By Theo Kik-Jansen and Eduard Puig, Edited by Theo Kik-Jansen

Any AoS player with a Twitter account will have noticed the buzz: It’s almost time for the AOS Worlds Teams event. Like its predecessor the ETC going back as far as 2006, Worlds revolves around 8- player national teams battling it out for the title. One interesting aspect is that the pairings process allows for massively skewed lists and polarizing tactics.

If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it! We’re here to have some fun. And what’s more fun than some old-fashioned shit-talk?! In come the Spanish. They caught our eye with their shameless bashing of the other teams. In other words: right up our alley! When they released this absolute banger of a predictions threat, we knew we needed to adopt this as the Plastic Craic team and so a collab was in the making!

Enough from me though, let’s hear from our Spanish pals!

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The Team

Greetings and salutations AoS fans! After a bit (or a lot) of banter on Twitter, the great people behind Plastic Craic contacted us. They wanted to follow us and let us share our views and experience from inside a Worlds team. And since we have nothing else better to do with our time (who cares about preparation anyway), we thought it would be a great thing to do and look back on when time passes! 

Soooo… That said, I think we’d better start with a brief intro of the team, shall we?

Jorge “socos” Castillo (Captain)

Jorge returns to his third Worlds, this time as our captain. Right from the Basque Country, he’s one of the returning veterans as well as a veteran of the Spanish scene, playing for Bilbohammer (and other teams sometimes). Jorge plays a large variety of armies, including Sylvaneth, DoK, SCE, StD and LRL, but decided to go with Khorne this year, with a Bloodlords list: 

Marc “Czero” Pi (Player-Coach)

Marc returns after a great performance during last year’s Worlds with Seraphon, where he killed 33 of the 36 Stormdrakes he faced, so he’s practically our own Dovahkiin. First of our players from Barcelona, playing for Team DiM (some might know them from TTS tournaments) and will help with the pairings this year as well. A very analytical player who is into Seraphon, Kruleboyz¹ and Nighthaunt, and decided to go with the latter this year:

Eduard “Vradi” Puig

“Think twice? Bold of you to assume I think once”

What can I say, my biggest contribution to the team is probably running the Twitter account and writing this article, plus the shitty jokes IRL. Coming from Barcelona as well, being the captain of Team DiM (someone had to be I guess), I am an experienced player and love to write crazy lists that sometimes work (spoiler alert: mostly not). I play Sylvaneth, Idoneth, Tzeentch and Kharadron, but Tzeentch is always on my mind and it’s what I’m bringing:

Pedro “Pedromancer” Lechado

“(In the matrix) I don’t know what to put… Put me a 5”

THE Pedromancer. Pedro closes out the quartet of veteran players from last year’s Worlds after his great performance with Soulblight. He is from the island of Mallorca, veteran in the scene and currently playing (and captaining) for his team Suit&War. His poker face disturbs even us, we don’t know when he’s happy or angry. He plays a LARGE variety of armies and this year he’s in charge of the Crazy Chaotic Goats:

Victor “Jaivol” Cánovas

“What if, instead of you moving the spoon in the coffee… the spoon moved you?”

Victor comes to Amsterdam for his first (physical) Worlds this year, but he’s a tournament veteran both in the Spanish scene and on TTS. Hailing from Barcelona and playing for Team DiM as well, he’s an aggressive yet tempo-based player. In case you’re familiar with the Destro boy concept: he’s our Destro boy². His armies include Slaanesh, Slaves to Darkness, Ironjawz and Gitz, with a secret love for Fyreslayers. He’ll be the one who pilots our Gitz this year:

Javi “Javi” Fernández

Continuing with the newcomers, Javi joins us after a very good season on the Spanish circuit. Coming from Madrid, playing on the DKHM Minimum Army team, he has achieved several team tournament wins. A calm player and reliable with his prefered armies, he plays Seraphon, Sylvaneth and Lumineth among others. He’ll be responsible to get the sons of Teclis to their enlightenment:

Miguel “Benipro” Benito

Miguel is another new challenger on the team, but he doesn’t lack experience. Consistently performing in several tournaments with his team Requiem, he’s another force to reckon with (and not only for the Frostmourne) from Madrid. In his roster of armies we can find Beast of Chaos, Slaanesh, Sons of Behemat, Ogors… He’ll be bringing the latter one to the Netherlands: 

Jesús “Chuchi” de la Peña Fernández

Jesus is also both new to the team and a known member of the Spanish community. Current champion of the Singles DKHM circuit, he earned his place on the team. This Master of Order and Death is from the northern Cantabric lands. This time Jesus will take the wheel (ha!) and will soar in with the Kharadron Overlords from the Spanish skies:

Juanma “Juanma” Alonso

And last but not least, Juanma will be this year’s coach for the team. His great analysis and data management will be very helpful for the team in our path to victory. Dwarf connoisseur and Tzeentch aficionado, his knowledge will point us in the right direction.

