Join us for the live show on our Twitch channel by following this link! The show starts at 11am, PST. The podcast and YouTube video-cast air at 9am, PST every Friday.
Show Notes
Date: 1-31-17
We have had a few technical issues and Mariana has come down with the Convention Sickness. So the video for signals will be up at 12:00pm today. Our apologies.
Intro
- Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube! Join our Forums, too! If you would like to be a guest on the show, email Reece at Contact@FrontlineGaming.org
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News
- The LVO 2018 has come and gone! What a great event! Here’s some of the highlights:
- Event Overview.
- Notable Occurrences.
- Our favorite moments.
- The next LVO will be February 8th through the 10th, 2019 so mark your calendars!
- MAJOR: BAO 2018, Game Kastle, Mountain View, California, July 28-29th, 2018
- MAJOR: SoCal Open, Del Mar, CA, October 27-28th, 2018
Upcoming ITC Events
40k 2017 ITC Rankings
Out of over 7,000 participants, here are your top ten for this season!
Rank | First Name | Last Name | Points | Events |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Nick | Nanavati | 881.82 | 5 of 5 |
2 | Tony | Grippando | 880.64 | 5 of 5 |
3 | Aaron | Aleong | 716.99 | 5 of 5 |
4 | Sean | Nayden | 711.41 | 5 of 5 |
5 | Brad | Chester | 708.67 | 5 of 5 |
6 | Brandon | Grant | 684.04 | 5 of 5 |
7 | Andrew | Gonyo | 683.32 | 5 of 5 |
8 | Sam | Henley | 682.34 | 5 of 5 |
9 | Tyler | DeVries | 677.11 | 5 of 5 |
10 | Mitchell | Pelham | 665.3 | 5 of 5 |
40k 2017 ITC Top Teams
Rank | Club Name | Club Code | Points | Events |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Beast Coast | BCoast | 1939 | 10 of 10 |
2 | Team Happy | – | 1652.58 | 10 of 10 |
3 | #REKT | REKT | 1345.93 | 10 of 10 |
4 | Relentless D | – | 1345.8 | 10 of 10 |
5 | Mugu Legion | Mugu | 1344.27 | 10 of 10 |
AoS 2017 ITC Rankings
Rank | First Name | Last Name | Points | Events |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | James | Thomas | 595.79 | 5 of 5 |
2 | Joe | Krier | 567.99 | 5 of 5 |
3 | Samuel | Valdez | 529.26 | 5 of 5 |
4 | Jarrett | Zazuetta | 501.44 | 5 of 5 |
5 | Vlad | Nica | 500.79 | 5 of 5 |
6 | Michael | Burch | 496.9 | 5 of 5 |
7 | Alexander | Gonzalez | 476.5 | 5 of 5 |
8 | DAVID | ROGERS | 437.77 | 5 of 5 |
9 | Zach | Lopez | 422.06 | 4 of 5 |
10 | Tyler | Hamil | 416.44 | 5 of 5 |
AoS 2017 ITC Team Rankings
Rank | Club Name | Club Code | Points | Events |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | WSD | – | 1120.58 | 10 of 10 |
2 | Rolling Bad | – | 1093.06 | 10 of 10 |
3 | CanHammer | CanHam | 1087.82 | 10 of 10 |
4 | West Coast Arsenal | WCA | 1063.58 | 10 of 10 |
5 | Betty’s Fighting Havenicans | BFH | 1030.22 | 10 of 10 |
February 40k 2018 ITC Events
- Fat Ogre February Monthly Tournament, Spring TX,, February 3rd, 2018
- Warp Charged Gaming Invitational, Midlothian VA, February 3rd, 2018
- Linebreakers ITC 40K Tournament, Victorville, CA, February 3rd, 2018
February AoS 2018 ITC Events
- February Age of Sigmar 2k Tournament, The Gamer’s Haven, Spokane Valley, WA, February 10th, 2018
Yikes what a point spread just in the top 10.
Whoa, I guess you guys needed a finish line camera for Nick and Tony, that was reeeally close.
What Tony did had to be mentioned. Also, any chance of added time or points reduction? Most of my games are still barely reaching turn 4. It could also be because Im running 5 squads of Obliterators who do random damae and deep strike in tho.
I think lowering points might be a good thing. Why not try 1650 like people were experimenting with in 7th just before 8th was announced? You’d get people whining they can’t use their big toys anymore, but it might balance things.
I have played 1750 and that shaves a fair amount of time too.
I can barely fit the minimums of things I want into 2000, I’d really have to make major cuts to fit into 1750 or lower.
Will Death Guard & 1K Sons be their own faction going forward in the ITC or will they be lumped into CSM?
I’d like to know to as I am going to focus on Thousand Sons next season. I hope they make this happen.
+1 to this, I want to run pure death guard
Great banter at the start. Almost choked on a sandwitch, thanks :p Fn armwrestling 😀
Also, c’mon mr bananners, you can’t do a stunner through a table. Do you even WWE?
