A bashdown

I am in the semi finals of my Blood Bowl league.  It turns out that Ziggyny decided to just concede to me via not waking up for the game so instead of me bashing his elves to bits I just got my free win.  Tomorrow I will need to face down a team of Orcs coached by Umbra and I am a lot less confident of my chances in this matchup.  Orcs and Dwarves are two of the most bashy teams with both teams lacking in speed and ball handling.  It will be a brutal slugfest.

I have some real advantages.  I have Block on my entire team, and my opponent is missing 3 copies of it.  That helps me.  I also have 2 extra copies of Guard, and 2 extra copies of Mighty Blow.  I rate to get more assists and do more damage.  Plus I have Thick Skull on my entire team, which normally isn't a big deal, but against another powerful bash team it will keep my dudes from getting KOd, in fact it reduces 'off the field' injuries by a full 33%.

This all sounds great!  I have better blocks, more assists, and superior injury and armour rolls.

But.

The Orcs have strength.  They have four dudes with Str 4, and one with Str 5.  This is a serious problem for me.  That additional strength means that I am going to have a really hard time pushing through their lines, and when their Str 4 dudes manage to single out one of my dwarves the dwarf is getting dominated.  I do way better in a massive dogpile where my superior Guard numbers help out, but I am worried that Umbra will be able to punch through my lines too easily.

My opponents so far have been way behind me in overall fighting ability, mostly through me having lots of Guard and them not having much or any.  The one game I won where my opponent had more strength they didn't have any Guard to speak of.  Umbra has both lots of strength and lots of Guard and this means that I can't rely on a line of dwarves to hold.  Umbra is going to roll more dice than me, and I am going to have better odds on each die rolled.  Overall though... I think he has the advantage.

However, I do have one ace up my sleeve, which is that my team value is lower, just enough so that I can buy a Wizard for our game with the extra cash I get to compensate.  A Wizard can do a nasty 3x3 fireball once a game and since my opponent's strategy is almost certainly going to involve caging around the ball carrier I have a great tool to blast that cage wide open.  The Wizard can potentially turn a half where I am just getting beat into a half where I score, or at least one where nobody scores.

And while I generally rely on the game plan of beating my opponents into bloody submission, I can't expect that against the orcs.  They are almost all 9 armour, and that means it is going to be extremely difficult to actually get a man advantage on them.  Umbra, of course, is facing down roughly the same dilemma.  It is even harder to get a man advantage on the dwarves, because of Thick Skull, but he at least has better options for getting good blocks in.

When I look at the four top teams I see a Chaos Dwarf team, Ziggyny's Dark Elf team, my dwarves, and Umbra's Orcs.  I think the Orcs are the team I am most scared of.  I really like my odds against the Chaos Dwarves, and although elves normally rate to beat dwarves I think my chances of beating Ziggyny's Dark Elves are pretty good.  Meeting what I consider to be my toughest matchup in the semis is not the result I wanted, but there is nothing for it but to hope that my singular fireball can swing the match to me and catapult me to the finals.