Congrats Barrel and Tsetsuki !

Looks like the Lions really came put on top!

Mad props to the all the winners. Good, I can go back to work on my UPN pilot for "Borg Justice..." Sorry Borg, I just can't convince Ms. Ryan to stuff herself back into the spandex cat suit.

So does this make the two guys Unimatrix 4.5 and Unimatrix 4 and half-a-dozen, or are there just going to be two unimatrix 4s?:p

Alas, I didn't win. Who want's to be a stupid cyborg anyway. Now I'll have to re-attach my arms. I really wanted shinny metal arms too. Anyone have some Healing Potion or something?

My congrats to both Tset and barrel.

Now, I know this probably wasn't a huge factor, but something needs to be done in the future to prevent it from being much of a popularity contest. When the armies are all very good, you tend to at least bend a little to the person you personally like better.

Maybe for ABC V you can have participants send you armies via PM, and you repost them identified only by numbers.

Well first of all, congrats to both our Winners... well actually, congrats to everyone who posted an army as you really didn't make it any easy on us... :)

Now that the dust settled however, I'd like to have a discussion regarding the actual fig pool as it was quite a complex one, and there were some really harsh decisions to make both in building and in judging...

So if you don't mind I'll be firing the first shots ;)

Here are my initial comments regarding the top 5 armies :

As the results showed, the *** Crusader Priest was a pretty strong fig to work with as the MS pool was quite deep, Wyvern, Wandering Moochooch, a pair of Werewolves, a Shade, and a *** WHK are only exemples of figs that could have been played...

However, it was not my personnal favorite for 2 very important reasons:
- there was only 1 Crusader priest in the pool. From my personnal experience, fielding only 1 Priest is a major risk to take as it will have that huge red bullseye painted right between the eyes...
- there was no really reliable healer available. I mean the CP is nice, but it's nowhere near as efficient as a healer should be...

Thus, I saw the *** Crusader Priest was quite vulnerable to long-range harassers such as the WHKs... Therefore, I elected not to play that... (actually, I even went as far as to eliminate all *** Crusader Priest armies from my vote)

Next, Kaboom also had a pretty strong showing with 2 of the top 3 armies, and I gotta admit, having Kyma and the ** Detonating Zombie did quite help in that case.

Overall, it's a great combo with huge damage potential abilities, building an army around it was a great idea (heck, If I hadn't been so bummeda bout the whole pool, I'd probably have elected to use one rather then a Bonestaff...)

Next you got Rava with it's incredible ranged potential, Pyre Spirit, and Barrel's "Swarm" army. Of all 3, I gotta say, the only one I really saw coming was Rava, but not with Pyre... Rava on his own is simply an amazing fig, it's long bound and 14 range coupled with arcing fire makes Rava a very dangerous fig to face, expecially for Kaboom as it's easy to forget about the total range that orc has.

When it came to building, I had narrowed down the biggest threats to the following possibilities:

- Khan Rava
- Summon armies (no distinction between nim and the Priest)
- Kaboom armies
- mixes of some of the above

My personnal feeling was that a Bonestaff army would have been able to compete with any of those archetypes, given the right build. Now, Bonestaff had 2 really bad things going against it, 1) the lack of small and easily killable figs (only 3 in the pool), and 2) the easy access to Revenant in the army.

However, there were a couple of positive points going for it as well :

- the pair of * Skellies, and the ** Detonating Zombie
- a Reckless formation.

Now I'll admit, I'm not a * Harka fan, but in this context they fitted nicely with the Bonestaff idea I was going for since I could reckless them to near death and let my opponent give me a a free shot with them...

anyway I'll come back later with more on this...

Wow, a lot of ties. Congrats to everyone.

Gamers:

Congrats for being the best army builders around. It was quite the competition! Until we battle for Unimatrix V..........

Mago-Azul

That's right. If I win ABC 5 I get to have a cool V instead of a number! So... we can excpect it after Dark Rider's release then yes?

Cool, and thanks for the contest and I'll see you at V.

Well I just checked fo rthe heck of it and I have to say I was surprised. thanks for the other 8 people that voted fo rme (just kidding thanks ot the 9). I have to say there was a number of very god builds. I hoep to make the time to talk about some of the ones I thought were tough. So with all of that aside a few commnets.

I agree with Oulaw7 about PM and post. I have no clue how much popularity played a part if any but I do agree with the comment.

Olan brings up a number of good points in his post and I am going to throw out some guess work here.

healers: I think there was a low level of healers or solid healers past a CP because Summon, rev and the chance to us Staff was already in the figure pool. One does not need a healer as much if one is goign to summon.

No Shyft: I think this hurt in some ways. I know it had an affect on my choices and limited strategy due to no shyft being in the pool.

Staff: Olan hits it on the head. There is a number of reason why the staff armies had a few problems. One was cheap fodder pieces that until rotation are the main units to staff. the other part is that armies were allowed only 1 relic. If a Staff/kaBoom army could have been built then there would have been more. Instead we got a lot of KaBoom Summon builds.

Figure Choice: I am not sure how anyone picked their figure to add to the pull but i reviewed the pool a number of times before adding. I tried to make a little mental checklist of the builds that could pop up. I did this to help excluded figures to add. I did not want to add anything that would help other builds out. I also wanted to add something that I knew could function in a few different roles. While The CP*** was my pick it was because I did not want to waste points on Nim. I also did nto want to add a DZ** because I knew it would help in some people's eyes the KaBoom armies.

I do think the next challenge should be with rotation.

thanks again everyone.

Congrats guys! Thanks for the great contest Borg.

Stop, Hammertime!

Great job all!

Thanks for the challenge Borg, and I hope we have a "restricted" one sometime. Or even better, have one where we try to come up with the best unrestricted army to trounce the best restricted army. ;)


Pickman

Congrats, Barrel and Tsetsuki

Steve

You guys are all cowards, you see a bonestaff or a Kbow and you panic like little girls.

Double post: Well there goes all orginality in the realms, everyone buy a bonestaff and a Kbow...