Nirneath Arnoediad - Statistical Analysis

 

The biggest MESBG tournament ever held on the island of Ireland lands this coming weekend at the Nirneath Arnoediad tournament, hosted in Belfast. With 56 players planning on attending there's an awful lot of army lists to study and Tournament Organiser, Michael Bradford has very kindly provided me that big long list to bring to you here on my blog. 

However, we'll get on to that later in the week. Firstly, as a little starter to wet your appetites, he also sent over an array of stats about the multitude of lists, so let's dive in and take a little look at these.

Up 1st is the breakdown of Good vs Evil, which came out very balanced, which Good ever so slightly edging the contest by the slimmest of possible margins.

Looking at the Alliance breakdown next and we can see that Legendary Legions are the most popular, closely followed by Pure single faction armies. With only a small amount of Yellow alliances and no Red ones would suggest that the army bonuses and Legion rules are generally encouraging players towards thematic lists, even in competitive environments. 

Moving on to look more closely at the factions in action we can see that Minas Tirith and Mordor are the most popular factions. Both of these have plenty of options and a good selection of alliances, so it's not surprising to see them being popular. In 3rd place is the Dragon Emperor Legion, with 5 of them here, and this is very much flavour of the month in competitive play. What is very pleasing though is the wide variety of factions on show, 45 separate factions being represented in some form.

There will also be a wide range of army sizes in attendance. These range from as low as 5 to as high as 80 models. Most of the armies, however, fall around the 40 model mark, which tallies well with the general rule of thumb of 1 model per 20 points. 

The typical bow count is also fairly reflective of the overall model count with most lists bringing around 10-15 (around 1/3 of the average model count). There are however, a few lists with some serious shooting potential, up to a maximum of 26 bows. Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale are 11 lists without any bows at all.

Heroes are a key part of the game and here we can see that most people brought around 3 or 4 heroes in their armies. There are a few all hero lists that standout for having much higher hero counts. This is also shown in the amount of Might each army has, with most having between 8 and 12 (typical for 3 or 4 heroes) and with 1 reaching up as high as 24 Might!

Speaking of Heroes, we can also see that the most common Leader is the Dragon Emperor (curtesy of the Legion), followed by the Witch-King, Suladan, Theoden and Imrahil as the 5 most popular. 

And finally the most important statistic.

Only one slingshot.

That's all for today, but join me again later in the week to these glorious lists in full.