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After an unpleasant experience against the new Tau in a local tournament, I got to thinking: how effective is null-deployment in a tournament setting?

It's limited to a few factions as far as putting nothing on the table turn one goes, but there are a lot of individual armies that can make use of this technique, namely through the use of Drop Pods. The ability to deny a full turn of shooting in a game where shooting is very powerful is a major factor, but so is the vulnerability that comes with only having half your army in play for a whole turn,(see Codex: Tau Empire).

Furthermore, the lists that win the major tournaments typically make use of reserves, but do not go full null-deployment; is there a particular reason why this is? The style of play intrigues me, and I definitely think it could be the basis of an effective army, but is null-deployment lacking something that keeps it from winning against top GT level lists?

As someone who plays both just that and its counter, if you have an army designed to foil it, it will tear it apart. By this I mean a battlesuit army with everyone with EWO, a nice cheap item, especially if you arent planning on putting more than dual weapons on the suits anyway.

Otherwise drop pods are great. With 30k now becoming more mainstream, expect to see more drop pod armies that can actually put a hurting on an opponent with tailored support squads as troops or veterans with heavy bolters and sniper. The problem comes in that once you blow your load on the target, you now are foot slogging, and there are obviously easy ways to mitigate this. However losing your most valuable units in the first turn kinda sucks.

Against armie vulnerable to a strong alpha, or who themselves rely on a strong alpha strike to win, it's brutal. Against an opponent who doesn't know how to deploy to counter it, it's savage. Combine those 2 and the game can be effectively won on your turn.

Against armies resistant to your alpha or have the tools to deal with a strong alpha strike, it''s handing free victory points over. Against an opponent who knows how to deply against an alpha heavy army, then it can be a real uphill struggle.

As with most tournament lists, almost everything has a hard counter and you pray that you don't run into yours too often. Tau usually do quite a number on alpha armies due to EWO and just got a new dex, so they will undoubtedly be popular for a while again.

It's one of those things that swings a meta. Everyone bringing scatbikes and WK? Drop pod grav is the answer. Everyone bringing drop pod grav? Time to roll out the intercepting Tau. Everyone bringing intercepting Tau? Time to roll out seer council / superfriends / screamerstar / [insert fast high invulnerable save with re-roll mechanic unit here]. Everyone bringing their deathstar? Time for the scatbike WK combo to remind people what volume of shots and stomps can do. It's like a big game of paper/rock/lizard/spock/scissors, but with dice and a lot more money and time.

I have run a full null deploy army using a combo of drop pods and outflanking units at a tournament and it worked out pretty well. It had a larger benefit to me in the ability to control the board than anything else really.

Since my opponent would not know where I was going to deploy, but knew I had pods coming down, they generally deployed very conservatively. Putting everything in a corner or heavily bubble wrapping their valuable targets.

This works, but it has the side effect of giving up board control which allows me to use more table area to control the engagement from that point onwards. This is a subtle but very important bit of information you can capitalize on, even if you end up going second.

Sure, you might not get the killer alpha you might have hoped for in your own pods (assuming you used pods as part of your null deployment strategy) but being able to dictate the terms of the engagement for the remainder of the game gives you a huge advantage.

 Drasius wrote:
It's like a big game of paper/rock/lizard/spock/scissors, but with dice and a lot more money and time.

I thought it was rock/paper/scissors/izard/spock?

Gideon said it nicely. I run a Salamander Gladius with 11 pods and nothing else (Sternguard Auxiliary in 3 pods). I can start things on the board if I want or if the mission types benefits from it but I love null deployments.

Gideon pointed out a few of the reasons. When I first started playing 40k about 3 years ago, I struggled with my 7pod Salamanders list (with 2 Ravens to support). I switched armies for a time being and I'm just starting to go back to a drop pod army a year or two later. After playing other army types, drop pod/null deployment looked and played a lot easier.

Null deployment has its advantages and disadvantages as does every army, but from the enemies point of view, all the pressure is on them to make the correct decisions.

They either give up board control and turtle up or spread out and make you (the dropper) make the decisions. They can deploy wrong, they can put too much in reserve, they can leave a key unit vulnerable, they can try to bait you with easy to kill units that are cheap, they can deploy perfectly and have no real weaknesses. They have to actively make decisions from the start of the game and it can be very intimidating.

As a more veteran player, I know what I need to do and how to respond to all of the potential situations listed above. It all comes from experience and playing games. Games after games after games, once you face the same army type or composition a few dozen times, it's more of a game of who makes the least amount of mistakes and I feel that favors drop pods/gladius/obsec armies. This does depend on mission types (ITC/Nova/Eternal War/Maelstrom/etc).

Some armies want you to be in their face Turn1 and as a drop pod/null army, you can simply deepstrike/deploy on your table half and fire from half court. There is no pressure on you to do damage Turn1.

