Re: Path To Glory - BSK All Matches Up ;)
Posted: Wed Nov 05, 2014 2:56 pm
Time for some musings. Read on to see what I think about the pairings, our armies, meta development and more!
.::. Borås Spelkonvent - Post-Tournament Analysis .::.
This tournament is held annually in Sweden and has in the recent years seen an uprise in popularity. One of our opponents, the ones from match 5, have been going here for several years and could tell us that the amount of teams participating had been steadily rising. This year set an all-time high with a record 24 teams attending: 5 of them taking the long trip from Norway.
As for the Seals, we started our preparations already in May as the aspect of playing as a team really appealed to us. We all had a number of armies and lists we were considering and thoroughly enjoyed playtesting and developing the team composition as a whole. The only army that ended up being taken in roughly the same format as we started out with was the Dark Elves. Both rusty, strange and myself had to go through many revisions and playtesting games to find lists that we could play and that would suit the team.
The pairing process was something we spent a lot of time preparing for. In the end, I don't think we failed in a single match with regards to pairing. True, we made a mistake in match 2, but this was because we did not have enough experiences with the matchups and evaluated them wrong. This goes to show how important it is to know not only your army, but also your enemies. Being able to correctly judge a matchup is crucial. This is a fact I have been stressing for the past few months on this site and blog, because knowing which faction the matchup is skewed towards means knowing how you ought to play. This is even more important in a team tournament setting, as evidenced by our 2x 0-20 losses in matchups we decided to play for match 2. For all the other games, we got the best out of the situation with the armies available, assuming opponents would not make mistakes. We found Dwarfs to be hard to pair, but holding High Elves back was typically a strong move because the hard counters to Dwarfs were usually weak to High Elves: Allowing us to capitalize on an otherwise weak matchup.
Speaking of pairing, from an overall point of view our strategy was typically to have the stable armies (DE + DoC) thrown out to the wolves, allowing our opponents to choose their matchups. This proved to be a good plan as they both did their job (again, with the exception of match 2 where we evaluated DE-DoC wrong). DE ended up with 41bp, with DoC claiming 76bp. For being our typical counters, this is very good. Dwarfs got some iffy matchups, but the nature of this army means you will almost always have this problem. In hindsight, we should probably have looked into more stable DW builds such as Denmark's Gyrospam from this year's ETC, but requiring Strange to buy another 5 copters was a bit excessive. Giving the Star Dragon freedom to choose its strong matchups proved to be highly valuable, I was able to find openings in all 5 of my games and ended up scoring 81bp for the team. It's a hard list to play because finding said openings often requires you to play risky (e.g. I had an LD9 monster reaction test without re-rolls in game 4), evaluate your opponent's counter-moves and play perfectly to avoid losing big points. While I made a mistake in game 1, it was still in my favour and the rest were all, without exception, big victories that greatly contributed to the team. With all that said, we were also lucky not to meet any teams with 2 hard counters to Dwarfs that could also play the Star Dragon. An example of such is the High Elf Deathtrain + Empire Coven of Light. While these are somewhat playable for me, they are impossible to secure big points from. I am unsure what the overall "composition-meta" looks like, perhaps there were indeed few such teams around. Regardless, I would have preferred to have a more stable Dwarf army and a more safe High Elf army (the Dragon is so risky at times when you play for the big points). Having to respect the nature of both armies' weakness cost us too much in terms of what our optimal pairing looked like. If I could choose from a perfect world scenario, I would have wanted to bring 3 armies that could play just about anything to a draw (e.g. our DE + DoC + vanilla-bell Skaven) and a 4th army that is just very strong and stable in the right hands (e.g. Deathtrain in a meta with little Life around): Capable of scoring big points in the right matchup but more flexible than the Star Dragon.
As for our lists, I think they were optimal given our knowledge and assumptions prior to the tournament. Rusty was originally testing DoC with a GUO, but we convinced him to try Horrors + Heralds which really, really paid off at BSK. It turned out to be the most crucial choice we made late in our preparations. His hounds were somewhat ineffective in some games, but this was also largely due to inexperience and in others, they were absolutely devastating. Dark Elves are so easy to build right that there was never a doubt in my mind we had an optimal list here and for Dwarfs, we wanted a shieldwall with a stubborn lord to hold anything that can't kill him or the bsb by magic. We decided for GTs instead of OGs because we wanted to threaten people wanting to go for 10-10 and give the DW a greater chance at fighting the ranged war against e.g. Empire. Playtesting unfortunately did not reveal this to be a weakness, but what we realized was that GTs firing indirectly were hardly ever an issue (they did give us 2BP in match 5 though, I believe) and we really lacked the sheer firepower of Organ Guns. In match 4, strange met Empire and lost all 4 WMs by turn 2, however he still only lost 12-8 so actually losing this war was not as disastrous as we'd feared. Hence, our assumptions were flawed but again, this is due to inexperience and we learned a lot. I think a Dwarf list can be configured to be a lot harder, Germany's ETC list from this year makes a lot of sense in light of our experiences for example. Lastly, the Star Dragon list I brought had 2 controversial elements compared to the builds that have previously been popular: I had a fighty Noble instead of Stubborn Crown and a 2nd Eagle instead of a 4th RBT. I was anxious about both, but in the end this proved to be the perfect setup for my playstyle: In matches 2, 4 and 5 these were all crucial elements to some of the moves I was able to pull off whereas a 4th RBT and a Stubborn Crown would not have helped me significantly.
