 Hello everybody, if it's Wednesday, it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly Joining me as always is my well. I don't know what kind of data or value he's adding into my life But here he is. Anyways, it's Tom. What's up, buddy? I am I am like a I listbot in body Speaking of we've got the man the myth the legend the master himself JP Gannis Creator of listbots amongst many other accolades, but hey, how you doing there brothers great to have you on the show Yeah, super stoked to be here. Thanks a lot No issue. All right, so we got a lot to talk about tonight first like I purposely went for the The clickbait title today for the show in the you know in does skill matter in Age of Sigmar I love it. I look we usually avoid clickbait titles, but this episode is gonna be so spicy That I just thought let's go all the way get ready. There's gonna be so much salt on the other side of this We're gonna take you on a journey a data journey tonight It's gonna be exciting tell your tell your friends tell your wife tell everybody the data the spicy data journey has begun Okay So but of course as always let's start with the news. So Tom kick us off. What do we got? Rumor engine it's up. No one cares great. It's a 40k Like I literally couldn't care less. I hate when they give us things that are obviously not anything we care about The only thing worth talking about on this rumor engine is still how poor the metal paints They're using are because even in black and white I can see the pigment from space Whereas their matte paints have this like smooth glorious application all the way around the thing and then this metal paint Just looks like they're painting with glitter You you and metal paint. Okay, so let's talk about the reality of the news item this week Cursed he's gone. Yes. Well, I mean it's right there, but But in broad sense, yes, it is soon to be gone on eBay. I'm sure yeah Okay, so yeah, let's I mean look we don't need to roast this too hard Basic story. Let's get some facts out there Kerr said he came out the original communications from the team was that from the community the community team I should say was that there was going to be more people have got plenty of receipts on this You don't need me to let's talk about it more Yeah, yeah, which means they did have plans to produce more because the community team doesn't just go off on their own and start saying stuff They're right. They're delivering pre-approved messaging right Kerr city launches, obviously, there's a huge demand for it huge like crazy high demand for it because this is an incredible box set and And then we get surreptitiously a couple days after launch In a sub tweet response like they had posted about something else Somebody said hey what up with that Kerr city and in a sub tweet. They said Kerr city is done. We're not making any more Check your little retailers and then when you went to go look at what they had previously said They quietly deleted all the prior responses in social media where they said that they were going to be more was going to be coming Yeah, so they they they they cover their tracks And had a single response in a sub tweet. Yeah, I mean it's the internet. So nothing you nothing Look much like star wars. No one's ever really gone. Um, but like Yeah Okay, then there was a letter that went out to stores And this is what not a lot of people know about like not everybody knows about the letter Sure, and it was it didn't give a lot more information. Let me just say those It was basically that sub tweet inform except that we got the following It said basically Kerr city will no longer be produced. We're not making any more Um, you know, we've directed people toward you retailers to find it Which by the way, there are a lot of stores that still do have this on the shelf Like what one of the problems we have here is we have this sort of slack problem Right where it's not equitously distributed into where it's needed Uh, so like, you know, my true advice is let's knowing that this is the case We can all complain but at the same time Let's be a good community for each other and like reach out if you've if if you're Well, somebody who's really wanting one and you really want it reach out on social media If you know you've got a local store that has some Help help people out help direct them to that store, you know Let's let's take care of our friends and community members in this because The reality is I've seen it happen a lot already where somebody's like I really need one It was like why got an extra one on my the store, you know the shelf in my store I'll grab it for you or whatever. Whatever. I don't care how you do it I did that for a content creator. Yeah, where like they they had wanted something and I said, hey I know we have some locally. We have a bunch of stores Do you want one? Yeah, so first things first regardless of whatever happened with gw in this The answer is always for us to be a good community and take care of each other That is what we should do Period Okay Now the letter that went to stores that basically we're not going to be making any more of this Didn't say why There's a million reasons of speculation I don't know what any of them are no one knows it anymore who doesn't work outside that building There's been rumors of molds breaking or legal issues or You know fire that destroyed something critical in the process or the shipping because Getting the all the cardboard and all the stuff from china and the time lead on that The new trade laws for the with the uk around what happens if a product's more than 70% made of Imported products and then is exported that has higher tariffs like I don't know And I don't suspect anybody else does either unless you're you work in that building so it's not worth speculating on It's clearly something Yeah Like that sounds vapid and stupid It's so insightful Vince Thank you. What I mean by that is like They would love to make money Right there are reasons why it is no longer available Right, so they didn't just like make it limited to screw us over. That wasn't the goal They they they really would like to make more money. Okay, as with their shareholders, I'm sure so They likely had some significant and untenable problem that they could not overcome And as a result had to make a really rough decision that they probably didn't want to make That's terrible and a shame, okay The one of the things they did have in the note that went to stores was that That they said we are looking at the possibility Of releasing some of the sprues In a different format individually in the future Okay Which tells me that at least some of the molds are still intact So That's good Now, I mean, I can't imagine like if they had any degree of product preparation for expansions I can't imagine That they don't move heaven and earth To re to to to re secure the ability to provide some base core games Now we could be a year and a half out from that, right? Well six months And and when that comes out everybody's gonna lose their mind again when they come out with the first expansion for curse city And everybody's like, well, I have my curse city. You didn't have enough for me to buy That's gonna be a fun conversation. It's gonna be amazing because it's it's coming, right? But when that expansion drops the point being that when that expansion drops Like but you said six months I I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see the expansion six months Because it gets pushed out to a lying back when to when they can provide core games again Or it gets pushed to it and repackaged in a different way like If I'm them and I've made a bunch of expansions for curse city I am immediately ripping all of them out of the boxes And ordering new boxes that say so like grave lords and welcome to so like grave lords part two I'm gonna be on the coast city. Yeah, exactly. I'm gonna gather them all together It's the release called so like grave lords part two The open card game you can play on the side. Yeah, if you want, right These new this new release for so like grave lords can also be used in curse city We'll give you the rules for free as a p.m Yes, see how you can turn it right around. This is easy stuff. All right. It's that product management brain working so anyways like The the clear flaw here And a lot of people have said in the comments and I'm certainly in agreement with it is that They didn't and haven't and probably don't plan to Communicate on this Right, like if they were going to send a message, they would have already period And as a matter of fact the letter that went to the stores said we will not be sending any communication on this It was very clear I think I love No, go ahead jb. I was just gonna say I think maybe one thing is like I think, you know, and this maybe started even when major sigmar come up came out as I've loved seeing like games workshops just sort of You know Burst into the future in terms of like being like a big gaming company and this stuff But I think it is sort of it's like right now in the in you know in 2021 It's like so many companies have these huge teams of people exactly completely dedicated to like What how are we gonna show ourselves on twitter, you know Like you need to keep up with ever, you know with woke this and woke that you've got to make sure your customers are happy you've got to know all the good memes and You know, I don't think gw have that Yeah, and I think it's sort of like in situations like this where you're sad where you're like the models Oh my god, the models are so amazing. I'm sure cursed city is a really sick game And you're just sort of like I don't know what happened in the year of you know Covid slash brexit slash the cursed fire of all the you know, the mold spurs But it's like it's really sad to sort of the game has to be Overshadowed by this as you say because they maybe just don't know how to correctly communicate With the community in a way that we expect by seeing, you know, maybe these companies have more practice or something like that Yeah, yeah, exactly like I I really think that the real problem is probably something significant in some way And that would lead them to not communicate it because they are a publicly traded company and nothing shakes shareholder value Like here is a incompetence. Well, no, no, no, no, don't have to be that. No, I disagree like or I'm saying like major logistical issue Like here is a supply chain problem. We can't solve it poses an existential risk to the future of our company You don't really want to put that on blast Every employee that worked on it has died in mysterious circumstances I mean, there have been a bunch of There have been a bunch of logistics positions open recently I'm saying So, you know, like that that public traded need Means that they have they're always walking this really tight communication line of like wanting to share openly with us But also being really worried about scaring Shareholders right investors And look if you want to know how I feel about that Obviously, that's dumb and I don't care Uh, I don't care about your your investors, but I'm sure they do like I play your game And you should care about the people who play your game because those if those people go away Then guess what your investors also lose. They're actually your income. Yes. Yeah, but I mean What I would say is this I think that I would agree with JP that I think that they're like messaging management reflects older policies Rather than kind of contemporary trends and I think a little bit of transparency And it can generate just an immense amount of goodwill We've talked about that with things like the ko book and stuff like this Like we've been down this road before silence is not the right answer Like and I don't know why they think it is. Well, I think because I'm sorry. Okay. I would say because ultimately what it does is Uh, to take a lead from uh, John Oliver, uh, it allows people like us to just fill in the blank with whatever we want That reality to be because now the messaging becomes All the community the loud voices of the community. So if we want to say, you know, what it's because gw Blah whatever it is. I'm not I'm not gonna put it on blast. I'm not gonna make up some vicious ruber But what I will say is this it it creates a vacuum and that vacuum is going to be filled with something Yeah, nature abores a vacuum. Yes indeed, right Uh, all right enough about this. Look, I I'm still looking for a second bark skier and three of those three more of those Little vampire dudes. So I got to get on that now because uh, those little vampire dudes and the second bark's here key to one Of my armies I'm building so probably gonna have to pay you the nose on those Their value is scaling significantly Yeah, and you know my rule on buying something that costs more than 20 dollars. It's really gonna come back to bite me here It is it is you're gonna have to like trade dual lands or something like that For the value that those plastic models are suddenly going Tom I see your play here to try to get at my dual lands and it's not happening. You can put that I mean I do have some models sure It's not gonna happen Tom. I'll tell you what I'll give you a I'll give you a like a You have a beta pearl to unicorn. There you go. That's what I'll give you Tom. All right. So at any rate, um Let's uh, let's get into the uh, the rest of the news. No, I don't want to carry on this Bellicor and uh, other stuff is up for pre-order Yeah, it is, uh Excited I've got my order in I'm very excited about big big bellicor We'll do a whole review show not gonna talk about it. Obviously the book is leaked Yeah Night haunt spicy. Yeah, absolutely like You know hot take real quick JP. What do you have you seen stuff in the book yet? Or have you watched any of the reviews of it yet? I've sort of seen it. I've taken a lot of its second hand Um, I think it looks cool. I love like again. I think the models are super cool I think right now like in some ways my my competitive mind given like a year or however long it's been 10,000 years of not really playing intense warhammer I've deviated more towards like I see the models. I'm like, whoa, these models are cool I can't wait to play warhammer again. And that's definitely just keeping going here So and I know there's I mean, I played a fair amount of night haunt and I know there's uh, the new guy out for night haunt who You know, again, hard to see, you know, you haven't seen necessarily list with him But he's got a powerful buff with that uh five up after save. So oh, yeah, he's okay. Yeah Look, I disagree. I think he's hot, but anyways, we'll get into it. I know It's a good buff it menu out like but like a lot of these things You know, it's it's not until you see what the list is that you can really say, of course, right That's exactly right. I mean, he's okay Uh, what I will say though is Who picking up a second general in that right nor the town are the right nor sub allegiance be able to teleport with To two different locations on the battlefield Uh, whoo spicy Yeah night night hot stonks stonks are It's going up. It's hard stonks on the night haunt, right? Uh, but yeah, uh And then now just win harder. Sure So we'll we'll talk about that. I don't know. Yeah, maybe next week. I'm not sure I'm not sure exactly when we're going to do the broken realms or uh bellicor show Probably can't wait too long or it's going to butt up against cracked ups again All right. So at any rate goes Um, those uh, we have a couple more news items. Hold on. I gotta find you. Um So, oh, yeah, and then in the midst of all this we have no new pre-orders until may F uh Yeah, I mean Okay Like uh, they're waiting to hire that other logistics manager There are a bunch of positions in order to be able to begin shipping again. That must be what's going on here My honest answer is I am glad they stalled pre-orders for a couple weeks Like fine good as many have said they probably should have done that It's eight months ago nine months ago something like that, right? This it's you know, they probably should have said just like hey We're gonna pause pre-orders and releases for a month and get everything in line and blah blah blah and push everything back And we would have had a lot less of this sort of jumping around But I mean they'll be back in may it's fine. There's plenty of Stuff from that has released here that we're all trying to get our hands on desperately and not they're not really meeting current demand So I'm hoping that this allows them to start meeting the actual demand out there They've built an audience that's really big that wants to buy this stuff. There wasn't enough bellicors to go around There wasn't enough cursed cities, you know, like so and again, it's tough because it's slack You know, like I'm sure there's going to be stores where you go to and there's like three bellicors sitting on the shelf and no one's buying it Right, uh, but whereas then there's three which reminds me. I gotta go check my stores Who who really want that bellicor model? So, you know, it is what it is It's tough, but I I hope that Uh, I hope that this gives them a chance to retool To and then come back being able to meet the demand for all these things because They keep producing stuff. We all want to buy so maybe make enough for us to buy it That would be yeah I mean, I think the biggest loss for me as a consumer is that like I would have like bought a bunch of the random limited boxes Sure. Is that like because of the FOMO because of how my own psychographic like like I can't like For me the loss suffered of missing a deal Sure Is like so significant that like I will buy and then just resell later Hence why I have shelves of models and like had I been able to buy Well, any of the like the bundled broken realms armies I probably would have but almost every store got like one of each Um, and they would just evaporate or they'd be like sold internally, you know By by the store owner to their friends or whatever and there was just none of these things available And so like I didn't make I haven't made any model purchases related to broken realms Where normally I would be buying at least one to two boxes per book Oh, hey, man. I got my morta velli's hellcourt. So I'm you are lucky because I had requested it and I did not So for you. I was on I was on that one early I'm into those flesh eater courts, baby. I'm I'm my smile. That's I've I've I'm down. That's where we're gonna go Yep. All right. Cool. What's next? Um Okay, we'll talk about the other other story item Yeah, man. Go ahead Vince. You know where we're going. Well, the floor is yours. That's fine Well, we'll start with this little guy right here. So I'm just gonna switch my image up on the screen We got a new article And in that new article they had this little image right at the top of the screen And if you're watching if you two are watching live, you'll see it pop up on your screen in just a second But it was the banner header to the article. So before we get into the the big news of the of the article We had a little picture of kragnos here. We finally get to see what kragnos looks like. There he is. There's his face Uh, so he's a destruction monster Uh, he's not a ryan. He's not a kernaughty guy. He's not a piece of chaos guy. He's a destruction monster So That's his face. There you go He looks a lot more rough and tumble than he did when we just saw the little art image of him in the uh in the thing So I thought that was cool. What are you guys excited for for kragnos our big destruction god beast monster guy? No, it looks like some sort of sick druid Not really. It's not really It's not really from tab Just I don't know I I refuse to fill Uh this image with all of my hopes and dreams I see um like I just I don't know what to expect and I'm not going to make things up because they're probably not going to have enough models for everybody anyway Probably using the cursed sprues. Yeah, indeed. It's yeah, it's Somebody said but is he I assume you said but is he to my is he a big destruction god beast monster? Yes, as I've said before you can either agree with me or find out you're wrong It's those are your choices. So that's fine. Whatever you like. I you're free to choose your own path here. Um But uh The I am very excited about this dude. I'm excited like, let me tell you why I love the concept of kragnos and jp I want your take on this I love that we got a book that was just like some new guy that we hadn't heard of before That's a totally new character. I want some new big movers and shakers doing cool stuff in the world Like I don't mind marathi and bellicorn that stuff. That's all cool. Those are classic characters that we've got emotional attachment to but I like also mixing in This new stuff like I want some new people Rolling around tearing up the world doing some things not just the not not just people from the the world that was What's your take? What's your feeling? Yeah, absolutely. I think I think there's like I know I mean people complain about everything on the internet, but I know people Like I've seen some a bunch of complaints about the lore in age of sigmar at various times And I think sometimes when when the main purpose of the sort of medium is for us to play games in right I think that sometimes what you need is you need the lore to just Sort of become big enough and go on long enough that it gets compacted down to where only the good bits survive and I think Like just adding this new stuff Um and bringing in again I think the you add the marathi stuff and that's all cool You add this new stuff and you sort of just set one layer in the strata Where people can be like, oh, yeah, you remember