Instead foremost in my mind was a desire to make every team fun or enjoyable to play. When it came for me to design my own tournament rules my main concerns were not diversity or balance. Three days of playing in that environment is going to seem just as stale as in the traditional ‘big four’ meta. When we get to the World Cup and every squad is made up of Wood Elves, Undead, Dark Elves, Necromantic, Humans and Chaos I suspect there will still be complaints. That coaches don’t want to face the same 6-7 teams over and over again and – very importantly – it doesn’t matter what those teams are. I am going to assume that trying to achieve this is the problem we as a community would like to solve. So it seems that the desired end goal is that any given tournament should have as wide and as flat a distribution of races as possible. But in the hypothetical extreme case that tiers made Ogres the best team and people were facing them game after game, the complaints would still be swift in coming. There is a doubling of the impact here, as the best teams will both be more prevalent and be those that inflict the most defeats. This effect is naturally going to be felt more keenly if results against the offending team are poor, and so we have a situation where the best teams (Undead, Wood Elves, Lizardmen) become seen as problematic in and of themselves. In the lead up to large events we see coaches poring over team lists to see how many different races will be attending an event, and the word diversity seems to have become shorthand for this.

Coaches do not like to have to face the same team over and over again, be it during a single event or over the course of several. But what exactly what are we trying to achieve? As far as I have seen it described the problem tiers are trying to solve is one of repetition. Modern tournament Blood Bowl has become something of a trail of tiers, so popular have bonus skill packages for the weaker teams become. (Article by Joemanji, for more wisdom check out his patreon page: )

Blood bowl team tiers