Should There Be a Competitive 30k Scene? – Editorial

By Jack Stover | March 11th, 2016 | Categories: Editorials, Horus Heresy, jstove

If you make it, they will come? It’s the Field of Hersey Dreams these days, but should their be a competitive 30k scene?

Here’s an interesting thought for the Heresy hobbyist, should TO’s support a 30k scene?

To give you some perspective, 30k Events jumped in attendance roughly a bajillion percent between last year and this year’s recent LVO.

That’s not actually a real number, but I bet Rob Baer has one. (Editor’s Note: zub, zub)

In years past, 30k was the sole property of the seriously dedicated hobbyist, due to its barrier to entry- That barrier of course being Forgeworld pricing. However, whenever Forgeworld does something awesome, GW eventually pounces on it and makes it plastic, to bring all that resin money back home to the plastic main brand house. (valkyries, every cool Imperial Guard tank, super heavies, stompier, better, AV13 dreadnoughts… All were FW before they came to a native codex)

Now, with Betrayal of Calth, the barrier to entry for building legion armies has been cut off at the knees. The barrier to entry for 30k is now super low.

Calth might be one of the highest value armies-in-a-box GW has ever released. It includes piles of models for all the backbone units of a legion list, and a badass plastic contemptor for a cherry on top. Start with a Calth box, sprinkle your legion’s snowflake units on top, and you’ve got a pretty solid core for an army, at a lot cheaper than even some standard 40k equivalents.

Most of the core vehicles are already accessible too. While the historical rhinos, preds, and raiders are all Forgeworld, the modern variants are all available in off-the-shelf plastic, and will work just fine for your purposes… And on that note, I would hold off on buying legionary armored vehicles for a few months anyway, because some of them are being redesigned to fix the problematic issues with their track assemblies.

So, with 30k armies suddenly being cheaper to build across the legions, (Can’t say the same for the admech or the Solar Auxilia… Yet) what reason is there not to have an interest in competitive 30k?

Let’s look at the arguments against building a competitive 30k scene, and then RUSH TO CONCLUSIONS, because if you disagree with me you can write your own editorial and mail it to Rob Baer. He’d love to publish your rebuttal (Editor’s Note: Mostly true..)

Seriously. He’ll freaking do it. (Mostly…)

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“Guys, can I have my own Editorial Class Titan?”

I DON’T WANT THERE TO BE A 30K TOURNEY SCENE BECAUSE…

I ENJOY 30K AS A NARRATIVE GAME.

That’s fine. You don’t have to compete. But I want to point out that a game having a competitive scene creates a benefit for everyone who enjoys the game, not just those who only participate competitively. It is the competitive crowd that dives into the rules, looks for what’s broken, and complains, abuses, or tweaks it until it is fixed. The problem with competitive gamers is that they’re not always the most fun people to play. But you don’t have to play them. The good thing about competitive gamers is that they make the game better without you playing them, because competitive players love to win, but they hate to get robbed by a rules loophole or an unbalanced list, so they’re the most loud and outspoken when it comes to fixing abuses in a system. They do all the crying, and things get fixed whether you suffer with them or not.

I DON’T THINK THE META WILL BE DEEP ENOUGH

Are 90% of the lists going to be space marine armies in a 30k scene?

Yes. They’re the most numerous, and cheapest to acquire.

Guess what- That’s already true in 40k as well. How many marine codexes are there? 6 if we don’t count supplements, twice that if we do?

What’s the difference between 40k marines and 30k marines?

First of all, everyone uses the same legion list, so you’re not worried about taking 6th edition Dark Angels against 7th edition Space Marines, and getting slammed because the first legion missed the memo on gravguns and centurions. Second, the legion list is WAY DEEPER than any single marine codex, and gets deeper with every release.

The legion tactics are also infinitely more individual than their 40k marine counterparts, and some legions are so divergent from the codex astartes (that doesn’t exist yet) that there’s swathes of the army list they can’t actually use.

Is there going to be redundancy? Of course there will be. Putting your primarch in a spartan and throwing him at your opponent like a demigod bowling ball will probably always be a thing, but guess what? That’s not unique to 30k, how many space marine bikestars have you seen lately… All of them?

X WILL DOMINATE Y

On paper, there are a lot of units in 30k that look completely freaking ridiculous.
But here’s the interesting thing- Everyone can get them, and everyone can kill them. It’s not the same as 40k, where a codex drops or flops on release and you’re stuck with it for a year, and there’s always ways to create an unstoppable force to smash into an immovable object. No matter how hard something is, Horus or Angron are probably still going to punch it, or a squad of dudes hopping out of a land raider and double tapping plasma guns can probably evaporate it. The answer to every question is just a page turn away. S10 is cheap in 30k, and D ain’t hard to find either if you want it.

THE RULES WILL GET CRAAAAAAAZY AND I DON’T WANT TO DEAL WITH IT.

30k right now is a cleaner game than 40k.

-Players using fewer army lists with more depth, using less outside resources like supplements, allies, and one-off dataslates and formations.

-Forgeworld is insanely proactive on rules corrections. Remember the infinite chain-fire moritat? You probably don’t because they fixed it. Remember when GW fixed the re-rollable 2+ demonic saves in 40k? Pretty sure they didn’t, they just released another book instead.

-The release schedule is more defined and less chaotic. We have no idea what’s coming out for 40k in the next 3 months, we could be blindsided with any kind of wacky formation or model release. A new formation or codex could flip the entire insanely fast 40k meta on it’s head. But guess what? We already know the tactics of the next 3 legions, and their book isn’t even out yet, and there won’t be any surprises when it does drop. The releases, meta shifts, and new products in 30k are way more predictable and easy to build a competitive scene around, they come in more manageable, slower chunks.

So really, if you’re afraid that competitive 30k will do to 30k what competitive 40k will do to 40k, your problem really isn’t with competitive players- It’s with GW’s breakneck speed 40k design/release schedule. The competitive crowd is just following the carrot on the stick.

So why should you support a 30k competitive scene?

Well, it won’t rob anything narratively from your experience, because you don’t have to participate in competitive play.

You’ll never show up to a competitive 30k game and get ambushed by something you know nothing about when your opponent pulls out a new codex, supplement, dataslate, or model with the glue still drying that didn’t exist last month.

Your army will never be shelved or dusted off by the codex creep rodeo, because you and every other legionnaire are in the same deep living army list. If somebody gets a new tank, everyone gets a new tank.

You’ll get tired of looking at marines all day… FALSE. Look, if you’re not tired of looking at marines already, you should check your pulse. GW has been about marines since Rogue Trader. 30k is just about cooler marines with cooler toys.