Jun 29, 2011
I have been remiss in providing coverage of all the events that provide free tickets to the Throne of Skulls Games Workshop held event. Anyway this week I am going to get caught up and provide a round-up of all the events that happened for the month of June.
Almost caught up! Anyway, this time we have another mystery list that is waiting to be discovered from the great events of the Astronomi-Con. This year’s Toronto event had 54 players with some great looking armies and always fun missions.
The Overall winner of this event was James McBeath. He rode into town playing vanilla Space Marines.
Once again the Internet is bare on exactly what was in his list. Let us see if someone in the community can help us find it!
The Astronomi-Con always has some interesting awards here is a break down of those that took home some prizes.
Best Overall +++ James McBeath – Space Marines
Best Sportsman +++ Claudio Paola – Space Wolves
Best Army +++ Jonathan Tung – Space Marines
Best Appearance +++ John Beck – Eldar
Best General +++ John Gordon – Chaos Space Marines
Best Terrain +++ Robert Kelly – Fight Or Flight
Best Single Miniature +++ C. J. Eldridge – Nurgle Plague Hulk
Best Army List +++ George Symon - Witch Hunters/Sisters of Battle
If you are looking for pictures from the tournament please take a minute to check out this blog…
http://shiftedmatrix.com/events/astronomi-con-toronto-2011-gallery/
If you look around you will also find Jonathan Tung Space Marine army which is just sublime…
Another thing of note is Astronomi-Con is taking a big step by removing comp from their scoring and events! This is actually pretty big news because Astronomi-Con events are seen as mostly as hobby events, but now they have acknowledged 5th edition is designed well enough that comp is really irrelevant (at least that is my hope). Here is organizers “press-release” about the change…
For some time many of you have known that we have been unhappy with the Astronomi-con composition system as, with changes GW has made to many of their recent Codices, it now no longer works as intended in many ways.
As such – for Astronomi-con Vancouver (and the foreseeable future but Astro Van is a test case) there will be NO composition points scoring. Those points will currently ‘lie fallow’ so the convention will have a maximum of 180 points instead of 200.
First game seed will be based on a system used for Chess tournaments with a player’s previous Battle Point history used for initial game seed. For players with no history it will be random amongst the no history players.
These are what we will be doing for Vancouver and we will undoubtedly change and tweak things based on how these systems perform. We just made this decision literally moments ago – so you are being told as quickly as we can get this out.
If you want to learn more about the fantastic Astronomi-con events head on over to their website at…
One more event to cover and we will be done with June!
As always check out Blood of Kittens event calender at…
BoK Events
pathtyphon
TastyTaste
Frank Austin
fluger
Brent
Dethtron
newsun
AbusePuppy
nyhil
That Teri Girl
reecerobbins
badtaste
Keith is drafting a response to this as well but I thought I would also chime in.
Tasty’s impression that our removing comp due to 5th edition being ‘well designed’ isn’t accurate. In fact it’s pretty much 180 degrees from how we see it. It’s not so much the rules but the Codices – in particular their tendency to dump models or units into all parts of the Force Org Chart willy-nilly.
The entire point of having a transparent and pre-published composition system was fairness. To ensure that everyone was scored on exactly the same grid and that identical armies always received the same score.
With some of the changes GW made in some of their ‘dexes (in particular the various Space Marine variant ‘dexes) you could – quite literally – have exactly the same army down to the last bolt pistol and get different comp scores. Radically different in fact. This was patently unfair to the player who took the army which got the lower score. Two armies which are identical should score identically. Anything else is simply not fair.
In trying to find solutions we quickly realized that anything that worked independent of the Force Org chart was going to be very very complicated. We then turned to some of our top local players and talked seriously with them about their views. They felt, in all seriousness that the variety of missions should be enough to achieve the other thing that the comp system was meant to do. That being to encourage people to bring fair, fun armies. And looking at it, they were right – those fair armies did seem to perform better in an Astronomi-con scenario mix.
So – we’re testing that theory by removing the comp score for Vancouver and we’ll evaluate afterwards how that went. The old system won’t return but if the event starts to drift into unpleasant and un-fun areas we’ll need to find another way to address the problem.
Mike M.
Astronomi-con Co-organizer
I am looking forward to Astronomi-con Vancouver this year. I attended last in 2009, when the event was held in June instead of August (a better time of year for me).
Removing the comp system for this event doesn’t really change its appeal to me. I come for the good company, nice terrain, and excellent scenarios.
I will admit that I spent a great deal of time min-maxing my list for the comp system and enjoyed it.
Greeting all, just thought I’d share the list I used this year. It was Emperor’s Children themed, though just not as sexy as Jonathan Tungs
HQ- Vulkan
Troops- Tactical Squad
10 marines, flamer, missile launcher, sergeant w/ combi-flamer, Drop Pod
Troops- Tactical Squad
10 marines, melta-gun, multi-melta, sergeant w/ combi-melta, power fist, Rhino w/ dozer blade
Elites- Ironclad
Heavy flamer, Drop Pod
Elites- Sternguard Veterans
10 veterans, 2 melta-guns, 2 combi-meltas, 4 combi-plasmas, 2 combi-flamers, sergeant w/ power fist, Drop Pod
Fast Attack- Land Speeder Typhoon
Fast Attack- Land Speeder Typhoon
Heavy Support- Predator
Autocannon, side lascannons
Cheers. McBeath.
I felt so bad about tableing Johnathan Tung in the last game. It was a pleasure to play him and my poor chaos looked like poop next to them (though, was that my poor paint job, or just the theme of the army?)
Next year, Orks I think. Lots’a lots’a Orkz!