Scutarii wrote:
Each team does a blind bid of one of their players. The blind bid players cannot face each other.
Then each team chooses two of their other players to face their opponent's blind bid. The player then gets to choose one of those two options as their opponent.
After that initial set things get fairly difficult to meaningfully impact with pre-planning.
There is thus the potential for some limited control over the match ups. With this set up it's easier to avoid a bad match up than it is to engineer a good one.
E.g.: Eng-S vs Scotland opened with me and my Sisters as that way I would always be able to avoid the Biel-Tan list which...I think everyone who had an opinion on it agreed was either a 4-0 or a 5-0 to Biel Tan (barring dice, obviously).
This kind of thing was basically why i spent a bit of time looking into the matchups system and what we could do to mitigate what turned out to be some pretty big issues in our team composition. Throughout the other teams there was an abundance of TK and Barrage, but few war engines. This was a bit of an issue for the Squats as they're not that keen about going into multiple shadowswords and deathstrikes, and no war opposing war engines is a bit sad for the Cyclops.
Similarly our Orks didn't want to play into that, nor into barrage heavy armies given all the skorchas. And talking of barrages, this is a bit of an issue for the sisters as well. This led to most matchups inevitably having some issues for us, forcing me to prioritise who was going to get to avoid their worst matchup. This was particularly bad for the Orks as they would often have more than one bad matchup (i.e. an opposing team with a load of TK in one list, and Barrage in another), and since mitigation at that point wasn't possible, the Orks got a bit of a rough ride overall (Sorry Chris!)
The core idea of planning was to try and garner 1-2 decent matchups and hope the less favourable ones would end in draws, giving us a good chance of winning each round. This came unstuck against Scotland, as there just weren't many good matchups, and some pretty horrible ones with Biel Tan thanks to the Warlock and Void Spinners.
Obviously for next year there might be a completely different scoring and matchup system (as is generally the case) but if this one's used again i'd suggest to anyone planning on putting a team together that they probably want to work it back from the position of picking armies that don't have similar vulnerabilities, as this can inevitably lead to some pretty rough matchups for your players. It was quite fun being able to do a bit of planning for rounds though, especially the discussion of potential matchups with the rest of the team
