Event Review: Tennessee Elite Open 8-Man Teams

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending the Tennessee Elite Open’s 8-Man Teams Event along with my team, Scions of War. We have played in many 5 Man Teams Events over the years, mostly at the American Team Championships (ATC), but this was our first shot at the 8-man format. I absolutely love team events and they are by far my favorite way to enjoy competitive Warhammer 40K. From the strategy of building a team composition, to evaluating opposing team lists and the process of pairing the rounds, the teams format is a unique and fun way to compete. In this article I’m going to go over the strategy for preparing for the teams format, the event structure, and our results and lessons learned. Let’s get into it.

Warhammer 40K Teams Strategy: How the 8-Man Format Works

Warhammer 40K Teams Events have a unique event format and understanding how this works is key to developing a strategy that works. Teams are formed with each player playing a particular faction that cannot be duplicated across other team members. For example, one player on the team can play the Space Marines faction, one can play Necrons, and so on.

Teams are paired together like a normal singles event, first at random, and then based on the teams placing in the events. Once teams are paired, teams exchange lists, go over strategies for pairings and select Defenders, which are then placed face down and revealed simultaneously. Each team then selects to Attackers to “attack” the other team’s Defender with the Defender selecting which between the two to play. The Defender selects the table to play on and the Attacker gets to select between two missions to play on the layout. This process repeats until all individual players are paired. This process is described in-depth in the National Tabletop League’s Guidelines and are the standard for Teams play in North America.

Scoring is done using the WTC Team Differential with individual games being scored normally with the differential in individual matchups converted to a 0-20 scale based upon the differential in the score. These scores are compiled to determine the winning team for the round.

Warhammer 40K Teams Strategy: Team Composition and Pairings Strategy

Team composition is critical for a teams event. This comes in the form of team roles. In general you want the following for an 8-Man Team format:

• 2 Solid Defenders – These are specialists designed to exploit certain layouts and missions. Generally speaking these are durable or aggressive armies that want or need specific layouts to perform at maximum potential.
• 4 Attackers – These are builds designed to function and score on a variety of tables (as they’ll be selected by the opposing Defenders). Generally you want your attackers to be flexible enough to score into a variety of matchups. It is a good idea to include 2 armies focused on combat and assault and 2 that are more shooting oriented.
• 2 Flex Armies – These armies are flexible and designed to be able to be used as Defenders or Attackers and can lean heavily into skew builds where they can try to force a mismatch (e.g. A Knights army, triple Land Raiders, etc). These lists can step in and be Defenders when needed and can retain enough flexibility to be Attackers as needed. Aside from skew, these armies can also lean more into “balanced” style builds that have a good mix of shooting and melee.

Teams lists vary from singles lists in that you can really lean into certain list concepts to try and create matchups that pose difficulties for the opposing teams. These types of specialized lists work well into the teams format because you can generally avoid your worst matchups through the pairings process.

For our team’s composition we chose the following:

Defenders:

• Dark Angels – Wrath of the Rock
• Death Guard – Tallyband Summoners

Attackers:

• Aeldari – Aspect Host
• Tau – Mont’ka
• World Eaters – Berzerker Warband
• Adeptus Custodes – Lions of the Emperor

Flex:

• Chaos Knights – Infernal Lance
• Ad Mech – Haloscreed Battle Clade

My Event Run: Aeldari Aspect Host (4-1)

My list was designed to be an Attacker. Being Aeldari Aspect Host, my list was designed to be flexible enough to go into a variety of matchups and layouts and force difficult pairings for the opponent. In that regard, I was successful going 4-1 with one loss to Votann and wins against Blood Angels (twice), Death Guard and Tau.

My role in the team was to try to force big wins in most matchups, which I was successful in most cases. Aeldari are still a great army for teams because they are fast enough to play on a variety of layouts with success. They can maneuver on various layouts and play the Secondary game extremely well. My list was capable of going into a variety of opposing builds. I tested and tweaked the list extensively prior to the event and felt well prepared going into it.

