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Something that comes up time and again when discussing Warhammer 40k tournaments is what to do about power-gaming. To some people being able to build the 'best' army is why they're in the Hobby, and to others it's the reason why they don't compete in tournaments. We've seen all sorts of comp-systems, and however you skew it people come up with the best lists and that leaves plenty of models home gathering dust. Even worse, you either need to cough up for the latest, greatest army of the week, or you risk falling behind. It's like the constructed format in Magic: The Gathering, but far more expensive, and time-consuming. Furthermore there's all sorts of room for accidental cheating, weird ambiguities, and annoying 'gotcha' moments when some absurdity from the far reaches of 40k occurs.

So I thought, why don't people organize tournaments where the TOs write a list or two for every army, and let players bring the models for the list they want to play? So no worrying about the list, just bring miniatures and play confident in the notion that you know what you're going to play, the lists are all correctly points and contain nothing particularly controversial, and you can concentrate on playing. Apparently Wargames Con has already tried this.

I've brought this up elsewhere and received the feedback that nobody would play this way because people like writing lists more than they're bothered by the problems involved in writing lists, and furthermore the TO wouldn't be able to write lists to appeal to everyone. What do you think? Would you be interested in such a tournament?

The first thing I think of is that models are still being left on the shelf gathering dust, just different models, and ones I may like to play. I would have no interest in this due to the mass amount of mirror matches I would guess to be inherent in the format. One or two options per army sounds lackluster, but I realize that for bigger tournaments these are apparently the issues anyway. Mirror matches because there's only one or three min-maxed lists out there with small variation. Regardless, this doesn't sound like it fixes that problem to me, merely redirects it. And people have bias, or people like certain models, so I wouldn't think TO's writing everyone's lists would necessarily level the playing field. I'm not judging TO's, it's just maybe some of them will want to see things fielded some players wouldn't want to face in this format. Just my initial thoughts.

Maybe a better idea would be they can create a "core" list that's a partial amount of the points, then limit options for the rest?

How did it work for Wargames Con?

Yeah, I think there's probably units in each army that every player has that can be put together in a standardized army. Smaller armies like 1000-1500pts is in line with what I was thinking. Those still allow for a decent number of units.

Wargames Con, as I understand it, ran "mirror match" games where everyone had the same list. This idea is a little more flexible, but they're not entirely different.

Another variation of set-lists would be a tournament where half the players brought Orks, and half the players brought Space Marines, and then rotated through opposing side players with either the Orks or the Space Marines winning as well as the usual Best-Paint, Best-General, and Best-Overall