8th Ed. List tailoring

Some months ago, when i got back into business, I was introduced to the terms powergamer and list tailoring.
And to my amazement they are deemed to be bad things.

My opponent wasnt aware that im going to devise a plan to death snipe his vampire with the help of a flying skink, nor were they expecting me to bring to the table things that can actually fight against woc. usually i know who im fighting against and against what army.

now i understand why list tailoring is banned in tournaments, to the sheer reason of limited time, but otherwise.... wtf.
that was the way it was played back in the day, you pick two armies and plan the armies and clash. back then i got my ass served to me many times but i wasnt complaining. nowdays ive been more adept with my lizzie army and have been on a win streak for some time now. looks like no one wants to do "list tailoring" anymore, meaning they dont allow me to tailor my lizard army, and will only play against me if i bring somekind of random army.

now to me, that sounds insane.. argument is that it is more balanced. really? some random lizardman army isnt balanced at all. we need our special stuff to combat certain armies especially, salamanders are amazing but against some armies they are useless, we lack magic weapons that is needed against undead in a random army, you cant bring some random army against woc or doc either if u want to have a chance of winning. skinks and a group of saurus are prob the only thing id bring to every game.. everything else would be dependant on who im fighting against. also if everyone does the planned armies, isnt it not way more balanced than just some random generic armies clashing, and way more fun too.

some say list tailoring is cheating, but i seriously cannot connect the two. it is an advantage ive heard.. well if u cannot plan your army to fight against a lizardmanarmy then yes i guess it is an advantage due to the reason you cannot play the game

ofcourse there are Obvious scenarious where list tailoring is plainly wrong, for example one checks another players army list and build his own army list on the fly just to counter the other players list. this i would call cheating.

whats are the thoughts of lustrias people on this?

 

For any kind of organized tournament I would say you stick with the same list throughout the entire tournament. I've never been to one,.. but anything else would take up too much time and just seem wrong.

For friendly games I don't see anything wrong with tailoring a list to go up against, as per your example, VC. After all both players know who they will be up against. But I would hold someone who brings the same "all round" list each time in higher regard.

 

Obvious statement time: List tailoring is unfair if one player does it, but completely fair if both do it.

I think these days it is the norm to not tailor because many more people play in tournaments or like to play in an environment where they can playtest their tournament lists. 'Tournament style' becomes the norm in many gaming groups, so anything that differs from that is considered unfair or just wierd.

Maybe it's best to write a basic all comers list with a spare 'slot' of 250 points or so you can swap in an out, and offer your opponents the same chance before a game? That seems like a fair compramise between the different styles.

 

I think the term 'list tailoring' is being very confused...any general would be expected to put together an army which will have units and items in it which will be of advantage to him. However this is not tailoring a list at all, it's being a good general and no one should have an issue with that.

What you've heard is a term in which someone has said something along the lines of....."I can't wait to play our game tonight because my army has a Chimaera I'm keen to try" and you promptly change the list you've already written to include the Flaming banner to nerf his monsters regen!!!! It's basically cheating to gain an advantage.

Some people do like to make 'all comers lists' which is basically what a tournament is...it's a test to see which army would be best in a number of situations. I think that if you're going to have a game with someone, it would be best to know if their playing tournament style or not. Because at the end of the day, it wouldn't be very fair to play someone who's built a good all-comers list with you're list which has all the right units and models to combat his race.

Like most games like this there are hundreds of ways to 'cheat', by which I mean gaining an unfair advantage over your opponent in non-game terms or settings.

 

I like to list tailor, simply because it allows me to use units that otherwise just sit on the shelf.
Back when I ran dwarfs, I noticed that all these people that bitch about list Tailoring would somehow show-up without a dispel scroll when they new I was bringing dwarfs.

If you want to fight a tournament army, play in a tournament. If you want to practice for a tournament, let me know. Otherwise, expect to see some things that make sense.

BTW Flying Death Snipe is always good. It just works better against vampires due to the lack of shooting they have to deal with it.

 

if your going to plan your list around a game you're playing in the next few days, its something that should be established before hand.

showing up to play an army that has been specifically tailored to defeat yours is no fun if you haven't also done the same.

if your showing up at your local club with an army built to beat vampires and then you choose to only play vampires, that would be pretty lame.

building lists that perform well in your local meta is an important part of list building. but i think thats completely different from building a list only to defeat one army without the other players knowledge.

 

Different groups play by different ways. In my core gaming group I own 4 armies and my opponents have only 1. My opponents always ask me what army I am going to use because they think it is unfair that I know what army they will use but they don't know what army I will be using.

