Reexploring the Hive Mind: part 2

The Hive Mind
Tyranids – The Pairings MVP

Welcome back, everyone! With VTC now upon us what better time to visit the influence an army like this has on the pairings process within a team. If you haven’t read part 1 of the series, make sure to check it out here!

Tyranids, In my opinion, have always been at their best in a team event setting and there is a number of reasons why. If we have a look at this list utilizing the speed of Kraken and the double move coming from Swarmlord the army can ALWAYS posture aggressively whilst maintaining a defensive stance and playing quite passively. This brings a number of issues for the opposing captain in the pairings process. When you pair into this list, you need to consider how it may play against you and you have to be able to handle both styles of play. The army threatens to play hyper-aggressive so you need to be spending the majority of the game protecting yourself from these big charges that can deliver some surgical damage to certain areas on the table you leave vulnerable. The other thing you need to consider is if this is still a winning game if the Genestealers just don’t commit to you, can you still kill it? can you still win on primary while it plays passively and still projects this huge threat? It is never as simple as, “I can just kill all the gene stealers” because they are just never going to give them up so easily. 

There are definitely some armies that can quite easily mitigate this lists damage capabilities and hinder its ability to be so effective at stopping the opponents primary, though these situations will usually only come up for the Tyranids if they are used as a “put up” in the pairings process. The stronger use of this sort of list build is to be held in the hand and it really prevents the opposing captain from being able to put certain lists forward that they would usually feel very comfortable doing, such as most Death Guard lists, Dark Angels and other lists that are quite slow and durable. 

This sort of effect on the pairings process is not unique to this specific nid list, but that power actually lies within the general makeup of the faction as a whole. Being one of the last books that can make use of the “fight again” on anything, all the double moves, the Kraken advance, and access to the old style “Vect” just gives this army so much power and presents really quite scary to match into. This doesn’t mean any Tyranid list you through together will have such an impact on pairings, what a Team format allows you to do is skew so much harder than you usually would in a singles environment and really build your list to threaten specific archetypes within the current meta. So having a look at the list I have chosen to use, it is quite terrifying for a lot of these msu combat style lists that are popping up such as, the MSU (multiple small units) style bloody rose Sisters, Harlequin lists, and most Drukhari builds. There are quite a number of other things this list pairs really well into but the choices included like the mass hand flamers and metamorph whips are teched specifically for these MSU armies looking to trade quite rapidly. 

Moving forward from here, we have another Teams event coming up in June with Gladiator Gaming and I’ve definitely got something spicy coming out for that one, taking a bit of a different approach to synergise with our line up, but all in all super excited to be back on the nid train and see how far our favourite bugs can go in the current meta. 

Next week’s write-up will be reflecting on how my team went at VTC (Victorian Team Championships) and a bit of a rundown on how the Tyranids performed and if they acted as planned within the line-up, stay tuned!