Human Playbook?

[nazgob]

Well, now that I have some time, here goes.

I have only run this build once, and that was at casenwydd back in februrary, but i'm pretty sure my comments will apply for league as well, at least at low TVs. My build was as follows:

4 blitzers
1 thrower
1 ogre
4 catchers
1 lineman (may have been 2, can't remember if it was 1.1 or 1.15)
2rrs

It was a bit risky, but I wanted to experiment with the speed and the dodge. Please remember that rerolls are not important for this team. At all. With all that catch, block, dodge, sure hands and pass, I find that you can survive with 2. Or 2 and a leader reroll if you're desperate (as I said, tourneys).

The other thing is that you are sacrificing the normal strengths of the humans - their flexibility. Or at least, how it's normally viewed. Your team's speed is second only to skaven and wood elves, but they can no longer contest the norse or even the zons or, on a bad day, the pro/high elves in strength.

The first thing to notice was the speed. My first game was a gainst norse and I was able to completely outrun him. His dice did help me quite a bit, but a combination of kick and MA8 was deadly. If you're thinking of taking 4 catchers, kick is a must. You have to utilise your biggest strength - the speed. I belive it was 6 nil - a text book example of bad dice and MA6 against high speed and nuffle's blessing.

I lost my next game against diamond joe and his lizards. I could keep upwith the skinks, but simply had no hope at contesting the strength battle.

The third was against eski and his humans. A more typical tournament build I think, as he had only one catcher and several more rerolls/substitutes. And I struggled to outrun him. And then mighty blow targeted the catchers. And I really struggled to outrun him. Basically, the game came down to a failure to protect av7, and a failure to bash. The first could well have been my fault (more on this later) and the second was down the the build. 4 catchers without a deep bench to either replace them after injury, or before, to allow the team to contest the bashing game, does present a rather large problem.

Game 4: sillysod and his amazing wizarding skaven. 4 gutters, 1 wizard, 1 draw. The speed was close enoguh for me to almost keep up with him, while the blitzers gave me bashing strength. A draw.

Game 5 was against gazza's ogres, which I won. Not much to analyse - I booted the snots off the pitch and ran around the ogres.

Game 6: this was an hour and half of insults between me and hogshine. He had humans in a similar buoild as eski. Long story short, I had my arse handed to me in exactly the same way that eski did.

I lost 3 games, my worst showing with humans so far, but in the 4 games I scored, I got a total of 13 touchdowns. So the team has little trouble scoring. Until it gets bashed to hell - see the lizards and hogshine's cursed ways.

To sum up:

You can outrun almost every team. But you can't adapt as strongly. You can reposition almost as well as wood elves, but when you get there, you hit just as hard. Or just as weakly. You can't win the strength battles, and there are times when humans need to do so. You can't grind out a skaven team, for example.

Or at least, at low TV.

At high TV (hypothetical now), you could have more subs, maybe have only a couple of catchers on the pitch for your defenasive drive. But that gives you a different problem. If against bashy teams you play the agile game ( demanding catchers), your benched linemen are wasted TV. Conversely, when you want to play the bashy game, your benched catchers are wasted TV.

Regardless of team value, you will struggle against another human team. They are your nemesis. Just as fast, but likely with less str2 - they will have an advantage over you. As a result, i'd like to try the build again - I still think it could work, but I am very painfully aware that if I meet more humans the same problem will likely occur. Its tough to hide over a third of your team from almost all of theirs (that's your catchers vs anything with str3).