Disappointed there was no balance talk though:
Apart from the obvious, 3 identical lists were undefeated until they faced each other and took top 3, the mixed faction lists were again dominating the top tables about 9:1.
Here’s my proposed fix/rule tweak:
“If your army has 1 common faction keyword that isn’t Imperium, Chaos or Aeldari, you get 3 CP for having a battleforged army.”
It’s not much but its the first step into making both mix and mono being equaly viable. If that doesn’t help:
“You only get CP from one faction”.
All this CP stuff can be fluffed as “the different generals disagree on tactics, thinking the other army is more expendable” or whatever
Full post for people wanting to read:
1. MIX>MONO in tournaments. Non-mono faction lists outnumber mono faction lists 10 to 1 (at least) on top tables of major tournaments.
2. VARIETY. Every faction has a set of units. About 20-60% of them are viable. Some might not be great, but if you don’t have any other deepstrike/psyker/artilery/whatever in your army – you have to take them to fill the gap. However with the unrestricted access to all the armies in your faction, the number of viable units shrinks even more. The sub-par units that would be taken to fill a role are just replaced by optimal units from other factions, which leads to a lot less variety. Especially relevant to screens.
3. CP FARM. You take a CP hungry army. It’s really great with some CP. Then you take a cheap brigade/2 batallions of another army, you take warlords that give CP/restore CP. Suddenly the main faction becomes so much stronger, it eclipses the same mono-faction by a ton.
4. ALLY-LESS XENOS.
Lack screens? Tough crap.
No psykers? So sad.
Bad long range shooting? Sucks to be you.
Is the solution to this just to me them overpowered/overtooled to compensate for their lack of allies (making the mono-factions even worse by comparison?). It is the easy solution. But it is not the solution that’s healthy for the game.
5. Auras, Stratagems and buffs being more effective on other factions than your own. Yeah. Is that not the weirdest thing ever? Nurgle Daemons have a tree/epidemius. +2 to cover save/get buffs on kills. You know what that’s best on? Death Guard(get bonuses by shooting turn 1, not bad “meh” melee damage when you get there) and CSM(0+ oblits).
Solution?
Example rule change:
“If your army has 1 common faction keyword that isn’t Imperium, Chaos or Aeldari, you get 3 CP for having a battleforged army.”
The exception to all this are auxilary factions: assassins, knights, inquisition, sisters of silence, etc
In this hypothetical scenario, where allies are penalised by , their codex (um… there will be one right?) could have a rule about taking them as allies and not being punished. It could even be a stratagem: 1CP “Hire Mercanaries” for reserve points to have something like a sideboard
I would be surprised if something along those lines isn’t coming at some point from GW in the future, there’s the big FAQ in March and then the next Chapter Approved and this sort of sentiment isn’t uncommon on their various channels and from play testers.
Personally I’d love to see it done on an army by army basis where detachments are worth more CP if your army is purely one faction, with more elite armies getting more for the smaller detachments. So pure Grey Knights get 6 CP rather than 3 for a battalion while armies able to fill battalions only get bonuses on brigades or under certain circumstances like having the minimum troop requirements filled by full gaunt units or something similar. Could even reward different in faction build like detachments being worth more to a pure Ravenwing DA army
That would be a help. With the current path 8e is going it will become just as broken as 7e. Keyword issues that are becoming abusive and poor Force Org / Detachment builds for Matched Play that are so ripe for abuse that it may as well be called Open Play. Again – moving to army builds that require three books to be “gud” – it’s a deja-vu!
Why talk about balance? 3 exact same armies is perfectly balanced. I just didn’t get what they meant when they called this edition balanced at first. Now it all makes sense.
Hah. Yeah its very silly. I like how they span the whole thing: same armies means the winner will be the most skilled player.
Which I guess it was but I doubt it was in the way they envisioned 😀
No more wondering if you should play War Convocation, Battle Company or Scatter Bikes. Next time we may see the top 8 with the same army and when you can really see who the best player is. It’ll be excellent 🙂
I think the above poster has a decent piint about balance, but is go the other way. It hink its too much for the ITS missions to continue to try to overly balance the game. Currently MSU and horde armies are kind of 0unished by the missions while elite armies like the eldar force is ignored. Thus would be super awesome if GW was like it was a year or two ago where they didn’t balance and it was on the ITS.
However with nerds in the tournament format, and nerds from GW chapter approved and Faqs all of the best MSU and horde stuff that were nerf’d woth some pretty serious aggression. Now they are so far into the ground in ITC its abit ridiculous.
Now that being said I currently love the missions and how you and kind of optimize each match up in some way. However, they turn really into list building punishments where you want units that are tough to kill or can be hidden(first strike), less than 10 models a unit(reaper), with high damage out put (gettinf thousand cuts), not habe multiple wounds(dodging gang buster), can deny table space (prohibiting recon), and etc. All things reapers, rangers, and wave serpents can do to great effect. The missions are too much of a thing to build your list around. What is astramillitarum to do it makes infantry squads pointlessly useless. Make brim stones just feel really bad as your just paying points to give your opponent easy secondaries.