Forming the team

You’re probably now wondering how we got together, and there’s an easy answer: The Spanish National Circuit by DKHM. The circuit is open to any TO/tournament that wants to join it. It just needs to be on the same pack (that’s the Worlds pack) and have a minimum attendance (so no 6-player one dayer tournaments). The circuit is both singles and teams tournaments, and in partnership with Team Spain, the top 3 players in each singles tournament gets an invite to take part in the team’s pool, as well as to the grand finals hosted in Madrid. The same goes for the winning team of each teams GT. Then, once in the pool, we play between certain exercises or limitations that our captain Jorge dreams up at that moment to see which players he will finally draft. It is worth noting that winning the Singles Grand Final of the circuit gets you an automatic spot on the team, which Jesús took this year!

As for teams tournaments in Spain, we still have a small but growing community and we try to help up anybody trying to get into the scene, as it only benefits all of us to have more competition. We have about 5 to 6 Team GTs each year, which for some may sound like a lot and others may laugh at it (looking at you UK), but currently it’s difficult to do more. Keep in mind most tournaments imply a 3-4h travel for the vast majority of people (which may sound like your average grocery haul for you American and Australian readers, but here is quite a thing so we have to space them up a bit so most players can attend).

There are also small tournaments and other ones outside of the circuit due to other packs, size or other reasons, but it’s hard to keep track of them if they’re not in your local community (I am aware of the tournaments around Catalonia, but know little to none of those being held in Andalucia, for example).

The practice was more of a team pairing, dividing the players in two different teams and banning some of the most successful armies for each player, and trying to take us out of our comfort zone. How we approached the pairing, the games and the armies/lists was all part of the practice session. And with that, we got this year’s team!

Now once we had the players, we needed to start to think about what armies and type of lists we wanted to bring. The main topic was confidence. We wanted every player to be confident with their army and list, since last year we brought the two most recent armies in a rush (IDK and FS) and it didn’t go well. So we started with our initial pool of armies and had to adapt a bit with the release of 3 new tomes in a small span of time just before publication deadline (KO, Khorne and Slaanesh). So really it’s just a matter of knowledge of each army, confidence, playstyle and what we thought we could face in Worlds, plus some practice games to test and finally bring the composition we submitted.

Preparation

Since we are all from different parts of Spain, we do only one meet-up before Worlds to train and teambuild a bit. Last year we were lucky and it met the same day as the amazing round 1 pairings with the marble race and we saw it live in Bilbao on a TV, screaming and all that stuff. This year the pairings were just the day before, so we already knew who were we facing and some of us trained a bit against specific lists.

This year the meetup was in Madrid, as a collaboration with our sponsor Kingdom Wargames. It was everything you can expect: memes, eating together, jokes, drinking, eating again, talking about random things, me spamming memes on twitter and in between we rolled some dice. 

We also prepared the pairing against Sweden a bit while we paused for the mandatory pizza dinner (some with pineapple, as our Italian friends like). For the pairing preparation, to give you a rough idea (not giving away the goodies!), we fill a 1-5 matrix on each map (1 being the lowest/worst, 5 being the best) and then we do the same with every team’s list, and with those two values we have all the info we need to do the pairings.

Almost ready to leave for Amsterdam!

Now (at the time I’m writing this) we’re just a few days away from flying to the Netherlands and enjoying the event. Most of the team is still painting their armies (poor bastards), but from what I see on Twitter, we are not alone. I’m finishing magnetising all the Blues and Brimstone Horrors for the transport case.

The whole team is very excited for this trip, and we feel we learned a lot from last year. We improved as players, so we hope to perform better than last year. I don’t know if I can talk for the whole team, but the opponents I would want to play against (apart from Sweden, who I wanted to play last year as well so it’s a good start) include England, Australia and France to name a few of the ones we didn’t play last year, and of course repeating any match from last year would be nice since we had so many great games and opponents (special kudos to Norway and Italy). Oh yeah, and we’ll also play a practice game against Scotland on Thursday, so that will be a nice warmup for everybody!

But we’ll see what we get once the games advance, in the meantime we will do some tourism stuff, eat… well, “regional” cakes and prepare for an amazing weekend. I’m really looking forward to see if I predicted every result on round 1 in my thread, that would be crazy, but I’m a bit annoyed by the fact that I made this post so polite and not messing with anyone! Right now I’m just in a hyped state of mind that just wants to be there, meet new friends and see again the ones we made last year.

P.S: Scotland we’re going to smash you like the cheap Ikea furniture the Swedes eat their meatballs on. Stuart, you are next. And the Italians. And the Dutch. And the Norwegians. And the French, if they actually play. (*)

(*) None of these are actual predicted results and may not be used against us in case the match goes the wrong way.

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Fighting words! As our adoptive team, we are rooting for our Spanish friends to kick some ass at Worlds. And we have a treat to announce! You can expect two more Worlds articles in the coming days:

Next week I (Theo) will tell you all about the Worlds Singles event that I’m attending, to be held the 31st of May and the 1st of June in Amsterdam. I’ll try to go 1-4 with Destro (so the exact opposite of what this blog is famous for). IRL events have kept me out of the game for way too long and I’ll be diving into the deep end of Competitive AoS without practise or prep. But I’m just excited to be back in the game, and what better way than to have your shit pushed in by some of the best players from all over the world?! I’m just massively excited to meet loads of people and have 5 cracking games!

And after the weekend, our Spanish friends will be back with a full journal on their adventures at Worlds Teams! So watch this space.

¹My commiserations ~Pete A

²I am familiar with the concept ~Pete A

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