Anniversary is a good moment to look back at past year, analyze it a bit and compare with the previous one.
Blog numbers and behind the scenes
2024 was a very difficult year for me personally. My first child was born, I had a car accident (thankfully no one was badly hurt) and some back problems together with some serious health issues within my closest family, which heavily impacted the time I could spent on my hobbies. This resulted in almost complete abandonment of both “netlists” and “beginners corner”. As I only published 12 articles (one per month average was a minimum target I set for myself), so it was twice less than in 2023 and no netlists after 25 last year. Hopefully despite writing way less and views dropping every month I managed to reach similar number of views and visitors as last year.
In 2024 there were 31 386 views (1k more than 2023) from 10 978 visitors (400 more than 2023) which I consider a success, considering how much less I posted this past year. I expect my publishing frequency to increase quite soon and as I’m currently working on few other articles and I’m quite optimistic about near future. Ok, back to the topic – Five most popular articles this year were (view count include only 2024 as 2nd and 3rd place had over twice more views in 2023, which makes them my most popular articles overall):
- Most underrated fighters 1 153 views
- Best abilities in Warcry 1010 views
- Universal Abilities and Reactions Guide 803 views
- Activation War: Tempo, activation advantage and sequencing 758 views
- Three ideas for third edition 733 views
Tournaments
For the reasons mentioned above I only managed to play 2 events this year. In April I traveled to Warsaw for Warkraj2024 (Wartally link with more details), where I managed to finish 6th out of 35 players with 3-1 score. I lost to the same player I lost in previous year and it was a great lesson (I was outplayed in an interesting way and also “outplayed myself” a bit). I finished Warkraj2023 with 2-2, in 2024 ended up with 3-1, so it looks like I’m going to win next year 😉
What made this event even better was the fact that TO decided to use part of the battlepack I designed in 2023 (Mark of Chaos if you want to see the whole battlepack) and as it was the 3rd biggest Warcry matched play event ever it felt great.
Next event I was able to attend (Pumpkin Smashers on Wartally) used the battlepack I designed in 2024 (link to One Sheet Pack), so I felt like I had some “insider information” and decided to tryhard a bit less preparation wise. I decided to bring a bit more friendly list, with no fun-smashers like Gutlord or Vex (I took a Squid, which was super fun). I also new how the event will end up for me because some plotlines are too strong not to happen – I flexed my prophetic skills and called what will happen 2 weeks before the event and I was right about everything. I predicted I will go 2-1 losing in final with a player I already lost 4 finals against and as he was going to bring 5 man Skaven list it had to be a kill mission (all missions were randomized so it was 33%). I also correctly guessed that the randomly drawn variant of objective mission (where my dispossessed were the strongest due to Over my Dead Body double) will nullify the strongest aspect of my list – we played a mission where number of remaining wounds was used for controlling objectives and TO ruled that OMDB doesn’t work. Very fun event and I was especially happy that people loved my battlepack.
So my competitive year ended with 5-2, but I managed to keep my strange record of only losing to 4 players during events. In November a narrative league that I joined started, but I wasn’t able to play a single game in the first 2 months, so I hope to play all remaining games in January (I expect to only win 1 or 2 games, as I took one box Teratic Cohorts – IMO the worst one box bespoke warband in the entire game), I will most likely write something about that experience later in January.
My hobby time and Iron Golems curse
The number of factions I played increased slightly this year. In January when my wife was in hospital, as she was about to give birth I did most of my Ogors and started converting Iron Golems, but didn’t get very far as 2 of my discs slipped at the same time. I painted some dwarven ladies later that year that I used for proxying both VFS and CoS: Dispossessed (due to magnetizing bases). I also painted Kroxigors and finally played Seraphon. Due to how easy it is to speedpaint skeletons (and love for the sculpts) I managed to paint and play some Teratic Cohorts. Near the end of the year a new TO emerged and decided to do a bespoke only tournament, so I finally moved back to working on my Iron Golems and my back died again, preventing me from continuing the work and stopping me from playing in the event (thankfully only one disc slipped this time). In total I managed to paint and play 5 new factions this year with my Iron Golems still waiting to be finished or played. At least the conversions are done and I have one model finished. I swapped all the heads and few weapons (and one tail) so currently my Iron Golems have 1 Ogor, 2 Stormcasts, 2 Elves, 1 Dispossessed, 1 Human and 1 Skaven. I only mention this to point out that in my opinion “bespoke” teams should either join existing factions or include members of different races (like Iron Golems or Black Talons) and I’m naively hoping GW will go this way for third edition.
My battlepacks
My work in this area was definitely the most successfull. In first part of 2024 my first battlepack (Mark of Chaos) was popular in some areas and was used during bigger events like Warkraj2024 I mentioned before. When I published next version of it – One sheet Pack in September, it was popular too. Most events (that used it) took only some parts of it, but there were three events in Poland that used the whole pack. Only in last 2 months of the year it was used during events in Norway, Denmark and 2 cities in Poland. On top of battlepacks I publish here I was also heavily involved in writing Norcry battlepacks, which were quite popular too (especially “Strike or Defend” that migrated from Norway to Denmark and TTS league). I was very happy that a great majority of feedback I received was positive and it was nice to see noticeable variety of archetypes in top spots of Mark of Chaos events.
Plans for 2025
I see now that due to raising number of events and higher frequency of rules changes by GW I can’t keep up and maintain the “Netlists” part of the blog, so it will switch to a smaller selections of lists I play, recommend or find interesting. Maybe I will be able to move to a new structure before new edition drops, but its unlikely. With tools like Wartally its easy to scout top lists, so there is also way less need for this part of the blog. Beginners corner will also have to wait for new edition, as the game might change a lot. In near future I plan to publish texts about my thoughts on narrative, listbuilding with 3 Underworlds boxes and my wishlist for 3rd edition. Later on “how to overprepare for a tournament” series will return for Warkraj2025. I might also write an article on tiebreakers or listbuilding the most tempo list before next edition (that will most likely drop in 2025).
Thanks for sticking to the end. As always I hope I helped or inspired someone, even though its unlikely in a post like this. 2024 was a very difficult year and I hope 2025 will be better for all of us. If you find my articles valuable please consider supporting the channel on Patreon (noone did it in 2024, so its a cheap way to start 2025 as a hero and be the first in the world at something).
Overthinking Warcry 