Vanilla Nomads at MOAB

This is a summary of all the playtesting I did of my vanilla nomads lists in the lead-up to the Mother of All Battles 2018 (MOAB) in Sydney. I should note that I have been trying to make a list like this work for ages. Like at least 18 months. If you go back in the blog you'll see a lot of discussion of it. It has never quite come together. That changed a bit with Tunguska. The heckler with Red Fury filled a huge hole in Nomads, namely the sweeper piece. In the past I was having to use zeros with combis to kill stuff in the late game. Now I have this much more reliable killer. The heckler with jammer and fastpanda filled another huge hole - deployable repeaters in the midfield. Together, these guys also increased the camo shell game substantially. Finally, Mary problems gives you a potent hacker with an ideal device (HD+ is wasted without REMS and AD), and she can deploy straight into the midfield to score and never drain orders. So when this rundown begins I am working with an infowar list that you can see in the second post, below.

Tunguska drops and Nomads work...kind of

So Tunguska is out. I will do a full analysis shortly. In the meantime, some quick updates to my recent post about making nomads work.

Onyx lists

Onyx has to be one of the best factions right now. They have average matchups against the other top factions (Marut with TO snipers is especially bad), but there is so much raw power in the faction. They were good before, but with Kernau they've improved dramatically.

Trying to make Nomads work

I’m a bit bored with Infinity. I’ve played just about every faction (excepting Pan-Oceania outside of military orders, and TAGs don’t really excite me) and none of them really do it for me. I can rarely sustain enthusiasm for a faction for more than 2 months. More importantly, the more point-and-click strategies seem to have the advantage at the moment. Link teams with a few good support pieces, especially defensive ones, crush it. This sort of first-order optimal strategy does not give way to more nuanced tactics that require skill to exploit effectively. The skill requirement is there in things like Hassassins, but the payoff is not. 

Tunguska speculation

White noise is going to get me to do an interview with them to dissect Tunguska when they drop. In preparation for that, I've been thinking about the sectorial a bit. Here are some thoughts on what they would need to be viable.

Druze tactics and playtesting

Alright let's dive right in. Druze have a couple of things going for them:

How to beat Tohaa

As a farewell to the artichokes (I almost never play a faction again after I've taken it to a major tournament), I thought I'd write up the stuff that scared me the most while I was running them. People say Tohaa are OP. While symbiomates are indeed broken (in the sense that they undermine some of the core mechanics of the game), the rest of Tohaa is really manageable. The reason why they seem broken to people is that the meta currently (or has been) plays right into their strengths.

Let me start an explanation by looking at things that are really scary to Tohaa