Here’s the first part of my guest Tom’s unabomber manifesto on 30K success. As a recap, Tom is a highly successful tournament player (podium at the GT, played every ToS event for two years and not lost a game and he’s never lost to Magnus). I’ve asked him for access to his mind palace for how he approaches 30K. Strap in and ride the lightning:
Writing army lists for any game is a subject that tends to be bafflingly contentious. Everybody has a view on their own list, other lists generally and yours in particular (if you happen to be standing before them). Similarly, list advice is available on just about every hobby related outlet from blogs to podcasts to social media pages. This makes me think, as I begin to write this series, that I should probably begin by justifying this particular foray into the subject. Essentially, I think that most of the dialogue on this is reductive, ill-informed and mostly generated to pander to the self-righteousness of the author. Some notable exceptions exist, primarily in the form of Mr Ryan Kimmel from the Radio Free Istvaan podcast. I hope to add myself to the notably excepted over the coming series.
You often hear the question “how do I build a good heresy list?” followed by a vigorous expounding of why the questioner should do things exactly the same way as the volunteer sage who is answering the question. However, the correct response to this fundamental question is in fact “what do you want from the list?”. For many people this is an easy question to answer, they have been brought into the hobby by a particular idea or story; for others they have fallen in love with a particular legion or character. For me though this is only half the question.
One of the things I want to do early in this series is draw a distinction between list and theme. For me these fall on different sides of 30k. List building is gaming and theme is hobby. There is overlap between the two, before you start typing angry comments below, but as it stands I think people are too quick to overwhelm their list with theme, almost deliberately sacrificing table top potential to prove how committed they are to said theme. The same can definitely be seen at the other end of the spectrum with the player building any kind of competitive list also abandoning any pretence of theme in pursuit of efficacy (I’m looking at you Magnus/Valdor outside of Prospero/Terra players).
A part of answering this question is understanding the consequences of various decisions we make as we build and play an army. If you want to represent a very particular force from a Black Library novel, for example, you should understand at the outset that whether that army performs on the table or not is entirely random. By taking the decision to carry through such a precisely focused theme you have to accept that. It is a pet peeve of mine when people turn up to the table and complain about my army/board setup/mission when really they are just avoiding taking responsibility for their own decisions.
The other side of this equation, is the person playing Custodes and wondering why they have no opponent at their local store/club night. Just as with the hyper themed player, the hyper competitive player has to understand the choices they make in building such a list; namely that they are probably damaging whatever community they are playing in. Fortunately, Heresy is pretty well balanced in most regards, with the notable exception of book 7, almost everything from this book makes any list immediately fall into the hyper competitive category.
Now at this point you, dear reader, are probably reading along merrily mentally condemning the ghastly rogues of one stripe or another that I have been describing. Here we run into one of the biggest issues we have in our community. I will explain this with reference to Gaynor’s Law. Gaynor’s Law is so called because it recalls a conversation with a family friend (of the same name) who, when asked in conversation to define what he meant by rich people, answered jokingly “anyone who earns a pound more than me”.
If our community could be a little bit more aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the armies we build and little less concerned with calling WAAC at any player with different toys from our own lists, I think everybody would be happier. All of this starts with the answer to that simple question: “what do you want?”. I think what the vast majority of players probably want is a list that gives them a chance to make a game of any match up, that reflects some aspect of their chosen legion and the opportunity to roll out their favourite models.
All of these things can be done together so long as we answer the question honestly. Some people are going to want to sacrifice their ability to take on all comers in order to pursue that totally all infantry World Eaters build. It will look amazing, it will be great fun to play in some games and it will have absolutely no hope of scratching the enemy in others. Conversely, some people will want to play D-nova Magnus because it is devastatingly, unstoppably good. It is a lovely model but it had better be well painted as it’s going to spend its lifetime on a shelf looking (hopefully) pretty.
My intention in this series of articles, for which this will serve as the preamble, is to share what I have learned about writing good lists for the Horus Heresy. How to identify what a list needs at the conceptual level; how to make efficient choices where and when needed; and how to make the most of marrying theme and table top effectiveness. We will begin, next time, with a look at some archetypal lists and why I love or loathe them.
Until then, dear reader, the Emperor protects.