godswearhats

Sweet! The venue has a bar and restaurant on site and we will have a private room for lunch and dinner during the event.

I've updated the Masters rankings for those that attended Ham Slamwich. Check them out at http://dimensionalcascade.com/NWMasters

Where will you post the results?

This is not a qualifier for the Masters.

Dimensional Cascade Podcast is proud to present King of Cascadia, 2014 This 2-day GT will be held on January 3rd and 4th at the new Mox Boarding House in Bellevue, WA. It is a somewhat unusual event, in that it has two separate events running simultaneously within it. King of Cascadia This invitational pits the top eight ranked players in the Northwest region against each other for the coveted title of King of Cascadia. All eight of these players will have automatically qualified for a spot to represent the region in North Carolina at the US Masters in February. Hero of Cascadia This is the open portion of the GT, with the winner being named Hero of Cascadia and earning the 9th spot in the 10-person roster for the US Masters. There will also be prizes for top 3 in all categories (overall, general, sportsperson, hobbyist) as well as interesting prizes for other tournament related activities (most Dimensional Cascades for instance!). Finally, the Hero of Cascadia portion of the GT is considered a Masters qualifier, and so the highest ranked player (not counting the nine who have already qualified) will win the 10th spot on the Masters squad. Player Pack Both tournaments will be using the US Masters Player Pack and FAQ. However, the one difference is that we will use Best Overall to decide the winner of both tournaments (not Best General). List Submission Deadline All lists must be submitted by Dec 21st, 2014 (which means you must buy your ticket by then too!). Why then? I will need time to validate everyone's Swedish score, and to give people the opportunity to correct any mistakes, all during the holiday season (which, when you have three kids, is quite the season). Questions and comments welcomed! Tickets can be ordered at http://dimensionalcascade.com/KoC priced at $35 each.

Yup.

Yes. Technically the Masters is 6 games (with the 6th straight battle line), but KoC will only be 5.

I thought it might be helpful to let everyone know the last three qualifiers for the US Masters for 2014. Ham Slamwich, November 22nd (Bellingham, WA) SPDM 5: The End Times GT Edition, December 6-7 (Bellevue, WA) King of Cascadia 2014, January 3-4 (Bellevue WA) Ham Slamwich is currently full, so if you're not registered or don't have a 1-day tournament score for 2014 then unfortunately you are not eligible to qualify for the 2014 Masters. For those of you who have been to a 1-day event (SPDMs 3 and 4, OFCC Open or Ham Slamwich), SPDM 5 is the final 2-day event of the year that can earn you a spot to the King of Cascadia Invitational and automatic spot in the US Masters squad. The King of Cascadia tournament is divided up into two parts: the invitational for the top 8 players, and the open "Hero of Cascadia" for everyone else. The winner of the Hero of Cascadia earns the 9th spot on the Masters squad and the highest ranked player in the region (not counting the 9 who have already qualified) after this event picks up the 10th spot. Paul (the NW region advisor) and myself are working on figuring out exactly what the qualifiers will look like for next year. Some of that will be based on how many GTs the Oregon community is running, which in turn is based on the upcoming Ordo elections. Once I have a complete picture, I will post it. US Masters is Feb 21-22, 2015, and the first qualifier for the 2015 season will be the Black Sheep Brawl. ~gwh

These rules will not be forced upon any Masters qualifier in the Northwest Region. However, the King of Cascadia tournament will use the complete Masters rulepack (so that every one of our regional reps gets a 5-game GT under their belts with the exact comp, rules and player pack).

I came back today to post this link, only to find I had been, uh, ninja'd :-)

Correct, it hasn't been published yet. When the player pack is published, I'll make sure and post links on the forum.

We want to try to avoid removing or restricting rules from something unless it is crystal clear that this is the way it's meant to work. With this case, it was clear that there was a lot of ambiguity. We also weighed the potential for abuse / bad play and considered this a very narrow niche (which makes it safer to be more permissive)

Swedish comp is used at the US Masters (and so will also be used at the King of Cascadia tournament). I've actually spent a bunch of time on the Swedish forums (via Google translate) understanding how the comp works over time. The previous point about special characters is not quite accurate, because there are plenty of events that allow them. Any event that ended up being dominated by some kind of SC or SC combo would very quickly get comped - this is version 14 of the comp since 8th edition came out, so it's constantly adjusted and updated roughly once a quarter. As an example, Queek Headtaker is lightly comped in Skaven, but if you upgrade one unit of Stormvermin to be his bodyguard, the comp for that unit DOUBLES. You'll find that very common combos are comped to encourage list diversity. And the main push behind the comp is to discourage certain builds that are considered un-fun by the majority of players (avoidance, unit spam, magic spam, huge steadfast/Unbreakable units, etc.) I'm generally not a fan of comp, but Swedish is something I can absolutely get behind as a way to accurately rate the competitive power of lists.

Dan: hardly surprising considering that the largest 2-day event so far this year was Wet Coast. It'll all change after SPDM 5 :-)

Same goes for King of Cascadia (as they are at the same venue).