when this happened and like, okay You know, maybe it comes out and I was like, I hated the story, you know Like cragnos is relevant for whatever my faction is for whatever reason. I didn't like it And you're like fine But then as time goes on, you know that he's just a permanent layer in the story And I think just having more of that and getting like understanding more about What the mortal realms actually are and that stuff is is cool Exactly I think you put it perfectly I want that strata because it's point there's always new people coming in And there is these marks we look at like, oh, you remember when Glocken was introduced or something like that, right? In the end times or whatever whatever your point happens to be in that, right? It gets built up over time people who have a lot of love of Of of Gartus who just got his own model, right? Who's who's clearly like a storm cast character That's a previous strata introduced in the history of aos, right? Yeah. Yeah so Like we can still you can have cool stuff happen with nefarada and man friend people like that That's great. Nobody that's I don't hate that at all Neat. Those are great classic characters that are cool and interesting. Like I said, I'm back on the man for train after the last story He's cool again Best mortar, so there you go, but you can also then introduce these new people I think you're exactly right. It just keeps building, right? That's how we get to that cool layer All these characters were introduced at some point in time. It didn't just always exist Yeah, I mean, I think what this says to me though is that the kind of the the winds of change that we were sensing With regard to like the waning of death And the ascendancy of of destruction. Yeah Is is accurate like and I think that he is going to be the harbinger of Of the wave of of destruction that will move front and center or probably moving into the new edition And actually like if you look at the majority of the new big armies during this edition Most of them have been death related Not all of them like we've had to loom enough and stuff like that, but Like night hot got blown out to an entire range an entire army book And obr And now we're about to get vampires sure like so three of the biggest armies were all death related We're like a lot of like chaos armies that updates, but we really didn't get any new armies in second edition of aos And so like the new content seemingly focused on For this season has been focusing on flushing out unintended death And so I suspect that We'll probably see something similar with destruction. We'll have more than three armies in the new edition Uh, I'm excited. I'm very excited But of course this guy this little banner here. He belongs to an actual article That revealed something Boom. Oh my god Greatest monday reveal ever ever This is amazing. I'm wearing the pin again boys. It's back on. That's right. I am excited Here it is We're back We're back in this I was I was waiting You know my my I was I was like, um starting to feel kind of bad About this army and then I try to get out they released this they pulled me right back in thousand percent The dark prince s just such a perfect temptress um This thing is incredible. So this is the form that the little one of the two forms that the progeny took the little, uh uh The little silanesh piece that got out of the world in marathi Is going to take this for it took this form. So it took the form of the twins This one and the peacock So which is the the uh the talent and the voice One is a caster. One is a melee Love it Beyond excited for this. These are the greatest models. I've ever seen in my life There is no other model that gw has ever produced that even comes close to the two of these They are simply perfection given model form if you rank any model above this you're wrong The only thing that even comes close is the first keeper of secrets But this is simply the best You're lucky that I don't go too into a Uh, uh, David from shitt's creek entire song of just just sing singing simply the best here Uh, so It's amazing. I love it. Uh, it's wonderful. All right. What would you guys like to add on this incredible model? It's no goba palusa is it get out of here No, I mean it's awesome. I really like it I They did say that this will be a dual kit by the way that it'll be like you it's one kit you build is either yeah I love That you love this model. Uh-huh and that and you're getting things that you like. Yeah Yes It is a truly Stunning model also true. I don't I don't want to take that away In fact, like I feel confident to say like it's the best model we've seen released in the last year at least If not ever year decade century millennia all of time and space the history of this universe and all universe is sure Whatever you like sure But I'm ready. Here we go Uh, so what you all don't know the rest of our viewers and even jp is that vince and I uh went around When this was released for like An hour of shouting each at each other in a messaging chat where some of the other content producers just got to sit by silently and watch As we argued vociferously. Sure. Um and My simple acknowledgement is I love this model. I love that people are happy about it. I love that people are excited about it But there are some people who are disappointed Because this model was not included in the selenesh release. Yeah And so they feel like their book is incomplete Sure And they feel like like and like things like war scroll cards and stuff like that like they don't have the whole army It's been pieced out or separated and with these being so close. There's a degree of disappointment there Sure, and you know what except you actually cares about war scroll cards, but I agree with the rest of you I do and I know that I know you disagree with me I'm saying you're the I'm agreeing with your broader point I'm just saying you're literally the only human being that cares about war scroll cards But go ahead if you care about war scroll cards um Put it uh mentioned so in the chat in the comments below and on vince's uh twitter feed. I'm sure you can hit me up And so I I I use war scroll cards as kind of the foundation because I can't trust my phone to be charged for an entire event Um, and so as they are a printer. So there's I mean, it's just problems everywhere No, I'm not going to carry loosely stuff Books are heavy. No, um, like war scroll cards are the way that I that I keep track of that stuff just for for referencing and um I know that other people have a similar sentiment So I say that to say I also understand their disappointment You know having just watched this happen with lumeneth right where we had a lumeneth book drop and then six months later You know and the degree by the way for lumeneth is much larger than what this is Like I'm not like I'm not saying that they're they are identical. What I'm saying is they are in the same spectrum Where what happened with the lumeneth is dramatically Uh of more significance than what happened here, but I just wish we would move away from that Um, that's that's all I would say Uh, you you have you have allies in the chat tom. You'll be happy to know Um, but there you go Uh the uh Here can I can I just say as a as an aside gw see me over on camera too? Sure You know a really easy middle way solution to this and it seems like super inconsequential Is when we do one-off releases like this This sounds ridiculous Just put the war scrolls in the box All right, you mean other than what they already do because it it does come in the box Like the war scroll is printed in the box. It's it's printed in the booklet, but it's not a war scroll card Yeah, so you want it on a physical separate card. You're not having it in the book I want it to be just like the rest of my army, right? Just like my just like my endless spells and all that stuff Like we do we have this technology that we use regularly, right? Like when they release army boxes, they put war scroll cards in the army boxes It's a really low bar. I'm not saying you do this with every unit But whenever you have units that release that are separate from the main unit Throw people a bone and put the card in the box It's not it's not gonna stop all the complainers and I get that Uh, but it's an but it's a nice like middle ground thing to acknowledge that. Hey This was released outside of like battle tome renewal during the normal cycle And just to acknowledge that like because now anybody that wants a war scroll card for that has to literally either make their own Or wait like five years or six months when they put Release a new unit sure if they want them to all be the same like the options are They can go get the free war scroll and print it They can slice the thing out of the book That it comes in and include it in there or they can make their own in any of 50 different ways Yes, but if you don't you're out of your mind if they don't like any of those, which is fine Okay, I'm not telling you you're wrong. I'm just saying They're not without workarounds as imperfect as they may be But if you think that If you think that that war scroll is going to fit on a half page Right Let me tell you it's not I hope not and so and so like Just like cutting it out of the book isn't going to help because you're gonna have a full sheet of paper and then a bunch of small War scroll cards True, that's what I'm saying if you don't get all your war scrolls tattooed on your body like prison break I think you're a casual player and should be removed from the conversation 100 agreed with jp. Jay can finally spit in truth I mean Now here's the flip side of this the reality is any army that I play I have almost everything memorized anyways But I just like to be able to look in reference if I need to hand something to the other players That's just so just make an educated guess. You've probably hit on threes Okay, probably make one run So I don't want to belabor this point into the ground but yeah, that's fine my my Statements on the feelings around this slanesh bottle would be summarized as something like the following so that we don't have to drag This out for another hour of discussion on what I think is probably an uninteresting topic But I would simply say this I have no concern about how close they release something To the actual tome that comes out if it is minimal In what it is I would prefer That they didn't I would have preferred this to be in the book and come out at the same time It was probably more screwed up because of the delays versus when like crag knows I'm supposed to come out versus the book and yada yada. We all know that there's probably a six to eight month gap Yeah, I was supposed to be much longer. That's fine. It wasn't and so that makes it especially painful I don't personally care I want new toys for this thing. I love if you're into slanesh, you're into access Give me more. I want slanesh models coming out with crag knows I want sole blight grave lords to release with a new slanesh model I want aos 3 to release with new slanesh models. I want everything I want it all Okay, uh now that being said, I understand That I am a strong devotee of slanesh and all of its excessive Uh Requirements in this in this way and I get not everybody's in my camp. So I agree with you Folks that it's a shame. It wasn't in that book and I understand But my point would be let us not lose the forest for the trees That is This is a very gorgeous model that hopefully doesn't have bad rules Fingers crossed Okay And we don't know what else is in the book for slanesh You could be just this model. It could you don't think they're going to suck you right in and let you down again It's entirely possible and that would be very slanesh-y too And that's perfectly fine But I to my point is I don't want to let perfect be the enemy of the good Was this a perfect release? No, absolutely not could be have communicated it better said this is coming Put it in the book done any of several things. Yes, and they should have and I agree with all of that But none of that spoils the release for me I would still rather live in the world where I have this model The joy that I felt and that I have to believe others felt Maybe I like I can't be the most the only person that's this intense about slanesh I kept this page open for the last three days of that article Like it was just a tab that was open and I would rant this is not a joke And I would just randomly if I was frustrated or feeling anything that wasn't a happy emotion I would just scroll to it And I would just be like, oh man. That is so beautiful And I'd look at more details and stare at it more because I'm so excited about it right GW send this man to kit so you can Like my this made my whole day I was just like I started out my monday just like any normal monday and then I saw this and it Like it changed the trajectory of my week Okay Like that's real. Let's not be being like I'm not this is not hyperbole at this point. This is real, right? This is because this the thing I'm passionate about and I love and I was really excited And that's what these models can do for people And so I just don't want to lose that in the in the range, right? It's cool to have complaints I have no issue with that. Well, and I don't think any of us have rage like I'm not raging I was raging at you before because you were being an We wouldn't because you were being We're primetime Because you Were being you but what I will say is that um, I like I'm not mad about this release again I'm really excited. I think it's probably one of it probably the most beautiful model that they've ever released period Yeah, like the lines are just stunning. It's gorgeous. I love both versions. We've had this girl up for a while It's with the other girl. Yeah, they're they're so good uh anyways There we go. That's the thing. Okay. Now that I haven't lost all of you. I've probably lost like 10 people rambling on about this freaking thing Very excited about it As stated on the pin I am excited about sladesh. So there we go. Okay, cool Great week in the in the Vince household Okay, cool. Anything else? Was that our last news item? Uh, yep Also, we know that now that the witch hunters and crook are gonna be in cragness. Yes. Thank you. Yes Which gets what news flash probably not gonna be enough models Let's let's hope uh, so hey, maybe that's one way to thin out Croak and serif on no, I'm very excited about new croak. I love new croak new croak is awesome Poor rules on to him and make him 600 points and I'm gonna be thrilled Right, but I only have to but only half the serif on players will actually be able to have him And so that'll just like they'll just use them out the actual Oh Yeah, what's gonna happen easy easy Take him off his pollen queen. Just leave him as a little mummy frog in the middle Do you know how many old bellicors we're gonna have on? Yeah, yeah base. Yeah, uh, I know mine's gonna be So that's fine All right. I'm just gonna put him on a tower For the dread fort Sure I'll be up on the parapet like pointing for this His sword out and then yes, you know, that's the footprint of that hundred mil. Whatever one turn I'll probably put it on He just looks smaller because he's further away Yeah, exactly. He's really high up. Yeah give croak 150 points of rules and mark him up to 600 points And then we've got a good balancer that that fixes that problem. There we go Okay, let's get to some pick of the week gentlemen. All right pick oh the week JP, what would you like to share with everybody? What would you like to point everybody toward? What is it? What is the pick of the week? Oh, I didn't prep you on this. I'm sorry. I don't really tell people Is there any media video or something like that or you know an article or maybe a thing Like maybe there's this website where people could go and put their lists That you might like anything out there in the world. Do you want to boost the signal that you would like to direct people toward jp? All right. Yeah, all right. Thanks. Thanks for helping me with my shameless plug. Uh, yeah, so For anyone who wants to check out, uh, you know, we're gonna cover some of this a bunch of stats Um bad age of sigmar you can check out listbot.co.uk We're gonna be getting into it but you know as a bunch of stats for the meta a bunch of lists you can look at as an Analyzer that works however well you believe it does in telling you how good your list is Um, and yeah, it's pretty fun. I even used it myself the other day when I went and talked about flesh eater courts I was like, I want to see what people are playing on In flesh eater courts now and I could sort of scroll through a recent recent list So yeah, that's going to be my pick of the week. It's a perfectly valid pick and awesome It will be linked down in the description Tom, what do you got for everybody? So I I tweeted out a tweet today from aminesis studio Um, which is like this stunning Just truly stunning. Um, I think it's the daughters of kane mear Yeah, oh, yeah from uh from the blood rack shrine That they painted to be like the portal to the like realm between realms where slash is being held to basically be a like a duplicate of um That paint job of that very famous painting and it was just a stunning thing and uh He has a he has a blog. Um, he is a uh painter a self-taught painter from switzerland And so we'll have the link to his blog uh below where he's just kind of detailing his own journeys and stuff like that And just uh, he's kind of showing how he does things and walks through like painting tutorial steps and Processes and stuff like that and it's just it's fantastic. So i'm going to encourage you to check it out Uh, it was yeah, it was awesome. Uh, absolutely Did enjoy that that mear is a great piece it's a great like Uh, it's just a great thing for for that kind of painting and stuff like that. So yeah, I'm I'm all about it That was that was very well done very much dig your selection there solid Okay, so for my pick of the week Uh, well, of course, we've got to go to our friend two plus tough who is once again Reading the book so you don't have to Uh, so if you let me just say I love his series because like I don't have to read more books anymore He does the work so you don't have to yes, so dug is in the middle of his lore series around bellicor Uh, it's freaking great. He's three videos in as of today. So it's five video series Uh, he's three videos in as of today Would recommend highly I will link video number one, which came out Monday in that series It should just auto play you through the whole list. So if you want to wait till Friday There you go. You could watch you can just Do the whole story back to back if you want, but uh dug does an amazing job of Breaking it down. So absolutely great stuff would recommend 10 out of 10. Well done dug as always Okay, uh Cool. Now let's talk about some Hobby time. All right. So hobby time. So jp What do you what have you been working on man? You've been paying anything anything on your desk? What have you been doing with Listbot that that'll count as hobby. Whatever you do like what what is your what is your hobby consist of right now coding? Yeah, no, it is it is 50 50 like desperately trying to You know make the listbot website stop crashing and have some semblance of ui and ux, but That is less interesting then and less fun. Then yeah, I've been working on a uh lose my kids list. So It's got a got a bit of everything. I've got some troggs. I've got some spider. I got some grots I've got a mega gargant in there I'll convert it up to look like an even larger trogg. So, you know, I've had because there's been obviously so much time It's like been it's been nice to sort of get on a hobby project that I was like Like I have a full amount of time to sort of keep doing this and I even like for painting the grots I like I'm you know batch painting them in batches of like five instead of batch painting them in batches of 60 Or something, you know, so it's like you actually get to enjoy like, okay I can paint there you gotta highlight all the noses on the grots because I don't have to do them In the next week before the event. So yeah, that's what I've been up to and it's just there are an awesome range All the glimpse by gifts that's just so cool and so fun like you can do Like whatever you want with it. So yeah, we've been super enjoying that. Yeah, they're so fun. It's such a great range I agree. So that's awesome. Uh, and I love giant trogg Uh, I saw somebody turn one of the giants into a giant orc, which I also appreciate because We've long many times on the show we talked about how I think the ultimate like orcs just keep growing And so I think we need a giant size orc like that would be a great release for them Would just be a mega garden sized orc that just kept growing because he kept fighting and winning Uh, so yeah, tom, what about you buddy? What's your hop to time been? Besides opening magic arts I mean A new set did drop this week. Yeah, so I'm not gonna lie, but I put together a pillar That's something You did something Uh Is it a base for something are you gonna put something flying on top of it? No, I just like to build terrain And I was like, you know what I'm gonna build a pillar I don't know what I'm gonna do with this So I really like the gw's like the temple kit like the sigmar temple stuff And I have a bunch of boxes of it that I just every once in a while. I'll grab it. I'm like, you know what? I'm putting together this wall Okay, this is what's happening here. Perfect. The last thing last thing I built from my gifts was actually a pillar I got some of those like cake cake wedding topper pillars Smash it in half with a hammer and then you just sort of Painting