The first shows the NZ Player, their army their score and the average at this year's ETC for that army. Finally I have listed the six opponents they had.
The most striking thing is how well NZ's top four scoring players did against their army average. Dave G, Rowan and Thomas scored two points a game better than the average player for their race.
The second table shows the results for the various armies at the ETC - their average points, average poits for and against per game and how many countries took each army. It also shows how many times NZ played each race, who it played against them and the average points scored.
One thing that strikes me is that NZ put Skaven into a mirror match and matched Lizards vs. CDs, DE vs. DoC or VC and Dwarfs vs. Empire or Dark Elves. Apart from that there is little consistent pattern evident in the matches. The two CD v Liz matches ended 10-10 so it is a little surprising that we moved away from that in Round 6 and put WE against them. I suspect we may have been manevured into a situation where we had a number of poor potentials.
Looking at the NZ and the overall results I think in retrospect that Vampires would have been a better army choice than Wood Elves. The other countries clearly thought VC superior and the results bear this out.
Speaking of Elves, I'd say that the four dice limit on Shadow really hurt their overall performance given their reliance on Mindrazor to stand firm.
Beasts done good! Also hope people stop saying Brett's are crap now...
ReplyDeleteThe beasts result is slightly skewed as there are only 3 players. But still a great effort. The placing of TKs is also surprising. Were the TK lists similar ie light coven with archers etc?
ReplyDeleteThe TK results do not surprise me. With a 200 point advantage over most they where always going to preform well. They can be a really strong army and they have some really good match ups. If they would just raise the archer limit they wouldn't need to give them extra points imo.
DeleteDiverse TK lists. The UK one for instance relied on two Necrosphinxes. It was then maneuvered into games to maximise potential.
ReplyDeleteYeah diverse in the extreme. We had the light council, the Necroknight rush, double Necrosphinx/assassins creed job and the high strength hailstorm. And not one with Tomb Guard bus.
DeleteI witnessed first hand how powerful TK could be just before the ETC. It was too late for our team to do anything about it, but I certainly expected them to do a lot better than last year.
DeleteWith the book being relatively new last year and builds evolving quite a lot over the year (moving away from the sphinx builds towards the necronight+light council builds) I think the comp team underestimated them based solely on last years results and the fact that nearly nobody plays them anymore. Hopefully the comp will balance out again next year (Skaven being a particular bug bear of mine in ETC comp.. and in general).
My last game vs Ireland was a shocker.. 500pts ran off the table by turn 2 due to a slew of failed leadership checks. This left his fiends and thirster to run rampant. My army was designed to operate within the 15-5, 5-15 range, so couldn't manage big wins anywhere, but prevented big losses as well.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right in that VC would have been a better choice than WE, Chris himself came to that conclusion quickly once the matchups started rolling. It's somewhat difficult to predict though. Having one army that is problematic in the matchups can cause a ripple and end up with other guys having to play armies they might not otherwise want to.
As far as DE go, life is much harder without being able to mindlessly throw mindrazor at stuff, but the builds of the top performing countries show that it can be gotten around. I got 3 good matchups and 3 bad matchups and should have come out even, but as I said, last game was a massive failure.
I think the top 4 performers on our team did remarkably well and Dan, given his health, held up very well (and being mirror matched with skaven stinks, but seems to be very common at the ETC).
Like I said in an earlier post, there's a lot to work with here for next year and I think the team should be able to build on this and push for more. It is incredibly difficult to coordinate the NZ team given its international nature, but the most prepared teams do the best and hopefully that will resonate with the team next year.