Half an hour to kill before daughter gets home and we can deposit her with friends and head to Thrud, so time for some quick thoughts about rosters and rulesets!

You can see the summarised rosters on my Tableau Public and the full rules on Thrudball.org.

The tiers are these.  You had to pay for skills – 20k primary, 40k secondary.  No “duplicate” skill choices, so no two players just given guard, though you could have block+guard and just guard.  Max 2 skills per player.

• Tier 1 (1200k) – 4 Skills: Shambling Undead,
• Tier 2 (1200k) – 5 Skills: Dark Elf, Wood Elf, Skaven
• Tier 3 (1200k) – 6 Skills: Amazon, Old World Alliance, Norse, Black Orc, Elven Union, Human, Dwarf, Chaos Dwarf
• Tier 4 (1250k) – 7 Skills: Imperial Nobility, Necromantic Undead, High Elf.
• Tier 5 (1250k) – 8 Skills: Chaos Chosen, Underworld, Lizardmen, Orc.
• Tier 6 (1250k) – 9 Skills: Chaos Renegades, Daemons of Khorne, Tomb Kings
• Tier 7 (1300k) – 10 Skills & up to 1 Star: Nurgle, Slann, Vampires, Skinks*
• Tier 8 (1300k) – 12 Skills & up to 2 Stars: Goblins, Halflings, Ogres, Snotlings, Undergobs**

And the main thing to notice is that only tiers 7 and 8 can take stars.  As a result, and also because people quite enjoy playing stunty, we have a large number of stunty teams!  13 Halfling with 7 Morg between them, plus 5 Snotling, 3 Ogre and 2 Goblin for near enough 25% of the field.  The top two tiers took a beating, with only a few hardy souls making do with the meagre number of skills and TV.

Apart from the Mighty Morg, Deeproot also features heavily, and the human trio of Griff, Zug and Karla also put in appearances.  Griff is less popular than sometimes because he is basically 50k more expensive, as teams are only “stunty legal” if they don’t have any S4 players, and “stunty legal” teams get 50k more.

The full list of stars are these:

So expecting to see lots of damage this weekend – we have a 7s tournament on Friday night, but lots of the weekend might be 7s games if Deeproot and Morg keep firing.  Will the deadly duo be enough to bring Halflings to the title though?  They have never (I don’t think) won a 6 game individual tournament of significant size, so is it time for BB2020 to smash that stat?  Follow me and @thrudball on Twitter for updates throughout the weekend!