ETC Comp

I see the ETC second pack and I wonder what people actually play in some countries, it certainly doesn't seem to be the same game as other parts of the world.  In the UK we started out with zero comp and then 6 months in we setup a number of restrictions. Following on these have generally been slackened off every so slightly but no major changes.  Pretty much the only thing that matters is the max 12 dice in a magic phase, only adding 2-3 dice to the phase, max unit size of 450pts and look out sir on all spells unless they say otherwise.  Compare that to what is appearing out of a number of the european countries where it's 4 dice max, no irresistable on certain lores and a tonne of restrictions on individual armies.

To me that seems to be excessively unnecessary.  The UK has seen all the top players continue to be the top players, clearly the '6 dice monkey' terminology exists for a reason but not to the extent where it decides tournament winners.  So we're looking at restrictions in the UK which knock out a number of the irritating excesses of some lists, but still leaves virtually all options available.  The european teams talking about heavy comp seem to prevent vast number of build options from being used completely so part of the sacrifice of playing in there scene would appear to be far lower diversity.  As a player that doesn't like playing the 'optimum' builds this seems like a rather daft way of going about promoting enjoyment, it seems that 'balance' is achieved by striping out a lot of the uniqueness of the armies.

I'll be voting against harsher restrictions but to be honest I'm amazed that we've got here on the second year of the tournament using 8th edition it seems people really don't like playing the game as the designers appear to have intended.