I’m not gonna sit here and say I have all the answers but I feel like it would be much better of you had some way where you could continue to gave that active mission evolving experience with out also forcing specific list paradigms or over nerfing or buffing other units arbitrarily. Thier are so many list that are great in standard maelstrom or even eternal war that are just out right garbage can bricks in your current mission format.
Honestly, I think adopting the maelstrom card missions and just house ruling that unachievable objectives (killing a flier when your opponent doesn’t have on e in thier army) are just auto muligand is a safe bet.
Also I’m not sayi ng don’t make missions you could use the maelstrom cards but use different missions. Having different numbers of cards drawn or offering mission specific stratagems. Having siffing numbers of objectives or even secondary objectives that can all still keep the game super spiced up, but also lends itself to flexible armies that aren’t stagnant firing lines by forcing maelstrom objective card secondaries.
For decks it pretty simple to have theme sleeved and let opponents check them before the game etc. I mean heck folks could bring loaded dive that always roll 4s or 5s that look like all thier other dice, but we don’t frisk them over it. A deck shouldn’t be more ridiculous I think
Anywho just musings. TLDR It’s sort of disappoinyi ng to me that eldar did so well. Playikng eldar myself I definitly know they are good, but I also know outside of ITC eldar is no where near that good to practically sweep the top 10 more or less.
how about minus 100 ITC points if your force is unpainted
minus 100 ITC points for each FAQ needed to nullify your army
and minus 100 ITC points for unsporting behaviour?
FLG,
You guys should consider revisiting your Secondary Missions. Overwhelmingly, the ITC Champions missions are HEAVILY favored towards kill points. Out of all 40 points possible in the Secondaries, 31 of them are based on killing units/models. Even then, Recon and Behind Enemy Lines both require you to be in your opponents deployment zone ( BEL ridiculously so ) for four whole turns MINIMUM where most of the other secondaries can be completed in a single phase.This is exactly why certain armies are outperforming others by so much.
I understand you guys wanted to mimic Nova with their tactical flexibility within their missions but right now, this isn’t working.
Easy fix – remove Behind Enemy Lines and Gang Busters then add King of the Hill and the old maelstrom “Have three units in your deployment zone and none of your opponents”.
“isn’t working” O_O
I think you don’t like them and may have an opinion but the idea that they “aren’t working” is rather silly. The feedback on the missions is mostly positive (vastly so) and I haven’t heard anyone complain about them being skewed towards kill points too heavily until now. They also give a point and an additional point each turn for holding objectives/more… Each mission also has a 5th possible point and ALL of those are based on objectives. It isn’t like the mission pack doesn’t try and get you to hold objectives.. what possible secondaries that don’t involve killing something would you like? remember not all missions have 3 objectives.. one has only 2 on the table and another has only 3.
Excited for your thoughts 🙂
Team #REKT is out of Game Empire Pasadena…and are the group that you get most of your LVO judges from. Now might you know who they are?
Yes, lol
What if as part of mission each player received points for each turn 4-6 that they finish in the time allowed.
It would require playing faster to get full points. Also if you knew you would win, you might let up a bit to not table a new guy in three turns.
I really dislike the “it’s better not to kill your opponent to farm VP”. This is the worst thing that can happen IMO.
If you table your opponent – you should always get the best result possible. If you start with the no-tabling is the best move strategy, then what’s your opponent’s best strategy? Charging your opponent’s entire army in hopes you die in overwatch?
Only scoring points in battle rounds 4-6 is quite interesting — especially since you are required to bring in deep strikers by round 3 already too
After listening to this episode, I thought it would be worth noting my experience. I bought a ticket with the intent of just checking out the experience as a whole and playing a little shadespire (I over slept though. lol) I’m a little disappointed in the high roller package because I already own shadespire and there isn’t any use for additional copies. Most of the other items will probably just collect dust. BUT, I’m not upset. It did let me skip a super long line Thursday night that I actually stood in for a while until someone came by and said something.
Anyway, the best experience was just walking around Friday watching games. I intended to be mindful of a tournament setting and just observe, but a surprising number of people actually started talking to me during their games. There were a lot of good vibes flowing around.
There were many beautiful armies and to my surprise a pretty large variation in army lists. I ended up wishing I would have played even though I’ve only played a couple games of 8th. I got the feeling that most player’s primary goal was to just play games of 40k. Everyone would like to do well, but I think the tournament results were only a secondary objective for most.
I will definitely be attending next year (pending work), and I’ll probably buy the high roller package again because it’s Vegas and why not take another gamble on gaming contents. I will absolutely play in the tournament. And I will get a room for at least one night even though I live locally. The setting drains my energy thanks to my introverted nature, but if I had my own room to pop into and recharge it would probably be that much more amazing.
p.s. It would also be super fun to have a casual weekend long necromunda campaign.
Hey, thanks for sharing your experience! We had a LOT of people just come and check things out this year which was really cool. Looking forward to having you play next year.