have the cards I've been proxying for quite some time.

This fleet can in many ways be thought of as the final evolution of my tinkering with AST + Garm over the last couple months. The concept is: what if I just completely double down on Garm's gimmick. How far can he get me?

Name: Garm's Exodus
Faction: Rebel
Commander: Garm Bel Iblis

Assault: Surprise Attack
Defense: Contested Outpost
Navigation: Solar Corona

MC80 Star Cruiser (96)
• Garm Bel Iblis (25)
• Strategic Adviser (4)
• Auxiliary Shields Team (3)
• SW-7 Ion Batteries (5)
• Mon Calamari Exodus Fleet (5)
= 138 Points

MC80 Star Cruiser (96)
• Auxiliary Shields Team (3)
• SW-7 Ion Batteries (5)
• Mon Calamari Exodus Fleet (5)
= 109 Points

Nebulon-B Support Refit (51)
• Auxiliary Shields Team (3)
• Linked Turbolaser Towers (7)
= 61 Points

GR-75 Medium Transports (18)
• Ahsoka Tano (2)
= 20 Points

Squadrons:
• Lando Calrissian (23)
• Shara Bey (17)
• Tycho Celchu (16)
• A-wing Squadron (11)
= 67 Points

Total Points: 395

Yeah, you knew this fleet was coming eventually.

The goal here is to skimp on upgrades and gain the most efficiency out of Garm while not losing a SFC. I've been really inspired by Shmitty's Dumpster Fire fleet, sporting a Star Cruiser with only Nav teams. I'm taking it in a slightly different direction. He preferred Nav Teams with Garm to make good use of those Nav Tokens, fixing the LMC80's move chart. I am instead opting to fix its defenses and maximize the use of those Round 1 Garm tokens.

His fleet got me thinking that Star Cruisers might be being overlooked, and gunnery teams on LMC80s might be overrated. The pair I am sporting here are not standard artillery LMC80s, but rather medium-range double-arcing brawlers. SW7's are there to smooth out the damage at medium range, and I finally get to utilize a card I've been eying for years in the form of MC Exodus Fleet.

It's no secret I love cards like 7th Fleet Star Destroyer/MC Exodus Fleet that I can try to min-max the value out of. MC Exodus Fleet has just suffered for years from being too niche. How often do you run engineering anyway? But with Garm, that's a guaranteed double engineering token usage on both ships, so that's already 8 additional engineering points. Factor in a likely engineering command on both and at least 2 Ahsoka'd Engineering Tokens, and now we're looking at 16 extra engineering points over the course of the game, or 8 additional shields potentially for 10 points. Worth trying out at the very least.

Finally, I've got my new favorite card, ASTs, to buff up those side shields for the brawl and get full efficiency out of Garm's round 1 tokens.

In sum, I have a pair of larges that really want to brawl and take damage, get in close and double arc.

The next thing I built was the SFC, with which I wanted to test out if Lando will really bring back the small fighter group. He honestly looks extremely cool, and I think he will punch way above his weight. He's flying in with some usual suspects of Rebel anti-squads - we'll see if it's enough to slow down a determined bomber ball.

Rounding out the fleet was actually the hardest part of this, and something I was hung up on for weeks - swapping out TRCR90s, Peltas, Escort Frigates, etc. I knew I definitely wanted to get a command 2 ship in that could take ASTs to maximize Garm, but trying to get a ship in there I was happy with while maximizing its potential and commanding my squads was proving very difficult. I eventually settled on an AST + LTT  + Support Refit Neb. Cramming on Strat Advisor, I have 5 activations, and 6 deployments. It's less deployments that I would like, but a respectable number of activations for a double large fleet.

For objectives I picked some of the usual suspects and what I expect will soon become a staple red objective - surprise attack.

So, in sum, this fleet wants to get in quickly and brawl, trading punches and winning by out-tanking my opponents. While this fleet lacks specific anti-SSD tools, I think it will fare well because I should be able to easily maneuver the Liberty's into the side arcs while and then start pouring fire and repairing back up.

I probably don't want to run into a Sloane fleet or bomber ball, as I would have to really aggressively close to kill the carrier in both those cases to win. Against an MSU, I think I fare well, but probably not as optimized as a couple battlecruisers sporting gunnery teams would be. In any slugfest with larges, however, I predict I will have a big advantage. Double brace and Garm + Exodus Fleet means that killing my LMC80s will be slow going.

We'll see what happens, this fleet is highly experimental, but if it works I would love to take something like this to Chicago in November.