it so it looks like it's all spread it around. Yeah, absolutely Yep, I have a I have a bunch of those up there on my show. No, perfect. Yeah Shout out to the wedding cake terrain Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I mean it was terrible. I just said shout out to the pillars of the community Oh Oh such a good pun Okay fantastic, um for myself Uh, I haven't gotten a break into curcidia because just yesterday I finished up finally Uh, this big monstrosity Um, mine is a little different as you can see We're going for a slightly different take on our our main hero here Uh, so we have a big giant, uh, oh, yeah, yeah, there you go. There's it's that for anthony Yeah, anthony sent me a Terrain piece for my checklist that I had asked about sure and so I wanted to put it back on camera for him just so you saw that it exists Nice So yeah, I finished up this guy. I'll put out some pictures this weekend My bull god is a slightly different, uh, bringing a slightly different energy than gluteus I hope you're gonna be able to see him there. Oops. There you go. He's a little bull. Yeah, you just kind of float up there And we've got all his little people. I actually didn't use the little guy Uh Partially because he doesn't have any direct rules But also partially because I have a different plan for him and want to use him in a separate project So so why why did you not do the canopy and you did the mirror instead? Because I wanted him floating up there in the sort of like Uh, I am a golden god pose Instead of instead of lounging That's fair. Yeah So and I I too love that mirror And have used it like many times I have that mirror all over my slanesh stuff because I got like 10 copies or 15 copies of that mirror a while back and so I've got that thing everywhere There you go. Uh, yes, I will I will put out pictures this weekend. I just need to actually make time to take pictures Oh bits world. We miss you. Yeah, indeed. Don't we Epson chat. Uh, anyways, so, um Okay, uh Yes, the uh That little guy. Yes, the slaneshi halfling master chef. Yes. I want to do something different with him. So there you go Uh, I love that little dude. I just want to I want to put him to use in in a slightly different subject. So All right. Anyways Gentlemen, are we ready? To get to the main subject. Are you ready to talk about skill? skill against skittle in uh ages sigmar Skill against sarifond. There you go. Okay So we're gonna actually I need to switch our view here because we're gonna go for a Slightly different view today. We're gonna go for the whole the whole presentation which means I am going to Bring up the prezzo, but because it will be hard to read in only half we're gonna actually go full screen Then we're going to go ahead and hide that And then we're going to go ahead and put that into presentation mode Be in presentation mode and then I have to switch this my goodness Computer is not even once there you go. Yeah, indeed. Okay So gentlemen, this will be covering us for now, but that's all right. So Let's talk about ages sigmar stats skill Uh and everything else and what does it mean? How are can armies be too good all this kind of stuff? What does skill matter? JP I'm so excited about this. So before we start we're like this is this is my fun image We're just gonna talk about stonks. We talk about this stuff a lot. We've got our scaven here uh You know philosophically, I think that there is a constant conversation that we have Around armies that are too good or armies that are too bad. Certainly. I think about the game often like that. We think about uh Armies being out of bounds Let's but as before we get into the deets JP I want to start with you How do you think about Army quality defined like power levels. What's your what's your sort of 40 000 foot view take on that stuff? Yeah, I mean essentially right And obviously this is what we're going to be talking about it is it's a hard question right you get a book a book And the power of that book is essentially going to be Some function of the power of the book and the power of the players the player right and then also in that mix is going to be the lists That come out of that book which are you know, obviously very related to the book itself, but slightly separate, you know, there have been you know You can you know, people will often talk about we'll get into this later But you know people will often talk about you know that whether there's the internal balance and the external balance and you know All those different lists but I think essentially when you're You know when the thing I often want to look about that I think maybe we forget as war gamers is and I like to also think about how fun the book is both to play and how fun it is as a thing to exist in your game I often don't like to talk about how fun an army is to play against Because I think sometimes it's sort of like well playing against an army is watching them try and ruin your You know two-hour slot, right? They're trying to beat you, but I think that an army can be fun Like to think about and that it exists, you know, you know, maybe you don't like playing against bellicor makes sense But you can still think he's a cool part of the gaming landscape I mean So yeah, so my view overall is like there is there are power differentials between the books No doubt about that the actual power of a book is very hard to observe because of this magnification effect of good players playing good books more often And that you're sort of also lumping into that when you know, we're looking at this stuff What are the sort of lists that people can play are there a bunch of different ones? Is there internal balance? Is it fun and is it cool to have in age of sigmar? Yeah, exactly just to really put a fine point on that It's not as though we can measure the power of a book like you can measure atomic weight or something Right where we can perform some kind of scientific experiment and go. Yes. This is exactly this atomic weight Hence we know blah blah blah these facts, right? That's just not what actually is going on here We're trying to sort of back into it to a point, right? From the emergent data of how players are using it the games they're playing the tournaments We have available the scenarios those use the terrain setup of their boards the overall meta What other armies are out there? What armies were at that event? Like there's a lot of variables that we're trying to just kind of back into power Right. Yeah. Well, that's not to say it's impossible or it's wrong or we just have to throw our hands up It's just to say it's a very complicated picture. Yeah, it's dirty It's dirty. You have to sort of perform this complicated photosynthesis as you say of like Just 12 million inputs coming in and then you're sort of like well judging from what I've looked at And you know also from in general we have a reasonable grasp as a community people are like Oh, this feels very strong and stuff like this, which is, you know, not necessarily always completely, right? But good data to have And yeah, as you say you're just sort of trying to extricate back out of that And this sort of I find it very interesting is I'm like perpetually trying to figure out like What is the closest we can get to that atomic weight? You know, like can we like how do we extricate the fact if we know how good this player is and we know how they Would do how well they do with these two different books Can we sort of figure out, you know, try and fill in those missing gaps? as you say, there's a million variables going on and You know, it's hard to do and it's definitely something that you know, I'm still working on. Yep Tom, what about you? Any what what do you how do you think about this landscape as it were? Um, I mean, I I think that there are certainly Uh Like there are certainly power differentials in armies often But it's funny like often the oftentimes though, it's not like the raw muscle of a book that we're talking about oftentimes what we're actually talking about is we're talking about um The amount of tools that are available in that army. Sure And I think that I think that is going to be a relevant part of the conversation Right when we talk about what we're actually seeing in The data because for me Most of the time when I talk about armies being good or bad What I end up talking about is my frustration is about the lack of tools in a list Mm-hmm. Sure. Um Yeah, can I can I just make a point on top of that real fast? Sure that we as a community and I am including myself in this a hundred percent I think your point is so well founded tom Because we as a community viscerally react To the things that are blunt instrument power Mm-hmm and tend to give things that are toolbox power a pass Because it requires because toolbox power has a skill floor that blunt force power doesn't let me see if I can make this real for everybody what I'm trying to draw a distinction between When fec and slanesh launched those were the original slanesh not current slanesh Those were some of the most blunt force power tools. We had said seen introduced into the game ever Right. You could basically Show up sight unseen pilot fec and gristle gore and smash your way through most players. Yeah, good right By the way, there's some right You don't know jp is a big fec stan if you wanted to watch more about that you can go check out JP you just did a show with a os coach talking about fec. I watched it. It was great. You should all go check that out too I'll link that just because it was a really fun show and As i'm jumping on the fec train. I watched it. I was like, okay, I got to learn I got to study anyways um So though those are blunt force tools they per by point is they provoke immediate visceral reactions, right? We were all like, uh Yeah, like they're sort of this immediate like boo We all have about it But much more complicated sort of toolbox power is much harder To get even if it's dominant, it's harder to to elicit that same reaction, right? It takes time Yeah right, right, I think um I think also it's important, you know, obviously you need both right you need tools and you need You also do need some output and I think one thing that that people can Often as a community again is only picking one or the other right like the new um The new fox lumineff man. Yep Who flies around and he goes like 12 million inches. He moves in both phases Um in the whole discussion I never saw anyone, you know lost people saying they love him lost people saying they absolutely hate him People legitimately saying they're quitting the game because he exists never saw anyone talk about how much damage he did For how many points it is, right, you know, which at some point you do have to do and I think right Um, there is there is uh, just often cases of people just ending up a little bit too caught up in Either one of those things, you know, and it's not like the idea logic Is not idiotic, you know, like it's not just complete You know people aren't thinking about these things in totally wrong ways It's just especially now when it's hard to hit the tables Like you need both of those things and I think what we tend to see in the top armies Are armies that get one or the other of those things almost for free So you look at like flesh eater courts grizzled or you're like they have So much that you know still rocking some of the highest damage sort of pounds per square inch of any army in the game on the terror guys, right And you're like whoa, that's crazy. And then when they have stuff like, okay, they can summon You know 23 ghouls from a board edge, right to take an objective. You're like that rule is not crazy good but When you're sort of throwing it on top of while we already absolutely excel in this blunt trauma section it's It's like, yeah, those things start to start to compound So I think yeah, or if you have loads and loads of tools, you know, like if you're a bellicor kairos Sort of yeah, sure And you have all those tools and then you sit there and you're like, oh, yeah And also kairos can do six mortal wounds a turn anywhere on the board through the portal You're like, that's really good like on top of the tools But yeah, but as you say also it is obviously harder to operate a tool's heavy list than a you know, if Of course trauma, right? We're like, I know I could that was, you know, part of the thing with old slush You know, you could just like push in and be like come get me. It doesn't matter like I'm I am I've got your number regardless Okay, cool. So let's get into the let's start getting into some deets. Let's spill some tea. Here we go All right. First off, I want to just sort of ground level set So I want to talk about listbot ai the data set kind of how you think about this because This data set and what we're using here is going to lay a lot of groundwork going forward So I thought this would be a good chance jp. I'm just going to let you opine This is a random slanesh list that I made and put into the into listbot so people could kind of see how it works And uh, I got a b minus Good stuff not bad for slanesh So at any rate, uh, yeah, tell us about like listbot and the data set you're we're going to work with for the rest of this For the rest of this data exploration and so on and how you think about this is all So, um, again for the people who've never heard of it listbot is essentially this colloquial term now for a bunch of different sort of statistical views of age of sigmar so Um, we can we can start with uh the sort of this the lab the list analyzer bot. It's reasonably well contained. Um Where basically, um As we can sort of see listbot takes the list and it breaks it down into sort of these components Some of them are fairly straightforward. Let's get the first one for now, but we've got like effective wounds. That's just the amount of wounds you have Um, basically buffered up by how high your saves are So if you have a two plus save 10 wounds is worth more than if you have a six up save it takes more damage to kill you Then we got like, you know, how many cats and combines you got shooting damage overall damage How many bodies you get how fast you are and how your factions doing the meta? That's all fairly straightforward um, maybe the most interesting not necessarily the most important is the sort of listbot points value where um, basically I just took all the war scrolls in age of sigmar And with their points I fed them into a machine learning algorithm And just trained it to say, okay What you know, what do war scrolls look like? What do you think about war scrolls and then I can take a new war scroll And say, okay, given that you've seen all the other war scrolls in age of sigmar How many points do you think this is worth? And so if listbot thinks it's worth way more points than it actually costs You're like, oh, maybe that's a you know, maybe that's a really good unit If listbot thinks it's way less then maybe it's a bad unit, you know, and it's sort of as we've seen over time You know the community's helped me a lot with it like it gets things kind of right It has some fun insights basically, you know, some stuff it gets great You know, I think it's favorite unit in the game. Maybe not anymore. What was goba-beluza? It just did not understand It was like, well, there's multiple wizards and they all have so many wounds and they all have certain rules It was just like, I think they're worth like 1800 points and you're like, mm Not so much or morathi I think it always thought was worth way less because it didn't it couldn't understand like what taking three wounds that turn Only really means, you know, that rule doesn't exist. It's not easy to codify but Yeah, then it basically so uses all those factors and it just compares you to lots of other lists And gives you this score. So you're just sort of scored based on where you fall percentile wise and It's slightly cut out of the picture here But there's also it also throws out a precedent score, which is basically just saying look, maybe list bot thinks your list is terrible But a bunch of people are playing lists like yours and doing well at tournaments So it's sort of like a safety catch of like, um, you know, if list bot is suddenly this is the best list in the world You know, darren watson loves to break list bot and he's like all I do is put in on gore's of slanash And now I've got an s plus plus plus plus plus list and it's like underneath the precedent It's like this list is probably not very good. You know, I've never seen anyone do well with this list so, you know Be aware, right? So yeah, it's important to like I just to break this down for everybody Real quick. So for those who haven't used list bot and you should check it out again This is it's so funny jp because you and I started having a conversation about it in one of the whatsapp chats And at that time I did not realize you were the creator of it Like when we first started talking and we were just talking about ai and and you know the the kind of strategies We would use I did not realize that you were the person behind I've had a couple conversations like that. They're always fun And then very quickly I realized to be where I was like, oh, we've got to do this as a show That's what we came to pretty fast, right? Because there was just so much there we wanted to talk about But and I think the point here is it's not the the point isn't that like List bot can craft by getting its score and have this exact again precise atomic weight Right, it's that it can understand directionally the elements where you might be over or under performing What it sees as the aos average right how you're kind of comparing and then importantly And I think this is the part like again, it's cut off here because I can only fit so much on the slide Right, but as you scroll down the page It's going to show you like other lists that contain units like yours and how they've been doing and where they succeed So you can then get an idea On oh, that's neat. Maybe if I tweak my list like this or oh, that's cool They included this and this instead of this thing that I have or whatever, right? It becomes a really great tool Especially if you're someone who doesn't love list building. This is my honest answer Yeah, someone who doesn't love list building who doesn't like to be like tom and just that they're in grind a thousand versions of the same list Make a list that kind of interests you put it into list bot get like a bunch of recommendations of people who are close and just go and pick the one You like and go oh, yeah, okay. That's close enough to what I want. Yeah, but seem to perform really well great I got my list. Ta-da I love also For me one of the things as well was what I would find is I'd start I'd be like, okay I want to play a fact a new faction and I'd be like the amount of lists I know for this faction are one right I know the one list that everybody talks about that does well at tournaments and I know nothing else Like if I don't want to play that list I don't even know where to start and I was sort of like I just want a resource Where I can sort of scroll through lots of lists and then I can see okay. Look nobody plays You know ungoers of son ash except for Darren Watson Um, you're like or you know, everybody seems to take your dreadblade hero in night one, right? And you're like, okay, so no matter what list I'm building I should probably you know, I don't have to take it But I should probably look at what the dreadblade hero does and it just gives you a little direct Especially if you like say you're playing cities of sigmar or you know legions of the gash Something like that where you do have a lot of these war scrolls It can be useful to just sit there and say well I know I want to play my vampire lord on the zombie dragon But can you show me all the lists that have that in and you're like, okay You know, you can get your ideas or as you say you could just do the opposite You can just be like, what's the list that most recently has done well at a tournament as this list? I'll just play that I'll play that and see what it's like I'll change it if it doesn't work or if I don't like it, right? It's such a powerful tool for those who aren't Interested in like just grinding lists to find units that are interesting that are being used or are used in different ways To find different kinds of lists like that to me is such the great part of this this tool, right? It's that sort of like it really does especially for if you're not as Into all of it It lets you really understand kind of what's in different lists and helps you understand why Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you can like again just get to the experience and also And I love linking in the whatsapp chat when this comes up, but people are often like, okay I've got my list I don't know what spells to take and there's a tab on there for loadout analysis And it just says it's like look most people are taking spectral hosts as the spell on their terror guys, you know And again, it's sort of it gets you over some of the initial friction of starting a new army As you say where you're like, okay, I know the models I know what I want to play but I don't want to read through three pages of artifacts when everybody only plays one You know, I don't want to necessarily like look at all these spells and figure out whether I'd rather have run in charge Or operate at full wounds On both of my it sort of just gives you a starting point where you can get your list on the table and play While when you go, you know, when you go home, maybe you still read through all the other spells All the other artifacts and you're like, oh, I do want to play that but you can get sort of to