This Week in the ITC 5-17-18 What’s new in the Regions?

SaltyJohn

6 years ago

Hello, fellow Warhammer 40k fans! SaltyJohn from TFG Radio, and one of the Las Vegas Open Head Judges, here to bring you a wrap up of this week in the ITC!

This week I am going to return to the Regions for a quick check in with how things are going in the rankings there. I decided to expand past the top 10 for the region rankings this week and look at the top 20 from the different regions. Thank you to a few devoted readers from the South West region who asked if I could highlight their region specifically and provided me with some great info about it, if you have information you think I might find useful for these articles please pass it along to me and I’ll see if I can use it. You can contact me through the SaltyJohn Facebook page or my personal email.

Tracking the results of hundreds of events and over 3000 players for the ITC would be a monumental task without the Best Coast Pairings App. It is a wonderful tool for TOs of all kinds of game systems, to run their events and post results to leader boards like the ITC. I have a quick update on Best Coast Pairings and the new Event Suite in particular. I reached out to Paul McKelvey to get an update on what’s new at BCP and he wanted to make sure you all know about Event Suite:

“Event suite is our tool for retailers and conventions to give them all the functionality they need to truly bring digital tools to their analog games. In the basic package, event suite gives the store the ability to run their own circuits/leagues and rankings for all systems we support (over 20 now including magic), provides them with a basic web page, event listings specific to the location, the stores own ranking page and access to the event suite app which allows them to administer multiple events, the home page, rankings, circuits and most importantly let them assign TOs to the location which can run events for the location and any events they run at the location will automatically update into the stores rankings as well as global rankings.

The premium package is all the above features, plus drops our ticketing fee to 3%+.30, gives them the ability to embed the BCP pages into their own site (like we do for FLG), gives them a single payment account (any event that does ticketing will roll into one bank account so that the store doesn’t need to collect money from the TO it just automatically rolls to the store when the tickets are sold) and allows the store to export data to build a customer database.

The system pays for itself in what it saves stores in man-hours alone, not to mention paper, ink, lost sales cause of selling tickets at the register, tied up phone lines and the additional publicity of putting more eyes on the events. Our events listing is the most complete list of events for the gaming communities I have found, and that traffic is growing every day.

There are also a few other updates that should be rolling out in the next few days. First is support for WER which is the system wizards used for magic. We have figured out how to make BCP work with Magic so stores can use us to do ticketing and integrate with WER seamlessly and if they choose to use us to run the event they can (recommended, WER is known to crash a lot and have tons of bugs) or they can just use us for ticketing and run the event in WER (lose all the cool features of BCP).

Additionally we are rolling out an update for event creation that should make creating events much easier and allow you to duplicate events very easily for monthly or weekly events. The update will also have a few other updates like fixing time zone issues (mostly a Europe issue), put start and end dates on events (two or more day events and leagues), and allow you to update/modify events after creation like soft scores or ticketing.

A lot has gone on in the last week. Event suite is live and able to be signed up for now on our homepage or at this link:

https://www.bestcoastpairings.com/eventsuitepayment

But we really want you to contact Jason at FLG to buy. Frontline Gaming will be giving a lifetime discount that our site won’t offer.”

Paul and the team at Best Coast Pairings have been working hard to create a product that is user-friendly and has a lot of benefits to the user. I am excited to see just how these improvements to the BCP app work out for us in the future!

There wasn’t a whole lot of movement in the top 10 overall from this week to last. TJ and Matthew join the club at the top of the heap this week, welcome guys! Otherwise, we’re relatively the same overall.

Taking a look at the top 20 teams we see quite a spread of new names and old hands. Several of last years’ top finishers are absent from the top 20 including the numbers 3 and 4 teams last season, #REKT and Relentless D respectively, as the season progresses I expect the team rankings to get shaken up quite a bit as in years past. After a year in hibernation Team Zero Comp is still fighting hard for a top 10 spot and newcomers War Room Gladiators remain firmly within the top 20. I personally find the team rankings to be some of the most interesting to watch as the season progresses.

