Tits for Tournaments: Feast Goes All In

With only one week since the release of 6th edition Feasts of Blades (Top 5 Warhammer 40k events in the country) will be going all in with 6th. FoB has asked all the feeder events to play Warhammer 40k under these following conditions…

From Feasts of Blades

– All qualifiers after Aug 1st will be held in 6th edition.
– Qualifiers will be at 2000 points.
– Qualifiers will be played “by the book.” with the following exceptions below

– Qualifiers will NOT be using “mysterious terrain,” rules.
– Qualifiers will NOT be using “Archotech artefacts” rules (p 106)
– Qualifiers will NOT be using “unique terrain,” rules (p. 107)
– Qualifiers will NOT be using “Warlord Traits,” rules

This still doesn’t tell us how the actual event will be run, but it is a reliable indicator of what is to come.

For Feasts of Blades to go all in with double FoC at 2000 points, could open up a whole host of problems, with many in knee jerk circles already crying about the 40k world of spam– think of the nightmares of 8 Rune Priests and 6 Long Fang coming to a tournament near you.

What though makes the Feast announcement so eye-catching is all Fortifications are in and player terrain set up. I have to say that I am excited to see a large event not afraid of the big bad terrain or allowing players the power to determine how their tables look.

Feast is also embracing the missions presented in the main book with only the removal of Warlords powers as a disappointment. Warlord powers are hardly game breaking and provide an extra level of spice to any game.

My overall suspicion is the organizers for Feasts of Blades are allowing such an open qualifier format in order to collected data for their main events. Since Feast is still not till November, they have plenty of time to make changes.

It will be fascinating to see how NovaOpen the other major GT before Feast will react. NovaOpen’s mission tinkering obsession, you can assume, at the very least, they are working on some “fixes” for the basic missions. NovaOpen has also already indicated at least a few of the fortifications will be allowed.

As for the rest of the major events, there is general consensus that Allies pose no problems to the new meta. The battles will be fought over double FoC, missions, fortifications, random charts, and terrain placement. Don’t expect a unified system anytime soon.

We are in for an exceedingly stimulating time, but I want to remind players to keep an open mind in whatever any events attempts to do with the new rules. I suggest not getting all pre-butt hurt with any changes you think are broken, go to these events, support them, give feedback. A tournament organizer is going to listen more to someone who actually attends their events than those that just shout from the peanut gallery. Also, remember many changes are made for logistic reasons, not just “game balance”.

As for me, I want to make one thing clear, I will defend the rules as written; not because I think they are perfect, but because they will most assuredly be more perfect than me or a TO can come up in changing them. I also believe that this edition (same as in the past) is play tested at 1500 and if more tournaments would embrace that point level, many of the problems associated with large events are quickly fixed.

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