Part 1 of ‘Balance is Bad’

Guest Author Simon Leen 

 

It is quite common to hear that everything else being equal, the more balanced a list, the more likely you are to win a tournament with it and that we therefore ought all to be taking balanced lists to tournaments. The reasoning behind this claim, as I understand it, is that if you bring an unbalanced list, there is a high percentage that at some point over the course of a tournament, you will run into a list that counters yours and therefore lose the game and fail to win the tournament. Taking a balanced list does not ensure that you win the tournament, but it does ensure that you’ll have a shot at doing so. It has long struck me that this advice is only applicable to a certain narrow band of tournament players and that it is more reasonable for the rest of us to be taking unbalanced lists.

For the sake of clarity, allow me to idealize tournament games such that a game between two equally skilled players playing the same army is just as likely to be won by one as the by the other. There is any number of factors that might shift the probability in favor of one player or the other, but I am here only interested in two. First, they might be playing different armies, and this may or may not have an effect on who is most likely to win. We can argue about whether lists have absolute quality, but they clearly have relative quality. That is, there are pairs of lists such that one of the two is more likely to win against the other than to lose, given equal general skill.
An army that is what we will call ‘perfectly balanced’ will not impact the ability of the general running it to win any match, while what we will call ‘perfectly imbalanced’ will ensure victory half of your opponents and ensure defeat against the other half

The other variable is player skill. The more skilled I am relative to you, the more likely I am to win our games. While this is not obviously the case, I believe that the impact relative player skill has on games is partially a function of relative army quality. My assumption, which I will only defend with examples, is that the closer the armies are in relative quality, the more relative player skill matters. Take two generals, A and B. A is moderately more skilled than B. Suppose further that A and B are running perfectly balanced armies. A will, I submit, win more games by a comfortable margin. Now suppose A and B are playing perfectly imbalanced armies. If A is playing the better army, he will still win all of his games, and if he is playing the worse army, he will still lose all of his games. We see in the first example that relative player skill has a large effect when the armies are evenly matched and no effect when they are very poorly matched. This should make sense; generalship has a larger effect on the game as the general has more control over what happens, and we should expect a general to have more control over a game as the effect of other variables is minimized.

The point of all of this is as follows. Suppose you are an excellent general. If you bring an unbalanced list and pull good match-ups, you win. If you bring an unbalanced list and pull bad match-ups, you lose. If you bring a balanced list, it doesn’t matter what sort of match-ups you pull, as you can be assured that your army will, at worst, only be slightly out-matched. And, since you are an excellent general, you stand a good chance of overcoming a slight army mis-match. So, for an excellent general, bringing a balanced list is a good idea.

Suppose, however, that you are, like me, a mediocre general. It is quite likely that you will, at some point, run into a better general. Suppose I run into a better general with my balanced list. I am quite likely to lose. Suppose however, that I brought an unbalanced list. If his list is a bad match-up, I lose. But if his list is a good match-up for me, I stand a decent chance of winning. I need the imbalance in list quality to make up my deficient generalship.

To use a real life example, Ben Mohlie, Alex Fennell, and their ilk play at the tournaments that my local store puts on. By the time the last round rolls around, I’m frequently playing on one of the top tables against one of these guys. Baring extreme luck or a bad army match-up for them, they’re going to beat me. I can’t control the luck, but I can control how likely it is that my army will be a bad match-up for theirs. The more one-dimensional my list, the more likely I’ll get lucky and the tools to deal with his army. And if I get unlucky with my unbalanced list and pull a bad-match up early against a worse general and don’t even make it to the final tables, well, the end outcome isn’t any worse than I had brought a balanced list and lost on the top table in the last round.