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When I build a tournament list, I always have a few potential opponents in mind. List concepts I need a fighting chance against. But my list is based off of my local meta. I'm hoping other players can describe what they prepare to fight and what they bring against it.

My personal community meta:
I need an answer for a Tau brigade of 40 fire warriors, lots of shield drones, sniper drones, and support characters, all moving up with 3 riptides.
I need an answer for a 3-knights-with-loyal-32-plus-mortars list.
I need an answer for an Alaitoc list with Crimson hunter exarchs.
I need an answer for an Orc horde list with lootas.

I play imperial guard with marine or knight support. Recently, I've switched a lot of the guardsmen to Elysians so I can drop a ton of plasma (25.4 hits) and the warlord with the old grudges warlord trait next to a knight, or get close to Alaitoc folks.
My own knight is house Raven so that if my opponent is relying on lootas or the AP-1 Tau gun to kill my knight, I can use the relic and warlord trait to give me a 2+ save that ignores -1 modifiers, leaving my knight all but invulnerable to Orks and most of the Tau shooting.
I have varied artillery to put the hurt on anyone at range and clear out bubble wrap, and both scout sentinels and infantry squads to bubble wrap the artillery.

Those all look like the standard lists for ITC stuff

It does seem to depend a lot of what kind of tournament one plays in, as others said an ITC and non ITC meta can differ, sometimes by a lot. From what I remember from past threads in non ITC places castellans were not played that much, or at least not winning events.

Chaos soup with DPs, ahrimans and something seem to be popular and winning a lot lately, so dealing with those should probably an important thing to do too.

Karol wrote:
It does seem to depend a lot of what kind of tournament one plays in, as others said an ITC and non ITC meta can differ, sometimes by a lot. From what I remember from past threads in non ITC places castellans were not played that much, or at least not winning events.

Chaos soup with DPs, ahrimans and something seem to be popular and winning a lot lately, so dealing with those should probably an important thing to do too.

Plague Bearers is the 'something'. Like 60+ Plague Bearers.

Celerior wrote:
When I build a tournament list, I always have a few potential opponents in mind. List concepts I need a fighting chance against. But my list is based off of my local meta. I'm hoping other players can describe what they prepare to fight and what they bring against it.

My personal community meta:
I need an answer for a Tau brigade of 40 fire warriors, lots of shield drones, sniper drones, and support characters, all moving up with 3 riptides.
I need an answer for a 3-knights-with-loyal-32-plus-mortars list.
I need an answer for an Alaitoc list with Crimson hunter exarchs.
I need an answer for an Orc horde list with lootas.

Your list of opponents looks similar to what we see around these parts as well. Something that is starting to appear is a Chaos list out of Vigilus Ablaze (I think) with Huron Blackheart, a list with tons of CPs, some nasty stratagems and several twenty-strong Chaos Space Marine squads with some decent heavy weapons inside them. The stratagems and added CPs they gave the list make them quite resilient.

I can't say I have ever played in a tournament but always wondered how a list which is absolutely batfeth crazy, off-meta and unexpected would perform.

E.g. a Tau breacher heavy shotgun to the face build or something.

Eldar Flyers.
The nerfs stopped them from being a complete list pest but a list of mostly Flyers, Bikes and characters hiding in ground level buildings - thanks ITC - can mess up any list that struggles to shoot down the Flyers.
Thankfully as the Chaos lists with Lord Discordant become popular the Eldar Flyer spam lists become scarce.

 NoiseMarine with Tinnitus wrote:
I can't say I have ever played in a tournament but always wondered how a list which is absolutely batfeth crazy, off-meta and unexpected would perform.

E.g. a Tau breacher heavy shotgun to the face build or something.

They tend to fare poorly. Usually it's because if they actually were any good, they'd be the meta list to beat. Also, for the most part, solid tournament lists are not as one-dimensional as some people would like you to believe. A good tournament list needs to be able to handle the other lists that will likely show up, so the idea you can take something they haven't seen before and surprise these kind of lists doesn't usually work out. I've seen it dozens of times where someone shows up with some sort of surprise off-meta list, then gets shocked when opponents figure out what their list is trying to do and handily defeats it without much problem. That's because the off-meta lists are often one-dimensional skew lists that are easy to beat for good meta lists.

 NoiseMarine with Tinnitus wrote:
I can't say I have ever played in a tournament but always wondered how a list which is absolutely batfeth crazy, off-meta and unexpected would perform.

E.g. a Tau breacher heavy shotgun to the face build or something.

Yeah, Breachers just really do not offer the high reward to go along with their high risk. Going from S4 AP- to S5 Ap-2 is not a big difference when to get the S5 Ap-2 you literally have to suicide the unit.