The top 20 of the West is a veritable who’s who of Warhammer 40k out in that region. With Mitch Pelham, Jessica Bowman, Richard Cozart, Ray Ahumada, Brandon Grant, and Jordan Stein all in the top 6 you would be hard-pressed to find someone from the West, who plays tournaments, that doesn’t know most, if not all, of those names. I expect quite the run at the number one spot in this region between those 6 as well as pretty much everyone in the top 20. Alexander Gonzalez seems to be back in the mix after playing a lot of Age of Sigmar last season, and you can never count out veteran players like Rich Kilton or Thomas Hegstrom Oakey.

The South and Southwest, as I have mentioned before, tend to be strongholds of 40k. Many big names come from these regions and just looking down the lists you can see names that pop out as being prevalent in the community in many ways. Robert Chandler, Aurelio Correa, John Lennon, Don Hooson, Antonio Cedeno (Deno), it goes on. There are a lot of names missing from those lists too of players I know will get going as the season enters its mid stages.

Antonio Cedeno sent me some great info I would like to pass on to all of you in this article. Having looked over some of the RTT events hosted by Dragon Lair Austin, Court or Gamer’s San Antonio and some of the shops in Houston. Generally, at these events, we have seen 6 of the current top 25. The last Court of Gamer’s event had Chris Carlile #1 Eldar #25 ITC, Nick Gower #1 in Dark Eldar, Shawn Prosser #3 Nid #13 ITC, Anthony Bellm #6 ITC Top Tau, Kris Boss Top 25 ITC (sits 4th DG right now), Matt Allee #8 ITC. Often the events included Will Ivey #1 Blood Angel #15 ITC, David Villareal and Colin McDade both top Adeptus Custodes players one is #12 in the ITC right now. Anthony Cedeno himself sits second in Necrons and fighting hard to catch up to the Beast that is Jessica Bowman.

I know that was a lot of names to throw out there. It seems that at any given event they seem to have 6-8 people who are ranked in the top 3 in their faction as well as 6 in the top 25. Every now and then Thomas Reidy aka Goatboy will come out of hiding and smack people around as well. Texas has a strong Meta. Several of my articles have highlighted some of these players. It is interesting to show other regions the gauntlet people have to run out there in order to win a local RTT.

The North East is, by the numbers, the least competitive of the regions I am discussing in today’s article. None of the top 20 have more than 3 events to their name, while the names on the list are titans of competitive 40k. It’s interesting to me that the North East has so few tournaments logged for its top contenders when the other regions all seem to have 4 of 5 as the minimum to crack their top 5. It’s also just numbers. There’s more to having a competitive meta than just numbers of events played, the North Easterners have a reputation for being great players who perform consistently and that consistency isn’t coming from just sitting around math hammering their lists. They certainly play the game a lot, but not every game you play can, or has to be, at a tournament. I suspect while they have fewer tournaments entered into their scores players like Sean Nayden, Patrick McAneeny, Alex Fennell, and Shane Watts to name a few are playing plenty of 40k. With a lot fewer events entered though this region easily becomes perhaps the most interesting to watch develop in the short term as it has the most wiggle room for the players.

The Mid West continues to be dominated by Josh Death and Matt Root. It is going to take quite a bit of work to dislodge them but Daniel Sansone and Gary Frank are hot on their heels. Daniel Sansone is currently ranked 9th overall in the ITC and Gary Frank is just behind him, meaning the Mid West represents the region with perhaps the best chance of having a player from it take home the overall ITC championship this year. With so much talent knocking on the door of the top spots, and so many events, big events to boot, being played and won by their competitors the Mid West is certainly pumping out potential champions at an alarming rate.

Next week I would like to cover the non-US regions a little more in depth as well as get some more info on players from dominating their regions, and factions. If you’re in the top spots of those categories I am going to try and get a short form out to you next week. If you have any pertinent info from your team, region, or faction you think I could find useful for these articles, by all means, pass it along to me! I love getting information from all of you and it just isn’t possible for me to know and report on every little nuance in the ITC, but I guarantee you have that information! As always let me know in the comments what your thoughts are on the ITC this week in 40k.

And remember, Frontline Gaming sells gaming products at a discount, every day in their webcart!