Welcome back to my thoughts on how to approach dipping back in to 9th edition outside of brutal tournament metas’ in a way that won’t lead you to clubbing gaming Seals.
Building an army list
Especially at the moment the world is not set up for meeting up and gaming and as such a decent amount of hobby time is being spent in theory crafting and this works well in learning a new edition.
How we play a game
A lot of what I am going to be talking about will fit within the remit of matched play and narrative play. Weirdly I have found that once players have been involved in the hobby for a while they will default to matched play. In one way this makes sense as it’s the easiest structure to interact with. Narrative play will usually either add a reasonable amount of record keeping or planning so takes more time and focus and open play even more so.
One of the big things that this influences and why i think its worth mentioning is that matched play by its nature sets the goal of the game as winning.
So how do you win a game? More often than not it will come down to a mixture of greater understanding and greater tools, which translates as the player and the list used. The internet, for better or worse, has given rise to ‘competitive 40k’ and information on what are the most efficient army lists to win a game. I’m going to split in to four levels roughly how I would seperate lists.
Starter level – list has no thought to combinations of abilities or themes. This may be due to lack of availability of options such as a starting player may find.
Extreme army – list leans heavily on one or two elements that if they excel can win the game but if countered will leave the list weak. Could be strong shooting, large numbers or lots of character boosts.
Competitive army – list is built with 9th edition scenarios in mind, both primary and secondary objectives. Also has combinations of units set up to take advantage of strategems or traits.
Tournament army – a list built solely to win games either through using most efficient unit choices or looking for a list that counters the expected meta.
Like many lists, there will be elements of an army that can be in more than one category, but this serves as a base.
I’m going to start the next part with the understanding or player element of this as I feel there is more to explore in depth with it.