Hello, fellow Warhammer 40k fans! SaltyJohn from TFG Radio, and one of the Las Vegas Open Head Judges, here to bring you another article reviewing the ITC Standings for the 2019 season with the new scoring method in place. This week I am going to review the standings going into ATC and Chaos Knights hitting the meta.
This weekend will see many of the best players in North America competing at the American Team Championship, ATC, in Tennessee. This is a big event, particularly for team rankings, in the ITC and one of the premier events in competitive 40k. Any list of the top events in competitive 40k would have to include the best team events, ATC and ETC. Coincidentally the preliminary lists for the ETC also went live this week! Take a look through the various lists for the ATC and ETC they are interesting. If you don’t know, the team events generally allow you to pick the matchups for your team members round by round. Often times this format leads to teams going with some heavy skew lists, lists designed to dominate specific meta builds but lose badly to one or two other specific meta-lists. The idea is to make it so you can pick the most beneficial matchups and avoid the worst matchups round by round. If you are interested in watching some of the games from ATC they are supposedly being streamed by ProTableTop on Twitch.
Multiple table streams are the way it should be. Watching one game of 40k for 1.5-3 hours straight is boring, I don’t care how good the commentators are. Having a 5 table set up you can switch back and forth between is definitely the future. Now pulling it off well is something else altogether. You need to be able to either display the current game info immediately, have it available for the commentators as soon as you switch or preferably both. Being able to switch between tables is easy enough to do even with free software like OBS and some simple USB HD Cams with almost any gaming computer. The production quality will be interesting to see, as each table having a dedicated HD camera linked to an HDMI capture card is extraordinarily expensive for a stream that probably won’t make any money to cover the investment costs for that type of set up. The scuttlebutt, however, says Pro Table Top will have a multiple table stream set up where the stream will switch between 5 tables, with a professional streaming rig. There will apparently be some type of scoring tablet/table on each table so when they cut to the table all the relevant info you need as a viewer is available to you immediately. The commentators will also be lapel mic’d and have a roaming Handycam that can be live streamed as well. It’s a very cool set up if true. ProTableTop is a professional streaming outfit so it will be cool to see if they can deliver on what should be the format for live streaming 40k. Again, if you’re interested in seeing the games, and if the stream can deliver what has apparently been promised here is the link.
All that said, let’s take a look at the top 10 and 30 players in the ITC as many of those names will show up at ATC and could potentially leapfrog in the standings, or tumble, as a result, of the weekend. Below that are the team standings, top 5 and top 15.
There is plenty of potential for movement still in the leaderboards, both team and individual! It will be cool to see if one of the teams lower in the rankings can take a huge leap up in the rankings as a result of the ATC. Good luck to all the teams attending ATC this week! The next big thing we need to look out for is the impact of Chaos Knights on the meta. I know I am already working to build as many magnetized Knights as I can as well as getting a small Red Corsairs Battalion painted up. So far so good on the Knights, you can check out my hobby progress on the Salty John Facebook Page, here are a few shots of Knights I finished this week and the Valiant I hope to finish today. Chaos Knights are going to be really popular I think, I will have a review up here on Frontline Gaming next week.
I will leave you all with a look at the top 10 in the ITC Hobby Track.
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