the table Um immediately by just being like, okay, I'm going to take the most popular spells and artifacts for everything And that at least I know I at least haven't sort of missed something obvious or picked a trap or something like that Yep All right. So the other thing I wanted to touch on well, real quick before we go into that Tom any any thoughts you wanted to add there? I don't want to no cut you out. Okay Uh, then let's talk about the data set a little because you're obviously drawing on it on an underlying data set here So do you want to talk about kind of what the data set is composed of and stuff like that that way Sure, I have the backgrounding. Yeah forward. Yeah, absolutely. So basically, um the data set is I mean the main chunk of it is any games recorded on uh Well, what's tto is saying for tabletop.to is that literally what it is? Yeah, so basically it's just an online tournament running website also Like I've got some data from the australian rankings and the english bad dice rankings um, and I basically just take all this recorded tournament data and Just you know slap it all into a database. So And you know what was sort of cool that's happened over time almost I think since I you know in during the time that I've started it is we really used to only have Sort of we'd say all right This is the faction someone has played and this is where they finished at the tournament You know this guy came third with the Nash and you're like, I don't know what he played. I don't know who he played against Um any of that but now over time just a sort of you know A else has gone or just more gaming in general has gone more popular more sophisticated tools like tabletop.to Um, we have this data like here are the lists people played Here's each round they played and now and that that allows us to make some sort of more Uh nuanced inferences about like, okay Well, you know if this faction Is always going four one. Are they dropping that game game five or game one? You know what you know what you can sort of you can move past that's like win rate and just stuff like that And you can get a little bit more nuanced to it right So again, yeah, the sort of the long and the short of it is the data is any Recorded tournaments all around the world that I can get my hands on Very good All right, awesome Okay, so And yes, I think the key here is it can help you understand some of them I I like this little visualization here Because it's just sort of a nice little visualization for where does your army have strengths versus where does that weakness? Right. It's not even if you're like, you don't might not want to change. You just know. Okay, cool. This is the types of things I'm good at and that might not be uh immediately Uh, transparent to you, right, especially if you're just starting with an army You're like, okay, cool. These are the things that I'm doing well or above average or whatever right as the list Yeah, yeah, which I think is is good. Uh, all right excellent Next slide. Let's talk about the landscape So here I've got a little image I think this is actually different if you go there now just because more tournament data has been fed in But this is as of when we made the presentation or whatever So There's so much on here. This is sort of the high level Right. Yeah, yeah On on list bot you more than you have more than just list bot on the list bot site You also have all sorts of things like Tearing and and army information and stuff like that There's a couple points that I call out on the screen here that I thought was really fascinating Like seraphon has the highest number of event wins By a wide margin Like yeah a lot Uh Corradron overlords represents the largest boost to a player's skill simply by piloting it Which I thought was interesting. Uh, so we'll talk about how you backed into that in a while because that's a really cool thing Uh Disciples of zinch has the second highest event wins and has a very high chance to be seen at an event like when you look at disciples They're popular enough. You have a high chance to face an event and they have a high win rate, right? Like they're kind of hitting on all cylinders there. Yeah. Yeah, and uh Gets knight haunt and sylvaneth all represent a material challenge to the player's ability to navigate to a win Is how I have phrased this I love it love that And you know the other thing that I want to talk about is the chance to face at an event It's that we've talked about this in previous shows. Yeah is that Uh You know, it's not as though people just cluster around what they perceive As the most powerful stuff people play ultimately What they like, right or what they're interested in and this is another good proof of that You look at like obr, ma tribes cities of sigmar, skaven All of these have more than a 20 chance for you to face at an event because they're relatively popular armies In the meta despite whatever like they're all over the shop here on relative tiering or positioning or win rates or whatever, right? Uh, so I just think it's it's fascinating. Uh, so anyways, yeah hit me with some thoughts you you've got on this And tell them to come to you afterward Yeah, one of the I think touching on the chance to face an event Is a cool one because it's one of the things I sort of wanted to think about where It's like about what is going to give you expected value in terms of like List building and stuff like that like if we imagine someone says Um says to you look we have this tournament And that you're going to and if you win, you know, we'll give you 10 million dollars a lollipop of your favorite flavor, you know, and whatever else you can imagine, right? Then what are you going to bring and you're like, oh, I'll bring seraphon, right? You know, you're like, that's probably just the best army. I think that's the best army I'm going to bring if if instead they said, okay, we've gathered, you know the top 20 players from the whole world and you're going to an event um What faction do you bring then you sort of You have a different then you're like, well There's a very good chance that I'm going to be playing loss of other seraphon, right? Right. And so this this sort of chance to face it Sort of ties into the fact that the way we play age of sigmar isn't to optimize competitive gameplay You know, we go we get a random round one And then you work your way up through the ladder versus people who've got similar records to you Rather than say like a chess tournament where you play against people see you today your own skill, right? so I think what that sort of When I throw this in this sort of chance to face is if you're thinking about And we'll get into the skill stuff later, but if you're thinking about oh should I change my list to to counter seraphon, right? it's like Probably not is almost always going to be the answer because it's like One, you know when seraphon's big right 35 you got like a one in three chance to face them And then you go to factor in you know, we're going to talk about this What are the chances that that game when you play against seraphon is determined by Your by specifically the stuff you added to your list, you know, it's not determined by the fact that You want all the priority roles they want all the priority roles. It wasn't a super strong seraphon list You know, they made a big mistake. You made a big mistake So it's sort of like Again, if you were going to that world masters you could really think about getting extra value out of countering seraphon You know, but if you're just going to an all-comers event You know, you probably just you're just like yeah, okay. I could make my list 20 better against seraphon But it's just never really going to be worth it. So that's why that's why I slapped that in there And again, I just sort of try to put a bunch of stats in here And then I you know, again self-explanatory the most relevant one again touched on is this player power boost Yeah, let's let's get into this one because yeah, fascinating and and on the site you do have a more detailed explanation Yeah, yeah, that's calculated. So it's it's not just some opaque thing. But yes, go ahead Yeah, again, I sort of struggle I think it's had a couple names because it's hard to exactly quantify I've got a little blurb of text, but it can be good to explain where basically what it is is we say We take the subset of players who played this faction and you have to have played like I think it's like you have to have played three factions and you have to have played At least, you know, some amount of games with each one to qualify as going into this data set Um, but basically it says, okay, so we'll you know, i'd net deacon will say, okay, you've played 10 games of i'd net deacon and you've got a 60% win rate with them And we've looked at your games on all the other other factions you've played You know, you've also played, you know storm cast and fleshier courts and your win rate is 50% So what we sort of say from that is like, okay Well, it seems like deepkin, you know, regardless of how good it is in an absolute sense Seems like deepkin makes you about 10% better than you normally are Um, obviously a bunch of different factors could go into that Maybe you you know, you played storm cast for your first tournament and then swap to deepkin, etc But we average that over everybody who plays the faction basically Um, and that's that's sort of again to get into the one we're talking about this skill stuff That was sort of the start of how i'm trying to separate the that is it good players playing the faction That are making it so good because as we say seraphon has so many event wins But as we talked about if you wanted to go win an event seraphon is the army you should bring So we get that sort of double that that positive reinforcement of like, yeah Well, everyone who wants to win the event as much as they can is probably taking seraphon Everybody take if you're taking glooms by gifts, you know, like I took my goba paliza to An event in ireland by definition my winning is not the most important thing to me now. Maybe it is, you know When I get to the table. Yeah, I'm trying my best to win. You know, I'm not just sitting there being like Oh, wow goba paliza is so much fun. I don't care. I'm not trying my best to to win all the games But if I'd been trying my best since, you know, since this building I wouldn't have brought gifts and I wouldn't have brought goba paliza so The player power boost is designed to sort of capture that and you could sort of see like gifts has a negative minus 17 percent Where it's like, yeah, a lot of people do better on their other factions and then presumably bring glooms by gifts because they love it And do worse now again, even that's that You know is is tainted by the fact that as I said when I brought gloom, you know, when I brought change host to an event I optimize my change host to the best I could right. I'm not making any friends um And when I when I brought glooms by gifts, I was like, well, I'm not gonna play glooms by gifts and not bring goba paliza Like like what like because I'm already so There are always going to be these other little compounding factors But you sort of hope that overall they give you some sort of picture, you know So that's all it is. You can just see a sort of different like daughter's a cane You know, basically as strong in terms of win rate as these other two armies, but It's only that plus two percent power boost So it's like the most of people playing daughter's a cane and doing well. We're already doing well on other factions And whereas, you know, I don't think in seraphon and I think ko yeah is the is the biggest one Are people are doing better on ko than they are on the other factions they play right And it's interesting to watch how that will change over time as more of our data happens like, you know, right now You look at slanesh still looking at it because of the data set that it's pulling right over the past year And you look at it still at this a rating obviously recent events have um Not been as favorable for slanesh, right and so it would like I will be interested to it's it's interesting to watch how this tracks over time because my expectation would be Because slanesh has such a high skill floor right And it's so sort of complicated and finessey to play That over time it will have a negative player power boost that sort of creeps into the numbers Because it's almost by necessity this type of army that you can't that like people are it's very easy to do worse with Right. Yeah, exactly. And I think you see that especially with slanesh, right? And you see it with silvaneth got a minus 23 here I can imagine similar with slanesh where you played the previous book and you know regardless of how good it was Which was very good like you played the previous book and you learned this play style, right? Very true with silvaneth. I'm sure very true with slanesh and then the new book comes out And you're like I'm stoked. I'm going to get it all out on the table again And you're like wait with this slanesh army. I can't you know, just Charge in and pile in a bunch of times before you get to attack or you know with my silvaneth I can't just cover the whole board in dryads and cheese like It's uh You can sort of see that happening as you say and again it doesn't You know, you could be very good, you know An army could actually be very good and still have a negative player power boost In fact, like you can see nergal here are reasonably high up, right? They're sort of the top of beat here But they have a slightly and legion of grief in fact have a slightly negative Power boost and legion of grief. I know this because I've played them a lot are very interesting legion of grief in the top Uh 25 percent of players has just under a 50 percent win rate and in the top 10 percent of players has an 85 percent win rate So legion of grief and again, you know, there's a variety of factors that contribute to that You know, maybe a bunch of people are just I play night horn. I want to try legion of grief or something like that But it shows like that there that like there are these sort of Nooks and crannies that exist in the meta game that are not fully being Explored, you know, right right. Yep. Yep 100 percent Tom, what about you thoughts? Uh No, I don't have any thoughts. Keep going. Okay Like skill matters is like like I don't want to be I don't want to be flippant But like it seems like the right the right answer here is skill matters. Yeah, so we're and we're building we're building We got it. We got it crafting. Oh, yeah, and maybe as just a brief comment You can see these numbers are quite small like like, okay, she's living at this big But even for these top armies, you're like, okay, if you play deepkin you might do about six percent better And in an event with five games That's not that's not even a one win, you know, if you're doing six percent better You've got to be playing, you know, five or six um Events before you see one extra win. Yeah, that's right. Absolutely Okay. Oh and one I think one thing to address about the data set I Yeah, I'll just say this um is people often ask me this is sort of a it's not pet peeve But it's funny people often ask me they say, oh, you you know, you say that You know, uh, seraphon only has a six percent win rate But you're including people who are playing four fun seraphon lists not just the optimized seraphon lists Right. They're like, look, this includes people who just want to play loads of carnosaurs um and you know, but what I'm really just talking about is croak And you know, that's that's fine as an idea, but I've never had anyone ask me that For the weak factions, you know what I mean? No one's ever said to me Have you taken piece of chaos and removed adam mumford playing 16 cockatoos and nothing else in his list You know, like no one's ever so I think just as a no It's a yes, this you know seraphon will include the win rate of people playing non-optimized seraphon But the worst factions will contain more of those so if anything like It the the weak factions are slightly stronger because if we looked only at optimized Gloomspite kits, you know, they would have a much higher win rate You know, there's people there's people who you know, uh, Richie mccally added an 85% win rate with Gloomspite kits over a year So like it's we you know the stuff of the optimal versus suboptimal lists We basically hope comes out more or less in the wash Yeah, no, that's a really really good point. Yes. It is funny that it's always the it's always the top armies to get that treatment Not the lower one. Yeah. Yeah, no one's ever like was he playing optimized pieces of chaos? You're like, oh How am I supposed to know? Sure, exactly All right, so power and presence So what that previous information gave us the ability to do in what you have here is sort of this quadranting out Right by both success and sort of number of appearances, which is kind of useful because it lets us think about this In a different way of like not only how good it is but how often do we see it and that kind of thing And again, you can we can just we can have discussions about how these things move or what presence means or stuff like that Uh, for example, like daughters of cane right now when you pulled this data was still in the powerful and rare category I'm not sure that will remain true Right because it you know, it's got a new look It's coming back in in a big way people are probably we know a lot of people moved away from the faction Because they were playing it. We saw sort of a lot of players just kind of migrate away and try other things Maybe those they'll come back because of the new book, right? um And the at the same time you see lots of weak and popular things and to me what that says is again As we talked about on the last slide There's just a lot like a lot of people play armies because they have a deep love for them And by the way Weak doesn't mean these people do bad. Let me be 100 clear on that, right? Yeah So again, and we'll we'll we'll dive into that more in upcoming slides So like because we're going to eventually talk about what it means to like I think a lot of people have this fear of like meta chasing and stuff like that and see it as this dirty pool I don't actually think it happens a super duper amount Like I just don't see it the numbers everything I've said seen in our surveys in the tournament data Says that yes, there is some movement to to go to more powerful armies. Like yeah, it's not that it's zero Right. It's just that most people tend to play armies that they want to Yeah, that they feel they have to I think it's a it's a big thing right that you go to you know that you go to an event You're like there's a one in three chance of facing seraphon not, you know, it's not two out of three It's not 60. It's not 70. You know, and even even among like top players, right top players who are winning You know, we're averaging, you know, almost five wins per tournament You don't tend to see them on the best army at every event You know, they're probably like they've always played, you know, a high a low S tier army, maybe But when, you know, they're you know, I know in scottland one of our best players, you know, he's like, okay He plays daughter's a cane. He plays the Nash um, but you know when Like hardguard berserkers are the best army. He's not playing You know, he's like, I'll just keep playing this army even though it's worse because you know, it's one of the armies I like I want to sort of play the most powerful army that I like You know, rather than just I don't you know, as far as I'm concerned, these are just bases Right Yep Right Absolutely I I was surprised to see fire slayers in the popular list as Uh, that has to be only boosted by tournament thing because overall fire slayers not popular in every survey We've ever done of players collections of stuff Most of the rest of these do appear sladash also tends to be on the lower end, but like fire slayers is almost universally the lowest standard army every time So that that might be it'd be interesting to compare those stats But that might be one of those armies that's only up there because it's so strong Because it sort of it sort of makes sense to me even right when I look at like when I think about a block of Hardguard berserkers and how hard they are to kill I'm like, I wish that was I don't even know the name of them the little dwarves completely covered in metal You know, I'm like that would make so much sense to me that no matter what you throw at them, you can't move and it just I feel like Yeah, I aren't yeah, exactly like I feel like fire slayers sort of the way they play Don't capture the sort of berserker Vibe right, you know, and so like I'm not surprised for you to say they're low popular because I feel like they just Have a hard time fitting their on table to their sort of like lower thematics and stuff Yeah, exactly Tom anything from this list jump out at you Well, I mean um Not really Uh, I like seeing uh iron jaws up at the top. Yeah That's right because it is a fun army. It's fun distilled into army form. That's what I'd say Yeah, and actually I I've been recently looking at some stats I've sort of been breaking down the meta into like what are the strongest armies if you're like, uh, You know, you're trying to get one win in an event if you're trying to get two win in an event And iron jaws is like the best army in the game If if you're like, okay I'm I get normally two wins and I want to push into being a three two player Iron jaws is the strongest army in the game to do that. Um, and Yeah, it just sort of makes sense in my head. