In our Road to LVO series, we’re following several different players and hobbyists as they prepare to play in one of the largest wargaming conventions on the planet. This year’s Road to LVO series is sponsored by Frontline Gaming.
Welcome back to my Road to LVO series. Last week I talked about traveling to Last Vegas – check that one out if you haven’t already. This week I’m going to be talking about event prep – what I do and what goes into it. Obviously there are practices games, talking about the game, and theory crafting, but there’s quite a bit more to it than that. As it turns out, I’ve got back-to-back engagements with two of the year’s largest US events this weekend and next, so there’s a lot of prep to do.
And look: I can be lazy and not do everything all the time or go all-out for every event; you don’t always have the energy to do that. But then I can only blame myself when I fall short – and there’s always more you can do prep-wise to set yourself up for success. That said, time is limited and so instead of playing countless games I need to find ways to work smarter, not harder.
Back to those two events: This weekend is the Challengers Cup Teams event, and then next weekend is the Las Vegas Open. Let’s get Cracking.
Army Selection
This is simple enough, and often made easier if you only have access to one army (or one competitively built army). But if, like me, you have multiple armies, this ends up being a relatively complex question. You have to consider questions like:
- Who’s going to be there?
- What’s the meta look like?
- What will be be prepared to play against?
- What are the Missions?
- What do the terrain layouts look like?
- How many reps do I have on each army? Where am I most comfortable?
- What do I have painted?
- (for teams events) What does my team need?
These questions and their answers can change quite a bit depending on whether you are doing a teams or singles event. This topic alone could fill a full Start Competing article, but today you get the abridged version.
For teams, we are mostly working with 4-7 other armies to build the best composition. You want players who are comfortable or even experts at particular armies and usually you want a high percentage of those armies to be some of the higher win rate armies in the current meta. If it’s a less established meta then we extrapolate what data we can, playtest the new builds and see where those land. By doing this, you can develop a super matrix of matchups and compare it to the 12-16 armies you expect to see most at any given event. Then you compare that to the 1-3 armies each player on your team has good expertise and recent reps with and you use that to build your comp, trying to avoid having any glaring red spots in your matrix where you’re going to lose big.
You can get more granular in this process if you like, making list changes and comparing different lists and detachment builds for the same army as well. This rabbit hole goes deep does doesn’t have to be that complicated – you mostly want to know where your good and bad matchups lie, and where you’re missing data. If there are matchups you haven’t played, research them – look at stats, find other players you trust who have played it, and if you have the time and opportunity, test it yourself.
For singles you can also do the matrixing above, and if you have an idea just what or who is going to show up to a particular event, you can lay out the armies you play and make a choice based on what is going to do the best on any given weekend. Terrain and mission layouts will also be key concerns because there won’t be any table selection – you’ll have the same terrain as everyone else every round.
If time was infinite and I didn’t have other obligations it might be the no-brainer to simply pick the “best” army and go. However time isn’t infinite and I only get so many reps before each event, and in the process of playing games and events you sometimes you end up on armies with which you are far more experienced, even if they aren’t the newest, shiniest thing. Shifting playstyles can also have a major impact on your ability: Shifting from a gunline style of army to a melee pressure army creates more room for error and chances for your inexperience to cause problems. If your last hundred reps have all been on guns and you suddenly switch up to nuanced fight phase movement and mechanics, you might find you aren’t as good as the guy who has 400 reps in an army with no guns. You may find it easier to just shift to another gun army instead. Play styles matter and shifting to different styles takes more effort than people realize, even if you’re good at the game.
Unfortunately, this is the dilemma I’m currently faced with: My head says “Chaos Knights” but my heart says “Waaagh!”
In the teams setting I am often playing “nose goes,” taking an army that the team needs in comp but no one has picked up yet. As a result, this year I’ve been put on armies and pulled in directions I never expected and right now I’m on Chaos Knights. And while it’s still meta chasing, I’m doing it to fill a role on the team more so than for myself.
Sometimes it’s just good to lay out your options on the table and compare what data you do have to make the best, and most feasible decision you can make for yourself.
The Mission Pack
The more data you have going into an event, the better. Many events publish their event packet weeks or even months in advance. USE THIS INFO. It contains so many valuable tidbits of information. As stated above, the deployment info alone is going to save you valuable time and energy – and may win you games.
Missions do matter. Some missions have particular terms and conditions you’ll want to be fully aware of, especially if you have little experience in them or if the rules on them have changed – I’m looking at you Terraform! Make yourself familiar with it all the less learning you are doing at the table the better. You also avoid the trap of something like round 5 Purge the Foe and having brought a 15+ unit army. Rob: Or spending half a game protecting your home objective only to find it doesn’t matter for primary scoring.
