I already talked about the team tournament in my news from the front posting yesterday.
I'm trying to find a golden thread for this posting, so let me begin to say some words about the tournament and how I managed to form my team.
Playing team tournaments got very popular in germany over the course of the last year. I'm not sure who started the trend, but the fact is that "da boss" of my gaming club (called Firebug) announced the next club tournament to be a 3 players team tournament a couple of months ago. He is a very nice fella but also very ambitious. So the first team formed up quick, with him and the two other good players from the club joining forces. A second team formed up quickly after that. Since our club has ~40 members (not everyone playing 40k) and the inn we play at can't hold more than 60 people, we decided that we don't want to have more three club teams with the remaining members being free to form up teams of their own with friends of the club.
I'm more of a honory than an active member due to distance between my home and the club rooms(~200+ miles). For example I can't visit the weekly gaming days, so my activity is limited on club tournament participation and wearing the club shirt at other tournaments.
During the last club tournament I met Jochen gain. He is a friend of mine whom I acquainted years ago and we stayed in contact after the tournament was finished.
So we idea came up to form a team of its own. With us two forming the core we were just one member short. There is a another gaming club called WEC ~90 miles away, with a friendly relationship to our boss and other members. Their own tournaments are also a real blast and I'm eager to play one of them in 2010. After one of their members heared that our team was in need of a third player, he send us the name of a member of them who searched a team for that specific tournament. With Manuel our team was full and we started making plans using a mailing list, a couple of phone calls and gmail chat conversations.
Manuel owns a lot of armies, but he's playing chaos at tournaments for years and Jochen is mainly a SM player, running a SW force back in edition 3 and new DA army using either the DA or SM codex in edition 5. I only own eldar, so my choice was rather easy. Our original setup was SM/CSM/Eldar, but we changed that to SW/CSM/Eldar after the new SW dex came out. More about that and the reasons for that setup later.
The Tournament setting was:
- 5 games over the course of a weekend
- 1850 points per army and for every team no codex can be taken more than once.
- 20 teams of 3 players each
- Swiss system
- missions unknown
- couple of restrictions like no named chars, two Raiders maximum and no 3 units of the same kind except for troop choices. So no Vulkan led armies with 2 raiders full of SS/TH terminators or a eldar force with tripple wraithlords
Each team had a captain, in most cases one of the 3 players. I was the captain for my team, so my job was to meet with the other captain at the assigned table set to exchange lists, shake hands and try to get good matchups for my team.
The pairing system was borrowed from another very popular team tournament. After going over the lists the captains roll off like you do during deployment. Let's call the one who needs (or wants) to go first captain A and the other guy is captain B and take a look how the system works:
Captain A chooses one his three player for the first pairing.
Captain B then chooses one of his members as the opponent.
Captain A now has the right to pick the table those two player will battle on against each other.
Captain B chooses one of his remaining players for the second pairing
Captain A picks one of his remaining guys
Captain B chooses the table to play on
Rinse and repeat... As you can see this system works out with any amount of player and the penumilate pairing also decides the last one.
In my opinion this kind of tournament is far more challenging than a normal one and it needs a bit more preparatory work. Why?
Let's run a quick scenario and assume that we have team A (lash-CSM/Mech-SM/nidzilla) facing team B (Pod-SM/JotWW-SW/BT). Team A has put some thoughts into the tournament and after hearing those horror stories about Jaws of the World Wolf the nidzilla player says that he can't even guarantee a draw against a SW list with JotWW in it. After looking over the lists team Bs captain sees that he doesn't want a CSM vs SM matchup, thanks to lash and oblis using morphed plasma cannon and his SM player skipping on a psyker in favour of other HQ-choices.
Team A wins the toss and what can the captain do?
Scenario A) Listen to the words of his nidzilla player, trying his best to avoid a Nid vs SW game at any cost. He can achieve that regardless of going first or not. If he goes first he doesn't elect his nid-player. Thus he can influence the second and third pairings, but looses the chance to pick a good table for those games. If there is only one bad table for the nid player, which isn't too bad for the one player of his team, who goes first, he can also take care of that. For example if one of the three tables is void of any good terrain, while the other two aren't and his nid player doesn't use warriors to create coversaves for MCs, he just use that table for the first pairing.
Scenario B) He thinks that his CSM player would massace both the SM and BT forces, thanks to their lack of psychic defense. He also thinks that his mech-SM have a small edge against the BT thanks to his SS/TH terminators. So if he sees a chance that his nid-player could achieve a draw or minor loss against the SW through a denial tactic, he could sacrifice him and hope for two other good matchups (Mech-SM with SS/TH against BT and Lash-CSM against Pod-SM)
So you need to pour some thoughts into army combinations and tailored vs all comers list. That of course assumes that you have enough large armies to draw on. If you're only 3 best friends with one army each you can skip the army selection process.
That's the reason why we choose SW, CSM and Eldar. We didn't have a tournament ready IG force in our closets and Manuel really excels when he plays CSM. CSM gave us a very offensive army, esp. against enemies w/o psychic defense or a lot of transport vehicles. Our SW army packs a lot of long ranged punch, has the "new kids on the block" bonus and with JotWW works really well against both nids and ork armies. My eldar force filled the need for a denial list. With the scoring system used my chances weren't that high to achieve a major victory or even a massacre, but you don't get tabled that easily with them too. Manuel made some test games with his army, Jochen went to a small tournament with a first version of his new SW. I talked a lot with Dverning (thanks again if you read this!) over gmail chat, since my experience with eldar in ed5 is rather limited and with my side job I didn't managed to glue everything together for some test games.
We all met up at the inn on saturday...that was where the fun started, but more about that and the first game in my next posting tomorrow.
