Lancer Class Pursuit Craft

The Lancer-class pursuit craft, also known as the Lancer Pursuit Craft, was a patrol ship produced by MandalMotors at the behest of the Black Sun crime syndicate. Bounty hunterAsajj Ventress utilized the Lancer-class craft Banshee during the Clone Wars, while hunter Ketsu Onyo flew a Lancer-class vessel, the Shadow Caster, during the reign of the Galactic Empire. Another Lancer-class, the Nebular Kelpie, was seen during the Battle of Exegol, allied with the Resistance.

Before you ask, yes I did copy-paste that from Wookiepedia.

Speed 4 black die bomber with grit and rogue! On paper this reads like a masterpiece, but why don't we see Lancers very often? 4 Hull is not great. That's the same as an A-Wing for 4 more points. 3 Blue anti-squadron is okay, but still the same as an A-Wing. To me, it feels like lancers can't decide what they want to be doing. They're decent bombers, and decent fighters, but not particularly great at either. The issue is that for 1 more point you can get a YT-2400 which, in my opinion, is a superior rogue fighter. The other issue is for 5 fewer points you can get a Y-Wing which is a cheaper 1 black bomber. Rogue is really handy don't get me wrong, but I just don't think it's enough good to outweigh the meh of this craft. I'm sure there's a place for it, I just haven't figured it out.

Ketsu Onyo, on the other hand, is great! 22 Points is not too expensive for what she does either. She gets a scatter + brace token suite which is super handy for keeping that 4 hull around a bit longer. Her 2 blue bomber die is also just so good. Doesn't really matter what faces you two blue show she's gonna be pushing through some damage, just don't roll two Accuracies. Her ability is fun but doesn't always come into play. "While an enemy squadron is at distance 1, its speed is reduced by 2 to a minimum of 1." Shove her into that firespray, tie bomber, or droid bomber swarm and hold them back. With the change to intel in 1.5, her ability loses a little bit of power, but it's still good. She can reliably tie up most squads alone, even with grit on the board they won't go far from her. Just be careful cause she does have a tendency to die quickly.

Okay, so what can we gather from all that: Generic Lancers can be good, I'm sure, in the right list. Most likely you're gonna want to bring multiple of them and make sure bomber command center and/or Toryn Farr is close to helping those dice. Ketsu is fun and good I could run her all day, in fact, she was the final addition to my VWC22 list. She is fast, relatively cheap, and more than capable of bombing or dog-fighting.