In the edition changeover, one thing that everyone could agree on was that banners mattered more than ever. To start with, they were worth VPs in 3/6 scenarios, as opposed to the 3/18 scenarios previously. And they were overall worth 3 times as many VPs as before, so they were clearly much more of a priority.
While the Matched Play Guide has reduced the impact of both of those things (simple banner VPs are now in 9 of 24 scenarios, and are worth a little less than 1/18 VPs), they’re still noticeably more valuable than last edition. As such, it seems a reasonable conclusion that a banner is an essential part of competitive army lists. After all, this game is fundamentally about earning VPs, and armies without access to banners can’t access a percentage of the VPs on offer. How can an army be competitive if it starts the game down on the things that determine the winner?
Theoretical meets practical
This analysis is compelling, but it has some issues. First, it doesn’t stand up to statistical analysis. A sizeable chunk of the strongest armies of the edition so far are ones that can’t (or often won’t) field a banner, including both kinds of Moria, both kinds of Eagles, Halls of Thranduil and even Men of the West (which seems to forgo the banner quite often). If these armies have been winning without banner access, then it can’t be too essential.
Moreover, my own relatively small sample size of games recorded in Tabletop Admiral (a couple of hundred this edition) don’t support the importance of banner at all. To summarise what I wrote in this previous article, I have had exactly one game all edition where the winning margin was less than the number of banner VPs on offer. That is, I’ve only played a single game all edition where banner VPs could have flipped the result. And indeed, that game was one where both sides did start with banners, I just managed to kill my opponent’s one in the final turn. So I’ve played exactly 0 games this edition where an army not starting with a banner directly caused them to lose.
Moreover, the army that started ahead on banner VPs ended up winning significantly less than half of the games I’ve played this edition, which was unexpected. If we took that result seriously then it would mean that having a banner actually makes you less likely to win, which seems silly.
While I’d caution again against placing too much emphasis on those results (small sample sizes and skewing factors are both very impactful here), it’s clear that banner VPs are a bit less impactful in practice than they seem in theory.
Using these boys (and no banner) has definitely skewed the stats a bit for me
To see why, we’ll dive into what impact banner VPs can have on the game, and then a few factors that make them more or less significant in different matchups. Hopefully, by the end of it we will have a better perspective on the ways that banners actually do change a matchup.
Will the VPs flip the score?
Let's look at a hypothetical game of To the Death between a Depths list and a Minas Morgul list. The Orcs almost certainly have a banner, and Depths can’t without Legacies, so what impact does that banner have?
In theory, it could be worth 4 VPs at the end, and thus turn a tight loss into a tight win. Assuming that the Balrog isn’t able to get into the banner, that could be the difference-maker in a really close game.
In practice though, I find that the score differential in most games of To the Death tends to be much higher than 4VPs. Because all of the VPs are for killing the enemy in different ways, whichever army has things go their way in the melee tends to pick up the break/unbroken VPs, the quartering VPs, and some number of VPs for killing enemy heroes/the general. That’s particularly likely here, because the Depths army can’t be broken except by crippling the Balrog.
As such, while it is possible for the 4 banner VPs to be the difference maker, there are many more permutations of scoring in which the banner only turns a major loss into a minor one, or a tight win into a blowout.
And of course, that’s all assuming that the Balrog isn’t able to bully its way through the lines to fell the banner, or to yank it in with a flaming whip. The games in which Minas Morgul break are particularly likely to see the banner slain, but it’s honestly quite plausible in any version of the matchup.
This is all borne out by the analysis of my previous games of this edition, where the difference in VPs in To the Death has tended to be much higher than the 4 on offer for banners. So it seems that in terms of directly determining the winner, banners generally have a peripheral impact.
Will the VPs flip the engagement?
However, starting the game ahead on VPs has more effect than just the potential to end the game with more VPs. It can also change how the game is played prior to that.
In particular, it is often pointed out that banners can force aggression from one side, allowing their opponents to dictate the engagement. This could allow a horde army to draw out their opponents into the open, or an elite army to force the fight to take place in a chokepoint. Where a banner does have this effect, it’s a really significant benefit that can make a list substantially more powerful.
