Hey everyone! Adam, from TFG Radio, here to add a some Mexican* spices to your dreary 40K reading lists
As I mentioned before, the ITC format is extremely popular. Although other format exist, and are used by other tournaments, a majority of the tournaments use the ITC missions. in fact, this weekend the American team Championships (ATC) are using the ITC missions yet again. Although the format is the most popular, the missions do leave something to be desired, in my opinion. Most grand tournaments are five or six rounds. As a result, the same missions are used over and over again. in addition, because there are so many grand tournaments being run every weekend, each local RTT can be used as a practice event for a nearby grand tournament, and thus still use the ITC missions. This get bland and boring really quick. The same could be said for the other types of event missions, such as NoVA, if an area only plays those missions to get ready for an event. I think we need more variety and randomness, thus we should bring back the old Games Workshop missions from 3rd and 4th edition.
Back in the day, Games Workshop had a large number of missions, all unique. Whenever we went to a tournament run by Games Workshop we wouldn’t know which missions they were going to use. Many times it was at the whim of the tournament organizer. This forced people to really build an “all comers list” that would be able to handle the different armies as well as able to complete a majority, if not all, of the missions that could be used in a tournament. You didn’t see a lot of skew lists, like you do today, because those types of lists would not be able to adapt to the various missions available. Even though the missions were random, they at least told you what deployment to use and even how to deploy. You could be literally inches apart to start the game or as far away as possible. In one game you may deploy in sequence depending on what unit types you have (for example, fast attack first, then troops, then heavy support), in another you could start with just fast attack units on the boards as the “convoy” makes it way on the battle field, so they start in reserves. The many different missions allowed for a whole variety of play so you almost never had the same experience at tournaments.
I know this type of format isn’t for everyone. I think the general mindset has move past this type of tournament format. You’ll sometimes see someone bring these old missions out, update them to the current edition, and trot them out in a tournament. These are few and very far between. many players nowadays don’t like the randomness. They want to control as much of the randomness in the game as possible, which is difficult to do with a dice game. Still, being able to count on the mission types that are being played in a tournament gives players something to shoot for in their army design. Although I just wrote about how great random missions day of are, I still appreciate knowing what I’m getting into when attending a tournament. Maybe the number of available missions just needs to be expanded a bit.
That’s all for this week, I hope you enjoyed the read. Let me know your thoughts, and what you think of those old missions, in the comments section. Don’t forget to visit our Facebook, Twitch, and Patreon pages to stay up to date on what we’re up to and when episodes drop!
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* Because I’m Mexican, get it? Get it?