This year the Field of Fire Gaming crew decided to get together and try out one of the bigger tournaments on the east coast, the American Team Championship. The tournament is a little different than the average Grand Tournament because, as the name implies, each player is on a team and not just trying to curb-stomp whoever they get paired up against. A long round of brainstorming at our local gaming club produced the team name “The Men Who Stare at One’s” when my buddy Frankie got clever. So we had a team name, got together four other guys brave enough to be on my team, reserved our spot, and off we were on our ATC adventure.
The team aspect of this tournament really drew me in because a lot of preparation goes into getting a well rounded group of armies together. A codex or “faction” cannot be repeated in the team. This means that there could only be one detachment of Eldar, vanilla Space Marines, Space Wolves, Imperial Knights, whatever, per team. Initially I was all for five armies of War Convocation but, very quickly, I realized that this tournament offered a little bit of diversity in what you were going to see on the table.
Another unique aspect of this tournament is the pairing system. While teams are matched up based on their win/loss/tie record primarily and then the battle points they score as tie breakers, individual players are paired up by the team captains. The effect of this is that you can really specialize your army to counter something in the meta and hope you get a good individual pairing. The details for the pairing system seem to still be in flux so when I get hard details on that I’ll post them later. What this meant for our team though is that we decided we would try to have one take all comers list, three specialized lists, and one list that was nearly unkillable to just score points.
Currently this is our breakdown:
- Dean’s take all comers: War Convocation with Coteaz and Voidshield
- Jack: Daemon Prince Tetrad
- Will: Blackmane’s Drop Pod bash with Living Storm Psykers
- Jordan: Scatpack Eldar with Vypers and Fire Prisms
- Frankie’s unkillable: Gladius Strike Force with Ultramarines tactics
Once we play test and pair our lists up against other players we’ll see if anything changes. When I have final lists I’ll post those and do a quick breakdown next time.
Happy Gaming!
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