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's I think it's almost It's like a cool thing I that I sort of hadn't thought of before about, you know, we sort of talk about Oh, you know, seraphon so strong change host is so strong If my friend was going to a tournament for the first time ever and they were like, oh, I want to do well I wouldn't be like take change host, you know, if they hadn't played age of sigmar, right? I'd be like, I'd be like, take, you know, big why is a good one right powerful and rare take big why take iron jaws Right, and it's not I'm not flaming anyone that like, oh, yeah You know anybody can win a million games with iron jaws But like that's going to teach you some meat and bones age of sigmar That if you are not so confident with tournaments or the game You know, you're you're not going to learn as much playing change host and you probably won't do as well Mm-hmm, right Yep I will be very interested to see if we get some movement Down here in this area where it says night haunt in week in popular They're already popular. Let's see if that moves a little over the next year straight to the top. That's right. That's right Okay So let's keep going. Uh next up small change big difference. This is one of my favorite charts. You sent me Don't have me. I I I thought about redoing it and I just couldn't find like the data set that I'd used off And I was like, we're just going with the with the old school green and green and blue lines on a plain white background way too zoomed out So sorry about the very small numbers. That's why we're that's why we're doing this Uh on in big in big mode so that everybody hopefully can see it This says december 19. This says november 19. Just so you all understand But okay, so the green line is the average slanesh event score. So this is over Uh Over 2019 basically right where this is happening The important part is their book kind of comes out here Right and then we go And then then this downward trend kicks in now the relevant part here Is this blue line, which is the average slanesh performance delta like how far eight layers slanesh results deviate from their Normal results. So that's like the player power boost we were talking about before. Yes. Yes. So Uh slanesh, which was dominant from its release 2019 started slipping even before the FAQ I have the FAQ marked here like this is where the FAQ happened, right? Yep, but it was already on the down slide on event scoring But players playing slanesh Still saw similar results, right? So it remained more or less stable But what you saw is a lot of top players leaving the faction. So it was getting less Score, right? Exactly And uh, yeah, I mean this sorry. Yeah, I was just gonna say this was one of the first like When I really started looking at like, okay, how much is the faction? How much is the player and I was pretty Uh pretty stoked that the graph looked like this because I think you know you basically again bunch of top players winning events with slanesh And you know they you know slanesh exists for however long it does and then you know people I think people know that there's going to be a change coming and people just are like, I've played this army a bunch um so You know, I'm happy to move on to something else and so tournament people who just want to win tournaments I like I'm going to switch to something else because this is going to be getting a you know Some sort of change to make it less powerful and you see just dramatically The performance starts starts to go down so much and you're just like, oh the faction is getting worse and you're like well Actually, it's just so much of that is if you have three players, you know again Because warhammer is a small sample size if you have three players Bring slanesh to events and winning event after event after event with it Right, then it's going to have this crazy high win rate crazy high score Right, and then if they leave you're just left with everybody who was playing before and and it's like if you're a you know A slanesh player going for one It with all with your army you go for one with your other armies and they you know It does obviously your results stay the same when they announce an FAQ is coming or when everybody says on twitter There's an FAQ coming you see this blue line stays stable But you just it there's such a big effect in sort of the traditional ways we were viewing um Army performance that it was nice to see that it's like yeah, and again not to say that slanesh was Not better than other armies. It's just that effect gets magnified when You know like we saw with the seraphon event wins when all the top players are like tell me what the best class the player is Okay, i'm gonna take that there right now. It's important to note here This doesn't run to zero by the way just so we're all clear on the numbers on this side This score is like 64 to uh to 50 So like that's the kind of trajectory of what's going down here But it's a that's a big jump right so falling down an average of sort of 14 percent over 2019 in this performance rating Again, I think your point is well taken like think of the number of events that happen in the world with aos Again, we're using 2019 says we had a lot of events going right You know if there's like one event a weekend maybe two sometimes that doesn't amount to a huge amount of stuff if you've got Five players who abandon the faction Who are all you know getting high marks? That can have this huge impact on sort of slanesh's overall appearance quote unquote in the meta, right? Let me and my expectation this last note I have is that since this is representing kind of events I would expect your sort of casual games to lag Right that is to say like to you you would see the same my guess We'd have no way to measure this but this is complete conjecture But my guess is if I was able to somehow survey Uh casual games. I would see the same curve. It would just be slower. Yeah. Yeah, you'd be I mean, I it'd be super cool to see and I've thought about doing it before if you could if you could be like if you could track sort of popularity of the army Among people who are more active in following the scene on the internet, you know, and you're like, so you see slanesh drop off You know everybody who's in the slanesh whatsapp group right stops playing them when they get announced They've been nerfed and then as you say over the months people sort of catch up and are like, well, no one plays Slanesh. I don't want to play some that right right Yeah, I this is like you sent this along and I was so thrilled the slanesh effect. Yes, indeed Uh, I'm gonna like it's I doubt this picture looks much better now. Okay So, uh, but hey big demons coming. Um All right, so let's go to the next one So let's now so let's With all that setup, let's get into skill. There's so much on this page. I kind of broke up your visual that you sent Yeah, yeah, yeah, no good work spread it around. Uh, so Ultimately when we're answering the question The the the banner that the headline is skill is highly determinative But not completely and we'll we'll get into it like trust me. We're not to the best slide yet We are going to get to a slide here That when jp sent me this image it blew me off my chair. Okay. It's coming It's when I was still learning about the like how to display graphs. I sort of went to the other extreme So, but you know some factions outperform when placed in the hands of lower skill players So there's a lot on here. Let's start with actually the big center of this chart. Okay Uh, let's talk about the underdog win rate. All right. Yeah, so breakdown sort of the underdog win rate neutral win rate favored win rate or overdog I like that's what we should call it. By the way overdog. Yeah Yeah, so basically, um internally this bot uses like a known Algorithm for calculating like player skill is used in like a lot of online video games and stuff like that So basically, you know when you win you're getting plus elo effectively when you lose you're getting minus elo and that depends on who you win or lose against and You know, it's it's like chess and one of the things it also provides you with is it says like, okay, is this game like For this neutral win rate It's like is this game basically like considered a high quality game in terms of elo gain or loss So that's when you're playing someone who's like a little better than you or a little worse And it's like, okay, you know, one person is not going to dominate the other person here Right. Um, so we sort of strip those games out and there actually aren't very many of them many of them Again, we sub tied it back to age sigma before uh to sort of it's not a super competitive format You go you get a random first opponent, you know, and so your second opponent is like half random Right, so often you go to an event and you might just play one game against a player who's at a close um skill level to you And so we sort of scrape those out in the neutral win rate section But then we have the underdog which is where, you know, this faction was sort of um Was considered by the algorithm to be like a significantly, you know, not insanely but like statistically significantly worse player than their opponent Um, that's the underdog win rate. And then the overdog win rate is when they were, you know, again They were by their player scale. They were a favorite to win it Um, right And again in general, you're going to see that the favored win rates are high and The unfavorite win rates are low and at the time, uh, this is this sort of again ties into the player power boost a little bit but um at the time kera john overloads or kera drawn overlords, um were top with along with basically joined with uh over more tribes with the sort of one in four games Where it's sort of you would expect them to lose based on the sort of the player skills involved they were they were they were taking the win and Again, I always want to try and think, you know, there are a lot of other factors here Right, you know, maybe people haven't figured out how to play kera drawn overload I play against kera drawn overlords. Yeah, you're maybe a lot of players were playing the old kera drawn overlords book Which was weak. Um, and so sort of their illa was lower than uh, than their actual skill level And then the new book comes out they keep playing it and suddenly they're winning these games the previous that they'd lost You know, there's a lot of possible Possible explanations there, but uh, you know, it's also it's um I think maybe part of it is just like how Sort of is the faction, you know, is the faction strong and in an easier to play way Right. I think daughter's a cane is my favorite one daughter's a cane Um, yeah, here we go. This is like the best. There's the best set of stats to any of these The dock one is incredible If you're a dock player in chat, you know hats off to you But it's just nutty that so they played 33 games where they were the better player And they won every single one and they played 22 games of the weaker player and didn't win a single one So basically what that's saying is for daughters of cane is like this army will do exactly what you tell it to It's like if you if you are a really great daughter's a cane player And I know that you know, they've obviously been very strong They've been levels of strong all through range of sigmar. Um, but they are a fiddly army You know, I haven't looked too much in the games with the new book But like you've got to be in range or as you've got that stacking over turn time But you know, they are You know, if you're missing these prayers, you might be squishies You can't always just go in and I think that's just super cool that it's like, yeah Basically, if the daughter's a cane player is a lot better than you You know You're you're just in big big trouble basically and if they're worse than you you're not in any trouble at all Like this it but it was basically just really cool to see daughters of cane to see any faction with the actual zero and 100% They also won all their neutral games, apparently. Um Though that could be like three games or something. Um, but uh, yeah, I thought that was super cool And again, you see it you see it sort of to various extents Um For all the factions, but yeah, it was definitely it was definitely a cool thing to look at and you know It's it's possible, you know, ko you're like I I personally don't like playing against ko Because I feel like they can cover a lot of their mistakes in the movement phases by teleporting and I think a lot of the skill in age of sigmar is movement phases. Um And so then maybe that's part of it, you know, again, maybe it's not I don't know, right not a wizard Yeah, so the the and if you look in the lower right, you'll see there that the 2020 data set ko one 110 out of 123 games Where the better player won where they were the overnight that's what's on the chart That's a great win rate, right? So the better player has piled this army to about the standard because 90 percent Is sort of our standard where there's a 15 gap in elo, right? So they're they're right on Yeah, yeah But they also in 24 out of 89 games managed to basically punch above their weight Yeah, right and uh, that's you know, that's a good number of matches for them to be punching above their weight And and it's interesting to me that ko and ogres are the two big underdogs Um, not too surprising to me honestly because ko are sort of the kings of power projection In this like long range shooting combined with extreme teleporting mobility Yeah, right And maw tribes are the kings of like I can snake the game Because you you missed one small thing, right? Because i'm rolling around with guys that are worth 10 Yeah, yeah, I mean right you could sort of just be like um You know if you're playing maw tribes and you run to fight your opponents and they're on the objectives Sometimes you're going to win that game sort of, you know without thinking about it too much and again remember I think I never want to anyone to get the impression that i'm like flaming their faction because again You're talking about 25 right? You're still in talking about one in four games You're sort of which you know even you know most factions are sitting there 10 right because there's dice and people make mistakes So it's not it's not insane. No one's like, oh, yeah, you could just take over maw tribes and win whenever you want No matter how good you are Um, so no one's getting flamed But yeah, there are some armies obviously and it makes sense that they'll exist where they just They get a little bit more for free basically. Yeah Yeah, I mean I can see situations where you'd be there in maw tribes where like Okay, I've got this, you know guy on a stoninhort on an objective You don't have 10 people in your army. You don't have any units with 10 with 10 models anymore I'm just gonna win this because you can't kill my stoninhort fast enough, right? Like yeah, I'm not saying that's a common situation. I'm saying it it's all about mounting up those edge cases like that Yeah, exactly, right and that's one of those armies that can often have those edge cases occur Yeah Tom what do you what do you think about kobia the tops that you're here? That does is a perennial underdog Sure Does that does that check out to you from your experience of playing ko I mean you've piloted quite a lot of ko Yeah, because I mean what it does is it gives you the ability to make the right decisions Yeah Like the like and so like At the end of the day like that's a lot of what's going on here is Do like are you able to make the right decisions? Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head there Yeah, um Like it sort of we've covered it already, but like if you're a daughter's a cane player and you're like I really need to kill that lord of change Your options Might be somewhat small in how you can do that, right? If you're a ko player and you're like I really need to kill that lord of change You know, right? It's a bit easier and more tribes in a slightly different way. You're like if you're like um You know if you're playing daughter's a cane, you're like I really need to get this objective If you're like, okay, well, I've got to get my unit on the objective I've got to make sure it's backed up by the right heroes stuff like that with more tribes You might just be like, oh, they're bad guys there And I've charged them because I want to kill them and you're like also by doing that I'm also on the objective for 10 models You know in a way that if you're playing gristle gore, you're like, well, even though I've killed You know a bunch of these Like I've wiped out this unit of infantry the guy's still got a hero on it behind them And so he still holds it because I'm just one dragon. He's just one guy, you know Whereas more tribes can be like, okay, I've killed that screen and now I hold the objective So they just as you say again, that's not how everybody's going out and winning their more tribes game Uh, what winning their more tribes games, but it's just good. It just seems like those edge cases are going to come up more often Yep So Let me now get to the summation of this this slide There's two critical critical points I want to make here because I think they're so absolutely Important for people to take home about how much skill matters because as we're answering the question this show posed of does skill matter or does army power matter and should people just meta chase There's two things that are going to set us up for this in a big way. Okay Top right as I already mentioned 90 percent is sort of the skill expression here, right where there is more than a 15 gap in elo The higher rated player is winning more than 90 percent of time What that says Is that skill is determinative 90 plus percent of the time? Yeah Again, and that's all that's actually like again. That's Basically all five of your games at an event, right? It's sort of a little bit less Right, right you go to an event all of your games are probably determined by your Um by how you play now not all of them, right? Obviously you're gonna go to some games and you're just gonna you know You know, maybe you you make a mistake you get really unlucky you get, you know a really bad match up on a battle plan But I think You know, I think this is an important number when you talk about what balance means in age of sigmar And it's one that I sort of you know a friend of mine Shout out to blagan who's designing a new version of age of sigmar where visa chaos are good as far as I understand it But you know when you're talking about game balance, it's you know You can look at how good our seraphon compared to how good our glimpse by gifts and that it you know, that's an important thing Um to look at I'm not saying it isn't right, but when I'm thinking about rather than balance sort of Competitive health of the game. I'm like this is the stat. I want to look at I want to look at Can I go to an event and I have a balanced experience where my results were mainly dependent on how I played That like it's a different form of balance And I don't I don't think it's like gw should just abandon You know buffing glooms by gifts obviously buff glooms by gifts every day, please I'll get a glooms might release a crack Yeah, exactly like grave lords. Yeah, you're you're in my camp. I understand exactly. Um, but In terms of like, yeah, as I say the competitive health the balance as that you as a player will experience going to tournaments Yeah, it's going to be your play and part of that part of that is also in list building Um, you know, that's that's not totally unincluded It's not like okay if we took the best players and we gave them a deliberately bad list Like the glooms by kids list i'm building right now because it's got all the models I like um, but like if you do that it we're not saying oh that person would still win all the time it's but It's just when you go to actual events people are building, you know, they're like, okay I'm building these lists like as all that part of that stuff It's like you are sort of in control of your destiny and we can see over here in this little pie chart at the bottom That's where I was going next, but oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. So let me let me answer a comment real quick Um, so c monkey said, uh, would you consider understand the understanding of larger meta knowing how most armies play? What units do would you consider that as part of skill? So the answer is yes, that's definitely part of skill, but remember we're backing into skill, right? We're using this elo calculation That's like basically about comparative win rates and against strength of players and how they've performed overall and stuff like that But Theoretically, yes the players who so like I can't it's sort of opaque What's making that player be good to some degree, right? We can watch them travel across factions and continue to have A high win rate or do well at events or you know go forward one or five and oh or whatever But we don't know the composition of what they're doing like there are they a great table of general Are they do they really understand all the units in the game? My answer is probably all of that stuff Right, like this is something that a lot of other games you you you kind of It's easier to kind of quantify because we know what makes a great player in those things Like when I look at a great magic player Some of the great magic players of the history of magic, right if I look at like an lsv or somebody like that You know, I'm playing against them. I set down the first card I have like I play one card against them like I drop one card And they've got a pretty good chance at calling