We anticipated the meta to be largely similar to this year's ETC. By and large, this proved to be correct, but many teams took new and innovative lists that were sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle. One of these made us do a big mistake (yes, I keep referring to match 2) and again proves the importance of having a curveball and actual game experience against strong builds. It was refreshing to see teams try and innovate though, in addition to our own games we saw experimental Elf builds on tables around us and in the top placing teams. The meta seems to be evolving more and more towards more ranged control and multiple threats, however we also see that people are adapting to the ones taking this to the extreme: The super-popular DE build with multiple pegs and tons of shooting for example struggles a lot with combat resolution, so we see certain builds simply dismantling these in terms of solid, pushing power. Skaven for example do this reliably and effectively with a Bell (the winning team had a Skaven player scoring 89bp, one 9-11 loss and then 4x 20-0s in a row), certain High Elf builds (Lifetrain for example) are hard for them to deal with etc. Thus, it is my perception that we see two major playstyles appear: The evasive, hard-hitting, shooting style that DE/WE/LZ primarily play and the more "you can't touch this" based style that Empire/High Elves/Skaven typically play. There are a multitude of opportunities in-between, but what's interesting to note is that every single list competes in all stages of the game and controlling the board, either in terms of movement or firepower, is of paramount importance and present in all lists.
What appears to be the clue to creating strong lists then is to simply out-shoot the shooters while having the tools at hand for stopping the solid lists. In other words, you need a list that can compete with Wood Elves and Dark Elves at a distance while having the stopping power to make a High Elf cavstar fearful of pushing too hard. Alternatively you can try and make a list that simply pushes so hard that the shooty/evasive lists can't deal with it fast enough while also doing the solid game better than the rest. The Star Dragon build I took falls into this second category, albeit with some serious weaknesses (Empire being #1, which is a huge problem as they are so popular in the current meta). Dennis' build, which I faced in our first match, falls into the former.
I believe there is a vacuum here to be filled with the new 50% Lords and Heroes allowance. It allows us to further exploit these approaches. Our characters are often what enable us to do what we could otherwise not have done and it's easy to see that they can open up for new and unique builds. As always, I'm looking for curveballs here and seeing as 2015 looks like it'll be crammed full of tournaments, there are plenty of opportunities to explore this space.
.::. Borås Spelkonvent - Post-Tournament Analysis .::.
This tournament is held annually in Sweden and has in the recent years seen an uprise in popularity. One of our opponents, the ones from match 5, have been going here for several years and could tell us that the amount of teams participating had been steadily rising. This year set an all-time high with a record 24 teams attending: 5 of them taking the long trip from Norway.
As for the Seals, we started our preparations already in May as the aspect of playing as a team really appealed to us. We all had a number of armies and lists we were considering and thoroughly enjoyed playtesting and developing the team composition as a whole. The only army that ended up being taken in roughly the same format as we started out with was the Dark Elves. Both rusty, strange and myself had to go through many revisions and playtesting games to find lists that we could play and that would suit the team.
The pairing process was something we spent a lot of time preparing for. In the end, I don't think we failed in a single match with regards to pairing. True, we made a mistake in match 2, but this was because we did not have enough experiences with the matchups and evaluated them wrong. This goes to show how important it is to know not only your army, but also your enemies. Being able to correctly judge a matchup is crucial. This is a fact I have been stressing for the past few months on this site and blog, because knowing which faction the matchup is skewed towards means knowing how you ought to play. This is even more important in a team tournament setting, as evidenced by our 2x 0-20 losses in matchups we decided to play for match 2. For all the other games, we got the best out of the situation with the armies available, assuming opponents would not make mistakes. We found Dwarfs to be hard to pair, but holding High Elves back was typically a strong move because the hard counters to Dwarfs were usually weak to High Elves: Allowing us to capitalize on an otherwise weak matchup.
