This honestly feels like a weird thing to write, given how much things have changed since the weekend, but we’re not going to have much tournament coverage for a while, so here goes.

This past weekend, in the happier times when our leaders were still assuring us things were mostly fine, I went to a tournament. I even did really rather well!

The event in question was the 17th iteration of Battlefield Birmingham which, while it’s now a bit of an outlier in the tournament scene, holds a special place in my heart because my very first tournament was BB13 about two years ago. I’m clearly not the only person for whom that’s the case, because despite running with what’s now a very unusual event pack and not submitting scores to the ITC, the event attracts an extremely competitive field and tends to sell out immediately – even after an unusually high number of dropouts there were 90 players, including plenty of names that veteran tournament watchers would recognise. That speaks to what a good event the BB team tend to put on, and how much loyalty they’ve earnt by running events all the way through the rather darker times of the previous few editions!

Combined with the impending lockdown of most major events, however, the unusual nature of the tournament pack does present me with something of a conundrum – I’m aware that much of our American audience has been assured that non-ITC formats aren’t real and can’t hurt them, and the metagame is likely to have shifted substantially by the time it next matters. I also forgot my iPad on day one so have way fewer photos than normal. With all that in mind, I’m going to fire through my games with extremely quick summaries, and then do a rundown on what I thought of Schemes as a tournament format.

Tournament Format

As you might have inferred from the preamble, Battlefield Birmingham was using an event format including the Schemes of War missions. Specifically, we were playing an ETC-style setup where each match had an Eternal War mission and a Schemes of War mission, both of which could contribute towards the scoring (with Maelstrom cards giving fixed 2VP instead of d3 where relevant). In addition to this, tournament points coming out of each game depended on your margin of victory as follows:

<=3VP difference: draw, 6TP each

draw, 6TP each 4-6VP difference: minor victory, 8TP for the winner, 4TP for the loser.

minor victory, 8TP for the winner, 4TP for the loser. 7-9VP difference: major victory, 10TP for the winner, 2TP for the loser.

major victory, 10TP for the winner, 2TP for the loser. 10+VP difference: crushing victory, 12TP for the winner, 1TP for the loser.

While this probably looks extremely strange to people who’ve only played ITC, it’s historically been a relatively sensible thing to adopt in games with Maelstrom cards. Needing a VP margin to win theoretically prevents a sudden swing from a card on the final turn turning a loss into a 1VP victory for the player behind, while having the “primary” tiebreaker between players on the same record be an aggregate of their margins across all five games is important. That’s because the VP margin you can rack up in some of these missions if you take a crushing early lead is eye watering, and you don’t really want placings to be based on “how hard did you dunk the one opponent where you ran super well”. VP is still the second tiebreaker, so there’s some of that, but over the course of the event only a single player managed a straight five crushing victories, so the margins genuinely did matter.

As a final point of difference from ITC events, all pre-game choices (other than cards chosen for Maelstrom deck, which you could select each mission) were locked in on your army list, meaning there was a bit less game-to-game flexibility than normal, and a few more constraints to what you needed to include. That brings us neatly on to what I decided to play at the event. Spoiler – it was elves.

My List

To be more specific, while I’ve got a few newer list concepts in the tank I made the decision that for this event I was going to go a bit old school, and see how a list pretty close to my older style worked out in a post-Marine nerf world. I played the following: