The Curious Case of Flyers
The one true tournament build is dead. Long live the one true tournament build. Rinse. Repeat. The ink had barely dried on the new 8th Edition indexes when the competitive […]
Tournaments
Making a Run at the Top Tables: An Interview with Adam Abramowicz
Mediocrity has a place near and dear to my heart. I wrote a (successful) college admissions essay about it. And my personal list design and playing skill in 40K falls […]
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 […]
Saying Goodbye to 7th…
It’s a matter of weeks now before 8th Edition rolls out, with many, many changes afoot. It also happens to be close to the 3rd anniversary of Variance Hammer getting started. […]
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 […]