If you’ve been following along on some of our tournament reports this week – either James “Boon” Kelling’s wonderful take of tactics and strategy en route to a tough finish at GW’s Austin event or my own oustanding tale of getting demolished in my first game with Thousand Sons, you may have heard us mention the invitational event this weekend that serves as a finale to Games Workshop’s US tournament series.

The Finale, at the Grapevine Citadel & Cafe in Texas (read: Dallas) is the end cap on Games Workshop’s 2021 tournament series, a small Invitational event featuring some of the best players from around the world who participated in the Open series this year. While Richard Siegler and John Lennon each had prior engagements that prevented them from showing up and dumpstering everyone, the line-up is still absolutely stacked with great talent. In particular, Goonhammer’s own James “Boon” Kelling and Dan Boyd will be there, representing the competitive and best overall winner groups, respectively.
The Format

The first thing you need to know about this event is that it’s actually two events. There will be a two-round Championship event for the Best Overall and Best General invitees that sees them use their own submitted lists. Then the Invitational throws the players some real curve balls for two-rounds of exhibition matches with how lists are built and how the missions will be structured.
Exhibition List Building

In order to level the playing field and focus on play skill over say, list building, the tournament organizers had every player submit a list of fully-painted models and units they had access to, then built lists for them. Since most were flying in, most chose to use the faction they were using for competitive play. Once they had those collections, they put together lists for the players, with a focus on creating accessible, interesting, off-meta lists that changed units and upgrades to bring them into something resembling parity.

I’m generally a big fan of this – there’s been a long-running debate here in the Goonhammer offices about what percentage of a player’s success boils down to list-building vs. skill on the table. On the one hand, Scott Horras “Heresy” maintains that almost every game is won during list building, and in-game skill isn’t real. On the other hand, Greg Chiasson would remind him that building a list Greg won’t lose with requires a host of the smartest competitive minds on our site working in concert to build the worst lists possible.
The Missions

In addition to the new list building format, the games will use new missions from the upcoming GT Missions Pack 2022. Unlike the 2021 pack, the 2022 packs makes a number of major changes to the mission rules, changing how scoring works and how they’re played. We don’t have all the details yet, but here’s what we know:

    Primary objective scoring is now 4, 8, or 12 points for holding one/two/more or two/three/more objectives in a player’s Command Phase.
    Mission secondary objectives – such as Raze or Data Intercept – are gone. Instead missions now have new additional primary objectives that reward players for accomplishing certain actions, such as destroying three enemy units in a battle round or holding the priority target objective their opponent picks.
    At least two of the secondary objectives have undergone major changes and there are more major changes to secondary objectives in the works (but we don’t know any more about those “major” changes).

This is a massive change, and one that’s sure to keep the players on their toes (as if the list adjustments weren’t enough). The reduced scoring for primary objectives means that players have to be much more proactive about scoring – previously missions that might have scored you 40 “easy” points will now only score you 32, making it harder for some armies to just sit back and rack up points unless their opponents walk directly into their kill zones. It’s still technically possible to max primaries without scoring the bonuses, but much more difficult.
The Games

Of course the important thing is going to be seeing these missions in action. There are three days of games, with Games Workshop streaming games on all three: One exhibition match on Friday, another exhibition round on Saturday morning, followed by the first Championship round that afternoon. Finally on Sunday we’ll see a second exhibition round, and a the final Championship games that afternoon.