Thursday, September 18, 2014

WHFB: A few places adopting ETC

There is something hilariously appropriate with this picture and this article.

Word on the street is that next year, Crossroads GT in NE USA will be using the latest ETC restrictions.  For those of you who don't know what ETC is, it's the European Team Championships, a format that players over in Europe have been using for some time to help steer the game into more balanced lineups.  However, they normally play in a team setting.

Let's be honest for a second here.  I dislike the idea of comp because at the end of the day, it's just dude's houserules.  I will say that some forms of comp help mitigate the enormous amount of crazy shit that can happen in a game, and that's always a good thing.  A lot of the time, it's a good thing that some light comp is imposed, but only when it's fairly light and doesn't change the game too much.  Unfortunately, when you have some kinds of light comp that affects certain armies and not other armies, you end up with the meta for that tournament just shifting what kinds of filth will be present at the event.  The latest Crossroads GT restrictions can be found here, and despite WoC being comped pretty hard, you saw light council Allerielle White Lion deathstars with full on shooting.  I think the winner was some dude running VC scream with congoline zombies.  Not to take away from the hard won victory, but this is literally just picking your poison when it comes what's being played under a comped tournament setting.

ETC borderlines what I feel comfortable with because I think there's a good amount of fundamental game changes.  While this version is a lot better than the previous editions of ETC (they got rid of the ridiculous channeling shit), there's still some things I have a bit of an issue with.  Magic changed from max of 6 dice to 5, that's a big change to how probabilities work for some armies.  For Death, 4 dice is the cap and for Mindrazor in particular, this is also restricted to 4 dice.  This makes the spell fail on just below average and this changes how the Shadow lore should be used entirely.

Then comes the army-specific restrictions.  I personally think my VC army at 2400 points ETC is very solid.  All I really do is drop the Necro, fix my core, drop a Spirit Host for some Fell Bats and I'm good to go.  The rest of the army is still intact and retains much of its existing power.  My High Elves on the other hand, is completely restricted under this comp.  My regular list right now runs with a Shadow Book of Hoeth Archmage, 2x Phoenixes and a BotWD on the White Lions unit.  Not only can I not take Shadow with the Book, but Phoenixes/BotWD/BoH are considered max 2, which means if I want to take my Phoenixes, I have to drop both the BoH and BotWD.  As for my Demons, I can't help but laugh to think I can take my standard competitive DoC list with very little changes.  Sure, I need above average dice to mass Caco Choir, but much of the potency remains the same (double Soul Grinders for example).

What do you guys think?  Do you guys like ETC?

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