Hello everyone, Frankie here shedding some light on local metas.
I just moved down south to San Diego and played in my first tournament down here. Since it would be rude to beat everyone here before they realized they were playing the Greatest 40k Player in the world, I decided to miss first place by 3 points and not take my first gold down here. It was a great turn out with 22 players for a local RTT. The competition was great and I met a bunch of cool people. But all that aside I want to talk about Metas. I never really believed that local metas would be different until I saw the armies I did at the event.
First lets talk about the metas I am used to. In the bay I am used to playing a lot of nid armies which Dark Eldar usually do really well against. Necrons are all around in the bay as well which, unfortunately, Dark Eldar suck against. Also Centurion stars are all over the place as are Tau up north. There are also a ton of Chaos players in the bay. And, let’s not forget about the most popular army: Eldar! Lastly not a whole lot of flyers. That’s the world I come from.
So after playing in the Bay for about 8 years I figured that all the armies at other stores would be roughly the same. I was wrong! At the tournament I saw 4-5 Fire Raptors which I’ve only every played against once, before. They are super good and turns out that they can blow up Dark Eldar vehicles quite well. Some other units that made appearances that I rarely ever saw up North were Rapier Battery’s, Land Speeder Storms, and tons of Void Shields. As for the Armies themselves, I saw lots of imperial guard which is a rare army in my meta from up North. There was only one Tau player as well which is crazy to me. I also saw a Dark Eldar player that was using a lot of Grotesques, up in the Bay there aren’t very many Dark Eldar Players and for sure none that use Grotesques.
It’s really fun to play against armies that you are not used to. I was also happy to see that the Local metas are indeed different because it means that you will see more variety at large tournaments. The main point of this article is to make sure people know to build their lists to take on armies that they are not used to playing against…which can be a challenge to do! I know that it through me off when my first game was against a Fellblade protected by a void shield generator, haha. Gosh that tank is good and killed my vehicles real quick.
Anyways, I look forward to playing in more events down here and getting used to the local meta. I also realize I need to reevaluate my list so it can take on a wider variety of armies. Let me know what your all local metas looks like because I am interested in the variety around the country. This is my first experience playing in a new meta as I have always lived in the Bay so for me, this is a new experience. I have always heard about local metas but never had the chance to see how much difference there can be in play styles from place to place.