A Very Small Sneak Peek Into the 3.0 Metagame

[swarmofseals]

I've spent a bit of time today going over the list submissions for two three tournaments on tabletop.to that have lists posted and are using 3.0 rules. Although these tournaments are a bit random (and we should never read overmuch into such a small sample size), I do at least recognize a fair number of the players names. While not everyone seems to be going full on competitive, my impression is that most players are bringing highly competitive lists (or at least lists that they think are highly competitive). The third tournament that I added was more of a solid mix of seriously competitive and softer lists.

Overall, the faction breakdown looks like this:

Spoiler

Seraphon: 16

Soulblight: 14

Lumineth: 9

DoK: 8

Mawtribes: 8

Tzeentch: 7

Cities: 7

IDK: 7

STD: 6

Sons of Behemat: 6

Stormcast: 4

Nighthaunt: 4

Khorne: 4

Nurgle: 4

Legion of the First Prince: 3

KO: 3

OBR: 3

Slaanesh: 3

Big Waagh: 2

Sylvaneth: 2

FEC: 2

GSG: 2

Skaven: 2

Fyreslayers: 1

Bonesplitterz: 1

Ironjawz: 1
 

A pretty diverse metagame.

The overall drop breakdown is as follows (note: it's possible that I made an error here and there. The percentage is a given drop counts chance of having the turn choice given the meta):

Spoiler

1 Drop: 7 (91%)

2 Drop: 7 (70%)

3 Drop: 1 (58%)

4 Drop: 2 (53%)

5 Drop: 2 (47%)

6 Drop: 3 (39%)

7 Drop: 3 (30%)

8 Drop: 3 (21%)

9 Drop: 3 (12%)

11 Drop: 1 (6%)

12 Drop: 1 (3%)

13 Drop: 1 (0%)

 

______________

Third tournament added:

1 Drop: 1

2 Drop: 6

4 Drop: 2

5 Drop: 2

6 Drop: 1

7 Drop: 2

9 Drop: 2

10 Drop: 5

12 Drop: 1

13 Drop: 1

14 Drop: 1

________________________________

Fourth tournament added:

1 Drop: 6 (97%)

2 Drop: 8 (87%)

3 Drop: 7 (77%)

4 Drop: 6 (68%)

5 Drop: 3 (62%)

6 Drop: 5 (56%)

7 Drop: 7 (48%)

8 Drop: 5 (40%)

9 Drop: 9 (29%)

10 Drop: 6 (18%)

11 Drop: 6 (10%)

12 Drop: 3 (4%)

13 Drop: 1 (1%)

20 (!) Drop: 1 (0%)

 

Discussion of drop counts (from first two events)
 

Spoiler

There's a pretty substantial chunk of the metagame (largely everything that's less than 5 drops) that is taking a Battle Regiment and perhaps has either a second big hero or other units that can't fit, or perhaps is taking a Battle Regiment plus Hunters of the Heartlands/Alpha Beast-Pack or even double Battle Regiment. When you get into the mid drops you largely see a combination of Warlord + Battle Regiment, and then into the high drops which typically doesn't involve a Battle Regiment at all.

The two most important inflection points from a list design perspective are at 2 drops and 5 drops. To go 1 drop you have to limit yourself to a single large hero. Does the ability to add a second large hero outweigh the loss of percentage from going from 1 drop to 2? Going to 3 or 4 drops allows one to operate further outside the confines of a Battle Regiment build, but are probably less impactful than the difference of 1 drop vs 2. From 4 to 5 though we see a big design change in that 5 drops allows for the Battle Regiment + Warlord build, which carries the major benefit of an extra enhancement and CP in addition to the extra flexibility of expanding beyond a Battle Regiment. Beyond that transition, it's hard to point to any specific drop count as being particularly meaningful from a design perspective, except possibly 7 drops which allows for Battle Regiment + Warlord + Charrwind/Alpha etc.