five out of the six for the rest of the cards in my hand Right like they that's blind information They're seeing the backs of my cards and if I said guess what the six cards are still in my hand They could probably get five right Yep Because they know your whole deck Yeah, yeah, yeah Right and so like there's a level of skill here that that absolutely is knowledge base as well as many other things Okay. Now anyways, let's talk about this People talked about like the the big concern is always meta chasing so And like what this chart says to me is nope because The worst I want to direct everybody to this dark what it says is you can meta chase if you want it Yeah, exactly right, but it's not going to do much for you because The right here where we see the worst player with the better faction, right? So theoretically that's everybody's sort of netlisty fear. Yeah, right somebody who hasn't built the muscle They haven't built the skill muscle with an army. They went out. They just grabbed the better faction They chased after this thing That only works out for them as a win 10 of the time It's not nothing. It's something they are getting better like they're improving. Right. It's it is increasing their win, right? But by half a game Yeah, exactly And if you're going to a three three round tournament, right, but you know not even right So it's right. It is sort of that exact thing of like Look if you are and this is again is talking about that sort of Magnification effect we see with seraphon if you're a player and you're like look I keep going to these events I get to the last game of the tournament on table one and I just can't I just keep losing, you know I keep coming second Then it's and they're like I really want to win an event then I'd be like You know what you should do? You should swap to seraphon. You should play changers, right? You should you know if what you really want more than anything in the world is to win your next event Take the best faction like why wouldn't you you know, they're already that foreign one player Exactly on table one losing into for the for the pole position Thankfully, I've never met anybody and there's no one currently in this podcast or this show right now Who happens to be in that position? Yeah, nobody who would know anything about that. Okay So So yeah, so it's like yeah, if you're if you're that person You're like I can't push it over the end then I'd be like, yeah, you probably want a 10% boost to your win rate But if you're a person giving to me and you're like, you know, I've just started going to tournaments I'm getting two or three wins. I want to get to start pushing three or four wins at every event, you know Then I'm not going to tell you to swap to playing changers Like and that's not again like not because I have anything against net listing But just because That's not going to be what's going to get you going to push you forward What's going to push you forward is all those, you know The the long list of things that make players better, you know, and a lot of that like if someone came to me It was like I've been playing glooms by kids. I just did a cool thing with wargamer along talking to Matthew Davies who sort of He's got a 70% win rate with still the net in a book with a 48% win rate And he's like I have a totally different list to everybody else And I think I play in a bit of a different play style and he's just doing it And it's like if you're a player who's going You know two to three wins with silver net Right, you can become a player that goes three to four wins with silver net without swapping factions Right, you know You do not and that's not to say if you want to swap factions, right? If you're like, I don't like silver net and they're weak and I you know I'd rather be playing some other faction than do it But it doesn't have to be the best faction either, right? I think again like we talked about before you could sort of scroll down the tier list Until you get to a factor where like I actually do really like those models You know, you're like, okay. I don't want to play seraphon. I don't want to play deepkin I don't want to play daughters of kane and then you get to You know, whatever's there disciples, you get to flesh eater courts and you're like there, you know You get to nergal and you're like, oh, these guys are sort of they're above average. They're a strong army I love the models play those right if you love your models If you think the rules are cool if you love building lists for that faction You're going to enjoy playing your game You this you know, this is the same advice you give to almost anyone doing anything, right? You're going to enjoy your game where you're going to enjoy the learning process more and you are going to get better results Again, I'm not saying if you're going to You know, uh, etc You should just play, you know, whatever your favorite models are because it makes no difference because it does make a difference But it's just you're not going to beat the people if people are beating you. It's probably not because of their army So like if you buck up like if you just I mean again, yeah, I'm just repeating myself But yeah, the better you get you're just going to find yourself winning all those games, right, right absolutely Okay, so yes, I mean the answer is that It's uh The answer is that Skill is this highly determinative thing and ultimately what's going to yield the most benefits is Understanding the game better understanding all the armies better understanding your army better understanding the scenario is better Like I feel like that's sort of fairly obvious when you say it on its head Right, but it's easy for us to get trapped in this conversation of like Oh, the army becomes so determinative Right. Oh, it's just seraphon. I might as well throw my hands up. Well, you know that that just isn't that that isn't what the data says Yeah, right. Now if it's oh, it's seraphon and they're a significantly better player than me Well, that's unfortunate. Okay, you're in trouble. Yeah But it's it's it's one of those things where I think one of my favorite examples is like We have a player in england great player Tony Moore plays grand host of negash has played it forever, right? And he's got like a 85 90 percent win rate with grand host of negash negash has a 30 percent win rate grand host negash has like a 35 percent win rate overall And it's like if you go if you rock up to the draw at your tournament You go up to the big board and you're scrolling along and you're like, okay It's me who am I against you're like, okay. I'm against grand host of negash You're like nice Not a not super strong. Then you keep scrolling when you see Tony Moore's name. You're like, oh I think I've lost like that would be the right process for most people who know and you know, not the other way around I don't like if you were like, oh, here's this guy, you know, here's my friend I beat him every time we play at home and I beat him every time we play in an event You're not going to keep scrolling and being like, oh, he's playing seraphon. I think I'm going to lose You're like, no, I you're like, I know this guy. We played a bunch and I beat him So like you could be reasonably confident, you know, right? It's like I think internally people do know about this and sometimes people get into arguments in the whatsapp where They're like, okay, you can only count the event, you know, the where you're equally skilled and there's no extreme luck either side And it's like that is that is a data set not one We really have the numbers for and that is a data set, but it's not how we play age of sigma, right? right It's not it's ties into what we were saying before you can't just walk up to an event and be like I'm only going to play people who are just as good as I am and never fail their nine inch charges Because it's just not a real It's not that's not a real opponent. You're going to go to a game You're going to have a random opponent turn one. You're going to have a half random opponent turn two You can have a quarter random game three and you know, just be really good right I mean, Tom and I have built a whole team's career on just rolling nine. So sometimes you That is a true statement. Um, that said, I mean the reality is is, you know, I've talked on the show before about Um, I really don't pay attention to my first three games Like my first three games simply don't concern me Because statistically Like I'm just going to be in the mix. I'm not going to hit like reliant Yeah in my in my first three picks at like an adepticon size event. Sure. Like there are exceptions Like that where like I'll have like a really bad draw, right early on an event and by bad I mean I actually end up hitting somebody who It gives me a really tough game But the reality is is that like The I plan for games four and five Because games four and five are going to be the make or break for the event for me Yeah, well, I mean you could sort of map that out, right? Let's say if you're say, um in The top 10% of players, right? Then your game one You're better than 90 of the field Right Your game two you've you've jumped that up and now you're you're sort of better than 40 of the field, right? You don't you don't get up if you are in the top 10% of players You don't get up to that sort of percentage until you get into those last games And it's like so most of your games and again, that's not to say, you know, I've lost games Where I was playing like a very overpowered faction had a lost to chaos dwarves I had a much better faction. I totally underestimated my opponent and I just made a bunch of stupid mistakes and lost the game It's definitely not done that too. Yeah, exactly And it's like that stuff that stuff is always going to happen But you can expect yourself sort of to be to be favored um in the games You're more favored in the earlier games and again, that's why Again, if you because there's sort of this sparse field Of skills like there aren't 10 million people that play warhammer, right, right most games are you're going to be quite a lot better Or quite a lot worse in terms of like experience and skill and stuff And let me I want to I want to hit something in the comments here So autumn lotus said if this is true give a world champ a boc army and show me his first place when Okay, we'll do that. So, uh, that's like we can actually do that in real life. So and and here's why I would say, uh His name is uh, joel or what's his name? Uh australian player Oh joel graham or joel migrat joel migrat one of the joels joel migrat there you go who plays boc Regularly goes for one at events, right and often finds himself in contention With a boc army for winning the tournament or being the top three, right? Because a lot of that sort of You kind of where you end up in the top three often has to do with these like very lucky factors So it's not I actually generally rate like the person who gets third the same as the person who gets first in my mind Yeah, yeah, looking at the event because it's often sort of these really weird soft indeterminate things that sort of happen Where you're there at any rate He's regularly in contention for that the problem is when he hits game five and he's playing for that Joel McGrath is a he has a handicap based on the army, right? Someone who's just as good as him. Yes, exactly in game five He's playing somebody where there's not this huge differential between his skill level right anymore and them like they they also Housed everybody, right? I I also want to give a just a great example to that autumn lotus, which is the uk masters The last one that ran was won by dan bradshaw You know in the uk masters is one of the most I think competitive events probably in the world, right? And it was won by dan bradshaw playing beast of chaos You know, he was playing that zango or enlightened list, which you know It got nerfed it's not a sort of it doesn't fit in 2000 points anymore But at the time it was still beast of chaos and it's not like everybody was like, oh, yeah He's just playing that list Beast of chaos like he just rocked up to the masters with sort of the 15 other best players in the country And again some in terms, you know in list boss eyes a why a good handful of the best players in the world And one with beast of chaos right and it's like again I'm not saying I don't think any of us are saying look beast of chaos is just as good And that if beast of chaos played against change host 500 games on table one that beast of chaos would come out on top but I think also tying into skill and To skill and army power right is is there is also a bunch of dice being rolled, right? So if you say you go to that match, right? You're equally skilled with your opponent, but they're playing a 60 percent win rate army You're playing a 40 percent win rate army and you just want to flat out say, okay They've got 20 percent more of a chance to win the game and you right or they're sort of favored They're going to win three games out of every four that you play You're like, okay, that leaves you one game out of four You know where you win turn two three and four priority And that's not one out of four But like you win the priority rules you make the 12 inch charge to win the game You know you you're playing nine one and all your units give a 10 Like there is also that element of like even when you're unfavored That doesn't mean you're going to lose because it's not a super high resolution skill But it's not chess, you know, you're not leveraging your 10 advantage to win You know to at every turn you're 10 ahead, right, right exactly So I that's what's important to remember is that in that game five That's where the army can have a little more weight because even if it's just a slight tilt against at that point Right that it's still a slight tilt against it can happen. It's just small. Yeah, we're talking about such a small area here Yeah, I mean because ultimately Like that's where those armies like that's where The armies that give handicaps or the armies that give those boosts really are going to matter Is in that final game or two where you have similar similarly skilled And what's what's handicapping you often is not the army or the the odds Or I'm sorry. It's not the odds that are handicapping you or your skills It's your army and it's the options that you actually have available in the match up itself And so one way to say it would be to say that armies do matter At comparable skill levels So that'll be a great setup now that we couldn't talk about this There's so much rich data on here But I want to keep moving because that's going to be the perfect setup tom For this slide This is the slide. This is the image The jp sent me That blew my mind right off the like my my head exploded out the back Okay So this is the evolution of green line good blue line bad. Yeah, sure So what are we looking at here other than a point graph? Okay. Yeah Okay, set this up for us jp so basically each of these Each of these little dots Represents like a player Basically, um, and as we go, uh from bottom to top We are sort of saying this, you know, you can see on the left here in tiny sideways writing average event score But it's basically like, you know, lower skills new players, etc are at the bottom And the top the most top players are at the top And basically the closer you are to the right the more Your results basically look like they are sampled from the distribution of your player skill Rather than the distribution of the faction you're playing So basically what that means is like the further you are to the right the more your results are determined by your player performance The further you are to the left the more your results are determined by the faction that you're playing And we see basically this cool curve And again, probably, you know, this is sort of when I was looking at stats that I think most people were already telling me We look at the curve and it's like look, you know, and you've labeled here for players with lower skill Good armies can't save them and like if you if your friends like I've never played age of sigma before and I'm turning up to a Warhammer event It probably doesn't matter what army you give them, right? They're going to be like what's a hero phase and You know, probably win one or zero games, right? Doesn't matter what army you give them the easier the army the better probably so it's not really going to look anything to do with um With how good their faction is and again on the other side in in in sort of the the top players You know, these are players who are averaging over four wins at an event Yeah, whatever faction they're taking They're going to do really well again richie mccally 90% win rate close to 90% win rate with glooms like gifts You know like at a time when they again had a 30 to 40 percent win rate So they're doing well no matter what and then as you get more towards the middle of the players We see it swing more to sort of just pass this 50 percent mark where Yeah, okay, a lot of it is your faction in rice For a middle section. Yeah, this this chart blew my mind. I keep saying that but I really mean it I want I hope everybody's understanding the gravity of what's going on here. Okay So that's why I put these notes on the side In the hands of highly skilled players up at that top part, right Army power becomes basically irrelevant Okay, it just doesn't matter like for the most part They can take whatever they want and achieve very similar high Respects, right? They're gonna they're gonna end up going for one and break for the five most sign most journeys or most type of things, right? Because skill is so highly determinative like it doesn't matter if they're playing seraphon Or if they're playing gifts or sylvaneth, they'll end up if they're a highly skilled player They can overcome that now again when they meet their their Mirror in round five some of those big things can be broken out They might be the less favored to lose so you know might break two to three against them or something like that Whatever doesn't matter the point is that it's so minorly relevant That's that that's why they're all at like, you know up over 0.9 being the how much it matters for them All right, that is to say The proportionality of how much their skill is impacting the game But in this big fat middle here, look at all these dots Look at all these where the majority of players set right for for for all of us average players Okay, I'm gonna include myself right on in there, right? Uh, it's making a huge difference It's huge. How much does this imbalance? matter Right, well it matters a lot. It matters so much right the The for the middle for most of us for most of you watching out there who are probably average players Like I said, I'm counting myself fully in this middle group. Okay The imbalance in the game is extremely painful Because we're not in the top cohort, right? uh And and so suddenly the power level of the faction is weighing in almost 50 percent of the of the the impact on the win Okay, that's what that drift toward 0.5. You know 0.4 0.6 averaging it around 0.5 means that means that like the the actual power level of the army itself now becomes hugely determinative To the outcome of the game Right, so when two Average players face each other, which is again is what most of us are right Suddenly we learn we see that oh wait actually the power differential between armies Is so important because for people who are like, oh, I sarifon is unbeatable by me I can't I can't beat it or whatever right? Yeah, okay. Like I believe that you're saying you're an average player Right And like I'm not trying to be mean I'm just saying like you're saying that's that's what we're openly admitting okay and The the relevance of it is so important like if there's any argument as to uh Why gw should pay a lot of attention or more attention to balancing and not putting out, you know books that are sort of breakers of the of the the The bounds This is the greatest. I example. I've ever seen of it. This is mathematical reasoning the majority of your players sit in a space where army power differentials are highly impactful on Their experience of playing the game and whether they win or lose Absolutely, and I think it's it's again. It's one of those things where I think with any stats as we sort of talked about You've got to think about like Why am I looking at these stats in particular? So It's like yes, the last one is true, right? You can as a player if you are an individual and you're like I want to win more games of age of sigmar You can't Make croaks points go up, you know, that's not in your power So if you want to win more games at age of sigmar, you have to push yourself up this curve Basically and by getting better as we've discussed you are going to win more and more and more games Like you are not going to hit an upper limit because of whatever faction you want to play or anything like that You you know if you improve your skills at the game, you're going to win more. That's totally true But you know again if we want to say okay. Well, what's the game look like for people who aren't maybe necessarily super interested in You know reading about every army book that comes out all that stuff You're like then you also still as we sort of said it's not that army power is irrelevant It's just like yeah, if you are an average player and you just say I want to go to an event Bring my book. See what's why you know, then yeah, your faction is going to have Yeah, you know, we're going to be about as roughly as important as As how you play again because you're going to come up against someone who's equally skilled as you And you're going