Layouts matter even more. Which terrain layouts you are playing on is one of the most important things you could know with any given round. This matters before and after you’ve chosen your army and in addition to knowing the layouts you’ll want to know where your army will thrive, and which layouts are going to make it tough to squeeze out wins.
Mission packs will also have things like chess clock rules and which FAQs are in use (ex: GW wall or WTC wall charges), so you can better prepare yourself. They’ll also tell you when the day starts, when lunch is, and inform you of things like whether day 2 games start earlier than day 1 – this is pretty common and I’ve seen more than one player fall to the dreaded trap of sleeping in, blissfully unaware of the new start time.
Deployments
You can tell who has and hasn’t prepped for an event or scenario just based on how quickly and confidently someone can deploy (Rob: Joke’s on you, I deploy confidently even with no prep. Checkmate, Ben). When it comes to events with set terrain and missions, you can prep in advance, thinking about how you’ll want to deploy in each round. Having a practice set up at home or using a simulator can make this easy to do, and let you identify firing lanes and how you’ll move once the game starts.
For teams and singles plotting exactly you can plot how the majority of your deployments are going to go – which model goes where, where you don’t want to deploy, what models can fit into certain areas, and what their basic moves and advances would look like. You can save yourself a ton of clock headaches by simply having done this already ahead of time. And you can even take screenshots to use later.
That said, it’s not all set in stone, and there’s going to be some variation – your opponent capable of first-turn charges, or they could have special rules that you don’t want to run afoul of. There could be TITANIC sightlines, requiring adjustment. This prep isn’t the be-all, end-all, but it does help you plan your attack.
For teams this is a little harder and will take more time, usually – there’s a lot more map variation. It’s good to have a conversation with your pairings coach beforehand about which tables you are likely to end up on and understand if they intend to set you as a defender or an attacker. This will help narrow down your options a bit.
The biggest piece of this puzzle is understanding the sightlines and shooting lanes for each layout and building a plan to stay out of them until you need to be in them (see above for an idea of what this looks like). You can create a plan to answer an opponent stepping into a lane, or create a plan for stepping into those lanes sooner than your opponent would like.
If you do one thing before going to an event, this is what I’d recommend, especially if you’ve never done it before. If you have a coach or work with a coaching service, go over this with them – it’s some of the fastest learning you can do. Games are often won and lost in deployment and you will have to deploy in 100% of your games, while your turn 3 will not matter in every game.
Play the Game and Practice Expected Matchups
At the end of the day, practice makes perfect. You need to play the game. If your time is limited like mine has been, use your matrix to highlight the matchups you need to play most and find good players to rep them into you. You will want to make the best use of these reps and rather then playing three narrative reps at your LGS , You may want to find other competitive players at a similar skill level to help sharpen your game. I find I usually learn more from a single game into a skilled opponent then I will learn from a dozen RTTs.
Highlight who your competition is. For me there are often just a handful of players in the room for whom I know my path of victory will go through. Do you have data on them? Have they played on stream? Have someone play as them and see how you fare. You can play into their exact list and get a better idea of just what exactly their army can do, even if your practice partner can’t replicate them.
Highlighting the competition is one of the most helpful things I’ve added to my prep and used to win events. You can apply this at every scale of event, from RTTs to Majors. Knowing who your biggest opponents are and what they’re bringing can really help your decisions – and it’ll likely inform the rest of the meta as well.
The rest is just playing good 40k. Sure there are be surprises, but if you’re doing well it’s likely that you’ll have to cross paths with these players so if you want to win the event, you need to be prepared to play them.
Sometimes You Have to Hobby
If last-minute painting before an event needed to be placed on the bingo square for a group of 40k players, it might as well be a free spot. You have to have a painted army and with a fast-moving meta it can be a rare occurrence to simply have everything ready to go on the shelf. This becomes less rare for the faction specialists out there, but for me and many other meta chasers, you have to put in the time to assemble and paint the models you’ll use.
I really need to just start getting my stuff commissioned so I can do more of the actual prep – I sometimes find myself having to do more hobbying than game prep, and that means that despite everything I’ve said, I don’t always do everything I talked about above. I’d certainly do better if I did, but time is always a factor – this takes work, and it takes time. But the thing I tell players and the people I coach is that “the hardest-working player in the room is usually the one who wins.”
So if your goal is to win, it’s time to put in a claim for being the hardest working player in the room.
What’s Next?
Challengers Cup is this weekend the docket. Next time around I’ll be covering the event and my experience with my teammates on Art of War. Then it’s time to prep for the Las Vegas Open.
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