Clearly for some lists there are composition questions in play, but if we set aside those for a moment there's an interesting dynamic going on here. Being 1 drop has a very clear benefit: you'll have the choice of turn the vast majority of the time. Going from 1 drop to 2 drop typically involves adding a second large hero, so lists that want to do that will need to be comfortable losing a significant (21%) chunk of their chance to determine turn order. Going from 2 to 3 drops is also a significant loss, while 3 to 4 is not a particularly big drop. 4 to 5 is another small drop, but the benefits of going from 4 to 5 (adding Warlord) are large. Going to 6, 7, 8, or 9 drops each loses a healthy chunk of percentage, and after that it tails off dramatically.

So overall it seems to me that there are two "ideal" places to be: 1 and 5. If your list construction can handle going 1 drop, there is a lot of benefit to doing so. 5 drop also has a lot of benefit, as at that point you get access to a bunch of benefits plus greater listbuilding flexibility. Every drop added beyond 5 needs to add enough to your game to justify losing 8-9% chance to have the turn choice. If your design is constrained to 2 or 3 drop that is probably fine, but again your design has to justify the loss of percentage. Once you are at 4 you might as well go to 5 if you can.

Of course one of the interesting things here is that unlike 2.0, players have a tremendous amount of flexibility in controlling their drop count. In 2.0 only a few factions could plausibly go under 5 drops, and even fewer could reach 1 drop. So in 2.0 the cost/benefit analysis of being at a particular drop count was fairly stable because the relative frequency of any drop count in the meta was somewhat inflexible. That inflexibility is no longer present, so we may see a lot more variance from tournament to tournament in the frequency of particular drop counts. I do think that the "key" dropcounts will remain 1 and 5, but the specific cost/benefit breakdown will vary a lot. Predicting the meta will be a legitimate skill and could make a big difference in tournament results. For example, let's say I'm right and as people get more sophisticated about their list design things cluster a lot more around 1 drop and 5 drop. If this were to happen, the the calculus around going from 4 to 5 could actually change. Let's say 25% of the meta is 1 drop, 50% of the meta is 5 drop, and 25% is >5 drop. Now going from 5 to 4 actually has a very large benefit (~26% in this case), so a clever player might forego Warlord for a significant boost in chance to have the turn choice. In the meta described above you're only getting 6% by giving up your enhancement and CP. Seems like a bad trade to me. 26% though?

 

Discussion of meta themes

Spoiler

In perusing the lists I noticed a few themes. One is the popularity of God lists. Nagash, Archaon, and Teclis are all very popular. If I recall correctly all of the Tzeentch lists were Tzeentch Archaon variants, and most of the Lumineth lists were Teclis + Vanari (although not raw sentinel spam as one might think). Nagash and Archaon (in Tzeentch) are both very attractive as they can snicker-snack basically any opposing monster hero regardless of how tough they are. Hand of Dust and Slayer of Kings with destiny dice don't care about your 2+/4++. There was also one Kragnos list and a couple of Ogor lists featuring multiple monster heroes. There are two Be'lakor lists, two typical KO lists, and two Kroak lists. Both Skaven lists featured Stormfiends prominently. Overall people are experimenting a lot with big monster heroes and big shooting, although there is less shooting overall than I might have expected. Relatively few people are trying to "go wide" by flooding the board to counter monsters.

Again, I wouldn't read too much into a small sample size but the metagame does look pretty diverse. If you're going to a big tournament you're likely to face a heavy shooting army at least once and a heavy monster army at least once, but there's plenty of other types of lists out there.

EDIT: added in information from a third event

SECOND EDIT: added in information from a very competitive 74 person event

Edited July 21, 2021 by swarmofseals

[yukishiro1]

I think battle regiment + command entourage is also totally viable, gets you in ahead of the 5 drop lists at only the cost of 1 cp once per game. If 5 becomes standard, it's worth paying the 1cp to go 4 if you can afford to do so. Makes it an interesting route to go. 