The problem with this reasoning is that it neglects the other two factors that can determine who gets to ‘pick the engagement’: objectives and shooting. In terms of objectives, a large majority of missions in the game already incentivise lists to move towards their opponent. Sure, if you have a banner and your opponent doesn’t then you could theoretically sit back in Destroy the Supplies and enjoy your 4VPs. But in doing so you are forfeiting the ability to push towards the opponent’s supplies, making it much easier for them to access the 10VPs on offer for the supplies. Indeed, of the 9 missions that give banner VPs (10 if you count Storm the Camp, which only gives banner VPs if you manage to take your opponent’s camp with your banner), only To the Death doesn’t have objectives that you’ll want to move towards your opponent to claim. Clash by Moonlight is the next most plausible, but even it now has a central objective that’s worth as much as having a banner when your opponent doesn’t.
Given this, armies are only really encouraged to hang back and coast on their banner VPs in To the Death (yet another reason it’s one of the worst scenarios in the game).
Moreover, even in this scenario (and Clash), this is only true when both sides have similar shooting output. Minas Morgul v Depths may actually be a good example of this: neither list has traditionally brought enough shooting to win the game that way, so the decision as to who commits first may be forced by the presence of the banner.
But in most matchups of To the Death or Clash, ‘who has to commit’ will be determined more by who has better shooting than whether an army is starting the game up on VPs. In my last game at Clash, for example, I started the game with an edge on VPs because of my second banner, but was nonetheless forced to sprint at Kylie’s Lothlorien because she could out-shoot me. If I had opted to sit back and take advantage of my banner VPs, Kylie would have slowly crept forward till I couldn’t hide anymore, while gradually shooting away my models one by one. It’s possible that I could have kept that dance going for long enough to avoid being broken, but all it would have taken would have been a single arrow getting through on Ugluk, or one of my Captains/banners being sniped out, or just enough Uruks dying that she could have charged and broken me in combat, and everything would have fallen apart. I had the edge in banner VPs, but because I didn’t have the shooting edge I was forced to fight on Kylie’s terms anyway. And if I had had the shooting advantage, then Kylie would have needed to come to me regardless of banner VPs.
So in terms of setting the engagement, banners only really work in 1 or possibly 2 of the 24 scenarios, and only when both sides have similar levels of shooting. That’s really not a great argument for their significance.
So how big a deal are banner VPs?
You could be forgiven for reading those last two sections and concluding that banners are hardly worthwhile including. But I think that would be a mistake, because they are still valuable – just a lot less valuable than people often think.
After all, banner VPs will still occasionally swing a game’s outcome, or at least move it from a major loss to a minor one, and both of those things are valuable to access when they don’t come at too great a price. Exactly how big of a difference it makes does depend somewhat on the army you’re fielding, however.
To start with, fielding a banner is a much bigger deal if you’re an army that tends to only win or lose by small margins. That particularly catches lists that like to shoot and kite for as long as possible, because (as we touched on in this article) spending a lot of time at range tends to decrease the margin of victory, even as it increases its reliability. It can also apply to lists that fundamentally struggle to prevent their opponent getting some VPs, such as lists with vulnerable leaders, warriors that tend to break or a model-count that’s insufficient to contest every objective. Breaking of the Fellowship can theoretically win Destroy the Supplies or Escort the Wounded, for example, but it’s going to struggle to prevent the enemy getting enough VPs to keep the score close. As such, it’s likely to have more close games that could be swung by banner VPs. And finally, armies that win slowly (e.g. a 70-model Moria horde) are more likely to win small than big, and thus less likely to claw back a 2-4VP deficit in a timed game.
The other big factor here is how reliably your list can snipe enemy banners. If you brought along a Dragon with Breath Fire, then it’s probably fine not to have a banner because your opponent won’t have one by the end of the game either. Same deal for lists with lots of monsters (Barge is extremely good for taking down banner bearers), spellcasters, or other ways to reach behind or break apart an enemy’s battlelines. Lists like this tend to be less bothered by their lack of banner VPs, because they can at least mitigate the impact easily enough. Of course, it will still be better to have access to those VPs than not, regardless of whether you can kill the enemy’s banner bearer. But where it’s either impossible or a significant trade-off (Moria’s 75-point Drums spring to mind), that’s much more tolerable where you can remove the benefit from your opponent. Eagles don’t really need banner VPs because they’ll kill the enemy banner 9 times out of 10, but poor old Army of Thror… won’t.
And finally, as we touched on earlier, the relevance of banner access is impacted by how strong your shooting is. Halls of Thranduil doesn’t really care about its lack of banner because in To the Death or Clash by Moonlight the enemy is absolutely going to be forced to engage on their terms anyway. What’s the alternative, getting shot by 15 Elf archers and Legolas every turn? On the flipside, Depths also doesn’t care that much, because it is going to need to run at any list in those scenarios anyway.
