I also recommend a rush on Han's Millennium Falcon. Fleet shards are smaller and thus easier to make the leaderboard in. The Negotiator will probably call Han's Falcon meta into question, but it'll be a hot minute before that hits a new shard, and even then you usually don't have to be on the bleeding edge of a meta to hold top 50 or better.
It helps that one of the ships needed for the event- Houndstooth- is one of the most defining ships of fleet and just getting your hands on that early will go a long way to securing your place on the leaderboard.