One thing that's quite interesting to me is how few total units people are taking. So many lists are coming in at the 6-8 total units mark, often with 3-4 of those in one synergistic castle, which to me seems problematically small in terms of being able to establish board presence on boards with 4+ objectives. A lot of these big hero lists barely have the ability to project significant power to two places on the board, much less three, and I'm not sure how well that is going to work on a fair number of the battleplans. I guess the calculation is that objective scoring is actually not all that important now.

If I was a TO, I would try to counteract that by selecting at least one, maybe two battleplans that minimize the importance of secondaries. I'm not a big fan of how many points secondaries account for on the standard scoring plans, and if it produces these sorts of god + buffers + junk lists, it reinforces my opinion. 

I wish they had been brave enough to do away with drop count entirely and make it just a random roll-off like 40k is, it would open up so much more space for interesting list design and stop rewarding people for playing the predictable way. 

Edited July 9, 2021 by yukishiro1

[swarmofseals]

14 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

I think battle regiment + command entourage is also totally viable, gets you in ahead of the 5 drop lists at only the cost of 1 cp once per game. If 5 becomes standard, it's worth paying the 1cp to go 4 if you can afford to do so. Makes it an interesting route to go. 

One thing that's quite interesting to me is how few total units people are taking. So many lists are coming in at the 6-8 total units mark, often with 3-4 of those in one synergistic castle, which to me seems problematically small in terms of being able to establish board presence on boards with 4+ objectives. A lot of these big hero lists barely have the ability to project significant power to two places on the board, much less three, and I'm not sure how well that is going to work on a fair number of the battleplans. I guess the calculation is that objective scoring is actually not all that important now.

If I was a TO, I would try to counteract that by selecting at least one, maybe two battleplans that minimize the importance of secondaries. I'm not a big fan of how many points secondaries account for on the standard scoring plans, and if it produces these sorts of god + buffers + junk lists, it reinforces my opinion. 

I wish they had been brave enough to do away with drop count entirely and make it just a random roll-off like 40k is, it would open up so much more space for interesting list design and stop rewarding people for playing the predictable way. 

Yeah, BR + CE is certainly fine and a good way to go to 4 drop if that is the target you are shooting for. Totally agree re: your other points. I think a mix of battleplans that emphasize and de-emphasize secondaries is ideal to promote dynamic lists.

[Beliman]

2 hours ago, swarmofseals said:

Slayer of Kings with destiny dice don't care about your 2+/4++.

How can Archaon use Destiny Dice? I thought that Warmaster and changing all "Tzeentch army" to "Disciplines of Tzeentch" removed all Allegiance Abilities from Archaon (or Kragnos).

[BigNStinky]

22 minutes ago, Beliman said:

How can Archaon use Destiny Dice? I thought that Warmaster and changing all "Tzeentch army" to "Disciplines of Tzeentch" removed all Allegiance Abilities from Archaon (or Kragnos).

Warmaster states they can make full use of the armies allegiance abilities even if it is not listed as directly part of the faction (which counteracts the Disciples of Tzeentch requirement as far as I can read).

 

 

On a note related to the topic I am kind of shocked that there was no SoB representation with how hyped they were with the buffs from the new edition + how high they have been rated on many tier lists so far. Very interesting. It is as you say a small sample size overall though.

Edited July 9, 2021 by BigNStinky

[swarmofseals]

33 minutes ago, Beliman said:

How can Archaon use Destiny Dice? I thought that Warmaster and changing all "Tzeentch army" to "Disciplines of Tzeentch" removed all Allegiance Abilities from Archaon (or Kragnos).

As far as I know it doesn't. The battle traits in DoT don't refer to a "tzeentch army" and in fact many if not all of the warscrolls in the DoT tome don't actually have a "disciples of tzeentch" keyword, just TZEENTCH. Destiny dice specify that they can be used for a TZEENTCH unit, of which Archaon is one. The FAQ doesn't say to replace all references to the TZEENTCH keyword with "DISCIPLES OF TZEENTCH" -- it says to replace references to "TZEENTCH army" with "Disciples of Tzeentch army."

