2021 - Change of Direction

 At the outset of 2021 I was playing 40k almost exclusively. Although we were in the midst of the pandemic, GW had released 9th Edition mid-2020 and was starting to release the army books.

Jump forward three or four months and I hit an absolute wall.....and as a result started to lose interest.

Two things triggered this.

First, GW released the 2021 Chapter Approved Grand Tournament Mission Pack. This proved to include very minimal changes from the 2020 pack. The 2020 pack had nine missions, however this was basically the same mission played with minimal changes - 2 or 3 Primary Objectives required, one of three deployment maps, one scenario secondary. It had got pretty old, pretty quick in 2020 (for example, I think playing my Harlequins I never changed my secondaries except when I played Knights). Essentially the games got very samey, very quickly.

So I was hopeful that the new pack would introduce so more interest and fun. It didn't. Same base nine missions and small changes with secondaries. Yawn. I can play the same game over and over again. Minimal risk management, repeated resource management.

Second, the Mat Ward Gambit. GW released three books in a row that were so far ahead on the power curve that it was reminiscent of 7th WHFB when Daemons, Dark Elves and Vampire Counts were released in short succession. Drukhari (one of my armies), in particular, had win rates that were off the chart - at one point as high as 83% for the Dark Techromancer build. This was followed by Ad mech where the height of skill was to turn up with 140 Skitarii Vanguard/Rangers. This power creep has continued through the year where the power of some skew builds is a joke - recently the Ork Buggy list. I'm not sure how these slipped through the much-vaunted GW playtesting but clearly mistakes were made.

So I fell out of love with Competitive 40k. Hard. In my mind the skill element had been diminished by the reduction in variability and the power creep.

This left a bit of a hole 😆

Over the next week I'll outline some of the things I've been up to in the interim.