THe Goober Ballz and Blood Bowl I

In spite of my recent postings, I did not play Undead in the recent bloodbowl league. I instead had been playing a Goblin team that I got and painted up rather nicely. I had gone the whole season with very few advancements, cutting goblins as they got better simply because the team value bloat wasn't worth it.

I have found that playing a stunty team certainly has its disadvantages in a new league. I won my first 3 games simply because other teams could not field the players that I could and could not directly deal with the cheap secret weapons. After the first few games, once other teams began to get basic skills, I ran into a problem however. I am pretty much peaking my team out around a team value of 1250 or so. When the rest of the league is hovering around that value, the Goblins tend to do very poorly as bribes seem to be key to the survival of the team.

Bribes do two things, primarily they allow second shots with your secret weapons. This is good, but more importantly, it allows you to keep fielding players. If you are running 3 secret weapons, those are 4 goblins that will be playing for only one turn. Sure you can play them all at different times, but it really is not much different than getting 3 goblins badly hurt per game. With the stunty rule, you already have to worry about keeping men on the field, bribes just seems to really mitigate the roster loss you would otherwise see.

I was lucky and rolled an Agility increase for my poger, #5 Justin Thyme and he became my full time ball handler. Other than this, I cut any other advancements that happened and waited for the rest of the league to advance.

For the Goblins, running about 250-350 behind the rest of the teams seems to be a sweet spot, just make sure you have the bodies to throw at them when they want to hurt someone. Inducing a second ball and chain can be huge and likewise inducing a third troll is devastating.

That said, this isn't really a team that has a lot of the traditional joys of blood bowl. I think almost everyone who played against it had a blast as Goblins were chucked everywhere and they were sent off the pitch in droves. Likewise, I also got a great deal of excitement out of playing them, but I missed out on one of the key parts of the meta bloodbowl game in the individual player development.

Bloodbowl is interesting in that there actually is a meta game. A lot of people talk about the 40k meta game, but it is a very ambiguous thing, with bloodbowl it is very real as you develop your team in response to the other teams in the league.

That is why I am thinking of shelving the Goblins just as they may be reaching their sweet spot. I will retire them, perhaps to be played in the off season league, possibly to return later. In the meanwhile I am going to pick up a necromantic team and use my existing undead line that you have recently seen on here.

I've just got to find some suitable werewolf miniatures. Any suggestions?