[Beliman]

49 minutes ago, BigNStinky said:

Warmaster states they can make full use of the armies allegiance abilities even if it is not listed as directly part of the faction (which counteracts the Disciples of Tzeentch requirement as far as I can read).

Is that right? 

Quote

‘WARMASTER: This unit can be included in a Blades of Khorne, Disciples of Tzeentch, Maggotkin of Nurgle or Hedonites of Slaanesh army. If it is, it is treated as a general even if it is not the model picked to be the army’s general, and you can still use the army’s allegiance abilities even if this unit is not from the army’s faction.’

YOU can still use the allegiance abilities, not Archaon. At least that's how I understand that, Archaon just doens't break your Allegiance even if he don't have de "Disciples of Tzeenth".

35 minutes ago, swarmofseals said:

As far as I know it doesn't. The battle traits in DoT don't refer to a "tzeentch army" and in fact many if not all of the warscrolls in the DoT tome don't actually have a "disciples of tzeentch" keyword, just TZEENTCH. Destiny dice specify that they can be used for a TZEENTCH unit, of which Archaon is one. The FAQ doesn't say to replace all references to the TZEENTCH keyword with "DISCIPLES OF TZEENTCH" -- it says to replace references to "TZEENTCH army" with "Disciples of Tzeentch army."

If Allegiance Abilities are not a reference for a "Tzeentch army", what rules are the ones that are going to be affected by that change (swap "Tzeentch army" to "Disciples of tzeentch")? 

Maybe you are right, but I just want to know if it's how it should be played or it's another "ventplates" situation.

Edited July 9, 2021 by Beliman

[yukishiro1]

Yeah, IMO the Warmaster thing is badly worded and somewhat ambiguous as to whether "you can still use the army's allegiance abilities" means you can use them generally, but not on the warmaster unit, or whether you can use them on the warmaster unit despite them not having the necessary keyword. 

[Doko]

11 hours ago, BigNStinky said:

Warmaster states they can make full use of the armies allegiance abilities even if it is not listed as directly part of the faction

That is false .it is 100% clear that state only that you can bring kragnos or archaon who arent in big wag tome per example in a big wag army and being your general while you dont loose the big wag alegiances for your big wag units,

Nothing in warmaster says that kragnos or archaon can get the alegiance skills as being inside the army and who use them as inside the army is a cheater

Edited July 9, 2021 by Doko

[yukishiro1]

Well, that's the issue. A lot of people have interpreted it that way, and the language itself is rather unclear. I agree with you that I don't think it's what they intended, but it's another case of GW writing rules badly. It would have been so easy to be totally clear about it, but they weren't, because <GW reasons>.

[Enoby]

While nothing in Warmaster may suggest that he gets allegiance abilities, the books do suggest as such? So Kragnos doesn't have any of the keywords that would make the allegiance abilities work from my understanding (and he specifically cannot benefit from allegiance abilities regardless). But Archaon has no such stipulation that I'm aware of and has the keywords necessary for the faction - I'd question why he wouldn't benefit from the allegiance abilities? 

It saying "you can use the army's allegiance ability" suggests that the allegiance ability is still in effect, and as long as he has the keywords, Archaon benefits. 

Unless Archaon has a similar stipulation to Kragnos that I've missed?

[Skreech Verminking]

10 minutes ago, Enoby said:

 

Unless Archaon has a similar stipulation to Kragnos that I've missed?

 Archaon, calls himself a god (even if he isn’t one)

Kragnos is worshipped as a god, although not being one.

Well I’m seeing a ton of difference here (like non)

[Enoby]

1 minute ago, Skreech Verminking said:

 Archaon, calls himself a god (even if he isn’t one)

Kragnos is worshipped as a god, although not being one.

