Hey everyone, Reecius here to discuss the impending changes coming as a result of the ITC community’s vote on how to define best in faction, and the new missions moving from beta to official.
We recently ran a poll based on popular feedback as to how to define the Best in Faction awards for the ITC. This was based on end of season feedback from the 2018 season. One of the most common points brought up was that Best in Faction awards should only be awarded to armies that are “pure” faction, meaning all detachments in the army come from the same faction. I had previously not been aware that this was a concern so started digging in and upon further research saw that it actually was a big deal to many players that felt competing for Best in Faction vs. another player only putting in some cases as few as 1/3 of their points into that faction wasn’t a fair competition.
So, after a considerable amount of thought and debate among the internal staff and in discussion with other TOs, we decided the only fair way to handle this was to put it to a community vote. Here is the result of that vote after about 1,500 ITC community members responded:
It was a blowout at an almost 4 to 1 ratio, the ITC Community members who cast their vote decided they wanted to have the Best in Faction award only go to those who’ve played a “pure” faction army. So, what does this mean:
- These changes take effect immediately. If you’re playing at an event this weekend and already have your list sorted out, no worries, we are allowing a 1 week grace period for events this weekend to allow for time to adjust but starting the week of April 8th, 2019, all events will be held to this standard.
- Events already reported this year will not be changed. Everyone so far has been competing under the same rules in good faith. People that took time away from work and family to go and compete for faction points did so under the rules at the time and as such, it would be unfair to go back and take that away from people. Likewise, if your goal is best in “Soup” factions (which are going to be pretty dang competitive, I bet) the scores you got for best in faction X will not apply to a soup category. It goes both ways.
- What is a “pure” faction army, anyway? Typically this will be based on the Codex in question plus any supplemental material. Example, if you play a Codex: Space Marines army and have a Forgeworld unit, a unit from the Vigilus supplement in your list–neither of which are in your Codex–but all have the correct keywords and are “Space Marines units” you’re good to go. As we currently don’t track down to the sub-faction level, you are free to have one detachment of Ultramarines, another of Salamanders/White Scars/etc. Same goes for an Astra Militarum army with a detachment of Cadians and another of Catachans, or Orks with multiple clans, etc. Armies such as Blood Angels, Space Wolves, and Dark Angels have their own Codex and ITC faction category and as such, cannot mix with Space Marines without falling into the Imperial ITC faction. Same goes with Thousand Sons and Death Guard, etc. You can reference this handy chart to get a visualization of how we do things.
- New ITC Factions we will track points for: As we now are splitting things up a bit, we’ll need to track some new factions!
- Imperium (Imperial “soup” or mixed Imperial armies)
- Chaos (mixed Chaos armies)
- Aeldari (mixed Eldar armies)
- Forces of the Hive Mind (mixed Tyranid/GSC armies)
- Khorne (mixed Chaos armies with the Khorne unifying Keyword)
- Nurgle (mixed Chaos armies with the Nurgle unifying Keyword)
- Tzeentch (mixed Chaos armies with the Tzeentch unifying Keyword)
- Slaanesh (mixed Chaos armies with the Slaanesh unifying Keyword)
- What about summoned units? We are only going off of what’s on your list. Summoned units are ignored for the purposes of tracking ITC Best in Faction points. Yes, this includes a summoned Assassin using the stratagem.
- What about fortifications? Many fortifications lack specific faction keywords or have the unaligned faction keyword and thus will be ignored for our purposes.
- Are there any exceptions? In a game like 40k? There are always exceptions! Generally speaking if it is available to you in your Codex, Index or faction supplemental material, you’re good to go. Here are some specific Examples:
- Genestealer Cults may take a Brood Brothers detachment and still count as a “Pure” GSC army for our purposes.
- Your army will count for the Ynnari faction for our purposes if every detachment in your army is a Ynnari detachment under the restrictions outlined in the Ynnari rules.
- Adeptus Mechanicus may take one Imperial Knight in one Super Heavy Auxiliary detachment and retain their faction for ITC purposes.
- Note: this is a compromise decided among the ITC T.O.s to avoid situations where a player has an all or nearly all Knight army but then claims to be competing under the Adeptus Mechanicus ITC Faction which goes against the spirit of this new rule.
- Your army will count for a god specific Chaos faction if every detachment in your army is unified by the same god specific faction keyword.
My thoughts on this change:
This is a fairly substantial change but it is exciting, too! For most players, nothing will change. Just keep playing the army you want to play. The only difference being you may be getting points for a different category than you previously did. It’s clearly what the majority of participants want to see and my prediction is that for the very competitive subset of the ITC community you will see a move towards more “net-lists” so to speak as you can no longer win Best in Faction by just taking a splash of said faction in an otherwise pretty standard competitive list. But, as that is the smallest percentage of players the overall impact I think will be minimal for the average player’s experience (although it will likely get the most attention as that is how these things go). This also means the Best in Faction “soup” categories are going to be quite large and very competitive which also means more prestige in winning them!
What we will see also, is quite a few players that really like a specific faction shifting towards “pure” armies as their is an incentive to do so now, which means more variety on the tables. Combined with the changes to how scoring works at events, a player can play pure Space Wolves (or whichever faction) and go to an event, perform decently, say 3-2, and still get a really respectable amount of points towards their goal of winning best in faction! You won’t have to win events to win best in faction, just get out there and perform respectably knowing you are competing against other armies fairly. it took me a while to come around on it but I am very excited for it now!
ITC Missions Now Final for the Season:
- The ITC beta rules have been tested all month and are now becoming official with only minor modifications based on TO feedback. Again, if you are an ITC T.O., you want to join the Facebook group to be apart of these debates and discussions!
- The only real change was adding Bikes as a keyword choice in the Pick Your Poison mission.
- We will be streamlining the ITC documents to make them easier to navigate and rolling the Chess Clock rules into the guidelines per popular request.
Huge thanks to everyone for their input and to the ITC T.O.s for taking the time to help shape all of this to ensure we’re giving the ITC community the experience they want!
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