Interestingly, the NAF did not step in at any point to influence the UW situation, which suggests if the same were to occur again we should not expect them to act. So, after years of a stable meta and ruleset, competitive BB now has its first glimpse of how other systems live: subject to GW’s commercial whims and occasional mistakes, and hoping it fixes them. And as we have seen, UW win rates and Tourney wins have declined to more reasonable levels. In credit to GW, they acted fairly swiftly, releasing a change to the Swarming skill and increasing the price of the most egregious stars. Underworld reached win rates that have never been seen in competitive Blood Bowl. The impact of these various changes in the putative BB20 meta is hard to overstate. Then in BB20, we saw two huge factors enter play that affected UW in particular: the new Star players, considerably cheaper across the board, and with some changes that made certain players very good indeed and Swarming, the skill that let additional Snotlings enter the field in addition to the 11 fielded. In the first instance, we saw the long-standing traditional Underworld roster revised at the back end of BB16 and quite clearly the reason for its revision was to make it easier for GW to sell the team with the existing Goblin and Skaven sprues they made, rather than being based on any particular issues with the roster itself. The case of Underworld is probably the ultimate example of what the new era of Blood Bowl with active GW involvement in the game means. Kreek “The Verminator” Star Player painted by Crab-stuffed Mushrooms Underworld and the new era of Blood Bowl Dwarves and Chaos Dwarves found strong matchups against some of these new meta teams, while also having star-capable builds of their own.Īnd in ‘22, we see many of our old meta friends returning to the podium places, but Dwarves ruling the roost so far. Halflings make a shock appearance in our top 10 as we see the impact of star-focused builds. On the flip side, some teams with low win rates but that have traditionally been very popular – and the poster boys for this category are Orcs and Humans – do show strongly here.įast forward to the initial year of BB20 and the shake-up is just as evident as the win rates showed, with Underworld capturing huge numbers of tourneys during this period. The only reason Amazons are not as high as their usual peers is that they have always seen relatively low representation. Let’s contrast the above with the teams that are actually winning (or achieving runner-up) in Tournaments in the same time periods.Īs with our historical win rates, we have some familiar names at the top of our pre-BB20 meta. Both flavours of Dwarves soar, and several other previously-moribund teams find a way to shine.Īnd finally, looking at ‘22, the current post-faq era, we see that the old order has somewhat reasserted itself, though some of our new faces don’t appear to be going anywhere Tournament Winners Underworld reach absolutely unprecedented heights.
Our five dominant teams all crash several percentage points, some slipping to below 50% win rates. The transformation of that meta in our first year of BB20 play speaks for itself. Lower down the list we see some very competitive teams who have very middle of the road win rates (Dwarves, Skaven).Īnd perhaps unsurprisingly, our historical meta is propped up by our iconic stunty teams. The teams below them start to see a mix of Tier 1 teams who were reined in by their Tier, and Tier 2 teams who found success with their additional help.
Wood Elves, Lizardmen, Undead, Amazons and Dark Elves were teams that not only consistently found themselves in Tier 1 in rules packs (thus getting the least amount of benefit from them) but that also maintained the best win rates in the game. Barring the late charge of the initial release of Old World Alliance, BB had five teams who ruled the roost. Let’s talk a little about the historical meta first.