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Monday 11 January 2016

2015 In Review: New Years Resolution Results

Well it's 2016 now. Time to set some gaming resolutions for the year. But before I do that, it's time to look back at how I did on my 2015 resolutions. You can see the original resolutions here, and how I was doing at the 6 month point here. Now let's see how I finished the year. For ease of viewing I've colour coded my successes in green and failures in red.

1) End the year in the UK top 50 (Malifaux Rankings)... End up in the Neverborn top 10.
This one was locked in pretty early in the year. I wasn't really sure at the start of the year how good a player I was as I had no real tournament experience. I did far better this year than I expected and ended the year as UK #7 (having climbed as high as #5 at one point). Although the new rankings site doesn't have faction rankings any more I was in 3rd for neverborn for pretty much the entire year and would still be there (trailing far superior players Greg Piskosz and Mark Elwood) if is was up. All in all I couldn't be happier about my results this year.

2) Use someone other than Dreamer in a tournament game
At the 6-month point I had completed my first event where I used someone other than Dreamer, taking Pandora for two games. By the end of the year I had used 3 masters in a tournament, having taken both Lilith and Pandora to fixed master events. In the end my breakdown for 2015 tournament games (which will have it's own more in-depth article later this month) was 37 games with Dreamer, 8 games with Pandora and 5 games with Lilith. Still very heavily weighted towards Dreamer but I still completed this goal.

3) Only use painted models in tournaments
Objective achieved! This was much tougher earlier in the year when I had a small selection of models and was missing key pieces like Doppelganger. The last 6 months were pretty much a breeze, though I am looking forward to trying out some new models next year that are currently still unpainted.

4) Play in at least two large tournaments (League of Extraordinary Henchman for sure. Hopefully UKGT. Probably more)
Again this was an easy one. Having done several 28-30 player events and Nationals. Nationals was a blast and man was it tiring. Really cool to have been a part of the largest ever malifaux tournament.

5) Paint Lynch and Viktoria crews to decent standard
This was actually the last completed goal for me, having just finished painting the Viks in December. I've had Lynch painted since shortly after the 6-month progress post came up (though I haven't clicked with him like I had hoped so he ended up being left out of the tournament bag with Zoraida). I am hoping to take the Viks to an event next year, which would be my first non-neverborn event. Really happy with how they turned out and looking forward to playing

6) Try new painting techniques to improve painting quality 
Again, this one I completed for sure. Really happy with how my painting has improved and I have moved away from being so reliant on washes and dry brushing this year. I used water effects for the first time, tried tattoos and some other things for the first time as well. I am going to keep trying to push forward on improving my painting next year as well. I still need a lot of work on painting metallics and skin tones (spending most of my hobby life painting tyranids which had neither of those colour palettes has made using them a learning process).

7) Have playable crews for multiple Neverborn Masters 
I now have playable crews done for Pandora, Dreamer, Lilith, Lynch and Zoraida. I am also 90% done painting Collodi and his crew will be done shortly after. So realistically only Lucius will be left by the end of the month. So this was another rousing success.

8) Win a tournament
This was one of my loftiest goals, and definitely the one I had the least control over. However, after a hiatus from Dreamer for several months (and a generally quite summer when it comes to competitive play) I brought Dreamer back for a couple events to warm up for Nationals (where I ended up using Dreamer, Lilith and Pandora fairly equally). The first event was gunsmiths 3 on 08 November. I had a really tough game 1 vs Ben Crowe (what a draw..). I managed to pull a 1vp win over him playing Molly (for this first time in an event). Having beaten the top player at the even in the first game I liked my chances. I had 3 really enjoyable games (especially game 2 vs my most common opponent of 2015, James Reeves) after that but none were quite as tight at the first one and I ended up winning my first event. The next weekend was Tanefaux (Nov 14). That was only a three game event so winning all 3 games wasn't going to be enough, I needed to put up some large victory margins. I ended up with a really close win in game one over a Sonnia player and then faced James Reeves in game 2 (again) where I managed to out-summon Somer and pull out another win. Final game was against Aaron Bailey, which ended up being a surprisingly quick game as Nekima killed Francisco and Perdita in back to back turns (turn 1/2). Was a really fun game. Due to my large vp differentials from games 2 and 3 I ended up taking the event. So after a year where I never managed to win a tournament, I won two in 7 days, go figure. Note: the winning streak came to an unsurprisingly end the following weekend at Nationals (where I came 8th).

9) Continue to keep the blog at two posts a week (with the goal of contributing one article myself most weeks)
And we come to the biggest failures of 2015: The blogging goals. We were doing really well for a while. The first 6 months of the year were a success for sure. But as the year drove on people started uploading less content (myself included) which culminated in the blog going on hiatus for a month as we had literally no content to upload. Since we got back into it in the fall we have been fairly consistently putting up 2 articles a week again (outside of the christmas holidays at least) but this goal was still a failure due to the hiatus.

10) Finish Dreamer tactica (At least the 6 parts I have planned. Currently working on Part 3 still..)
So not only did I not finish this. I didn't even post a single part of it. This article series is officially dead. I tried to write it earlier in the year but could never make it work. There was just too much I wanted to say to make it a functional article. However, I did end up recording the Dreamer episode of Schemes and Stones, so if you really want to hear some more of my thoughts on Dreamer you can find them here.

11) Help create London tournament scene. Although Peter (Dr Walnut) is our local henchman and the main onus behind our tournament plans for 2015, I would like to blog team as a whole to be involved in creating more of a competitive scene in London. We did a great job in 2014 getting people started in the game, now it is time to work on establishing at least a couple London events in the year.
Well this is a tricky one. The London scene has defintitely grown significantly this year and looks to be even bigger in 2016 due to events by the Dark Sphere, Tanefaux and Crofaux  crowds. However, outside of helping the game grow locally at Dark Sphere (and I wasn't anywhere near the onus behind that) I'm not sure how much I've done to help this happen. So I'm gonna title this neither a failure nor a success but rather an incomplete.

12) Get the Abnormalifaux crew organized into a proper team. Need to get organized with shirts, team wooden spoon, etc. Since we all play together already it shouldn't be too tough, but like the idea of being official like all the other cool teams out there.
Well we never did get an item for whoever came last or first at an event, but that was a team-wide decision rather than specifically being lazy (or so I tell myself) Other than that it went well. We've got team shirts, we went to several events as a team, listed in the rankings as a team, success. We actually are one of the largest teams in the community now (and probably one of the least competitive so far but shhh). It feels cool to all be in our matching shirts together and hopefully this year we will get to more events as a group.

13) Start my "(insert Master here) after 5" articles series. 
This one is actually technically a success. Although I haven't done a TON on this yet, I did technically start it. I wrote a two-parter on my thoughts on Lynch after 5 games (part one, part two)(links). Not sure if I will do another one of these and if I do who it will be on. Lilith/Pandora are way past 5 games now so they are out. But I could right one on the Viks, Lucius, Zoraida or Collodi all of whom are near or under 5 games played so far. Not promising anything though.

So the final count for my 2015 resolutions is 10 successes, 2 failures and 1 incomplete. That's pretty darn good. If I could be this successful at my non-hobby resolutions I would be a much more succesful (and skinnier) person. Oh well, at least I can get SOME things completed. Some time this month I will be uploading my 2015 competitive year in review article and also my 2016 resolutions so keep tuned in for that, and thanks for reading.

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