Hey there my scaly comrades, I've never played a team tournament, and don't really know how they work. I was just looking at someone's posting about the strategy involved in picking matchups, and was wondering... ...how does it work? For anyone who has been to the ETC, etc. (hmm...), how do you end up with the matchups you get? Thanks!
Hi @Lawot I've been to a couple of team tournaments, but never been the captain, luckily! I can't tell you in exact details how it works, but here's what I remember: 1) You start out my mapping each army and what they're good at. If you have 5 players you want each player to cover a certain amount of secondary objectives, so you have everything covered - for instance you do not want to have 3 armies only good at Hold the Ground. This part can be kinda tricky, because many people don't have too many armies to select from and those who have may not be equally good with all their armies. Secondly you can only have one of each army (and no a goblin army and an orc army doesn't count as two armies ). 2) Once all the army lists are open to the public you'll have to check them all out. I believe what we did, was that each individual player on your team prioritizes each opponent by 3 colors (good, neutral and bad matchup). When everybody has done this you all gather up or have a talk on skype or similar. Here you'll go over each team/army lists again and match each player in your team to each team. This is quite a tedious part because a large tournament will have a lot of teams. I believe the ETC Warmup we participated at had 10 teams of 8 players - so that's 9 teams of 72 players each one of your team members will have to be matched against! Yay. When you're finally done you'll have a spreadsheet ready. So whenever you go up against someone, irregardless of what team, you'll have a plan and not randomly go at it. The good thing is that this will narrow down the players you can prepare your battle plan against (depending on how good your team captain is at getting the match-ups you guys want). 3) During the tournament your captain will speak to the captain of the other team. Here's where it gets kinda fuzzy. I believe boths captains start out by putting down a single card (army each) Following this each captain counter this putting down two more cards. So your team have 1 card down and the opponent puts down two cards to counter. Your team then picks the one of the two armies to play against. The first card you put down needs to be something you're comfortable with. You then continue to counter each other until you're done. Or something like that. Usually this is a phase where I do something else, so I never really followed the exact method. The final phase is where new teams can easily get steamrolled, because the more veteran players knows exactly how to get the prefered match-ups. In other words you can have a very hard time already before the games begins. The good teams will of course have put a lot of preparation into the pre tournament matching.