to be like, okay We're both sort of playing neither of us sort of are so bad that we're making terrible mistakes That lose the game or so brilliant that we're you know Overcoming the forthcomings of our army by winning it anyways, and we're just sort of going to hash it out and see who has You know the better book if you imagine in the simplest case right if you had two players and You know both only had one more scroll in their army and one more scroll did more damage You'd be like, yeah, that's probably going to be able to turn into the game If if all you do is just run at each other and see who wins, you know So it's like this is still it's still important to as you say because most your player base are going to be around In the middle and you do want to keep the game balanced. So it's more fun, but it also ties in I think To what I was saying before which is you know There's some extent you want to worry about the balance of the books in terms of that win rate But also and I mean people go crazy obviously on the internet for a negative player experience But like you also want to make sure that the games you're losing Are or winning, you know, you also want to make sure that the stuff we can't show on the graph Which is how fun you're how much fun you're having at age sigma that the game is so film worth playing Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah I think that's a little bit of something that I wish I could measure better, but that creeps up Which is just You know, if you know when people do lose to croak maybe in the on that game three And it's like, okay. Yeah, if you were better, you could have won That's not much of a consolation if you spend three hours having a not very much fun game Right, right. Yeah. So like it would be easy the sort of smooth brain take from this Right is oh, well the answer is just get good Right Like that's the that's the that's kind of what the data does say, right? But it like again a better player and your army doesn't matter There's an element of that But that's not actually the take I get from it because that actually isn't the right cause The or the sort of root of this that I see. All right The root of this that I see is one we need to do a better job of balancing these books and by we I mean Gw talking to you out there now one that's first, okay Like I've never seen a more clear proof point of that, right? and two This graph solidified in my mind in a way that I'd never seen data do before the following two facts That I knew to be true Okay one When you look at events in countries It's almost or on tts or anything Like you you see the same names Players popping up in the top 10, which is generally what I look at right to see who is it because again Game five a lot of different elements and ways things can break against you and bad luck You got a bad scenario you were on a 4-1 rip and then you came up against sons of behemoth in round five on focal points And it's like okay. Well There's only so much I can do when they're scoring like 30 points a turn and I can score five, you know um so like uh The the the but you tend to see the top the same ish top 10 players Event after event after event after event after event using completely different armies Right, the players remain consistent. The armies will change, but you like the top 10 is just this murderer's row of people right Yeah, yet at the same time. I know that there is this drastic imbalance in the books Right. I know that these things have to be true I can just it's prima facie evident that both these facts are true And I was trying to figure out how do we square those two things? And this graph actually puts it together in a way that nothing ever had before I would rather hear it So there you go. Um So and so balance is amazingly important. Yes Most of the time Yes, absolutely like look because the reality of it is Most of us again myself included will never be That top player Okay And what I mean by that is like one who would want to be like I you know I mean like if that's really your goal in life great good for you. I'm happy for you. That's cool You know, either you're possessed of such raw talent or drive or skill or whatever or You know, you're willing to practice or put the time into your life to get there. That's great. That's awesome I'm very happy for you. That's a cool thing But like a lot of us, you know ages sigmar is a game for 36 year old dads That's the average aos player okay so like most of us have jobs and you know partners kids Lives like we don't all have time to sit around every day thinking about nothing but aos and again That's not a judgment. I know it's going to sound like I'm trying to smash people who do invest a lot of their life Or get real good It's not everybody has different tastes and wants to dedicate the very scarce time in their life to different things, right? And so the reason that balance becomes so critical is because a lot of us are just going to naturally live in that middle area Because that's about the amount of time we have and and and will We have to dedicate to this game Yeah, and and you can also think about this right you can think about this is like This is the data in the middle that is creating Most of what we see of the imbalance Right, like it's sort of it's because that's the majority experience Yeah, exactly. So that's where a lot of it's coming from and it's sort of like for example this spot There's a thing i'm working on where it's like, okay I feed in a player's history on their list and i try and predict how many wins they're going to get at an event and you can do one You know one zero one wins four and five wins Pretty accurately like 70 plus percent of the time you can get those two and three wins are almost indistinguishable Right by the machine it essentially, you know, you could just randomly predict if you thought they were to two to three wins You can just coin flip it and you'd be about as accurate as this body is at predicting that and it's sort of like yeah there is At almost like that's almost the play testing section of raw bookness Right is that two to three win section where you're like these are players who are you know good enough They can play the game They're not making insanely good or insanely bad decisions And they are whacking the books against each other and and creating the win rate of these factions now One thing that also tells me though is sort of what we were saying before about sort of these unexplored niches is we don't know As much stuff we don't know what like optimized beasts of chaos lists look like So much because top players aren't picking them up that often because they don't you know outside of You know a couple we don't have the same amount of data for good for top players playing Uh beast of chaos as we do serif on we don't know what optimized beast of chaos looks like We mainly know what sort of the middle beast of chaos looks like and it sort of means We have a lot of unexplored space and again if we talk about that event Where if you were going to an event with the world's best Players right 30 of the world's best players and you went and played that event every week I think you would start to see a very different meta evolve because there you can start sitting there and going like Well, I can't just play serif on because half the people are playing serif on so what's good against serif on and you would have this Very different meta evolved than when we have an age of sigmar where Like the way we run events again in this sort of inherently in uncompetitive way where you're like I'm maybe getting one event against someone who's just as good at me And we're just going to throw it throw down in the tape, right? We're just going to throw our army books down You're getting one game against exactly Yeah, exactly. And now, you know, and so you're basically at that point You're like a lot of your data is just coming from this like, okay one game per event And yeah face emmer. Yeah, all less likely two top players meet and there's less data on that exactly Um, and so you a lot of your data is coming from sort of this weird place that isn't What you would consider optimal balance testing You know You what you want is you want to say, okay for every every sort of tier of player Can we get 300 games played for every matchup? Sure If we were using a sort of elo system to actually do matchups chest out, right? Yeah Yeah, yeah, because then you would suddenly be producing a lot more consistent data Of yeah, yeah skills. Yes, but but events could control for that. I think But I don't think they want to Yeah, I don't think I want to we could have made a choice a long time ago to go towards some kind of elo system We all decided we don't want that. No, no, I'm not even saying elo I'm saying that like I think that players are smart enough to self-regulate And what I mean by that is um Uh kudos to uh, steve herner. Oh, sure for how for how he has, uh tweaked the holy events in the last two years um, one thing that he has done, uh is People choose their matchups And so there's a drafting where like Everybody like chooses which table they want to fight on and then the in the back half of their drafting They choose either to like chase players Or go to other tables and what ends up happening is in day two You have all the top players head hunting all the other top players because they need to knock them down a A peg and so what ends up happening is is that the pool that was going to be competing already Are already fighting after each other They're pursuing one another because they need to make sure that other player doesn't get five wins That's cool. Yeah. Well, I think I think oh, I think that is super cool I don't think that sounds super fun And I think in some ways you're touching just on the fact which is that In general the way we the what motivates a lot of people and we this ties into what we're saying about Why gleams by kids are so popular when they're not that strong, you know, why knight horn is so popular is that We want To basically pick the models we like pick the you know pick the list that we like go to an event And have mostly a fun weekend rather than being like I am searching to climb the ladder of You know a OS, you know, and there are not to say there aren't people chasing their way up the ranking Trying to win events back to back to back but as we say what that mainly involves is then playing each other game five and You know who wins out of that because that's going to turn term and you know Who's rank one at the end of the year versus rank two or something like that? But for a lot of people the way we enjoy age of sigma is in this sort of more for fun Method, right? And I think that's one of the things that I often say that this is my sort of version in the subjective non-databacked opinions Which obviously I don't like to have But that I would rather see more focus on the competitive enjoyment Of the game than win rate based balance Like I think one thing that age of sigma suffers from is like we tend to have like Good units and bad units and good armies and bad armies rather than say Armies or units that are good at things or bad at things, right? Like fleshier courts Was like an amazing army for just look how much damage they put out from these monsters Sure And when they needed to be nerfed, it's like they just took that edge off the damage, right? They made it you lost the asf, you know You everything went up in points and so they were still the same army But they just they still had the same sort of shape on the list for graph But smaller and what that meant is when something like obr came out and petrofex originally was how it was It's like that would have been a great time to bring back the grizzled gore Right and be like well with all the obr running around grizzled gore can just smash through those more tech guard But they couldn't because they're just a week So I would rather sort of see these nerfs come into army's weaknesses like you take fleshier courts and maybe you nerf You know, maybe the casting of some of their spells you nerf, you know, how does their Yeah, their survivability exactly hit the hit the terror guys survivability Yeah, hit that terror guys spell for the five up word save stuff like that And then you're like look this army still exists in this space You know it and even if the win rate was the same as it was lower You could be like I play fleshier courts because it's really good at this thing and that it does And sort of I'm less concerned because most of your games are not going to be against equally skilled players That I'm less concerned with Like that exact win rate percent balance and more concerned with being like, oh Okay, I've got a cool army that still does the thing that I wanted it to do when I bought it And it's good in these situations, even though overall the win rate is the same as what it is Yeah, I mean to return to our earlier conversation when we talked about like we you know One of the things we level set for this conversation was the concept that there's sort of two things that make armies Really powerful one is just their outright blunt force trauma that they can cause right like they're they just don't die Or they just do so much damage or whatever right? It's kind of the very simple the problems they present Yeah, the other one is the sort of toolbox capabilities that they have the supplementary stuff their ability to dig out You know these other more ephemeral qualities right and when you get a really good army They can do both and what you've effectively just proposed to metaphor it is don't blunt the spear shorten it Yeah, right exactly. Um, so like you're you're yeah, I mean, that's that's the best way I could describe it Okay, this is all good. I want to keep moving because I know what's yeah Okay, so let's put the two together. So this was my little experiment that I had uh, jp run that I was very excited about This is super fun. I'll play uh, I am very happy about this. So this is I created a list of what I call the bad guys Okay So These are the bad guys. I think this is largely backed up by by the win rate percentages and stuff like that And also just our general sense of living in the world Uh, and so the bad guys are lrl idk ko sarapan zeech and doc I don't know what you're talking about So they're bad guys. I may have a couple armies on The The good guys are everybody else So fire slayers are good guys. They're good guys on this list Fire slayers are good guys I thought about it a lot as to whether or not to put them in the bad guys list or not But for this particular experiment, I left them out. Look, we could have an argument of exactly what goes in here I wanted to do this because I think you see these You see these six These are the usual suspects in the top 10 Okay, six is a good nice round warhammer number It really is. Yes. That's right. Oh, they're on the table. Uh, so um so The the point of this was like for example, uh, what what grand hammer just closed which was just this last weekend, right? and the The the top 10 was basically this It was just like it was just bad guys Right and like four of them were zeech or something. Okay So the experiment that I wanted to do with jp was I said, okay Let's take the bad guys as a cohort And put them against the good guys Okay And see what they're instead of thinking about win rates and fat middle in the traditional sense of just one army against another army What if we cohort them out? Right and examine them as two larger groups now like larger data sets. Yeah, exactly Now the reason that I wanted to do this Is because part of my supposition On why because when we originally defined the fat middle as 60 to 40 percent, which we all agreed was wide Like the ideal world would be 55 to 45, but this is aos So we're just gonna be generous and say 60 to 40, right? And what we've seen in a lot of the recent data Various sources is that nobody's breaking these bounds in big ways for the most part. We haven't seen a lot actually going outside of You know the 60 and 40 percent, right? and So my question to myself was why because it feels like there's so many of these armies that are just so clearly bigger and so the uh the the uh In my mind it became the three stooges paradox If everybody remembers that episode of the simpsons where mr. Burns can't die because all of his diseases are getting caught against each other And none of them kill him right there. Oh, the three stooges stuck in the door joke, right? Okay, so my theory was there was just that these were all killing each other And basically you had the highest gear. Yeah, you had like six alpha predators, right? But they kind of hold each other in check at 60 percent, but they as a group suppress everybody else Okay, that was my theory, right? And happily i'm right So When you guess what that's what the data reveals. Yeah, so which is good Uh, so at any rate if you look at the overall win rate The bad guys and the good guys define the fat metal balance, right? Yes, they're holding at the 60 40 They're literally setting the edges Right. Yep. Okay And so But if you remove the top players, which is what I wanted to do, right? Let's get rid of the top 25 percent and only look at the bottom 75 percent of players Right Then all of a sudden The the the the numbers flip to 70 30 Okay All of a sudden the fat metal explodes But one important thing to note here, right is that in some ways This is going to be super expected, right because We keep going you're fine. My dog. Okay. Yeah, no worries. No worries. Um In fact, I don't even have anything interesting to say. I don't know. Uh, that's all I wanted to say In some ways, this is expected you carry on Sorry, we have a dog interruption and people can't even see the dog. It's the worst. Uh, anyways Uh, so the uh, but if you look at like just the but if you look at the Uh, if you remove this player skill and just look at the performance of the groups The bad guys way outperform the good guys Right when that top tier of player is removed Correct because if you look at the upper quartile and you compare the bad guys to the good guys At the top levels of skill the power of the army disappears. They go 50 50 Okay, so then autumn lotus. So to answer your question. Yeah, why are most finals than the bad guys? Okay, great question because the top players Tend to be attracted to they're the ones who are also the most psychologically Attracted to playing one of the top armies, right? Right their dedication to like I want to be the win Right. Yeah means they're going to go the hardest into whatever they perceive As being the most powerful It's a correlation not a causation. That's the trick. That's what this data set Helps to reveal Right because what we see is that's how you get joel still showing up in the top 10 with beasts or whatever, right? Or you can pick your you can pick your your player in your army, right? Because there are those top players who use those uh Who use non quote-unquote top armies? But when you're talking about like psychographic incentives Those players are the most likely to pick the most powerful armies because they showed up being the most likely to be dedicated to winning Right, right. There's a self selection here So it's not that their army Is driving the top 10 as much as the player Is driving toward the top 10 and picks the army they think is going to most likely get them there I would I would affirm that logic per second Yeah So this to me was such a just like this is a single experiment We could certainly do more along this line But to me it just absolutely told this story so succinctly Yeah, right Where and by the way, it's painful to look at Sure Sure, because it just says when you take out the top players who are effectively evening the numbers, right then what's happening is They're flattening that they're they're hiding The overall disparity of the armies that we experience on a day-to-day basis because most of us who are playing Live in the 70 to 30 world Not the 60 to 40 world. It's certainly not the 50 to 50 world And again, this this this ties into the fact that it's very hard to observe the stats correctly because of the way We play the game because of these tournaments having so many games with high skill discrepancies Where it is the skill discrepancy determining the result of the game that We It's really hard to get at the actual stats because not a lot of games are giving us good data on You know, how good was this faction? So again, that ties into what we're saying We're basically just trying to back into as you were saying into that data from all these different angles To try and feel what's going on and and I guess you say sort of to capture What people think is like to sort of put in the data terms the feelings people get about Oh, well, I went into this game against seraphon and they really did smash me and I wasn't very fun or etc So autumn lotus. No, I didn't already have this conclusion written up. I ran this experiment and I wouldn't like Yeah, no with jp. I said, here's an interesting theory a hypothesis. I want to test. That's that's how you test things right And then the math came out like this Okay, I don't think I don't think anyone's saying autumn lotus that like Oh, there's no difference between the armies or that like the best player in the world if they play beast of chaos They would do just as well And these are really they would probably win four games most of the time and I think until Good. Yeah, sorry. I was just gonna say part of it is the resolution again of a just say more where you play five games And the the top top players even if they play zinch are probably going four one because if there's three good players There might only be one winning five games. So not everyone can come first So what happens is let's say you're a top player, right? You're in that top percentage and you often go five zero and you often go four one If you then play a weaker faction that means you're really unlikely to go five zero But you're still going to go four one your results are a stent. It's actually Indistinguishable from your previous results. So it's not you the player is less likely to win the event But their score will look almost the same because they're probably still getting four wins Exactly. And so just I want to go back to one of assistant ref's questions Which was he had asked a question a little while ago that do you really think that if say half the best players All decided to play boc Suddenly they would start winning events more than seraphon. Don't they go for seraphon because it really is better So and he says just not as normally just not as much better as we normally might think I think if you took half the best players and we forced them to all play boc for a while Right and we could get them into it and we could assume they would put the same amount of effort into it You know like and then they would be as passionate and all of that like assume we could cover And wallpaper over those sort of psychological things, right? What this data tells us is that yes boc would start showing up in top tens everywhere Now would it necessarily record top ones? No, because again, they might come down to Uh, you know, there's there's still the other half the top players who are using more powerful armies that differential can have an effect, right? But suddenly. Yeah, the top Tens would get wildly populated by boc like that's just what would happen And I that's what all of the data here tells us what happened and anecdotally I look at stuff like relian one of the best players in the u.s who went over played night haunt and nearly took out an event with it and ended up in the top 10 in the middle of When it was in like the hard doldrums or um FEC player out of uh, michigan who's like just one of the best fc guys and was taking down events with fc pre fc book. Oh, yeah The summoning list. I remember that. Yeah, what's uh bill you played him. Is his name bill you played him? Yeah, sorry very much. Oh bill susan He's out of pennsylvania. No, sorry pennsylvania. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to misplace you He's in uh, yeah and bills bill is a an amazing player that book just made him that much better Yeah, so I mean that like there are I have anecdotes. Those are anecdotes. They're not data relevant But like I have seen real examples that back up what the data also here seems to point at right so there you go Uh, there you go. I and again like I think it's important to iterate that it's like no one is saying By the way, you should get good at age of sigmar because beasts of chaos are just as good as seraphon you know, that's not true and um, like also A lot of these armies have different like a lot of the time what we what you don't see in the data is when a top player plays beasts of chaos they Through blood sweat and tears get four wins in an event and when they play Seraphon they have four three turn games And an event and they might go four one at both because game five they play versus someone who's just as good at them It's you know, they lose all the priority roles. It's a bad matchup. It's a bad battle plan, etc so There is an advantage from playing those factions. It's just that if you are a normal Tournament player and you're going to a five game event your best bang for your buck in terms of getting more wins Is going to be playing better, you know, that's going to get you a lot more bang for your buck than playing these factions And that so that's sort of the advice To you as an individual player is pick a faction you like You know try and get an optimal list and play it really well And you will be going for one plus if you you know, if you really do master that Now there's another side of this conversation, which is like, what if you don't do that? you know, what if you're just chilling and you go to events and You know, you're not interested in winning the 10 million dollars and the one lollipop and you just want to rock up And have a good time Yeah, the faction balance is going to hit you harder and that's why it's important to also keep the game well balanced You know, we don't just want to let balance run Crazy and then say oh well get better you could still win You know because a lot of people are enjoying this as a hobby that is not solely centered around Going to tournaments and winning games, you know, they want to pick models. They like they want to go Um and have a good weekend away with all the other people who play age of sigmar and you know That's what's a lot of fun about it. That's why I think it's good We don't really use like an elo system and seeded games and stuff like that It's just you know, you You know, there are armies that you're gonna have to work harder for and there are armies that you're gonna have to work Less hard for but at the end of the day, if you're a really good player, you're going to be taking out most of your games Yeah exactly all right Uh, I just want to talk about a couple of interesting items here. We got just a few more slides and then we'll wrap this up This is just more kind of point this to kind of lead on to what we're saying here These are like meta breaker people When we're talking about win rates at events I picked a nice selection that I highlighted out here of different people Uh, you want so meta breakers is another thing you can look at on the Uh on the list bot site You want to kind of take us through meta breakers a little bit and and kind of what this shows So meta breakers is basically, um Capsulation of kind of the stuff we're talking basically in a normal in the normal ranking system in the uk for example You basically you go to an event And you get points based on how well you did So, you know, maybe you come first is a big event. You get 100 points. You come second. You get 98 points, etc Um, meta break is a similar idea But your score is offset against the win rate of the faction that you were playing at that event So basically if you come first with seraphon, you're not going to get very many points at all You know, because you know, maybe you you know, you had 100% win rate But the faction overall has a 65% win rate But if you came, you know, if you say come fifth with sylvanath or something like that You're going 4-1. You're going, you know, or whatever with uh, this, you know, these weaker factions You're going to get more points So basically it's just an alternative rankings to say and again It's not to say that people winning with the top armies in the game aren't good players because they are But it's just another way to say, okay, if I play sylvanath and I'm doing really well I'm like, I'd like I think it's cool to recognize those people and say Like, yeah, look, you know, the book has a 48% win rate He's almost got a 70% win rate and he's just popping off you and more and 99% win rate We're on a faction with a 56% win rate And you know, this year has been a little bit weird, obviously for events and stuff But like that's the concept is just to recognize the people that we're talking about who are playing these weaker factions to high win rate standards Yep Yep, uh, joshay says we're smorgan on this list Well smorgan would actually have to play a recordable faction and not just whatever nonsense he happened to put together That is also like shockingly good S'morgan is like we talked about top players versus average players and stuff like that S'morgan is just like he's he's a dot off the map. He's in his own universe there Brian asked is that an ordinarily world war points to high skill rather than low power armies? Um, it's kind of a mix. I do mess with the formula sometimes like there Obviously if you wanted to quote unquote abuse it, right? You could be like, I'm gonna play tune kings You know, I'm a top player is one 12 events with seraphon I'm gonna play tune kings go for one in a bunch of events and come top up to the top of this It's not this isn't really to catch anything aside from just saying look at these cool people doing cool stuff With your factions because maybe you play silvanette and you're like, I want to see someone You know, I want to see a different rankings where I can see these other factions and good players Yeah, I mean so I just want to address autumn lotus I really hope that's not the point that they take from this being that I went on a 15 minute rant in the Middle of this about how important balance is to literally the vast majority of their player base So if they take that they definitely missed the forest for the trees Uh, I mean what I've been trying to bang the drum of here is Skill matters a lot But most of us have neither the time nor the inclination to exist in the top 5 to 10 of players And so once you get out of the top player bracket The army and the balance matters a heck of a lot. So yes, I hope that's the message they take That's that's the take home Right, like that was that was that measurement that's 70 30 was when you get rid of the top players This is this is the what your win rates end up looking like on those matchups of like lower tier armies versus higher tier armies Uh assistant ref uh, it's a small data set. Yeah, it's taken from your top three events I think the 99 percent might be Like a capped out 100 percent or something so it might just be because He's played three events with corn and won all his games in all of them Right. He just he went 15 for 15 basically. Yeah, exactly. So but it's not gonna say 100 right? Yeah, for some reason it caps out at 99 or it might be a rounding thing. Um, but yeah, again This page this meta breakers page. It's not about like data capture or anything It's just about having a you know a sense of recognition of like look at this guy He's popping off a silhouette. Look at this guy's popping off with, you know, blazer corn There's turning more with his grand host of negash Yeah, it's it's the honor players that are making a decision consciously To play lower tier armies And still performing well at events. Yeah. Yeah Yep, so it can be done. Right. Yes. Okay Uh, let's talk about the filthometer, uh, the average power level of factions and events over time This was a real interesting chart you sent me that I thought would just be a little fun conversation to kind of cap off on here um The the blue line being you're sort of, you know, the the running average by the way This goes I what I love about this is she went all the way back to like the beginning of age of sigmar Yeah, the actual the actual og age of sigmar and The I like I've highlighted this area here as having like Uh, we're like maybe the line didn't move that much. It got pulled up a little Um, but this like late 2019 period where we just had people really bringing some superfilth A few more dots up in this whole area right here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah No, for sure. I mean again, like this this is sort of not much to say about this but basically it shows that like because I think People have been talking about and I don't know if this is just a sort of, you know kids these days argument They will always hear um that Like events even at the mid tables are getting more filthy Really over time and this is obviously like it's the factions are adjusted for whatever factions were strongest at the time of the events Being recorded. It's roughly the same like we aren't seeing more people gravitate towards Well, I think there is a conversation we had about like power creeping the game And maybe you are getting more games at the mid table That finish on turn two or something like that because power levels are so high like, you know There was a time in the beginning of ass where if you played beast claw raiders versus iron draws You know, you had like three special rules between your whole two armies and now you both do loads of crazy things So it may be more explosive, but there aren't really people you're maybe a very tiny upward trend here But there aren't really if you don't really seen more filth at events than you did even when age of sigma started Yeah, and what's interesting is obviously we have less events. It's harder to tell But there's there's a lot less hitting in this upper like this way high outlier area here So, I mean they're giving this to only a couple percentage points, but still it's That we haven't seen as much of that. I hope that trend that was when slannette or slannesh was in the meta, right? At a tight 2019, you know, this is this is this is like the height of slannesh broken stainless Yeah This is like the dark days right here of 2019. Yeah the summer of 2019 the the the horror the horror. Yes Okay Let's see And things are trending positive So the haves versus the half knots the gap between the top and bottom armies is getting smaller So not huge keep in mind this delta is between 44 to 36 percent So I just wanted like again, we're not going like 100 to zero So let's be this is founded, but this again starts in like 2016 runs up to 2021 And what we see is that this this filth gap as it were this power gap However, you want to think of it is actually like decreasing Yeah, over time although again, where did we see the uptick? Oh, that's right. What is this down here? The filthy summer of 2019. Yeah, this is this is flex. This is carry an empire, right? This is fexgaven. Yeah, I think the big thing about fexgaven as well as they were both filthy armies And they're both super popular models that people already add You know lots of people like cool Yeah, it was a big jump in power and lots of people it wasn't like when you know when slannesh come out and it was like Okay, do I want to buy this whole new ring? It's people who are like, I have my scaven I love my scaven and now look they've got super cool new rules like fex and scaven both sort of You know set a new watermark For power level. So I'm not I remember that very starkly This year that happened four weeks before a depticon dropped and a bunch of those armies were the depticon. Yeah So, yeah, I thought this was I thought this was a good chart. This was a nice note to end on Because it said we are moving in the right direction Yeah, there's certainly a lot farther. We have to go That's but but I hope we continue this general progress like Yeah, good Moving in the right direction. Let's keep moving in the right direction Right And there's still takes let's not let's not let's go back up what I want to see I want to see more overpowered crazy rules less concerned about balance and more concerned about fun It obviously ties into gifts. I want to see just like Moon clan grots or stabbas I just want them to come back out of the loon trying every time you kill them And they just keep coming back and there's another direction to go We could have like everybody roughly balanced, but just always each year introduce one insane book Yeah, like introduce one fec style, you know, complete metta shatterer a year over over the top Yeah, that's just so obviously over the top and then what that'll do is the rest of us can all rally together To defeat them to hate that army and just shame those people into not playing it I mean Look, Ozzy my Ozzy mandius showed us that like humanity wins when it has an enemy, right? So Uh, maybe maybe we just need an enemy every year somebody to really all get together and and clearly hate Right, none of this spread out over like six armies. Some people hate First editions each right, right Yeah, we need one clear obvious out-of-bounds hated army. That's what we need Agreed Agreed or or maybe, you know, we talked about shortening rather than blunting the spear, right? We could just have loads of insane spears pointing in different directions So you're like glooms by gifts has infinite models and flesh eater quartz has infinite damage So let's you know, they just remove the cap on feeding friends that you just pile until your opponent's dead Glooms by gifts like the grots just keep coming out of the loon shrine till You run out of time and you're just like, I don't know who wins Like the game just balance stays roughly the same. Maybe it gets a bit worse game gets completely out of control But there you go. Yeah, there you go All right. Well jp. Thank you so much. I know this was a crazy data driven show like so much interesting stuff here I think this was like Really really interesting in in my estimation of just all the stuff that this data pointed to and revealed and again Like I don't think the point of this is to come to this and say we're providing like bible truth But this is a lot of more data pointing in a direction right sort of like Giving more strong evidence other than our suppositions and our feelings and our sort of gut takes That this is the structure of the world that they do need to focus on balancing the books because it matters a lot to the middle group That the thing I've always said that like I've I've said this for years Well, I'm not worried about top competitive players They'll take care of themselves and this largely backs that up right those those time people They're fine Like books are way powerful books are way not doesn't matter to them. They're going to keep winning games They're going to keep top tenning because that's what yeah, just Collecting lollipops like crazy. Yeah Yeah, so for those that are that are in that higher tier echon The answer for you if you haven't gotten a podium Is just keep rolling the dice Like because like at that point it's literally a 50 50 Like on on performance at that highest level So the answer how do you get trophies you just play more? Mm-hmm. Yeah Play more games learn your army like enjoy the game Get like trying to learn other armies like all of that good stuff. Um, yeah And that's good. That's going to push you up into podium territory Again, if you're like, how do I come first at every event for the rest of the year? That probably involves you swapping factions But I don't think really for most people that's they're they're concerned But even then the data that it shows here is that Right now in the current meta that's oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, that's not possible There's no jumping to there's not a silver bullet faction right now Because again, you have that head hunter group of like six exactly. Yeah No, so I I know if you're already in that group And like if you're already a top player you're like I come second or first at every event And I want to stop coming second then it's like, yeah, you probably have a short list of the factions You can pick from to achieve your goal. Yeah, if you want to play Yeah, exactly. And again, even then right, that's what you see with top players It's not always people picking the top one. You're like, here are these, you know They you pick your favorite out of the top factor. I advise that again if you're a player and you're like I've struggled with sylvaneth. I want to win more games You know, then I don't think there's anything wrong if you're like, I want to pick my favorite faction That's that's got a higher win rate than sylvaneth, you know I don't think that like I would say to you. Well, you you you've been bad You have to play sylvaneth till you have an 80% win rate. It's like no It's like pick a faction you like and if you want to pick a stronger faction from wherever you want on the tier list Pick that one like have a good time with it But you know for I know for me sometimes when I've wanted to focus on improving I pick a top to your army because then I know it's only me letting me down, you know Like I have no excuse So maybe you want to do that or maybe like you see some of the meta breakers Who are like I want to set myself a harder challenge, you know, just I think the point is just play whatever faction you want And you can do well with it. You know, there's no there are no crippling factions out there. Yep all right, well Very good stuff. If you out there like this Hey, give it a like give it a like if you like data Give it a like if you like my dogs who are all sitting asleep around me now and very upset because My wife dropped them off and then left Give it a like for because you think jp is a great dude And it was very nice to create listbot and and share all this wonderful data with us We really appreciate it liking the show is so easy. It's a little click of a button It helps other people find the show I appreciate all of you who stuck with us. I know this was some deep dive stuff Uh, but uh jp, thank you sir so much for doing all this work and grinding all this out Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. It was an absolute blast. Love chatting more Heller And I also love that I just look back at just this This is an edge model and I'm like, yeah, it's important to remember that Also, this is what it's about, right? Uh, you're absolutely right. I I purposely left it up that way when she She would come back at the end of all this and remind me again Just how how lucky we are and how crag knows needs to come out like hey I probably tomorrow yesterday five weeks ago. You know the best part about this is What's that? There's not gonna be enough of that model Well, two of them are gonna be in my hands. I'll say that right now. There is no force on this earth Show's over. We're back to car city. I'm out. There you go. So for all of you out there Thank you so much for watching. We really appreciate it very much as always We'll see you next wednesday