Warhammer 30k - List Tailoring In Your Community And When The Arms Race Begins

In my local community we have multiple gamer types. Primarily this breaks down to those who collect and collect, never stopping and we have those who got to 3k and decided that was their aim.

Personally, I feel that 30k gets good at the 3k per player mark and starts to become unwieldy at 6k per player. Once you hit around 5k there tends to be a need for a few super heavies to clear the bodies out of the way so I am definitely in the first camp, I have thousands of points for each army and I enjoy that method of collecting.

Regardless of the side of the fence, we have found it difficult to cater for everyone in our gaming sessions. Those of us with larger collections will tend to gravitate towards options that will do well against those with a known and seen list. This is the basics of list tailoring.

For me, that's a battle and hard to prevent. A lot of these gamers with 3k only have maxed out on terminators and so plasma or melta is an obvious choice. while flamers or rotor cannons become pointless. Do you have to take the occasional poor unit to help keep your opponent interested or is it up to them to realise their mistake and buy a little more? It does become an arms race if you follow that route, which in an expensive hobby is not the best option for everyone involved.

However, who has the responsibility to make it a good game for all? It has to be down to both players in my book and both players have to realise what their likely to be playing against and accommodate for it.

If you have a foot slogging marine army and your opponent has plenty of blast weapons with range, who is to blame if the marine player gets tabled? I'd say it's both people's fault for not taking a few minutes before the game to discuss the likely lists. Unless you really enjoy tabling people then you have failed in the social contract but is it fair on the player with the blasts if he or she has plenty of options sitting on the shelf that they are unable to use because of the local meta?

In our small community in the Highlands I find this a very interesting thing to look at because I firmly believe that no one is right. Some players may miss out on more serious games due to their self imposed limits while those who do have more will sometimes have to lower the tone to help not break the spirit of their opponents.

In a tournament of course, all bets are off but I have shied away from them in recent years in order to focus on a more lore based hobby.

Any way, what do you do in these situations? How do you deal with your local meta? I would be very interested to hear.