Welcome back, Dear Reader, to the somewhat delayed bracket presentation of BLUNDERDOME 2. Last week we went through the lists and the players of this, our most casual blunderdome ever. This week we’re playing games and recording the results. But before we could do that, we needed to determine who’d be playing who.

In case you missed our list write-ups, you can find them here:

• Part 1: Votann and Iron Hands
• Part 2: Drukhari and T’au
• Part 3: Admech and Orks
• Part 4: Tyranids and Harlequins

Once we had our lists built and our casual players lined up, we needed to figure out the play order. So we had our competitive crew sit down and come up with a general seeding for each of our lists, and here’s what we came up with:

1. Tyranids – Nids walk in here as the clear top seed owing in part to the fact that they can stack two extremely powerful supplements on top of an insanely powerful Codex. Crusher Stampede and the Leviathan supplement make Tyranid monsters even stronger, and help the book create Godfucker, a winged hive tyrant who can drop 40+ mortal wounds on a target with a few CP spent on the charge. Innes has been hoping to see this pervert list in action for months and he’ll get his wish when they start with Iron Hands. The Hands are tough but not much else – they don’t stand a chance.
2. Leagues of Votann – basically kicked off this whole thing with a book that combines insane durability, shooting, and melee with some rules that make it incredibly consistent with regard to killing anything it can see. Like Tyranids, Votann also benefit from not using Nephilim secondaries and their ability to do pretty much anything well puts them here at the 2-spot, just over Harlequins. Against Drukhari their biggest challenge will be getting line of sight on their targets and avoiding getting outflanked, but they can easily kill anything the Drukhari make visible.
3. Harlequins – the Clowns narrowly missed the two-spot and it won’t shock us if they manage to win the whole thing. Harlqeuins are just insanely good and able to do everything well, plus their un-nerfed Codex gives them something like 2600 points by today’s standards to play with plus luck dice for 4-6 re-rolls per round to help keep their units on the board. There aren’t any targets they can’t take down and they’re faster than almost any other list here, plus they’re harder to hit, giving them surprising durability.
4. T’au Empire – The T’au combine insanely good shooting and volume with lots of mobility, plus they can abuse interactions like Farsight Enclaves with Ethereals, pre-nerf AFPs, and can use their bombers to drop mortal wounds on enemy targets. The big challenge will be that they just don’t have the same punch as the three armies above them. If they go first they’ll remove whoever they’re playing.
5. Adeptus Mechanicus – The Mechanicus have more and better flyers than the T’au and nearly match them in shooting, but trade some of that firepower for durability. This one really could have gone either way, but because these armies face off round 1 it kind of doesn’t matter which one is seeded where – we fully expect whoever goes first in that matchup to shoot the other one off the table.
6. Orks – The Orks get to run their pre-nerf insanity that combines lots of jets with buggies that can shoot indirect at enemy targets and get around cover in order to start kicking off Freebooterz buffs to improve their accuracy. They’ve also got a ton of speed and can spike damage on any given turn to just completely eviscerate opponents. Their biggest challenge is going to be that Harlequins can easily tank all of the army’s aircraft and buggy shooting – and that’s if those units can even get into the reduced range necessary to hit. The odds of the Ork list actually killing a Starweaver on turn 1 to start generating Freebooterz buffs is pretty small.
7. Drukhari – How the mighty have fallen. In all the Drukhari list is pretty great and takes advantage of some very undercosted units and broken interactions but there’s just not enough here that legitimately rates compared to the top lists. It has a reasonable chance of upsetting Votann with its speed however, and the ability to score easy points on Herd the Prey helps as well. This is the most likely upset of the first round.
8. Iron Hands – The Iron Hands have some nasty tricks and may be the most durable army in the event, but they don’t have much in the way of offensive firepower. This was almost a play-in bracket with Hands vs. Custodes, but our Custodes player dropped at the last minute and Condit advanced to the 8-seed spot by default. Pray for him, because Godfucker is coming.

The Bracket

Next Time: Round 1

That wraps up our look at the Bracket but check back Friday for the results of the Round 1 games – we’ll have full results and some insight into how things went. In the meantime, if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.