Cancon 2012 and considering competitive play

Cancon commentary

So Canon is only 2 days away! In brief, cancon is a 1750pt 40k tournament, approx 130 players, 3 days and 8 games. Battle is a whopping 58%, comp only about 14%, painting 17% and sports 11% (this is all rough rounded, all scores are out of a total 350 possible points).

So why do so many people call cancon a soft tournament? This sort of analysis should really be a big part your list writing process, to put you in the beat position for a podium finish.

Most podium contenders should get an easy 80%++ for painting, given its a checklist system. That really only gives a 3.5% overall score between the worst contender and the best (and last year, no one got 100%).

Comp last year had the highest score somewhere around 40/75, and the lowest about 20/75. Comp is marked beforehand by a panel of 7 people not playing, who go through all 130 lists or so, with the average competitive list being about 2/5 equivalent. The top and bottom scores are discarded, giving you the average of the 5 middle scores.

So a comp of 40/75 compared to 20/75 gives a 26% variation between the very best and very worst scores, which in the grand scheme is only about 3.7% of the overall score. If we assume you take a moderately hard list, say 15/50, and compared it to the softest army capable of keeping in battlepoints, say 25/50, the variance becomes about 20% difference, or 2.8% overall.

Sports is 40/350, which a checkbox (tick 5 different boxes, did your opponent play slow, etc, and the TO checks where you get comp canned by your opponent. So for arguments sake, say the worst average score would be 3.5/5 compared to 5, losing 3.3% of your overall score.

Thus, realistically, if you have a chance of podium placing un battle, brought a solid list, don't play like a chump and paint your army - worst you can suffer is about 10% compared to your softest competitor, and more realistically about 7.5% (you played pretty well, average hard army, better than average painting score)

Now - the games.

With a 58% battle score, every single game comes in at abit over 7%. That's right - a single game nets you virtually all the soft score penalties. But its more than that - some of the bonus points are really hard to pull off from experience - most soft lists are going to leak bonus points everywhere, just trying to stick to the mission. Tabelling your opponent tends to fix these issues!

Cancon is a lot of fun - again with 8 games, 130+ players, a good dispersal of armies (everything bar templars atm), it should be something to look forward to. With the setup for points, a competitive army and player can really aim to do well.

Next I will run over my cancon list (imperial guard), a quick overview of how it works and how well it could expect to do!