The X-Wing Miniatures Game is a thematic space dogfighting game exhibiting the factions and spacecraft throughout the Star Wars universe. Typically, the game has been well-balanced to foster a various viable playstyles and archetypes, ranging from a handful of top-notch aces to a swarm of weak but overwhelming TIE fighters to a ragtag team of Rebel craft that work together to achieve victory.

The recent costing of the Nantex, however, has dramatically slimmed down the playing field into a meta of rock-paper-scissors. The peculiarly undercosted Nantex can be spammed to almost as many copies per list as one can fit fragile and low-reacting Vulture Droids into a list. Yet, given its high-initiative value, it can eliminate many pieces before they have a chance to return fire. With its turrets, it has an alarming high time on target yet it also has a massive damage output due to its bullseye firing arc--especially in tandem with other bullseye abilities like Predator and Crackshot. Given that the ship ability functions even when blocked, it is far less wary of not completing maneuvers than other craft. In a very inexpensive package, this craft has it all. It can swarm aces and utility, and it can ace other swarms and efficiency pieces. Due to its very open and good maneuvering dial, along with its repositional options, traditional area denial pieces like bombs, mines, and rigged cargo chutes have proven to be less than effective at reigning the craft in. Even alarmingly poor variance for the craft does little to harm the list in general, given how many copies of the same craft are within a single list. Although the list certainly takes skill to fly, there is a disproportionate burden of execution placed on the shoulders of the player playing against the Nantex.

In the only 2 large tournaments since the recent points change that allowed such spamming of a piece to great effect without any force multiplier, the Nantex has demonstrated a supernatural cut-rate against its Swiss-rate. As its few counters are eliminated by the many things that it counters, it floods the top tables and wins its second major tournament.

Why then, the petition, if FFG has been doing an otherwise fantastic job balancing the game? Typically, FFG's model of balancing is a semiannual format, with a slight retweaking of the game every 6 months. Given that the points change that allowed the Nantex to dominate was less than 2 months ago, it will be a long period for the game to have to wait to be rebalanced. But FFG is no stranger to emergency nerfs: once Triple Upsilon Shuttles was dominating newer players, they took action to address the problem with an emergency set of rebalances. Without any official tournaments, however, FFG might not take note of the unofficial community-run online events that still arguably propel the sales of the real-life miniatures. But given that the online meta will inevitably affect the real-life meta of the game once the Coronavirus is brought under control, the presence of such a dominating list as a swarm of 6 Nantex aces will inevitably dampen interest in the game, and thus sales.