Portent?

Over the past few evenings I have been helping out one of the Warlords who is umpiring Warhammer Fantasy at the Club's annual convention, Call to Arms.

Unfortunately I can't attend (the first one I've missed in ten years) because I already had flights booked to Pilgrimage in Sydney. However I have been more than happy to help out and to that end have been checking the lists and running an eye over them to make sure there is nothing too silly.

Call to Arms has no additional composition requirements over those in the rulebook. This I believe is the correct road given how new 8th Edition is, however the TO has reserved the right to veto any list that he feels is likely to impinge on the enjoyment of the tournament participants. Nothing I've seen so far has violated that premise.

However the point of this post is to comment on the diversity I've seen in the lists I've checked. In all cases I would suggest that the lists have been a departure from the archetype list for their race that you would have seen under 7th Edition. Unit sizes have changed as have unit selections. Character set-ups are quite different from the latter stages of 7th. No two lists look the same. Some have embraced magic, others have taken what I would consider the bare minimum. The choices of lore are different.

Now I expected to see some variation under the new edition but I'm hoping the diversity that we are seeing is a portent of the future. I know it is a little unrealistic to expect that we won't see default choices develop but hopefully the variety we are seeing is at least in part due to a balancing of the field.