Today we will continue with the contender series by taking a look at how to maximize your competitive success based on adapting to your tournament format. Some events play different round structures (such as best of 1, best of 2, or best of 3 match lengths) as well as a variety of tiebreaker regimens. While a strong deck and a strong gameplan will help you no matter what as described earlier in this series, there are some extra things to consider once you have your tournament pack.

Articles in This Series:
Warband Selection
Choosing a Deck/Pairing
Deckbuilding Overview
Evaluating Surge Objective Cards
Evaluating End Phase Objective Cards
Evaluating Ploys
Evaluating Upgrades
Deckbuilding: How Many Cards?
Opening Hand and The Mulligan
Board Choice and Orientation
Feature Token Placement
Fighter Placement
So You Won the Roll-Off – Do You Choose First or Second?
Practice
Event Format Considerations
Elites
Big Boys
Hordes (Coming Soon!)

Check out other tournament related articles:
Counterplay Series
Participating in Your First Tournament
What to Expect at your First Grand Clash
How to Run a Local Tournament
Building Your First Nemesis Deck

“Best of X” Formats

A “Best of 1”, or Bo1 format, describes a tournament in which each pairing plays a single game to determine a winner. It has some advantages and drawbacks over “Best of 3”, which is the rulebook’s recommended format. Rounds can be a more predictable length, and you can fit more rounds into a given day. You’re significantly less likely to end in a draw, but your tiebreakers will get a little funkier if the tournament size is large enough. You’re only playing one game, and somebody has to win that opening roll-off, giving them a distinct advantage in board selection and orientation, token placement, and fighter placement. In a perfect tournament, things would be more ‘fair’, and Underworlds is innately imbalanced (though not dramatically) by the setup stage. If your event is Best on 1, you need to be all the more confident in being able to handle winning or losing the opening roll off.

Best of 1 also has the issue of variance in dice performance or card draw order being more impactful as they won’t be able to ‘average out’ across a 3 game set. You may be interested in taking fewer risky or dice-dependent gameplans as you run the risk of cratering when you get one game of bad dice as it is disproportionately impactful to your standings. However, it comes with different advantage: If you select ‘Greedy’ cards such as Annihilation, or things that are rarely taken, your opponent will likely not anticipate that you took them, and after they’re played or scored your opponent won’t be able to use that information against you in future games. Should you score a ‘risky’ card in game 1 of a multigame set, your opponent will know you have it and can work more diligently to counterplay it or work around that effect. Traps are much more easily sprung in game 1, and if you only have 1 game to play, they’re more effective.

“Best of 2” is a semi-common format in Europe these days. In that format draws are more common (as a pairing can end 1-1), and so you’ll need to be much more intentional about tiebreakers. It does have a bit of a middle ground between the two previous ones, as game knowledge can carry over between games so what greedy cards to take and what greedy cards to reveal can be something to think about.

“Best of 3” format, or a ‘standard competitive match’, is a method of tournament in Warhammer Underworlds where a pair of players will play until one player has won two games. As ‘true ties’ in second edition are pretty rare, it’s very likely that the match will either end 2-0 or 2-1, and have a winner and a loser. As discussed above, dice and card variance will be less pronounced. And, perhaps most importantly, ‘better players’ will be able to use information about their opponent they learned in game 1 to counterplay and win more reliably. Gotcha cards might get ya in a one-off game, but unless you fall for it twice they’ll have to beat you another way.

To win a Best of 3, your deck can likely handle a little more ‘clunk’ and bad dice as you can get away with it for one game so long as you win the other two. However, you’ll need to be more careful about taking cards that your opponent can easily deny once they know about them, as that information will eventually be revealed to them and they’ll have that available in future games. As a result, some will says your deck needs to be even more ‘consistent’ as you want to be able to score most of your Objectives every game, even if the opponent knows they’re coming. If you want to win, you’ll also have to be good about noticing those deniable things about their deck and integrating that information into subsequent games. Don’t let them score the same ‘easy to block’ card on you twice!

The last thing to think about in a best of 3 is that you may run up against the clock by the end of a round. You’ll need to play cleaner, faster, and more efficiently to finish your matches in time. Players who can’t play fast risk ending a match on a 1-1 draw and not enough time to play their third game – this seriously hinder your advancement in the standings (and potentially dooms you to ‘draw purgatory’ where you are matched against other slow-ish players and then continue to draw indefinitely). That’s no way to win an event!

Tiebreaker Considerations

Another thing you’ll need to be aware of are the event’s tiebreaker conditions. You might win the same number of matches as other players, and if you can get the higher tiebreaker score, you can come out of top, potentially podium, pr even win the event over somebody else who ‘did as well as you did’.

Certain tiebreakers mean you’re incentivized to play a different way. Maybe you need to play to blow out your opponent, take risky cards, and drive up the total glory because Total Glory and/or Glory Differential are top considerations on the tiebreaker list ranking. Thomas/Saxthom recently won the Palm Springs Open because he took Annihilation and scored it in most of his games, so even though he ended the event tied for first, he came out on top because of higher total glory, which was a top tiebreaker in that event. Knowing this led him to feel it was appropriate to take the card, and as a result he went home a Golden Ticketed player.

Maybe you aren’t as concerned with total glory and just need to make sure you win rather than taking risky plays and can keep some cards secret between rounds since you don’t need to score everything every game to win. You’re more likely to win game 2 if you keep some of your stuff secret and can also feel more comfortable conceding and taking a loss with low glory/big differential if that’s not high up on the tiebreakers list. This allows you to finish your matches on time but also keeps more of your deck secret so you can come back and win 2-1 across a set.

I do want to call out special attention to a common tiebreaker that I personally find absolutely hideous and inappropriate for WHU events, yet GW uses it all the time: Opponent win Percentage or Strength of Schedule. Ideally this works to serve as a ‘who played against stronger people’, but it’s poorly adapted from AoS and does not take into account the many other ways WHU can be tie-broken.

If your event has strength of schedule as your top consideration, there’s very little you can do to influence it. You don’t decide who you play in rounds 1 onward, can’t influence who they play afterward, and to lose a tiebreaker for something totally out of your control is a huge bummer. There is, of course, on very stupid and poor-sportsmanship way to influence it:

Intentionally lose game 2 in a 3 game set if you know you can win. This increases your opponents’ average win rate. Ideally you lose it by 1 glory so your glory differential and glory totals aren’t hampered. Does this sound stupid? Because it is. But if your event has that tiebreaker, there you go.

In a similar vein, if glory total is the tiebreaker (rather than differential or average glory per game) you’re also incentivized to lose game 2. This means you score more total glory since you play more games. This also feels scummy, but this is the contender series and we’re talking about ways to win, not ways to feel good about yourself.

Wrap

There you have it, a short discussion on things to think about when looking over your tournament packet. Obviously, the foundational things in this series will do most of the work for you, and a strong player with good preparation will win more often. That said, you have the ability to influence a few things about that prep and active play if you’re aware of what things might influence your outcome. Build your deck and choose your warband with tiebreakers and best of 3/best of 1 in mind, and you’ll be better positioned to take a top spot in your event.