So they want to know what I am using for fear that I will be tailoring to beat them and they will have to come with an all comer list. That is not how I play though. I make up my lists before I even pose a game to the group.

Rather than tailoring I try to bring a list that will be able to deal with all those possible scenarios. Bring something flaming to deal with regen, bring a magic wep for ethereal, bring WM hunters for WM, bring something to break through high armor saves etc.

That way the list I develop can be used against anyone, sure it will probably struggle against something that skews one of those types of things. An all mounted Empire with demi and stank for instance. I will often have a few things to deal with armor but that can be a bit much. A Throgg led WoC army with a ton of trolls (or a beast of nurgle army) will overload my flaming attacks.

But, the reason I am not worried about those situations is because even if I knew that my opponent was bringing Empire that doesn't tell me I should load up on anti-armor because they could be running hordes or WM heavy or Light Council or blah blah blah. If I know I am going up against WoC do I expect Throgg+ Trolls? Do I expect Nurgle DP do I expect chariot/chimaera spam? Do I expect lots of chosen/warriors?

 

To the surprise of absolutely no one, I have some lengthy thoughts on this topic.

For those who want the short version, devoid of nuance and explanation, here it is-

Customizing your list is not only fun, but I would wager it's the explicit, sales-driven, intent of GW to encourage it.


Ok, so, the long form...

To start with, we can eliminate actual tournament games from consideration. I've never (over 20+ years of going to tournaments) been involved in an event where you could change your list between games.

That leaves three types of games:

1) Those played in preparation for a tournament
2) Those played against regular opponents
3) Pickup games

Let's look at each.

Tournament Prep
Most of these games will be played against the same people with whom you regularly game- those in group 2 above. The key difference is that you are using their list as a hopeful reflection of what you might face in tournaments. This means you want your opponent to use net-lists, common power builds, and others like that in an attempt to emulate what you will see. You'll probably not practice against Bretonnians, for example, but might want to take on the Nurgle Prince lists and dual Ironblaster Ogre lists. You will want to tweak your list from game to game, trying to come up with something like an all-comers list with the caveat that it has been weighted toward handling the 'top table' armies.

You will tailor your list quite a bit in these games, and both players know it.

I can't really see how this sort of tailoring could bother anyone.

Regular Opponents
This is my favorite. The fun happens here. GW likely sees these games as the sweet spot. Timmy and Tommy, two brothers in a basement in Topeka, Kansas, may not get to play against many other people. Ten friends in a club may rarely get to play others outside the club. Even larger communities (like the one where most of my non-tournament battles are fought) still have a degree of regularity to them. You will see the same faces, battle the same armies, and play on the same terrain most games, only rarely facing someone new (which is pretty much the same as a pickup game, now that I think of it).

How many times have you either personally, or through the stories of a friend, heard about how when you go to a GW store you are questioned about your games and given, in one way or another, suggestions about how some shiny new kit can help you win your games?

"Oh, so your friend plays Chaos with lots of knights, eh? Do you use cannons to shoot them? No? Well, here, get this box and your knight troubles are over!"

You get the cannon, blast your opponent, and then when he goes to the store the sales guy says "Oh, so your friend is killing your knights with a cannon, eh? How about some furies or Chaos Hounds to silence those guns? I have some right here..."

GW is counting on you wanting to adjust your list to handle what your opponent is doing to you. I believe this is the foundation for their sales model, the content of new books, and more. I don't mean this to be taken as power creep - not at all. It's just them continually producing products that they can sell to gamers who look to those products as ways to make their army better, and since most gamers play against the same people most of the time, "better" means "beating what my normal opponent usually fields."

That leads us to the actual games between buddies themselves. I take some pretty serious joy in finally crushing a unit that has been giving me issues. Heck, just look to those pesky Cold One Knights in my reports. I've been trying to work out how to beat them for a while. I even recently used a Slann with Loremaster High Magic. One major reason was to get Arcane Unforging so that I could take out the Ogre Blade on his character in that unit, thus giving my Kroxigore a better chance to live. That _was_ list tailoring - and it was fun!

I think there is some major happiness to be had in the back-and-forth, guess/out-guess game. You get beat time and again by something. You do some research on the net, in your book, or through booze-fueled visions. You come up with a counter attack and it works! Joy! This goes on for a few more games until your opponent, now in the same boat you used to be in, does what you did. He adjusts and suddenly your counter has been countered. AWESOME!

