AUSTRALIAN TEAM CHAMPS - a captains log by Mitch Cowan, leader of Team NZ North. Not a fly guy. But a shy guy. The kinda guy. Who will always be mine (Pt.1)

I really have no direction, rhyme or reason that I was going with the title and music video, except that I started humming it while I was copy and pasting text and writing the title. Except maybe that its book-ended by Will Smith and Martin Lawrence from Bad Boys, and just like them our boys from NZ North showed up gun blazing. Michael Aue Bey fuhuhuhu!

Mitch Cowan, the captain of the NZ North has kindly shared an account of his experiences and thoughts being a member of one of the two NZ teams that ventured to the Australian Team Champs for the first time. Cheers Mitch, and without further ado, here are his words to chuck into your eyeholes:

For those interested just thought I'd give an idea of how the matchup process played out over the weekend for NZ North (AKA Team funsies).

The process itself was pretty straight forward:

Basics are one team got to pick 2 matchups and tables games would be payed on while the other team got to pick 3 matchups.

My initial thoughts were that the B team would have an advantage being able to chose the first 2 matchups as well as all of the tables. As the weekend played out it seemed the A team being able to decide 3 of the matchups was super important when the teams were evenly matched or if you had a lot of bad matchups.

The week before the tournament lists of the teams were made public. So we went through each set of lists individually and gave an opinion of the matchup.

Round 1 - ACT - Destruction

Team	Opponent	Expectation	Result
Mitch, eKrueger	Ed Sykes, eSorscha	Good	Win
Pete, eKaya	James Moorhouse, Bradigus	Bad	Loss
Nikola, pVayl	Taylor Dean, pDoomie	Bad	Win
Charlie, eFeora	Chris Johnson, Ossrum	Neutral	Win
Chas, pHaley	Aaron Harwood, eDenny	Good	Loss

I felt we did ok in the matchups but I did go too fast during the process. Didn't repeat this again thankfully and was saved by some excellent play from the team.

Winning the dice off I put myself forward into a choice of Moorhouse or Ed Sykes. Taking the Khador matchup I then put forward my special Bradigus weapons Mr Pete and Chas esq.

Moorhouse took the Circle matchup and put forward Cryx and Trolls. Was surprised to see Cryx, but looking at the rest of the potential matchups the cryx players options weren't very good against our team and he must have been thrown to the wolves on this one.

So Cygnar gets the green lit Cryx matchup leaving Charlie and Nikola to be paired with Mercs and Trolls respectively.

Moorhouse tried to get into our heads early after matchup selection with something along the lines of 'How do you guys felt that went? Cus we have 5 greens'

Personally I was confident we had at least 2 solid games from the get go, myself and Chas, based on our matchup preferences. Nikola didn't want to take on the Madrak2 list but it ended up being Doomie Runes of War so there we got another green after list selection.

Pete was drawing the short straw but it was actually the matchup we wanted against Moorhouse's 8 Watcher Bradigus list. Cus if anyone could drop a random list into that caster for the first time and take it out, my money would be on Pete. Alas he could not, making a key mistake I know he wouldn't make ever again (Pete's pro tip: 'Don't give Bradigus free synergy stacks on shifting stones kids!').

Charlie and Nikola both played excellent games to take their opponents down. While I was putting the big hurt on Sorscha2 with Kruegs I nearly went down to a last ditch wind rush assassination, thankfully it failed.  Chas nearly got there with pHaley vs eDenny but couldn't remove the dastardly Withershadow for the win. Still 3-2 and we definitely had made our mark taking down the #2 team from the previous year.

Onwards and upwards for team Kiwi Fun team!

Round 2 - Victoria - Close Quarters

Team	Opponent	Expectation	Result
Nikola, pVayl	Jamie Saxon, pGrissel	Bad	Win
Mitch, eKrueger	Dan Schmidt, 3Butcher	Good	Loss
Charlie, Harbinger	Luke Henry, pSkarre	Good	Win
Chas, eHaley	Matt Hickling, pSorscha	Good	Win
Pete, pMorv	Nick Owen, eLylith	Good	Win

After the last game against Trolls, Nikola was pretty confident he could take down the troll list so when given the opportunity we matched him up there to take away the only truly terrible matchup for the rest of the team.

