Nova Open Best Region, Club, and Sportsmanship

Last week we took a stab at parsing through some of the data from the NOVA Open tournament to find the Best Armies. Facing the Grey Tide did a more in depth analysis with some great insights in their NOVA Recap Part 2. So now that you have some information on the best armies of the tournament I wanted to dive into some of the Nova Open’s more interesting details. I’ll be looking at the best region, best club, and finally, my favorite, the average sportsmanship score by army.

Best Region:

I pulled out all the regions that had less than three players and this is what we get. Illinois and Pennsylvania are rocking out at the top with a decent showing of players from each region doing quite well. I have a suspicion those players are veterans of tournaments in Chicago and Philadelphia which are both hot beds of competitive 40k. Another data point that stands out is the 32 players from Virginia. Obviously NOVA is in DC and so should draw quite a few players from the Mid-Atlantic area but none of the other local regions had quite as strong a showing. I’ll have to be keeping a look out for more local tournaments in Virginia if the community is that strong.

Best Club:

Again, I pulled out any clubs that had less than three players. This leaves the Wobbly Modelers as the top scoring club with at least three players representing them. Beast Coast had a great showing with 22 players coming in third. Its also worth mentioning how many different clubs were at NOVA this year. Personally, half the fun of any tournament is the travel and fun I have with my local players after the dice are down. I hope to see more clubs coming out together to tournaments and taking some of those experiences back to their local game stores.

Sportsmanship:

Look at those goody-two-shoes Skitarii, Sisters of Battle, and even the Tyranids! Its also interesting that Imperial Knights did so well overall at Nova and yet still were tied for the lowest sportsmanship scores overall. I’d be curious to know if the scores are a result of how the lists were built or how they were played. Another interesting thing to note is that sportsmanship scores aren’t directly opposite the average performance of the army, the Blood Angels didn’t score well, unlike the knights, and still received low sportsmanship scores. To me, that means players aren’t just using sportsmanship to hurt a player that beat them. While I think its probably easier to give a good score to someone you beat, I’ve always been concerned that sportsmanship would be used vindictively. It’s nice to see this isn’t the case.

Were there any other interesting observations you had at NOVA? It was interesting to me that all Renegade players were classified as Chaos Space Marine players due to how Torrent of Fire works. Also check out Dernicus’s perspective of some of our local tournaments like the Blue Ox Quarterly and the upcoming ITC reporting Edge of Oblivion GT.