Beyond Sportsmanship: Game Stewardship
The great Time of Reflection Posts continues! This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for awhile – I started thinking about it thinking about the evolution of Horus […]
Tournaments
Revisiting the Girls in Gold
It’s been a quiet April here at Variance Hammer. I’ve been working on a review for Inferno, digesting Shadow War: Armageddon (which went on sale as I was boarding a plane and […]
Chasing the Dragon: Is GW’s Release Schedule Ruining the Hobby?
Yesterday, while wandering BoLS, I encountered an editorial, The Real Ugly Side of 40k. The author’s fundamental assertion: that the competitive landscape is beset by ugly and unpainted armies, and at […]
LVO 2017 Analysis: Doom of the Eldar
As has become something of a yearly tradition here at Variance Hammer, I’ve done some number crunching on the 2017 Las Vegas Open 40K Championships, to see what there is to […]
Iterate and Improve: Reviewing the LVO Team Narrative Event Year 2
As we have established, I do not belong in competitive play. It’s just not my jam. Fun to number crunch and think about, yes. Which is why, for the past three […]
Is Going to Tournaments Correlated with Winning Them?
I was grabbing a current snapshot of the current ITC standings (as of Jan. 29, 2017) for another project, but while I was looking at the data I started wondering […]
The Performance-Sportsmanship Tradeoff
After yesterday’s analysis of the Warzone Atlanta data, a commenter on Reddit objected to my use of the term “Friendly” to describe my army, and the implication that competitive armies […]
Warzone Atlanta: Crunching the Numbers
In a previous post, I went over Warzone Atlanta from the perspective of an event attendee. Now that I’ve gotten my hands on the data from the event itself, I […]
Warzone Atlanta: A View From the Tables
Last weekend, I got the spend the better part of two days throwing down with complete strangers at Warzone Atlanta. An analysis of the tournament itself is coming when I […]
What’s Wrong With The Tau?
“There are two armies ruining the game: Eldar and Tau.” I hear some form of this a lot. Any mention of overpowered factions, units that need nerfing, ‘What’s wrong with the […]