My 2 cents. I have only been playing for 3 years and I say only because there are a lot of players with 10+ years under their belt that can and have outmaneuvered me. It really comes down to who makes the most mistakes when it comes down to null deployment imo.

Null Deployment is very effective. I think the best Null Deployment lists are the ones that don't HAVE to use a Null Deployment strategy, though. (Flexibility is your friend.)

I play Drop Pod Salamanders and Null Deployment Dark Eldar frequently. Very, very rarely do I run into opponents in a tournament who are prepared for such a list, and I've never encountered what I'd call a "hard counter" to such lists.

It's not the most commonly used strategy, either. I've found that you frequently run up against people who either aren't super experienced against it, or who have never played against it at all. Those games tend to go overwhelmingly in your favor. If your opponent knows what they're doing, you need to be able to recognize that quickly, and adapt accordingly. The only time you'll get caught with your pants down is if you fail to realize that your opponent is prepared for your shenanigans.

Thanks for all the responses! From what I've gathered, the biggest strength of Null Deployment (especially with Drop Pods) is not that they get to dodge one turn of shooting, but that they get to extremely flexible with their deployment. When you have the entire 6x4 board as a deployment zone you can make things very interesting for your opponent.

As far as I know, there are two major counters to Null-Deployment armies: Interceptor and counter-deploying.

Counter-deploying against a Null-Deployment army is similar to countering deep-striking units in general, albeit writ large. Leave just enough space between units and board edges to potentially fit a unit, but unless they don't scatter they will be unable to deploy in a valid formation, causing them to either mishap or be removed as casualties. Of course, this is dependent on being able to deploy in a table corner and having enough units of sufficient size on the table to create these traps. If your opponent is being especially devious, they could also avoid the trap entirely and deploy away from your units, which is why these kinds of traps are so hard to perform correctly and consistently.

Interceptor, or the ability to shoot against a unit that just came in from reserves, is the other counter play against Null Deployment armies. Aside form Coteaz, only Tau have widespread access to (undercosted) Interceptor. But even with Tau, they have limitations. While Interceptor is great on many models, especially riptides, putting it on everything limits the flexibility you would get from other potentially more directly beneficial wargear. Interceptor is also a shooting attack and therefore subject to all the restrictions of shooting attacks with regards to line-of-sight (but Tau can ignore that too ), ability to claim cover saves, and weapon range. It also forces you to give up your next round of shooting with the model/unit; in effect you a taking your shooting early.

While Null-Deployment has counters, I don't see them being so hugely widespread as to make it unplayable. Tau have better options than to put INterceptor on everything, and even if they do it puts them at a disadvantage versus every other type of army. While you can deploy to counter deep-striking units, your opponent has to be willing to risk their units/fall into the trap for it to work.

My question remains: why are Null-Deployment armies not winning major tournaments?

There is a certain flaw in reserve armies in general that they risk feeding themselves in piecemeal.

A drop pod army - the most obvious 'classic' null-deployment army - has only half its stuff available on its first turn. That half is going to be shot at by your opponent's entire army, less anything you manage to kill in your alpha strike.

Which means that there's a real chance you'll drop in half your army, kill a few things and then lose almost half of the army (since they're outnumbered almost 2-1) before the reserves turn up.

The other trick which can be nasty against null deployment armies is anything which can mess with opponent's reserves. The Officer Of The Fleet, Samus, Callidus Assassins, etc can all cause consternation when the second wave doesn't turn up on schedule.

The piecemeal effect is why I maintain that reserves are, in general, awful.

Martel732 wrote:
The piecemeal effect is why I maintain that reserves are, in general, awful.

Absolutely. Also Interceptor, and a lack of manoeuvrability after the initial drop.
Reserves are mostly terrible bar the odd cheap unit.

Piecemeal and counter reserve manipulation do play a large part of the disadvantages of null deployment. However, I would like to point out that specific tournaments/mission packets favor Null-Deployment (drop pod style).

For instance, Gladius Strike Force was huge in Nova 2015. Most ran Rhinos and Razorbacks (with a few drop pods sprinkled in). There were a few drop pod heavy Gladius or regular CAD Space Marines that maxed out Mission Points by Turn4 or Turn5 early in the game.

From what I could see, none of the big names were running it, so there wasn't a presence on the top tables but in the lower brackets it was doing really well. There could be a few reasons for this. The most apparent would be that Gladius isn't as competitive as Super Friends (Deathstars/Psychic Shenanigans). It could also be that the less experienced players were playing Gladius with Pods or other forms of Null Deployment. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons, I'm simply saying that mission types should come into play when you are choosing your army type (null deployment or not).

Don't drop pod armies automatically lose turn one? According to the rulebook, it says at the end of ANY turn if your opponent has nothing on the table, they lose.

End of a game turn.