Does veto=Vanquishers? The veto system and its real effect on the meta

 

Does the veto system mean that these guys are going to dominate the meta?

The veto system has become a staple of this edition's tournaments, and likely will remain so next edition. However, it's often maligned as encouraging skew lists. Indeed, that’s seen as the principle downside of veto for many who oppose it and prefer random or pre-selected scenarios. However, the truth is actually a lot more complicated; veto helps some players running skew lists, leaves others pretty unaffected, and actually hinders a third group of skew players. Moreover, this all varies between the three main types of veto systems, and is generally just a lot less consistent than people like to think.

Before we dive into all that though, let’s define a few terms. I know, normally it’s good to save the best bits in the article for the second half, but I’m feeling generous today.

First up is ‘veto’ itself: it’s basically a way of selecting scenarios to play, in which players receive three scenarios to choose from and each ‘veto’ one of them, ending up playing the one that neither vetoed. If both players are smart, then they’ll each veto the scenario that they’re least likely to win in this matchup, leading to a kind of ‘medium’ scenario that both sides have a decent shot at (hopefully). The main difference between the three kinds of veto is how those three scenarios are chosen. They could be from one of the six pools in the Matched Play Guide, or three randomly rolled scenarios, or three pre-selected scenarios that are announced before the event. In any case, players generally play the ‘medium’ scenario from the three on offer.

Next up is ‘skew’, which I believe encompasses both hyper-elite lists– like the Vanquishers of the Necromancer or Breaking of the Fellowship– and full-horde lists like Goblin Town or Army of Laketown. It also probably captures massed gunlines like Assault on Helm’s Deep, mobility skew like Dark Denizens, and generally anything that’s far from a generic ‘2-3 combat heroes, a banner, and 30-40 models’ kind of list. The key aspect of skew is not anything specific about the models it takes, but rather that it has some really bad scenarios and matchups and some really good ones as well. I'll be mostly discussing skew in the context of hero-heavy lists this article, but bear in mind throughout that everything here applies as easily to Goblin Town as to the Vanquishers.

Putting these two terms together, let’s look at a fun hypothetical: three players taking Breaking of the Fellowship to two tournaments, one with random scenarios and one with veto.

First hypothetical: random scenarios

Three different players take this list to a tournament. Do any of them have a good time?

In this hypothetical, three friends are all taking Breaking of the Fellowship to a local tournament, because they hate themselves and don’t like having fun (see this tournament report for why I don’t like Breaking of the Fellowship). The scenarios are randomly selected, and they all have the same (boring, bad) list. The three players, however, are not equal: Veteran Vanessa regularly podiums at tournaments, Medium Michael generally goes 2-1 or 1-2, and Noob Nelly is here for the hobby side of things and generally loses most of her games. Let’s see how they do!

In the first round, all three are playing Contest of Champions. That’s an awesome matchup for them, and all three Aragorns get enough kills to seal the deal before the enemy leader can track down Merry and Pippin. Our three friends all pick up major wins!

Next up is Reconnoitre, however, and things rapidly go south. The enemy armies all outnumber them by miles, and manage to swarm off the board edge in force. Vanessa pulls off some clever plays to break the enemy and kill their leader, so only cops a minor loss, but the other two take major losses. Sad.

Finally, in round three the gang are all playing Domination, and there’s a lot more spread. Vanessa carves through her opponent and manages to take out a major win, while Michael scrapes through to a minor win and poor Nelly spread her models out too much and gets minced.

At the end of the day, that leaves Vanessa and Michael on 2-1 and Nelly on 1-2. Vanessa is probably a bit down about that, while Michael is happy enough and Nelly is hyped that she got a win.

Now, let’s change it up and see how veto affects things.

 

Second hypothetical: pool veto

In this alternate reality, everything is the same except that the scenarios are actually being vetoed from the Matched Play pools.

In Round 1, the gang are now playing Pool 4 – the killing scenarios. After vetoing To the Death, all three players end up playing Lords of Battle instead. For Vanessa, that’s perfectly fine, and she gets a rapid leg up on the kill tally to take a solid major win. Michael also does pretty well, but Frodo’s death means he gets broken for a minor win. Poor Nelly, however, gets torn apart as the enemy heroes Heroic Combat through her Hobbits, and rapidly comes to realise quite how many points Frodo and Sam can contribute to the enemy’s wound tally. She makes a good go of it, but takes a minor loss.

In Round 2, everyone is playing Pool 5, and thus gets to veto Reconnoitre. That ends up putting them on Divide and Conquer, which is enough of a step up for Vanessa to eke out a win after Marching to the middle with everyone. Michael and Nelly do still go down, but by less, ending up on minor losses after not quite flipping the central objective.