Well I’m seeing a ton of difference here (like non)

Ahh, just like the Great Horned Rat then?

[swarmofseals]

44 minutes ago, Doko said:

That is false .it is 100% clear that state only that you can bring kragnos or archaon who arent in big wag tome per example in a big wag army and being your general while you dont loose the big wag alegiances for your big wag units,

Nothing in warmaster says that kragnos or archaon can get the alegiance skills as being inside the army and who use them as inside the army is a cheater

You are way too confident in your take here. What you say is clearly true for Kragnos because he doesn't have the proper keywords, but that isn't so for Archaon, who has the relevant keywords. For example, Destiny Dice stipulates that you can replace a die roll for a TZEENTCH model. Archaon is a TZEENTCH model.

[Skreech Verminking]

17 minutes ago, Enoby said:

Ahh, just like the Great Horned Rat then?

No not really, the horned rat is a bit different.

Unlike sigmar, who for some reason became a god (that guy was mortal and died, so I guess he is a dead-thing) the hroned rat well, just started existing at one point.

You could argue of course that the horned rat is nothing but a great, great daemons, that hates and embodies the aspect of all pf the four chaos deities (which from this stand point wouldn’t be much else then greater-greater daemons, that everybody worships as a god).

The. There are the different realms in which this greater-greater daemons exist.

Considering that not much is known about those realms (either they were greated by those deamonic beings, or just always existed, or have a similar story to the big bang theory of our currently still existing universe, or maybe it is just a prison for these powerful beings)

Now if those realms were made by each one of the greater daemons to live in, and consider this as a power a god or deity, I guess we could call the horned rat, Khorne, Slaanesh, tzeentch, and nurgle, truly gods.

Unlike sigmar, who isn’t even able to create his own hated storm-things buddy, by himself.

which just would mean that the age of sigmar is the wrong name of aos, it should be the age of Grugni, considering that he is doing all the work.

same goes for kragnos, or Archaon, or Nagash.

Gotrek on the other hand, could be considered a God or deity, since this guy basically invented grumbling and smashing monsters to bits with his head, not even Gorkamork could go toe to toe with this guy

[Ragest]

12 hours ago, Beliman said:

Is that right? 

YOU can still use the allegiance abilities, not Archaon. At least that's how I understand that, Archaon just doens't break your Allegiance even if he don't have de "Disciples of Tzeenth".

If Allegiance Abilities are not a reference for a "Tzeentch army", what rules are the ones that are going to be affected by that change (swap "Tzeentch army" to "Disciples of tzeentch")? 

Maybe you are right, but I just want to know if it's how it should be played or it's another "ventplates" situation.

I'm with you on this, if the change of keywords doesn’t affect allegiances, spells, abilities and nothing in particular, why they change it?

[Marcvs]

14 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

 

One thing that's quite interesting to me is how few total units people are taking. So many lists are coming in at the 6-8 total units mark, often with 3-4 of those in one synergistic castle, which to me seems problematically small in terms of being able to establish board presence on boards with 4+ objectives. A lot of these big hero lists barely have the ability to project significant power to two places on the board, much less three, and I'm not sure how well that is going to work on a fair number of the battleplans. I guess the calculation is that objective scoring is actually not all that important now.

I think it is also a consequence of the "standard scoring system" of most battleplans (control one / two / more) which doesn't reward trying to fight for all objectives but just for 50%+1 of them or even just two, considering one point difference is not huge with tactics and strategies.

[Grimrock]

1 hour ago, Ragest said:

I'm with you on this, if the change of keywords doesn’t affect allegiances, spells, abilities and nothing in particular, why they change it?