Speaking of pairing, from an overall point of view our strategy was typically to have the stable armies (DE + DoC) thrown out to the wolves, allowing our opponents to choose their matchups. This proved to be a good plan as they both did their job (again, with the exception of match 2 where we evaluated DE-DoC wrong). DE ended up with 41bp, with DoC claiming 76bp. For being our typical counters, this is very good. Dwarfs got some iffy matchups, but the nature of this army means you will almost always have this problem. In hindsight, we should probably have looked into more stable DW builds such as Denmark's Gyrospam from this year's ETC, but requiring Strange to buy another 5 copters was a bit excessive. Giving the Star Dragon freedom to choose its strong matchups proved to be highly valuable, I was able to find openings in all 5 of my games and ended up scoring 81bp for the team. It's a hard list to play because finding said openings often requires you to play risky (e.g. I had an LD9 monster reaction test without re-rolls in game 4), evaluate your opponent's counter-moves and play perfectly to avoid losing big points. While I made a mistake in game 1, it was still in my favour and the rest were all, without exception, big victories that greatly contributed to the team. With all that said, we were also lucky not to meet any teams with 2 hard counters to Dwarfs that could also play the Star Dragon. An example of such is the High Elf Deathtrain + Empire Coven of Light. While these are somewhat playable for me, they are impossible to secure big points from. I am unsure what the overall "composition-meta" looks like, perhaps there were indeed few such teams around. Regardless, I would have preferred to have a more stable Dwarf army and a more safe High Elf army (the Dragon is so risky at times when you play for the big points). Having to respect the nature of both armies' weakness cost us too much in terms of what our optimal pairing looked like. If I could choose from a perfect world scenario, I would have wanted to bring 3 armies that could play just about anything to a draw (e.g. our DE + DoC + vanilla-bell Skaven) and a 4th army that is just very strong and stable in the right hands (e.g. Deathtrain in a meta with little Life around): Capable of scoring big points in the right matchup but more flexible than the Star Dragon.
As for our lists, I think they were optimal given our knowledge and assumptions prior to the tournament. Rusty was originally testing DoC with a GUO, but we convinced him to try Horrors + Heralds which really, really paid off at BSK. It turned out to be the most crucial choice we made late in our preparations. His hounds were somewhat ineffective in some games, but this was also largely due to inexperience and in others, they were absolutely devastating. Dark Elves are so easy to build right that there was never a doubt in my mind we had an optimal list here and for Dwarfs, we wanted a shieldwall with a stubborn lord to hold anything that can't kill him or the bsb by magic. We decided for GTs instead of OGs because we wanted to threaten people wanting to go for 10-10 and give the DW a greater chance at fighting the ranged war against e.g. Empire. Playtesting unfortunately did not reveal this to be a weakness, but what we realized was that GTs firing indirectly were hardly ever an issue (they did give us 2BP in match 5 though, I believe) and we really lacked the sheer firepower of Organ Guns. In match 4, strange met Empire and lost all 4 WMs by turn 2, however he still only lost 12-8 so actually losing this war was not as disastrous as we'd feared. Hence, our assumptions were flawed but again, this is due to inexperience and we learned a lot. I think a Dwarf list can be configured to be a lot harder, Germany's ETC list from this year makes a lot of sense in light of our experiences for example. Lastly, the Star Dragon list I brought had 2 controversial elements compared to the builds that have previously been popular: I had a fighty Noble instead of Stubborn Crown and a 2nd Eagle instead of a 4th RBT. I was anxious about both, but in the end this proved to be the perfect setup for my playstyle: In matches 2, 4 and 5 these were all crucial elements to some of the moves I was able to pull off whereas a 4th RBT and a Stubborn Crown would not have helped me significantly.
We anticipated the meta to be largely similar to this year's ETC. By and large, this proved to be correct, but many teams took new and innovative lists that were sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle. One of these made us do a big mistake (yes, I keep referring to match 2) and again proves the importance of having a curveball and actual game experience against strong builds. It was refreshing to see teams try and innovate though, in addition to our own games we saw experimental Elf builds on tables around us and in the top placing teams. The meta seems to be evolving more and more towards more ranged control and multiple threats, however we also see that people are adapting to the ones taking this to the extreme: The super-popular DE build with multiple pegs and tons of shooting for example struggles a lot with combat resolution, so we see certain builds simply dismantling these in terms of solid, pushing power. Skaven for example do this reliably and effectively with a Bell (the winning team had a Skaven player scoring 89bp, one 9-11 loss and then 4x 20-0s in a row), certain High Elf builds (Lifetrain for example) are hard for them to deal with etc. Thus, it is my perception that we see two major playstyles appear: The evasive, hard-hitting, shooting style that DE/WE/LZ primarily play and the more "you can't touch this" based style that Empire/High Elves/Skaven typically play. There are a multitude of opportunities in-between, but what's interesting to note is that every single list competes in all stages of the game and controlling the board, either in terms of movement or firepower, is of paramount importance and present in all lists.
What appears to be the clue to creating strong lists then is to simply out-shoot the shooters while having the tools at hand for stopping the solid lists. In other words, you need a list that can compete with Wood Elves and Dark Elves at a distance while having the stopping power to make a High Elf cavstar fearful of pushing too hard. Alternatively you can try and make a list that simply pushes so hard that the shooty/evasive lists can't deal with it fast enough while also doing the solid game better than the rest. The Star Dragon build I took falls into this second category, albeit with some serious weaknesses (Empire being #1, which is a huge problem as they are so popular in the current meta). Dennis' build, which I faced in our first match, falls into the former.
I believe there is a vacuum here to be filled with the new 50% Lords and Heroes allowance. It allows us to further exploit these approaches. Our characters are often what enable us to do what we could otherwise not have done and it's easy to see that they can open up for new and unique builds. As always, I'm looking for curveballs here and seeing as 2015 looks like it'll be crammed full of tournaments, there are plenty of opportunities to explore this space.