I can't remember the order pairing was done this time around, but for every put forward we were just able to pick better matchups as we had the right tools across everyones lists. We were ready for eLylith and Cryx just wasn't going to work against our teams set.

If I hadn't died to that bastard Butcher3 we'd have taken down another respectable AU team 5-0. That said we were of course stoked to take a 4-1 win and continue the momentum.

Round 3 - South Australia - Fire Support

Team	Opponent	Expectation	Result
Charlie, Harbinger	Jerry Mason, pButcher	Good	Win
Mitch, eKrueger	Nic Equid, Borka	Good	Win
Nikola, eVayl	Jason Ly, Goreshade3	Good	Win
Pete, pMorv	Marty Kay, Terminus	Good	Win
Chas, eHaley	Sean Stevens, eKrueger	Bad	Win

Our estimation of this team was pretty much how the results show. We simply had the goods in list pairs and we had a lot of coverage.

Having no clue as to the skill level of the cast majority of the field we were free to just think about the matchup phase based on conversations in the dojo. I'm confident this mentality really served us well throughout the weekend. We only focused on the list pairs rather than any extra player info that might skew expectations.

Coming out of this matchup process I was happy we had solid games against all of our opponents and it showed with the 5-0 record.

Round 4- Western Australia - Incoming

Team	Opponent	Expectation	Result
Pete, eKaya	Aaron Thompson, eVyros	Good	Win
Charlie, Harbinger	David Bray, 3Nemo	Good	Loss
Nikola, eVayl	Chris Swain, Terminus	Good	Win
Chas, eHaley	Ryan King, Lucant	Bad	Loss
Mitch, eKrueger	Nic Chapman, Jarl	Bad	Win

When we were looking at the lists a week out from the event, this team was marked across the board as a really tough set of lists for our team. Aaron T was rocking a super scary 30 Strike force Ravyn list and we just didn't know what to make of the Cygnar they were bringing to the table. There were a lot of hard counters on all sides of this matchup.

If I had one achievement as captain for the weekend, it would be this round of pairing.

Wining the roll and putting myself forward the Troll and Retribution lists were presented. With both being serious problems for our team I took the Trolls. This freed up Nikola for 4 green matchups across their lineup and Charlie from the prospect of Harbinger being shot to death by 30 pointy eared bastards (as a former Ret player I say this with no love. That unit is trash, as are Sentinels). 

It also put us in the most glorious position to place Pete, the hardest of hard counters to the Ret player, and Nikola's Vayl fun times circus in front of their captain.

Their captain, being that Ret player, took the most amount of time choosing which flavour of bad to pair with. Apparently he hates Legion (this can be understood) and chose to take on Pete. Oh happy day!

We then ended up with the matchups above. The scenario was one where I felt Chas could take down Lucant with eHaley so the Red matchup expectation wouldn't reflect this, so I felt a win might be on the cards there. That game came down to a boosted 10 with rerolls not connecting.

Tragedy stuck again when Charlie was caught out by 3Nemo's feat and a key chain lightening which the book should have not allowed. Charlie won't be caught out again by this and definitely took something away from the game. He was tabling his opponent before this happened.

Pete pulled through as expected leaving his opponent needing 'time to seethe'. What a champ.

Nikola assassinating Terminus made it 2-2 with my result to come in.

My opponent surprised me by dropping Jarl into Krueger. It was a meat mountain style list which had Jarls feat as a delivery system. Pretty scary stuff when you factor in Quicken, but he couldn't get any work done with Jarl and Ghetorix did too much work next to a gallows grove. Krueger took it out on scenario turn 4.

3-2 and team NZ Fun Squad goes through to the second day undefeated. We were told our matchup for the next morning would be our Southern counterparts. It would have to happen some time, but we were riding high and ready to take them down. We spent a relaxed evening having dinner and drinks with NZ south and then back to the hotel for some classic Monty Python.

Next post will finish up the remaining 3 rounds and some final thoughts on how NZ North worked as a team.