Round 1: Leagues of Votann – Layout 3 – Mission S: Linchpin on Dawn of War (0-20 Loss)

In Round 1 we got paired into the Midnight Mongooses. I ended up playing against their Leagues of Votann Hearthband player, Blake. I felt pretty good going into this matchup. This Votann list was strong and posed a lot of matchup problems for our team. I felt I could get a close victory or draw here, which looked to be the case early on in the matchup. I managed to screen the left flank of the board out where the majority of my army was centralized. This forced Blake to drop his hammer unit out of position on Turn 2 after he had a very disappointing Turn 1. I knew this unit was coming and had zoned out the board pretty well to provide minimal lines to my key units.

Blake dropped them out of Deep Strike on that far flank where most of my forces were protected by terrain. He did shoot and destroy a couple of units leaving them out in the open and exposed for a powerful clapback on my next turn….that was however before Blake nailed a game changing 12″ charge on a boxcars roll getting into a squad of Warp Spiders. This charge flipped the game entirely to him and made what was a pretty comfortable game for me to spiral out of control and ended in a big loss. Fortunately for me, that was the first and only loss of the weekend.

Round 2: Blood Angels – Liberator Assault Group – Layout 2 – Mission D: Scorched Earth on Tipping Point (18-2 Win)

After Round 1, our team took a pretty big loss to the Midnight Mongooses, but we tried to hold our heads high and try to climb out of the early hole. Round 2 I would get paired into Jade and her Liberator Assault Group Blood Angels. Of course, Blood Angels have a special place in my heart as they are my main army I play. I’ve been collecting them for nearly 20 years and have had hundreds of games with them. So, I had a pretty big advantage in knowledge against the army. I knew going into Blood Angels, I’d have to try to force my opponent into exposing her melee units in the open. I did this by pushing up expendable units into the mid-board. This forced her to push her assault forces up to charge.

This was a back and forth game, until around Turn 3 when I had manage to destroy most of her key units. Fortunately for me, this ended up resulting in me pushing to burn a NML objective on Turn 4 and her home objective on Turn 5 resulting in a big win. Jade was a fantastic opponent and we had a great game. The rest of the team did quite well and we ended Round 2 with a Draw. We were pretty happy after our first day with 1 loss and a draw going into day 2.

Round 3: Death Guard – Champions of Contagion – Layout 2: Mission D: Scorched Earth on Tipping Point (20-0 Win)

Round 3 I got paired into Dylan and his Death Guard Champions of Contagion list. This list featured the usual suspects of Bloat Drones with Heavy Blight Launchers, Myphitic Blighthaulers, Plague Marines, Poxwalkers, and 2 squads of Deathshroud Terminators. My goal in this matchup was to screen and zone out to speed bump the Death Guard and force them into making positioning mistakes. I kept a squad of Shining Spears in reserves in this game as Dylan had a squad of Poxwalkers guarding his home objective and wasn’t going to be able to zone me out as the game progressed.

On Turn 3 I was able to Rapid Ingress the Spears and on my subsequent turn, wiped out the Poxwalkers and took his home objective. The Deathshroud were problematic, but because he had to piecemeal them into me as I wasn’t giving him many good places to land even with the 6″ Deep Strike in Contagion, I was able to finish both squads off by Turn 3. This one ended up being a big win for me resulting in a 20-0. Even better our team won this round! So we were feeling really good going into Round 4 being 1-1-1 now. We were climbing our way up the ladder!

Round 4: Blood Angels – Rage-Cursed Onslaught – Layout 4: Mission M: Purge the Foe on Crucible of Battle (12-8 Win)

Because of the opposing teams composition, I ended up being a Defender in this battle as we were trying to avoid certain matchups, which mostly worked in our favor. They threw Blood Angels at me as an attacker and I took them. My opponent, Ethan, had the option to take Scorched Earth on Search and Destroy, which would have been a more favorable mission for him I think, with the short corner deployments, but instead opted to take Purge trying to force the Kill More with my very squishy MSU style army. This matchup was interesting. I ended up with the top of turn and moved both my War Walkers, Striking Scorpions and a squad of Rangers up into the mid-board in the wide open. His list was nearly entirely melee with the exception of a couple of Gladiator Lancers.

