Ep. 11: Enter the Matrix - An Introduction to 40K Teams Events

So what is teams and how does it work? Well, the main and minimum things to consider for teams are the number of players in each team, the restrictions when composing your team and the pairings and the scoring that happens when you actually go to the event.

So without telling you the absolute bleeding obvious, unlike a singles tournament like LGT, teams are where you have multiple people play in one team against another team of multiple people.

The usual event format that us mere mortals tend to see is often doubles or five-person rosters when it comes to teams, such as the UKTCs, ITTs that are often advertised.

One of them is actually coming up in November, 2026, and the lowly rollers will be there.

The professionals who represent countries tend to have eight person teams events, and you can often watch those streams online to get a feel for teams in general.

I'd recommend personally checking out something like War Games Live or 6++'s stream of the WTC, which is the World Team Championships.

At the minimum, if you want to get involved in teams, you usually need to find four other people who also exist and roll ones to play alongside you.

Once you have that, you might be thinking, Sure, we can find the nastiest, sweatiest meta army in the game and just run that five times across us, right? Nope.

No, you have restrictions in that you cannot run more than one Astartes faction.

So if you really wanted to, you can't run the dullest, most vanilla lineup of Ultramarines, Dark Angels, Black Templars, Space Wolves, and Imperial Fists.

and you cannot ally in units of another faction without taking out that faction completely from your roster so do be careful let me give you a quick example so say you have an imperial knights player and they want some chaff in their list they have the option to ally in an immolator full of battle sisters but if they do that then you cannot have adeptus sororitas in your team roster lineup at all whatsoever So always be mindful about what you ally in.

But strangely, you can take all of the Chaos sub-factions and CSM, which is a bit strange.

But do remember that you cannot and should not ally in sub-faction units like, for example, Noise Marines or something if you're the CSM player in that setup.

Not only that, you can only run one disposition each.

So if you were thinking that you could make your opponents just roll their eyes into the back of their heads and completely out of existence with five take and hold matchups, you're firmly mistaken.

You better get practicing disruption like your boy Waleed's been doing since the start of 11th because one of you has to take that.

So now that you have five people in your team and you have a roster of five different factions without overlapping allies, and each of them has a different disposition, you arrive to the stone cold sports hall and start playing, right? Not quite.

You do get to, however, do the funnest part of teams, which is the pairings process.

Now, what is pairings? well what happens is that you rock up with your team and you have five pieces of card or something with a faction from your team clearly labeled on it and you put one of them down onto the table face down right so you have one faction you put them face down on the table at the same time as your opponent and these factions are your defender and obviously you don't have to do this uh the same cards in the same order every single time throughout the event shake it up do whatever you need to but yes you have your defender down And we'll go shortly, we'll shortly talk about what defines a defender or attacker.

But once both teams put their defenders down, you reveal what they are.

After you see these defenders, you then chat amongst your team and you put down two attackers face down again, which is two different factions in your hand.

The opposing team also does the same and then you flip the cards over and it shows you which attackers your defender can choose to play.

You choose one of them.

So after you reveal the attackers, the defender will choose which one they want to play.

Once they've done that, you put the chosen attacker face down again back onto the table and then you reveal.