40K: Anecdotal Evidence and Why You Make Bad Army Lists

We are all guilty of this. We have a game or two where a unit, who despite all the odds, over or under performs on the table top. This can be due to a variety of reasons. Your dice could be hot or cold, your opponent could have made some spectacular blunder allowing you to seize an opportunity or you could have forgotten to shake your chicken foot before the game and committed a grand error sacrificing your power unit to no or ill effect.

In a one off game these things are not a problem. We play a dice game or we playtest ‘what if’ scenarios and ultimately the thrill of a rollercoaster game is why we play. The problem occurs when we let these situations influence what we take in our army list the next game or what we list up for tournament day.

Anecdotal: based on personal observation, case study reports, or random investigations rather than systematic scientific evaluation: anecdotal evidence.

We play a game and it is important not to lose sight of that but on tournament day we should be trying to bring the best list from our chosen codex.

Examples of Anecdotal Evidence include things like: My Sanguinary Priest always dies so I never take them, my Land Raider never delivers the Terminators, my Catachans always win if they get into close combat, nothing lives through my plasma/melta gun line, good ole rock – nothing beats rock, etc etc.

You get the idea. We build these perceptions in our mind that artificially limit how we either play the game or build our list. These barriers prevent us from crafting the ‘best’ lists that we possibly can. Many of these perceptions are not based on mathematical facts. They are based on what occurred within the microcosm of one or two games.

The odds of the d6 are basically a constant that you can bank on. I am not suggesting that you break out a calculator before you make moves on the table top but you can quickly identify the right move to make if you consider a lot of these factors while making your army list.

This game is not balanced and because of that there are units that are simply better at performing their role than other units within the same codex. This can be due to a better point to stat ratio or maybe they have some super wargear that is difficult for your opponent to play around. The Sanguinary Priest Aura is a stand out example of this. The massive force multiplier is housed on a somewhat fragile frame. Getting your Sanguinary Priest killed does not in any way shape or form render him a bad choice to take in your army. I do not believe there will ever be an opponent you face that is unhappy with the fact that you don’t have one in your list. Please keep in mind that this is just one example. I am not trying to have this advice apply to a singular army. If you think hard enough I believe all of you will have examples in your mind of someone in your game store that subscribes to this time of ‘voodoo’ to build their army list.

Are these guys going to win a game every now and then? Sure they are. Like I said before, this is a dice game and almost anything can happen. Anecdotally I was playing my IG list against a Daemon player. He launched an assault against a 10 man vet squad with Scarbrand. After two round of combat I had one IG dude left and had lost combat by 4+. I rolled double 1’s for my leadership. This sort of thing has happened more than once and I joke about how my Catachan have huge Rambo arms and can stand up to anything in close combat but in NO WAY SHAPE OR FORM do I ever try to get them in any position to swing at initiative.

This sort of example is fun to talk about and it actually does help psyche me up to roll those dice in close combat hoping for a favorable outcome. Hopes and dreams are a non-quantifiable resource. If they were Georgia Tech would have beaten the Bulldogs this year.