I had managed to kill one of the Lancers on the top of my turn. I had pushed Jain Zar and her Banshee squad up near the center staged behind a ruin. Ethan really prioritized Jain Zar because of the Fights First threat and the fact that she and her squad can just pick up Space Marines. On his turn, he decided to push out most of his army to the middle with the idea of charging with multiple units, wiping out my screens and then piling into Jain Zar and her squad to fight them to avoid the Fights First. It was a risky play and while he did indeed kill all those units in the mid-board, he could not quite kill Jain Zar and her squad.

The retaliation on Turn 2 was devastating as I was able to destroy 25 Death Company, Lemartes, a Chaplain, 3 Sanguinary Guard and a Captain and I would have destroyed Mephiston as well on a far flank with a squad of Fire Dragons, but Ethan rolled all his invulns to keep him alive. This clapback shell shocked my opponent, but despite this he recovered and even though he didn’t have much left to play the game he kept the final score close ending in a 12-8 victory to me. Unfortunately our team did not do well into this team overall and we lost the Round. So we were 1-2-1 heading into the final round of the event.

Round 5: Tau Empire – Retaliation Cadre – Layout 2: Mission D: Scorched Earth on Tipping Point (17-3 Win)

Round 5 would see me pair into Adam and his Tau Retaliation Cadre list. This list featured several different Crisis Suit squads with Missiles and Fusion led by Commanders and Farsight along with some Stealth Suit squads, Pathfinders, 3 Vespid squads and a Riptide. My goal here was to prioritize killing the spotting units and pushing units into melee to force his suits to stay in combat to shoot and allow me to protect my units.

Again, I kept a squad of Shining Spears in reserve and Rapid Ingressed them to take his home objective. I was fortunately able to control most of this matchup to throw in units into melee to prevent fall backs so I could focus down Crisis Suit units and the spotters. The plan was successful and resulted in a big win for me 17-3. Adam was probably my favorite opponent of the weekend. Which is saying a lot as all of my opponents were wonderful people to play against. We had a good chat afterwards. Unfortunately our team could not pull out the win and lost a close round leaving us with a 1-3-1 finish for the event.

Warhammer 40K Teams Strategy: Lessons Learned

Overall, we did not perform as well as we would have liked as a team. I felt our faction choices were quite good for the event, but in hindsight we could have probably swapped out the Death Guard list for Necrons Awakened Dynasty and possibly Ad Mech for something different as well. In many cases those lists didn’t pose the matchup problems we had expected which gave our opponents a lot of flexibility in being able to save some of their best armies for better matchups.

Further we should have put our Tau player as a Defender rather than an Attacker. Because he was an Attacker, the Defenders always picked layouts that provided them with plenty of terrain to hide behind with minimal open shooting lanes. We really needed him on Layouts 2 and 4 but he ended up playing most of the event on Layouts 7 and 8 which were very difficult for him.

Finally, we had a good strategy for our Space Marines player as first Defender, but in hindsight we should have just had him practice entirely on Layout 1 in preparation for the event. Despite this, he still did incredibly well for us over the course of the event into some pretty tough matchups going 4-1 himself.

I feel like we learned a lot in this event about pairings and strategy in the 8-man format and next year I think we will have even a more formidable roster and strategy. Overall I was super proud of how our team performed.

Overall Event Experience at the TEO

First, my hats off to Frank and the entire staff at the Tennessee Elite Open. This event was the most professionally organized event I have ever attended (and believe me I have attended a LOT over the years.) Frank has a real passion for competitive 40K and it shows in how he prepares and runs this event. The tables were well spaced out. The terrain was great. Event guidance ahead of time was very clear. There were judges assigned to sections that you could call by pressing a handy button at each table. Every row of tables had a pairing table with mats laid out to pair the rounds out which was convenient. He had banners for every team present which we got to take home. This event was just top notch from top to bottom. In my opinion, team events are the future of competitive 40K and Frank and his staff are making that future a reality now. If you ever get a chance to attend I absolutely cannot recommend this event enough. We will be attending again in July for the 5-Man Teams event.

Final Thoughts

What a wild weekend this was. TEO was an amazing experience and ranks up there as one of, if not the, best events I’ve ever had the fortune to attend. The players there were all incredible players and sporting competitors. The venue was amazing. We learned a lot as a team and I’m super excited to attend more of these events in the future.

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