It had to be changed because the definition of a faction changed. Before the term 'Disciples of Tzeentch army' had no real meaning because the faction was defined around the Tzeentch keyword and had nothing to do with the units in the Disciples of Tzeentch book (which was confusing for a lot of people). Now that they've changed the definition of the faction to simply be whatever is in the pitched battle profile of the book  the term 'Disciples of Tzeentch army' actually means something, so any reference to 'Tzeentch army' (the previous definition) now needs to be 'Disciples of Tzeentch army'. The allegiance abilities themselves haven't changed, just the definition of the faction that uses them. With the Warmaster ability Archaon can be included in that faction, and as long as he meets the pre-requisites of the abilities themselves (a 'friendly TZEENTCH unit' for destiny dice) he can use them just without issue.  

Edited July 9, 2021 by Grimrock

[Juicy]

i came here to read about metagame and loved the initial write-up. Can we not make this into a can archaon use DD topic please

[Ragest]

4 minutes ago, Juicy said:

i came here to read about metagame and loved the initial write-up. Can we not make this into a can archaon use DD topic please

Is related, if kairos-archaon is in the same position that list is going to dictate the meta.

[Golub87]

1 hour ago, Skreech Verminking said:

Unlike sigmar, who for some reason became a god (that guy was mortal and died, so I guess he is a dead-thing)

Of all the things in AoS lore that rub me the wrong way (and it's probably about 95% that rubs me the wrong way), this is by far the worst.

What is a more compelling, sensible narrative that provides more information about the world?

That Sigmar the God is an entity from the Realm of Chaos that was created, responded to and got shaped by the legends that citizens of the Empire had about the founder of their nation (which reflect the Arthurian legends of our own world).

OR

That Sigmar the God is actually the dude what smacks orks (sorry, Orruks) real good with a hammer. The more smacking, the more divinity.

Edited July 9, 2021 by Golub87

[Skreech Verminking]

1 hour ago, Golub87 said:

Of all the things in AoS lore that rub me the wrong way (and it's probably about 95% that rubs me the wrong way), this is by far the worst.

What is a more compelling, sensible narrative that provides more information about the world?

That Sigmar the God is an entity from the Realm of Chaos that was created, responded to and got shaped by the legends that citizens of the Empire had about the founder of their nation (which reflect the Arthurian legends of our own world).

OR

That Sigmar the God is actually the dude what smacks orks (sorry, Orruks) real good with a hammer. The more smacking, the more divinity.

Myth busted,

sigmar is a chaos deity indeed, 

you heard it hier first folks 😂

 

ps: if you consider the old world lore as well (which you should since it is a part of aos)

Sigmar was indeed a mortal being at one point, although his deeds were so great that people started to worship him as a deity over time.

In the end times, the spirit of sigmar somehow managed to take over the dying body of karl franz, and well that is mostly it.

he is a dead-thing bodysnatcher  in other words.

At least from a Ratman lore perspective.

(doesn’t mean I’m right, I’m just saying that there is nothing cooler then the great horned rat😉)

Edited July 9, 2021 by Skreech Verminking

[Warfiend]

 

5 hours ago, Doko said:

That is false .it is 100% clear that state only that you can bring kragnos or archaon who arent in big wag tome per example in a big wag army and being your general while you dont loose the big wag alegiances for your big wag units,

Nothing in warmaster says that kragnos or archaon can get the alegiance skills as being inside the army and who use them as inside the army is a cheater

I agree  it's 100% clear, but not in the way you believe.

I posted a detailed explanation of the changes in this thread:

If what you said is correct both Disciples and Maggotkin wouldn't be able to use their own allegiance abilities because Maggotkin or Discipes aren't keywords in those armies.

Edited July 9, 2021 by Warfiend

[Doko]

It isnt i who says it. Its the rules. If there is some bug as you said with magotkin then gonna be faqed to fix it but rules are rules and kragnos neither archaon have big wag or disciples of tzenth keyword so they wont get the allegiance. So simple as rules says it

[swarmofseals]

@Doko You are reading the rules incorrectly. Well, you are correct for Kragnos but incorrect for Archaon.