The best way to approach list design

MBG from  http://blog.spikeybits.com/ said it best when he said "You have to build your list for the tournament". We were driving back from Nova and a fellow traveler was mentioning having trouble with his Nids. I asked him if he adjusted his list for the Nova and then MBG dropped that gem.

I've been building lists for specific tournaments for awhile now and besides spending lots of times practicing with a all reserves strategy it has been the biggest factor to a recent string of tournament wins. Building your list in a vacuum by just picking spamming strong units is fine for the BRB missions. If you are going to play more complex missions from events like Adepticon, Bolscon or Nova you need to tailor your list to them if you want to increase the chance of performing well.

Here is an example from this years Ard Boyz semi-finals. I saw that the first mission was VP, the second was that you needed 5 more scoring units than your opponent within 6 inches of the center to get max points, and the third mission was scoring heavy as well since 1/3rd of the time the goal was to control terrain features or an additional 1/3rd of the time the goal would be to have more scoring units than your opponent in a quarter to control it.

So I chose to run this list: 5x 10 Purifiers with 6 Halberds and 4 Psycannons in a Rhino, 10 Purifiers with 7 Halberds and 3 Psycannons, Crowe, and 3 Dreads. It's a very simple list and I planned to break up at least 5 squads into Combat Squads in missions 2 and 3 but leave them in tact in mission 1 since they were huge blocks of VP. In the first mission when a squad would get down to 1-3 marines I would hop them into a Rhino. The big blocks of Purifiers were very difficult for my opponents 500 VP Messenger to sneak past(it didn't). I wasn't worried about not winning the second mission, I just wanted as high a chance as possible to get the maximum battle points. What if I lose 30 of 60 scoring models in 10 man squads? Now I could only get a minor or major win. That can sink you in an event like Ard Boyz. You definitely want 2 massacres in the first two games and then be in a position to get even just a small win and still have 1st place locked up. So I made it so my opponent would have to kill at least 39 models to stop me from getting 5 scoring units around the center objective. Making sure I was in a good position to max the second mission gave me a big edge compared to my fellow competitors.

In the first round of Ard Boyz I played a list more like my GK 3 Raven and lots of PsyDreads list I designed for Nova. I don't remember the missions but it seemed like it was fine for them when I decided to run it, there were probably a couple of KP missions which the list excels at. Two different stages of 2011 Ard Boyz and two radically different lists, all Henchmen and all Purifiers.

I think we are getting to a point with so many different tournament formats that being a great player is just as important to your chances to win the tournament as your ability to adapt to the meta and the format of the event. This could be a sort of "Suitcase Player" era. The coin was termed in Magic for a player who had all the cards so he was ready for any style of play or change in the formats. Even if you don't have a big collection you can borrow from friends. Having a gaming club or group who travels to tournaments together can be ways of starting a network of people who help each other out with temporarily generating armies for competitive play.

As a quick aside you can also take advantage of knowledge of terrain or the composition of players of an event. Now that I know the Nova Open has 3 humongous hills on most tables I will certainly play an army that takes advantage of that  in a big way next year. Just the day before the Ard Boyz Semi (mine was on Sunday) I played in a tournament where I suspected two of the Dark Eldar players wouldn't be attending so they could rest up for the Ard Boyz Semi they had qualified for. Also 1st place got a ticket to an invitational 8 man cash tournament. They both had a ticket so I thought there was a great chance they wouldn't be playing. So I dusted off my trusty Redeemer and had a bit of fun with it. Normally I can keep the BA and SW players from getting at it until it is too late but the DE can shoot it up. I knew it would be safe from long range shooting with them gone and no local IG players(the local strong IG player was testing a new Chaos list with 30+ Melta guns, yeah I know that could be tough but I figured since we were playing Adepticon Championship missions I would tie objectives and beat him on KP because of his 11 Rhinos).