Finally, Round 3 is on Pool 2, and vetoing Domination gets everyone to Breakthrough instead. It’s much the same as Domination really, and everyone does about as well as in the first hypothetical: Vanessa takes home a decent win, Michael scrapes through and Nelly can’t quite bring the numbers back and loses solidly.

Pictured: Breaking of the Fellowship struggles to hold onto a central objective

Compare the pair

Comparing the two hypotheticals, we get some mixed results.

On the one hand, Vanessa did much better with the veto selection than with random scenarios. She still handily won her easiest pool, and had better odds in the hardest pool, which she was able to leverage into a win. That put her on three wins overall, and means she may well podium.

Michael did about the same in both hypotheticals. Being a strictly average player, he still won in his easiest pool, and still lost in his hardest pool. This man is probably pretty happy with the result, but it could have easily been a 1-2 in either hypothetical.

Finally, Nelly actually does worse with veto than without. Her near-auto-win Contest of Champions was taken away and replaced by a favourable-but-not-guaranteed Lords of Battle, which she (being less experienced) couldn’t quite convert into a win. And she still lost her other games, despite not having to play Reconnoitre.

Pictured: Breaking of the Fellowship getting absolutely stomped

Now, obviously this is just a hypothetical set of players and scenarios. But the results do align with my experience playing skew lists, and veto more generally. Veto favours skew lists if you’re a top player, doesn’t do much if you’re average, and actually weakens you if you’re inexperienced. Veto makes skew lists more likely to win the tournament, but also makes them more likely to get wooden spoon.

Another way of looking at this: with random scenarios, skew lists tend to end up towards the centre. In this hypothetical, for example, three players of quite different skill levels all ended up either 2-1 or 1-2. Veto, on the other hand, spread them out from 3-0 to 2-1 and 0-3. Under veto, skew lists tend to get results similar to ‘ordinary’ armies, while random scenarios tends to clump them into the middle brackets (in the long run; it can also lead to tournaments where you happen to roll mostly killing scenarios and love your life, as in this throwback tournament report, or to tournaments where you roll no killing scenarios and life sucks. In any case, it's clumping all the skew players somewhere).

So, does all of this mean that veto is good for skew lists? It really depends what we mean when we say that. Veto likely has a negligible outcome on the win rates of skew lists; trading their 80/20 games for 60/40 games roughly makes up for trading their 20/80 games for 40/60 games. However, it does make them more likely to win events, which may make them more popular at the top end.

Of course, this whole time we’ve been discussing veto systems as if they’re all pool veto (i.e. as if we’re vetoing from the pools set out in the Matched Play Guide). But what effect do the other two ways of vetoing have?

Vetoing from random pools works roughly the same as pool veto in terms of win rates and chance to podium. Sometimes it will produce pools with multiple scenarios heavily favouring the skew, and sometimes it will produce pools with multiple scenarios favouring the opponent. If anything, I’d argue it tends more towards ‘balanced’ matchups, because it doesn’t have set pools that are exclusively killing/mobility scenarios.

Vetoing from pre-released pools, on the other hand, has the same effect as having pre-set scenarios for each round. If those scenarios are heavily mobility-focussed, then that will heavily favour mobility-skew (e.g. Dark Denizens or maybe Goblin Town) and heavily disfavour killing-skew (e.g. the Vanquishers or Fellowship). On the other hand, I recently attended a tournament with the following pools:

Some very good pools for the Vanquishers

Needless to say, the Vanquishers cleaned up pretty comfortably there.

The takeaway here is that having pre-set pools doesn’t itself favour skew lists, it’s that any set of pre-set scenarios (whether they’re scenario pools or just single scenarios) will skew the meta if they’re not balanced. If your 3-round tournament has 3 killing scenarios, then the Vanquishers will flourish. If it has 6 killing scenarios across 3 pools for veto, then they will flourish in exactly the same way.

 

What does veto actually do?

Hopefully I’ve convinced you at this point that veto doesn’t artificially make skew lists better, but rather spreads them out from being concentrated in the middle-bands of tournaments.

Whether this is a good thing or not is fairly subjective. Do you think players should have to field 30-40 warriors, a banner, some fast models and a couple of combat heroes in order to podium? And on the flipside, do you think lists that don’t look like this should tend to clump around the mid-tables regardless of player skill? That first stance is defensible, and so is the second one to a lesser extent.

Veto does have some other effects on the game, however.