That's so much fun. I really like that. The mental aspect, the strategies...it's all great and it all comes from list tailoring. Take that away and you take away a lot of the fun. You are left with games that you are pretty much sure will have the same result 90% of the time.

Think about it. Let's say your regular opponent shows up at Game 1 with a certain list and it crushes your list. You play it five more times and the result is the same in four, maybe even five, of them? Are you seriously going to just keep your list the same and keep going? Hell no! You are going to make changes to give yourself a better shot. It's natural. He has a K'Wtf Destroyer? Well, next game get a hero on a horse and give him the dragonbane gem. Maybe that will work. If it does, he may just surprise you after a while and drop the K'Wtf in favor of more shooting, which will kill your hero just fine.

It's fun. It really is.

Pickup Games
Honestly, I can't really see how you could tailor your list for these games unless your opponent showed you his army list first and then said had 30 minutes to make your list. I've never seen that happen.

As close as you could get would be if you brought several lists and, after asking which army your pickup opponent was fielding, you picked a list that you think does better against his army type. Even that, though, is not really tailoring as you don't know what he has in his list. It's a pickup game, so by definition you don't have foreknowledge.


So, yeah, tailoring is not only fine, it's fun and a big part of the game.


EDIT: One more thought -
Besides, don't you want your opponent to give you the best challenge possible? No matter how you slice it, a game, factually, actually, really and truly is - at all times - a competition. Victory is rendered hollow if your opponent says to you (even if not in these literal words) "Yeah, well, I took it easy on you."

EDIT #2
Oh! Oh! Oh! Almost forgot!
Random Scenarios and Mysterious Terrain.
For Eff's sake, please play with these. A TON of what people complain about with tailoring is countered when you actually play Warhammer as the book lays it out.

8th edition made it much harder to build One List to Rule Them All since the scenarios and terrain can totally screw some of the "best" builds.

If you are not using the game as designed, you have a lot less room to complain about how your games are going...in my opinion.

Your opponent is going with all chariot Core in his Chaos List vs your ASF elves. Damn those impact hits! Oh, but wait, we rolled Blood and Glory. So sad, Mr. Chaos Ultra-optimized & Tailored List Guy - looks like you lose as soon as I kill your BSB. Shucks.

Seriously. Use the scenarios.

 

I agree with a lot that Sleboda said.

However, I think, like most things, it's a matter of not crossing the line.

It's one thing to do everything outlined in Sleboda post. It's another to build a list that's essentially useless if not playing against one specific opponent. Spamming one unit you know a specific army has trouble with seems like a "cheap" way to win. You aren't besting the opponent, you are abusing the fact you are only playing one game against one very specific army.

There's always going to be a certain amount of rocks paper scissors in WFB. Bringing the nastiest rock you can find and only playing scissors seems to to against the spirit of the game.

Unless of course you've established this will be common practice amongst your gaming group. That way it'll be impossible for anyone to feel cheated or like it's unfair.

End of the day it's all about having fun tho.

 

I hear a lot of talk about an opponent loading up on that one unit that super good against army X, but never see an example of it. I think that might be, because "that" unit, is actually good against everybody, so you're already taking it anyway (daemon prince, skullcrushers) or "That" unit that is so good doesn't actually exist.

Tailoring to go up against an army book is pretty limited, as all of the army books are pretty diverse in what they can put on the table.

On the other hand, if I know my opponent only owns 2500 points of models, and we're playing a 2400 point game, tailoring to beat what he can bring is a little un-sporting. In these cases, I'd prefer to play smaller games so that I don't know what my opponent will be bringing.

-Matt

 

When one of our Dark Elf players switched to a Chaos Dwarf army featuring the K'dai Destroyer (a really cool looking hand built model) it didn't take long for every one else to include 1 K'dai Killer character in every list. I used a Scar Vet on Cold One with the Dragonhelm, Dawnstone, Venom of the Firefly Frog, and a Great Weapon.

Another guy showed up in town and looked at the lists that people were running in the monthly tournaments (mostly Empire, Dark Elf, and Chaos Warriors armies) and he put together an army that was "tailored" against all those specific builds and he rolled everyone for a quarter (with Orcs and Goblins).

I don't think there is anything wrong with list tailoring. It's really the only defense against things like the Daemon Prince or K'dai. If you keep taking really big, powerful monsters/characters/units then I'm going to start taking whatever I can to stop them, even if those units/builds are inefficient against other theoretical lists. If I know you're bringing the K'dai in your actual list then I'm bringing the Dragonbane Gem and leaving the Banner of Eternal Flame at home.