I'm trying to find a golden thread for this posting, so let me begin to say some words about the tournament and how I managed to form my team.
Playing team tournaments got very popular in germany over the course of the last year. I'm not sure who started the trend, but the fact is that "da boss" of my gaming club (called Firebug) announced the next club tournament to be a 3 players team tournament a couple of months ago. He is a very nice fella but also very ambitious. So the first team formed up quick, with him and the two other good players from the club joining forces. A second team formed up quickly after that. Since our club has ~40 members (not everyone playing 40k) and the inn we play at can't hold more than 60 people, we decided that we don't want to have more three club teams with the remaining members being free to form up teams of their own with friends of the club.
I'm more of a honory than an active member due to distance between my home and the club rooms(~200+ miles). For example I can't visit the weekly gaming days, so my activity is limited on club tournament participation and wearing the club shirt at other tournaments.
During the last club tournament I met Jochen gain. He is a friend of mine whom I acquainted years ago and we stayed in contact after the tournament was finished.
So we idea came up to form a team of its own. With us two forming the core we were just one member short. There is a another gaming club called WEC ~90 miles away, with a friendly relationship to our boss and other members. Their own tournaments are also a real blast and I'm eager to play one of them in 2010. After one of their members heared that our team was in need of a third player, he send us the name of a member of them who searched a team for that specific tournament. With Manuel our team was full and we started making plans using a mailing list, a couple of phone calls and gmail chat conversations.
Manuel owns a lot of armies, but he's playing chaos at tournaments for years and Jochen is mainly a SM player, running a SW force back in edition 3 and new DA army using either the DA or SM codex in edition 5. I only own eldar, so my choice was rather easy. Our original setup was SM/CSM/Eldar, but we changed that to SW/CSM/Eldar after the new SW dex came out. More about that and the reasons for that setup later.
The Tournament setting was:
- 5 games over the course of a weekend
- 1850 points per army and for every team no codex can be taken more than once.
- 20 teams of 3 players each
- Swiss system
- missions unknown
- couple of restrictions like no named chars, two Raiders maximum and no 3 units of the same kind except for troop choices. So no Vulkan led armies with 2 raiders full of SS/TH terminators or a eldar force with tripple wraithlords
Each team had a captain, in most cases one of the 3 players. I was the captain for my team, so my job was to meet with the other captain at the assigned table set to exchange lists, shake hands and try to get good matchups for my team.
The pairing system was borrowed from another very popular team tournament. After going over the lists the captains roll off like you do during deployment. Let's call the one who needs (or wants) to go first captain A and the other guy is captain B and take a look how the system works:
Captain A chooses one his three player for the first pairing.
Captain B then chooses one of his members as the opponent.
Captain A now has the right to pick the table those two player will battle on against each other.
Captain B chooses one of his remaining players for the second pairing
Captain A picks one of his remaining guys
Captain B chooses the table to play on
Rinse and repeat... As you can see this system works out with any amount of player and the penumilate pairing also decides the last one.
In my opinion this kind of tournament is far more challenging than a normal one and it needs a bit more preparatory work. Why?
Let's run a quick scenario and assume that we have team A (lash-CSM/Mech-SM/nidzilla) facing team B (Pod-SM/JotWW-SW/BT). Team A has put some thoughts into the tournament and after hearing those horror stories about Jaws of the World Wolf the nidzilla player says that he can't even guarantee a draw against a SW list with JotWW in it. After looking over the lists team Bs captain sees that he doesn't want a CSM vs SM matchup, thanks to lash and oblis using morphed plasma cannon and his SM player skipping on a psyker in favour of other HQ-choices.
Team A wins the toss and what can the captain do?
Scenario A) Listen to the words of his nidzilla player, trying his best to avoid a Nid vs SW game at any cost. He can achieve that regardless of going first or not. If he goes first he doesn't elect his nid-player. Thus he can influence the second and third pairings, but looses the chance to pick a good table for those games. If there is only one bad table for the nid player, which isn't too bad for the one player of his team, who goes first, he can also take care of that. For example if one of the three tables is void of any good terrain, while the other two aren't and his nid player doesn't use warriors to create coversaves for MCs, he just use that table for the first pairing.
Scenario B) He thinks that his CSM player would massace both the SM and BT forces, thanks to their lack of psychic defense. He also thinks that his mech-SM have a small edge against the BT thanks to his SS/TH terminators. So if he sees a chance that his nid-player could achieve a draw or minor loss against the SW through a denial tactic, he could sacrifice him and hope for two other good matchups (Mech-SM with SS/TH against BT and Lash-CSM against Pod-SM)
So you need to pour some thoughts into army combinations and tailored vs all comers list. That of course assumes that you have enough large armies to draw on. If you're only 3 best friends with one army each you can skip the army selection process.
That's the reason why we choose SW, CSM and Eldar. We didn't have a tournament ready IG force in our closets and Manuel really excels when he plays CSM. CSM gave us a very offensive army, esp. against enemies w/o psychic defense or a lot of transport vehicles. Our SW army packs a lot of long ranged punch, has the "new kids on the block" bonus and with JotWW works really well against both nids and ork armies. My eldar force filled the need for a denial list. With the scoring system used my chances weren't that high to achieve a major victory or even a massacre, but you don't get tabled that easily with them too. Manuel made some test games with his army, Jochen went to a small tournament with a first version of his new SW. I talked a lot with Dverning (thanks again if you read this!) over gmail chat, since my experience with eldar in ed5 is rather limited and with my side job I didn't managed to glue everything together for some test games.
We all met up at the inn on saturday...that was where the fun started, but more about that and the first game in my next posting tomorrow.
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