First– and biggest– is that it reduces the number of blowout games. In our hypothetical above, the three Fellowship players went from having a single competitive game in Round 3 after playing Contest in Round 1 and Reconnoitre in Round 2, to having 3 relatively-competitive games with the veto system. That’s obviously just a hypothetical, but I think it’s inarguable that veto makes you less likely to play scenarios that are heavily slanted towards either side. To my mind, that’s just a good thing, regardless of your stance on skew lists generally.

Second is that it can allow lists to be designed without taking into account a specific scenario. The classic example is lists that don’t have a combat hero as their leader getting to auto-veto Contest. To an extent, this is also a subjective issue that you could approve or disapprove of; should lists that take Galadriel, or Sharkey, or Saruman, just auto-lose every 18^th game? Some people would say yes, because those lists have received the benefit of a safer leader in other games. Others would say that we’re artificially nerfing certain iconic models and arbitrarily restricting the options available to competitive players. Either of these stances seem valid to me. This issue is kind of a broader one with the Matched Play Guide more generally, so I'll be addressing it in its own article in the next few months before the new edition drops.

Galadriel certainly prefers when she doesn't need to get into combat

I will note, however, that Galadriel never having to play Contest is much less of an issue for random-pool-veto than for Matched-Play-veto. Yes, Lothlorien is probably fine vetoing Contest when the other choices are Lords and To the Death. But what about when the other two choices happen to be Reconnoitre, or Capture and Control? Now the Lothlorien player is having to make serious choices, and is suffering a real downside for having taken a weak leader. This is one of a few reasons why I personally favour random veto, because it does inject a bit of unpredictability into the missions. And in any case, having a scenario that you have to veto is always a downside, because it allows your opponent to pick the better of the other two options available to them.

Thirdly, veto increases the gap between players of different skill/experience levels by adding an extra (and very significant) decision at the start of the game. Again, this is a very subjective effect: how regularly should an experienced player beat a newbie? Everyone agrees that it shouldn’t be guaranteed, and everyone agrees that it should happen more often than not, but between those views is a wide spectrum of opinions. Veto has an impact on this, but I don’t think it’s a massive one either way.

Finally, arguably the biggest downside of veto isn’t related to individual games at all, but to a collective scene: if you only play veto, then realistically you won’t be playing certain scenarios very often. Contest of Champions will very often be one player’s worst scenario, so you’ll never get to play it. Same deal with Reconnoitre, or (to a lesser extent) Command the Battlefield. Scenarios that heavily skew to favouring certain armies just won’t get played very often. And scenarios that are just a bit crap, like Storm the Camp or Heirlooms, will also sometimes get vetoed because people don't like them. In the long run, that means you'll get less variety in your games. 

It turns out that I've played Fog of War at tournaments a lot, and have literally no photos from games of Reconnoitre

From the perspective of any given game, that’s probably a good thing; less skewed games (and not playing Storm the Camp!) is an improvement, after all. But if you’re going to dozens of tournaments in a year, then I see the argument that it decreases the variety of the experience if they’re all using veto and you never play Contest.

Of course, this isn’t an argument against veto per se, but rather an argument for variety; if 2/3 of all tournaments were veto then you’d still get to play Contest or Reconnoitre at the other 1/3. And I agree that not all tournaments should use the veto system, because diminishing returns do start to bite there.

So, should tournaments use veto?

It’s probably clear by this point that I like veto, and am particularly keen on random-pool veto. I don’t enjoy games where I feel like I lost at deployment, and equally don’t get much out of games where I felt like I had to mess up badly to lose. It’s much harder to learn from your losses when the main lesson was ‘don’t play To the Death against an Elf pike-block’, and it’s similarly hard to grow as a player from stomping people in one-sided games. Veto means I’m likely to have less of these experiences, and I appreciate that.

However, that’s not the point of this article. There are reasons that someone can legitimately oppose the use of the veto system, or at least be in favour of variety in tournament structure.

What this article really wants to clarify are what those legitimate reasons are. You can be annoyed that Lothlorien gets a free pass on Contest of Champions, but complaining that the Vanquishers become overpowered in veto is misunderstanding its real effect.

Pictured: the Vanquishers absolutely shredding an Angmar list without the benefit of veto

I hope you enjoyed this exploration of one of the great discussion topics of our time. Veto is always going to be a controversial topic, and I’d appreciate if the comments section stayed relatively polite. Try to keep people's grandmothers out of your first response, at least. 

In saying that, I would love to hear your views. Are there other effects on the meta from veto that I’m missing? Do you think only ‘conventional’ lists should be allowed to win (or lose) tournaments? I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time, may you always get a balanced scenario!