If you're bringing a gunline, then I'm bringing as many Terradons, Razordactyls, and Chameleon Skinks as I can fit and I'm leaving my Stegadons at home.

List tailoring is pretty much how a "local meta" is created. The best counter to a tailored list is to not bring the thing that the list is tailored against. Ie, you tailor your list against the list that was tailored against you. And thus the cycle continues.

 

List tailoring is fine. Admittedly I don't have much experience with WHFB, but my many years of 40k is a perpetual arms race with my regular opponents. One in particular stands out. He started of as infantry based Imperial Guard, whereas I was infantry based Chaos Space Marines. Early on I curbstomped him with my superior infantry, high leadership and close combat ability. Then he got heavy weapons teams with autocannons, annihilating me at range. So I made use of transports. So he used battle tanks. So I loaded up on anti-tank close range firepower. So he used infantry. And the cycle continued until he found a Grey Knights army list that will beat me 9/10 games.

We've become so accustomed to one another now that my lists are largely tailored to counter his. It's become ingrained in my playstyle. I recently went to a tournament with what has become known as my "all rounders" army and got annihilated for being to specialised. He fared better but still suffered from having the perfect list to defeat mine... but not everybody else!

I love the arms race. It motivates me to invest in new models, to paint and expand my collection. Most importantly it keeps the game fresh. I hardly ever use the same list twice now, and that's a lot of fun.

 

There is a slight difference between tailoring a list and reading the local meta. I think that following the trend in meta is more reasonable than finding out what your opponent is bringing and building a list to counter it.

 

I agree that if you an engaging in espionage to gain inside information about your opponents list, then that should be frowned upon.

But if your opponent always brings the same (or very similar) list then that list IS the local meta and if you tailor your list against that then you aren't doing anything more than reading the local meta.

List tailoring is easy to get around by changing your list every once in a while. It's harder to tailor a list against a moving target.

Plus, you have to remember, the world of Warhammer Fantasy Battle is a World of Chaos. A Time of Heroes. An Age of War.

There's no crying in war!

 

i agree. a lot of what people seem to be advocating here i wouldn't consider list tailoring at all.

my most common opponent is my brother who plays skaven. in my opinion an example of list tailoring would be bringing a list with as many salamanders as i can cram into a list (among other things), simply because i know that many salamanders is brutal to the large low toughness blocks of skaven. and i'd be doing all this without first discussing my intent with him.

theres only so many builds a skaven player can utilize, most of which include at least a couple large blocks. its kinda how the army works. i'm not looking to have fun, or learn how to play better. i'm simply looking to win in the easiest way possible. whats the point?

if most of my opponents played horde armies, and using a list like this was a reaction to the local meta, that would be one thing. if i bring this list to play my brother and only him that would be pretty lame. utilizing an army like that doesnt teach me how to play better, it merely teaches me how to abuse the fact that i know what army my opponent is taking.

perhaps a better example is showing up at your local club with an army you've built to be extremely effective against i dunno, vampires. you know theres at least one player that's playing vampires every weekend, so you show up on saturday and decide you're only going to play him (or her). other players ask you for games, but you decline, waiting to play this one opponent you've tailored your list to play. finally you get to play him, you smash him up, pack up your things, and go home.

that is lame. super super lame. especially if you do so without establishing this premise before hand with your opponent.

the game is about having fun. if your opponents are consistently not having fun, the problem most likely isn't with every other person.


the above situation is completely different then analyzing your local meta, realizing WoC will be a popular choice at an upcoming tournament, and building your list to be able to deal with the toys of WoC. that is an appropriate example of "list tailoring" that is encouraged and actively evolves the local meta.

 

I agree with most of the statements above.

For me personally: I have an army core which I pretty much never deviate from. Some skinks, some saurus, a cowboy...you know, stuff.
That way, I always have 250-ish points to wiggle with. If I get some new models, I can always fit them into my army. If I want to run something extra..I can always fit it in. If I see my opponent has something new (as was the case with a Hell-Pit-Abimination) I simply put a flaming sword on my cowboy, to at least give myself a chance of bringing it down.

My opponent always knows my army core, that has been the same for the past 15+ battles. My core is decent enough to at least hold their own vs pretty much any build (only winning becomes a serious issue then).

If I have found a great counter to my opponents unit(s), they will make sure to have something to beat that next game. In which case I have to switch gears and find something to beat that. It's the way it works, and it sure as hell is fun!

The Hunted