Where the lack of banner really hurts is for lists like Numenor, who can field enough shooting that they want to make use of it but not enough to really win the game on its own. 10 Numenor archers will win shooting wars against Reclamation lists with 6 Rangers, but will they do so fast enough to make the Reclamation player commit into you? Chances are that if both sides snipe at each other from range for 2 hours in To the Death, they’ll be left with an easy 4:0 victory for Gondor.
In summary, banner VPs are less necessary if you tend to win/lose by large margins, can reliably snipe enemy banners, and have either devastating or negligible shooting. And conversely, banner access is a bigger deal for lists that often have tight games, struggle to hunt down enemy banners, and have a medium amount of shooting.
What about banner rerolls?
A final note is the relevance of banner rerolls. Banners obviously don’t just provide VPs, they also let models reroll duel rolls. As with the VPs, this is made more or less relevant by many characteristics of the army.
To start with, it should be obvious that being unable to access a real banner is less significant if you already have most of your models covered by banner effects. Pre-Depths may not have been able to get banner VPs outside of Legacies, but it always had banner rerolls on its Goblins so it hardly cared. And even Men of the West is a bit lukewarm on taking a banner because it has a 6” banner effect from Aragorn. Eagles would honestly love banner rerolls (maybe they could hold a banner in their little beaks?), but for reasons of balance and logic we have been saved from that.
Less obviously, banner rerolls are better on high-Fight models, because their duel roll is almost always relevant (whereas the duel roll of low-Fight model is often irrelevant because their opponent has gotten a 6). They're also likely to be rolling less dice in fights on average, and thus have the rerolls 'save the day' more often. As such, not being able to access a banner or banner effect is a much bigger deal for these lists than for hordes. Again, picture that hypothetical Fledgling banner bearer and weep.
Another relevant consideration when assessing how much a list wants banner rerolls is its balance of damage output versus durability. Where a list hits hard and is especially fragile, each lost duel matters more because it’s more likely to convert into a kill. As such, access to a banner reroll will result in a significant increase in enemy casualties and a corresponding decrease in your own. Whereas more durable and less hard-hitting lists will benefit less from the banner reroll in absolute terms (i.e. models killed/saved per turn).
Banner rerolls are also a bigger deal the more fights that they’re affecting, and the less dice you’re rolling in each one (as we covered in this article). Easterlings actually get less benefit than you’d think from the Emperor’s banner reroll, because they tend to already roll lots of dice in each fight (making the reroll less likely to flip the result of a fight) and want to be limiting the number of fights per turn. Whereas Lurtz’ Scouts are rarely rolling more than 1-2 dice per fight, and are aiming to leverage their mobility to break the battle up into heaps of 1-on-1 fights. As such, they have more incentive to field multiple banners than more battleline-focused lists.
And finally, some lists are just strapped for points. Men of the West is the example I keep coming back to, because at some points levels the list struggles so much to get up its numbers that competitive players will leave the banner at home. Is it better to have a Captain of Gondor and a banner bearer, or Legolas? The banner is nice, but Legolas is really nice.
Putting this all together, we see that banner rerolls are more valuable for high-Fight lists, armies with a strong glass-cannon focus, lists that want to fight in broken-up combat, and armies that can fit in good numbers even with one or more banners.
So should you field a banner?
Ultimately, this question hardly needs answering: banners are good, and almost any list that can take a normal 25-point banner should do so. I’d argue that the 75-point Moria Drum remains too expensive for most Moria lists (Moria listbuilding could basically be its own article, but suffice to say I think a lot of players are doing it very wrong), and I do see the argument for leaving the banner at home in certain skew builds. But as a whole, if you can take a banner then you absolutely should.
Perhaps the more interesting question is when you should field two banners. And this is where the analysis of how much you care about banner VPs and rerolls has its real value. The more you care about rerolling duel dice and starting ahead in some scenarios, the more you will be inclined to field a second banner. It’s this analysis that has led to me taking multiple banners in all my 600-point Ugluk’s Scouts lists, because both the VPs and the rerolls were especially useful to me.
And finally, should you write off a list because it can’t access a banner? Nah. Banners are good, and not being able to access them is a downside. But it’s honestly not that big a deal, and is just one concern amongst many that you should be considering in your listbuilding (as I touched on in this article). If my experience is any indication, you are unlikely to ever lose a game just because your army couldn’t access a banner.
Is this your experience? Have you lost/won games due to having a banner? I’d love to hear from you, especially if you have a data pool you’re willing to share on how often banners have influenced your games.
Until next time, may you always avoid playing To the Death!
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