The OFCC open was a qualifier for this year, one of the 1-day events. Next year, the intention is that there will only be 2-day events that count toward qualification. If the OFCC Open and OFCC Team Challenge are on different weekends, and the Open expands to a 2-day, then that would probably be sufficient when combined with the Brawl (but one more would be even better!) The remaining qualifiers for 2014 are: Ham Slamwich (1-day, November) SPDM 5 (2-day, December) ----- King of Cascadia (2-day, January) The ratings after those events above the line is what decides the top 8 players who will play off for the title of King of Cascadia (aka Northwest Master), and who automatically get an invite to be on the NW team for US Masters. The winner of the KoC event will also get an automatic invite, as will the next highest ranked player not counting the other 9 who have qualified. (Incidentally, the ticket price from the KoC event will be used to cover the cost of our Masters dues for the region - $350). If any of those 10 cannot attend the Masters in NC, we will go further down the rankings with invites until we have a full squad of 10. The rankings can be seen at http://dimensionalcascade.com/NWMasters

All, I'm putting together the calendar of 2-day tournaments in the Northwest Region that can be used as qualifiers for the US Masters next year. Unfortunately at the moment there is only one being held in Oregon and that is the Black Sheep Brawl in March. There are 3 candidate GTs in Washington (run by the Dimensional Cascade team) and there are 4 potential GTs in the BC area. I want to give Oregonians as equal an opportunity as possible to qualify for the Masters team, but at the same time I don't want to restrict the other regions to just 1 qualifying GT - primarily because bad luck at a given tournament could eliminate otherwise great players, so everyone needs at least a couple of chances to make it. In an ideal world there would be 3 GTs in OR, 3 in WA and 3 in BC, with some way for outreach with AK and ID (whose communities are too small to run their own GTs at the moment). They would be spread out across the year, so that people could attend at times that suited their schedule. Is this possible? Can Ordo run 2 GTs next year, not counting the OFCC, or work with someone in the OR WFB community to do the same? Or is there some other solution that people can come up with that would allow the OR tournament players an equal shot at qualifying, without penalizing players in the other areas? Or (and this is not meant to be a troll question - I genuinely don't know) does the OR community at large not really care about Masters? Do you prefer to play in friendly events like the OFCC?

So, this same debate sparked on the US Masters forum, as it also applies to units of Skirmishers or Fast Cav that have the Slaanesh random move spells cast on them. Being on the Masters FAQ team, I spent a fair amount of time debating this one, and a lot of time researching. The argument that models with Random Movement don't have a Move characteristic and therefore can't reform because of you can only reform up to 2x your Move value seemed good on the surface. However, when we read the rules for Fly, it very clearly states that you can take a normal glide move of 10" or a march move of 20", but it in no way does it change your Move value. This would then mean that a unit of fliers (who get the Skirmishers special rule and can therefore reform as many times as they want) -- let's take Great Eagles with M2 as an example -- would end up only being able to move 4" if they reformed, which is clearly ludicrous. We also looked at the army book entry for Squig Hoppers: they clearly have a Movement characteristic and it is 3d6". In addition, there is the notion that models with Random Movement should be able to perform a Combat Reform, so what should you do in that case? While the FAQ isn't published yet (it will be on Friday I believe), we ended up having to come up with a ruling ... in other words, coming up with what is effectively a new rule that interprets the ambiguous existing rules as best as we can to remove ambiguity while retaining the intent of all the rules. Here's what we decided upon. For Combat Reforms, assume the Move value for the unit is the minimum rollable amount (3" for squig hoppers, 1" for models under the affect of the Slaanesh spells). For "regular" reforms: follow the rules for Random Movement. If at the end of the move the unit is not engaged in combat, it may reform about its center a number of inches equal to twice the minimum rollable distance (so 6" for Squig Hoppers, and 2" for anyone under the Slaanesh spells). Why not let units reform before moving? Because then you can abuse the notion of a reform in order to keep your unit in the same place (e.g. you reform everyone 2" and then you roll a 1-2 and your unit is still in the same spot, thereby negating one of the effects of the spell). The idea is that a unit with Random Movement *must* move. Why let them reform after moving? The rules for Skirmishers and Fast Cavalry clearly state that this is allowed. I'm not saying this is the "right" way or that this is how you should do it. I'm saying this is what we decided upon for the US Masters, and are putting in a document that we hope can be adopted by the larger community as a default tournament pack for what is, as we all know, a highly ambiguous game :-)

Poll should say it all. I'm curious to know what folks in the region think.

Aha, I knew there was a forum I was forgetting for announcements. Oh well. We've since recorded Episodes 6-11, which includes reviews of both Dwarf and Wood Elves army books, as well as a Tournament Zone Special that we recorded on-site at the Wet Coast GT.

This past weekend was Wet Coast GT up in BC, and as you might expect, the rankings are now significantly altered. The latest rankings can be found (always) at: http://dimensionalcascade.com/NWMasters

Can the powers that be please update the the first post in the thread with the latest updates (e.g. for Wood Elves)?

I'll throw it out there that we'd be happy to play all five rounds as challenges if the TOs didn't object :-)

@Team Dice Age: Ricky will also be playing at the Open on Friday, so you might get a chance to face him there. And who knows, maybe the dice gods will throw our two teams together on Sunday :-)

Dimensional Cascade Podcast team accepts challenges from Ordo Alpha, Ordo Omega and Order of the Black Sheep! (I'm not the Captain, but I know he won't mind ;-)) Edit: wow, day 1 sewn up already!