Good Practice

Practice is big in Warmachine. Whether its getting games in with your lists, practicing a matchup or even practicing unpacking a list on your kitchen table; it's a big part of getting better. Practice is just as important for TOs, but it's a bit more difficult to come by opportunities to get it! Possibilities exist though. I find club nights are a great time to practice some TO skills, for example. Our local club has at least five games being played almost every week which usually makes for a few rules questions over the two games we play an evening. At first, in the time before TO Barry, rules questions tended to be an open forum where the question was asked to anyone stood near the table, with it spreading across the room until someone responded. Now the response to "How does this/that work?" is "Barry!". This is often an inconvenience for my opponent as it means I have to step away from my own game to go sort them out, but it buys them some off clock thinking time, so it's not all bad for them. Generally, the club members know tis will happen and I try to inform new comers of the possibility. This means I can go to the game asking the question and sort things out with minimal disruption of my own games. This makes for great practice of TO skills in an informal environment, which translates to good performance in more formal tournament settings. Helping out other players at club night will also help reinforce to your local players that you know what you're doing, making them trust you more in actual Steamrollers. As a side benefit, it also tends to spread to the rest of the community through word of mouth too.

On the topic of practice, I have just picked up a third faction in Trollbloods. I started playing trolls because I thought they looked cool and would suit my play style, but as an added advantage, playing them expands my knowledge of the game too. I was mistaken on how a few of the Troll abilities worked, which has now been fixed by playing them. Not everyone can just wander out an start a whole new faction, but you can look through cards you've not encountered much. For example, I should probably look through some Convergence models as we don't have any locally. As such, my knowledge of them is patchy at best. Other methods of practicing TO skills are watching battle reports on the internet (Youtube, Twitch and similar) and picking up on model interactions and mistakes made in play (everyone makes one or two when playing a game as complex as Warmachine). You can watch two other friends playing at the kitchen table, even discussing lists can often bring up some interesting rules interactions! The rules forum on the PP forums are also a good place to skim through to pick up on the way rule wordings work. 

Thanks to Rob "Pundamentalist" McCormick for proof reading my ramblings..