A guest post on the ATC – By Brett Warhurst
Well the Warhammer 40,000 Australian & New Zealand Team Championship (ATC) is over for another year.
What is the Warhammer 40,000 Australian & New Zealand Team Championship (ATC)?
This is a Warhammer 40k tournament with a difference. Each state within Australia and New Zealand (which really is just another Australian state… :p ) is invited to create a crack team of eight 40k tournament veterans willing to do battle to determine who is the best at Warhammer 40,000. It was my privilege to be part of the QLD team representing my adopted State. This is a pure generalship event. Armies are 1850 points and each game round lasts for 2 hours 45 minutes. Teams have 8 players and each team can only select a codex once as part of their team mix. (so no, not every army is all pointy ears!)
Team 40k events are a vastly different experience to your regular 40k tournament. At a normal event you plan your list to take on a number of different forces and it is a game of single combat with an individual winner. This however is a group dynamic. Each player within the teams individual score is combined together to create an overall score to determine the winning team. What’s hugely different is the match up process. By this I mean which team member players who in the opposing team.
Check out the ATC Facebook page for more information.
ATC match up process
Match ups are determined by the two team captains. With 40k often a game of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ this is a critical path to success and correctly determining the match up process can win or lose a round before the first dice is even rolled! How this works is each captain discloses 1 player to be the defender and then the opposing captain chooses 2 players to be the attacker. Each defending captain then chooses which attacking player the defender will fight and the table this will occur on. The unselected attacking player is then returned to the mix and this process is repeated until all 8 players in each team are allocated an opponent.
Knowing that certain armies do really well against individual forces greatly enhances the chances of getting a higher score if you manage to correctly select the match up process. You can’t imagine the stress a team goes through in the first 15 minutes of each round as the captain’s battle across the table from each other trying to outwit their opponent and create the best path to victory.
Pre this event, our team had many conversations and practise games to determine which armies did well against what and also just as importantly…what to avoid! Each of our team’s players ranked every opponent within the competition as either a red, yellow or green match up so our captain had a good idea going into each round what to do. Sometimes a captain can’t avoid a bad match up or will deliberately choose 1 bad match up to take out a certain army and create an opportunity for the team to have better match ups overall. This is called being “thrown under the bus” and the weird thing is …in a team event you’re ok with this. You know that if you only score a few points in a red match up then that’s ok, so long as the team overall wins.
My games over the two days
Day One
I took my favourite army… Imperial Knights! Yes a Castellan for the win :).
Game one I vs a Tyranid Genestealer hoard. A yellow game for me as he has so many objective secured units. Knights firepower and combat ability won out and I won this game. Off to a great start!
Game two vs 2 Swadowswords, with a Celestine combo to give them a 5++ save. So Knight killers. Not a good game for me & I was tabled. I ranked this as yellow, but post game realised this was a red match up due to the player gaining an invulnerable save from Celestine. I missed that combo!
Game three was vs Chaos Space Marines and some Forgeworld goodness. The Castellan for the win. That Knight is just too good at killing tanks, even the Forgeworld Spartan 8 lascannon variety! A Green game and I scored max points. Not bad day 1, with 2 wins and a loss I should have expected.
Day two
Day Two I was thrown under the bus vs Harlequins with way too much fusion and haywire for my liking. I was expected to lose badly. I won! Yay scored 11 points out of 20 which helped turn the tide to win this round for our team.
Game 5, last of the event and I was facing Tau firepower on hammer and anvil deployment. So many drones, so much firepower and a Forgeworld Y’Vahra to deter getting in close. Yuck. It was a yellow match up and I was playing all game to draw. At the end of game turn 5 it was 11 – 9 my way…please let the game end now! Not to be. We played to turn 7 and I was left with just 1 Knight. The battle was bloody but he held the relic & a major objective for a 9 point swing at the end of the game so I lost. Damn!
So, how did team QLD go?
This year was a fairly new team, with six of the eight players never having played in the ANZ previously. Going into round 5 we were 3 wins & 1 loss. We were ranked well and if we beat Victoria then event was ours to win. Unfortunately it did not happen and we came 4th . Not the result we hoped for, but a good score all things considered.
For me the whole event is an amazing experience. When I look back I think the best part was playing 40k with your buddies in a team environment. Our comradery was amazing and I know I will always have a great bunch of guys to play games with into the future. It’s a whole new game when you play 40k as part of a team. If you ever get the opportunity to play in a team based hobby event, do it!
Cheers, Brett
Brett is an avid 40k player for ‘too many years’ and has an extensive hobby collection. He is both a regular tournament organiser and player within the Queensland Warhammer 40k community. He originally comes from Western Australia so really isn’t that bad after all!