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A good read as always. As a tau player I can tell you that this kind of list is very difficult to defeat as tau. Especially so when a good commander is at the helm.

However I believe that this game would be less lopsided if the tau's deployment was better. Mercer smartly spread out his devastators, his main anti-crisis suit unit. The worse thing the tau player could've done was deploy his plasma suits (one of the only real threats to FNP marines) out of line of sight/ range of the missiles. This would be easy with a refused flank deployment, or deploying the majority of your units on one side. With this strategy Mercer would have to reposition at least one of his missile squads, leaving them unable to shoot for a turn, or keep them stationary and not shoot the targets you want to live.

What really makes the refused flank good though is a nice counter flank, or a unit which goes on the other side of the board. In tau's case this would be your broadsides, who could be safely on the complete opposite side of the board, You can even reinforce them with a squad of pathfinders to make them even more threatening.

This makes the opponent decide whether he wants to go fully at the brunt of your force(without full missile support), or split up to get the broadsides (not likely with Mercer's list).

It is by no means a perfect strategy, but experience has shown me that the refused flank works wonders, compared to a traditional setup.

my 2 cents