Beast Coast Goes to BFS Team Tournament!

This coming weekend my team, Beast Coast, will be attending the first ever North East Team Championships! I’ll be playing with the same team of 5 that brought us the gold at ATC last year, and we’ll be looking to add another notch in our Team Tournament belt. Other strong teams in the 40k scene like Team Quality Control and Team Happy will also be in attendance, and the head judge of the ETC, Neil Kerr, is coming too, so the competition is sure to be fierce!
For those of you who aren’t aware of how team 40k works, it’s basically a bunch of singles matches played with the combined scores from every game adding up to make your team score. Where it gets really interesting though is the pairings process. In a normal tournament when you get to the table it’s just you vs your opponent on the table that you are assigned. In a team even however there’s an entire process to figure out which player plays each player and on which table out of the row of 5 tables we have to choose from.

Here’s a synopsis of the pairings process from the ATC website:
Teams will pair off into 5 individual games every round.
The event will have table sections containing 5 tables each, with varying degrees of terrain on them. One light terrain, one heavy terrain and three moderate terrain.
Individual Pairing will take place in the following manner:
1 – Teams will exchange lists and will take a few moments to review the opposing teams lists, making decisions of who they hope to pair their teams players against. discussing strategies, looking over tables, etc.  TEAM CAPTAINS SHOULD CONTACT A FLOOR JUDGE TO RESET ANY TERRAIN AT THIS TIME!
2 – Roll off- Winner Decides who get to choose table first.
3 – Each Captain writes down 1 of their lists to defend. This is done blindly and simultaneously.
4 – Both Captains reveal their defenders simultaneously.
5 – Both Captains now attack the opposing teams defender with 2 lists simultaneously.
6 – Both Captains Select which attacker they want their defender to play simultaneously. (Tables are selected based on order decided by roll off, then alternating)
7 – Repeat Steps 2-5.
After doing this. You now have 4 out of 5 matches chosen.
The last match is the game between the two attackers who were not selected by the defenders in Step 6.

So, now that you have a basic idea of how the team tournament works I want to share with you a brief synopsis of our team composition strategy, and go over our lists. Basically we wanted every list to be completely capable of maxing a score if given the right match up, and we wanted a few lists (3-4) to be able to deny a ton of points should they find themselves in a disfavorable match. The winner of the team tournament isn’t the team that went 5-0 every single round, it’s the team that simply won every round. With that in mind we created a team that could capitalize hard on good matches and lose the bad matches with the best possible loss.
So, without further ado, here are the five lists we brought.

 

Be sure to stay tuned throughout the weekend on Nights at the Game Table with facebook for live updates throughout the event! And, if you want some help understanding the team format, and getting coaching for your own upcoming 40k team tournaments you can check out Nights PRO