I'm so excited for Templecon this year! I wrote about Templecon already here, and how I was excited to be not only attending this year, but participating in a couple of the tournaments. When I attended last year I played exclusively for fun, playing only on scenario tables in the Iron Arena. One of the tournaments I'm most excited for is the team tournament, so now let's discuss my adventures in finding a good team for the Templecon Team Tournament.
Recently our team has been looking at the rules for the Templecon Team Tournament. Here's the rundown:
50 points, 2-list format (although there are rumors that this will change to 3-list)
Divide and Conquer, Death clock
3 Players on a team:
Captain, 1st Lieutenant, and 2nd Lieutenant
Team Rules:
- Teams will be matched against other teams each round. The team that wins the majority of individual games wins the team match.
- Teams must rank their players according to skill level (Captain, 1st Lieutenant, and 2nd Lieutenant). Each player will be matched against the same rank in matches. The highest ranked game result will break match ties.
- Team Feat: Once during the tournament, after reviewing matchups but before starting rolls are made, the Team Captain may change the ranks of two players on his team. Priority for use of the team feat is determined by a 3D6 roll off between captains – winner chooses order of declaration. Declaration of “no feat” is binding even if the other team declares use of their feat afterwards.
Prizes
- Best Overall Team (Tournament Points)
- Best Faction Team: All team members use the same faction (Tournament Points)
- Best Themed Team: All team members use theme forces (Tournament Points)
- Best Team Uniform: Judged by event organizers.
- Fully Painted drawing: All players that used at least one fully painted army list.
- Best Painted Battler Award: Best painted Battle Engine or Battlegroup (consisting of 4 models minimum) selected by judge.
For the New England Team Tournament my team (Regular Team) consisted of our Captain playing Menoth, 1st Lieutenant playing Legion, and I played Circle. Looking at the prize breakdown for the tournament, however, you'll see that aside from hoping that we'd be the best team, there really isn't much else we can hope to achieve. Don't get me wrong! I think that we have a really solid chance based upon our performance at the NETT, but the prize support for the tournament only offers no prizes for 2nd or 3rd place.
 |
| The Champion for our Captain |
I was discussing this with my teammates, trying to convince us all to change our plan. At the NETT there was not as much prize support for an all-tier or all-faction team. While I usually run tier lists anyway and Legion has some great tier lists as it is, it would not be as much of a problem for us as Lieutenants to run them, but Menoth's tier lists are rather... disappointing. Running an all-tier team is more or less out of the question. One option we have recently discussed is running all-faction. I already own lots of Circle models, and our 1st Lieutenant also has a collection of Circle, and our Captain has recently expressed an interest in Grayle. If the list requirement changes to 3-lists, it might become irrelevant as we don't have that large of a complement of models, but if it remains 2-list then we do have enough models to accomplish this. So we've begun to ask ourselves if running an all-Circle team would be worth it, competitively.
 |
| Circle has not really been represented much in the tournament scene, however... |
While we all consider ourselves good players, are we good enough that our two best players could switch two months away? Will we have enough time? Is it worth it? Is this "comp" creeping into Warmachine/Hordes? Should this be allowed? Does it seem fair to offer prizes for an all-faction team or all-tier? What are the tournament organizers telling us about what's important to them? Should we build our team based on the "meta" of the prize support? Stay tuned!