Eldar: Picking your battles

Please keep in mind that this is all my opinion and my own internal logic. I make no apologies if it doesn’t fit with your own. Most of this should not be news to anyone who had played Eldar with any desire to win.
The Eldar, unlike the best armies in the game, cannot produce a true “all comers” list that will perform well in any conditions. As a result there are many tournament formats that they simply cannot be competitive in.
Given that fact, I consider very carefully which tournaments I will take my Eldar to. I don’t mind losing to a better player or to the ever-present lady luck, but I try not to set myself up to fail.
So long ago I determined that I would only take Eldar to a tournament if I felt it was possible for them to compete.
That doesn’t mean limiting myself to tournaments where they have a true advantage, mainly because I’m not certain it’s possible to make a tournament where they are truly advantaged over all others. I’m merely talking about not using the Eldar in tournaments where they go in with a significant disadvantage due to the format or scoring.
To work out the characteristics that would define a tournament as Eldar friendly or hostile I considered my list of what I saw as the good, bad and ugly of Eldar options.


The good:
Delivering a reserve force using double autarch to reliably get everyone on table turn two.
Capturing objectives in the last turn of a game (preferably while going second). This ability is diminished by the variable game end, and amplified by tournaments that state an end point for games (games shall go for 5 turns only)
Delivering what must be considered, by anyone’s standards, a metric crapton of Strength 6 shooting.
They do offer one of the more mobile forces in the 41st millennium, indeed until the recent release of the new Dark Eldar codex they were possibly the most mobile of the lot.
Delivering Melta to specific targets. As long as there aren’t more than 2 of those targets. Above two it becomes quite unreliable. Above three it’s pretty much impossible unless your opponent is very unlucky or terminally stupid.

Passable:
Eldar are a passable army for straight out victory point wins. There are three distinctly different ways of using victory points in a tournament though and they are only passable in one of those three. I aim to deal with this in another post.

The bad:
Delivering mass melta to many targets. Their limit is three. Yes you can offer up double melta guardians as an option but let’s face it, it isn’t.
You can pull a fourth using two autarchs plus a guardian unit, that gives you a reasonably reliable melta unit, but it costs a bundle and its suicide duty for both your autarchs and the guardians... which feeds into :
Kill point missions. They just are. Yes you can build an army with few kill points in it if you try, but it’s generally quite poor. Alternatively you can play your normal army and find that you simply don’t have the wherewithal to finish units off definitively with anything that doesn’t simultaneously trade itself out. Kill points makes the suicide of two autarchs a particularly expensive option.
The final option is to play a denial game and that also loses, though for different reasons that I will go into in another post.

From those thoughts, I started looking for tournaments that featured positive factors:
1. Objective based missions such as Capture and control or seize ground, with a higher number of objectives and more spread out objectives being preferred
2. Fixed end point rather than a variable duration (games end on turn 5)
3. Missions where mobility is required, such as ‘recon’ or ‘break-through’
4. Missions where specific or limited targets need to be killed such as ‘assassination’ or the “kill the enemy’s elite/heavy support” as long as the number of targets is 3 or less.
And negative factors:
1. Victory point missions, particularly “Absolute” and “Difference” Victory point scoring
2. Kill point missions
3. Tournament rules that in any way limit mobility (smaller than normal table size)
4. Tournament rules that limit reserve usage
5. Tournaments that have houserules that affect skimmers “There is a warp storm on turn two....all ground is difficult”