Milton Keynes Grand Tournament 2024

Three is the magic number! Or so they say. So in theory, the third year of running MK:GT a.k.a Milton Keynes Grand Tournament should have been our best yet. SPOILER: It actually was. However, it definitely presented one of the biggest challenges so far. By now, we’ve got the hang of things from an organisation point of view. We know the timings of rounds, how long it takes to set up and take down, the venue, the layout of the room and the tables etc. The one thing that remains consistently the hardest thing to organise, is the terrain. Last year, in order to to expand to 96 players we had to beg, borrow, and steal from local communities to help with the amount of terrain needed since we only owned about 10 tables of our own terrain at the time. We’re now up to over 30 tables of terrain which is leading us to be more self-sufficient. However, 3D printing and painting all this terrain does take time and inevitably, even with 12 months notice, it always ends up with us working late to get a last few tables done in the weeks running up to it!

One day perhaps we will learn… 

Some “slight” changes from AMG

Despite being given WOQ status in 2023 and applying for official Grand Tournament status this year, AMG did not see fit to grace us as an ‘official’ GT. In all honesty (and with absolutely no disrespect to any other GT’s) it has made zero difference to how popular and well-regarded MK:GT is within the UK (and European!) communities. Instead, in a cruel twist, AMG decided that they would instead drop version 2.6 three weeks before the event!

Our initial thought was perhaps we should take the lead from GenCon and run the event on the ‘old’ rules. Instead, after putting the feelers out and listening to community feedback (let it never be said the Legion community is shy about being vocal), we put out a statement to confirm we would in fact we running the event as V2.6. For transparency, we had just one player drop as a result of the announcement. We knew that this meant a large proportion of players would be turning up without having had chance to practice since the changes which had the potential to shake it up but we only saw that as a good thing. In order to assist the players, we fired up the 3D printer and spent the next couple of weeks printing six faction specific POI tokens and a faction specific half range ruler for each player in attendance. I even reached out to one of our sponsors, Doughball Custom Cards, who had designed and printed a number of alt-art cards for players to win over the weekend. Doughball – or Jordan as he’s actually called – managed to do the impossible and print out an entire battle deck (with a custom MK:GT Standing Orders card included) for each player to receive that weekend as well. 

Table setup is something that I normally have quite a good understanding of. I enjoy making a balanced table and good placements of terrain pieces around where most missions take place. With the new missions, I had to study where the most common POI tokens would be placed and used a few of the templates floating around on discord servers. Overall, for the 48 tables we had set up, I only had a handful of rule calls each round to move some terrain pieces. Either because they were a little bigger than normal or people wanted an impartial movement of the terrain. I had very little issue with the new layouts. 

In terms of players, we sold out of all 96 tickets by the end of March, with the number of players on the weekend breaking our own record 87 players in 2023 to 92 players this year. We had players from over seven countries including Australia, Poland, Scotland, Wales, Netherlands, Sweden and of course England. The event was six rounds with three rounds each day. This did lead to us have two undefeated players this year. Both players were offered to play the seventh round if they wanted but both where happy with the standings and declined to play another game (possibly due to the enjoyment of the previous night’s social event?!)

Top 8 

8^th Tom Sefton 

Our inaugural MK:GT champion back in 2022, Tom continues to do well while also still in full-time education. The first thing about this list and a lot of lists since the points change is how much you can fit in a single list! Two named characters, a red save tank, and two hard hitting special forces. Add into that some objective scoring corps with heals for the three main things and this list can hit hard. Normally we have one or two units that are the focus piece supported by the rest of the army but with this we have three hard hitting units and even the supporting core have some heavy weapons as well. The changes to Dooku giving him Direct and surge to defend permanently I’m sure helped Tom in his games along with the AAT small dice pools having a bigger impact on the game due to the cover changes. Tom’s only loss was to Aussie Nick Fraser (formerly of the C4 podcast). 

7^th Lyla Claire 

To many people’s surprise, Lyla was breaking her own rules and not running Black Suns or Maul since last year she took Tempest Force and went 4-2. She was determined this year to make it work since the list is more aggressive and the game itself is more bloody, all playing into Lyla’s strengths and playstyle. The scouts with the Sonic charge at first had me puzzled since scouts don’t have charge and this kind of thing has been talked about with BX droids having swords and the poison bomb for extra damage. When you look at the dice pool of two red, eight black and a white dice with surge to crit and blast at range one it’s easier to understand. This is a very similar dice pool to the BSE units we are used to seeing from Lyla. As with most UK players she has also taken the three AT-ST approach and with her 200 extra points added the three bikes for extra mobility fire power and so that every unit apart from the storm troopers has a minimum of scout two including all the vehicles! Lyla’s only loss was to Dave Grant in the third round of day one (which you can view on the TNM Stream). 

6^th George Barker 

George certainly did not set out to reinvent the wheel with this list, which is atypical of most 501st lists that are floating around. The arcs have either got a Clone Commander to give them a surge and inspire one or in this case taken a Clone Captain to receive an order from Fives who gets it from the Clone Commanders direct so that the army starts with a dodge that it can share. This list starts with a minimum of five surges and a dodge every turn and if the Commandos receive orders then you also get some aims. A very solid list, well run by George whose only loss over the weekend was to Matt Haslam, even beating Mikolaj Bernaszuk who had beaten Olly Dier in round two! 

5^th Ed Law 

Now this is a Clone list to get excited about! List submissions were due the Wednesday before the event and Bad Batch were released the Friday prior in the UK. I told people they were legal but if you turn up without them due to not being able to get them then you got 160 point bid! Not only did Ed manage to get his a few days early he even had them painted for the weekend! Giving Bad Batch scout from Rex Scouting Party along with another unit enables everything to be up close from the start.In fact, every unit in this list either has Scout from Rex, Recon Intel, or Infiltrate. The plan for this list is turn 2 to play Rex’s Take That Clankers and everyone will have orders so will be able to increase their range by one (if they took an aim action) and have access to aims to share from the Commandos. This list is all about killing your opponent quickly but surprisingly also has a lot of mobility, which makes sense because the old clone tactics of staying behind a castle are long behind us, just like in real life! Ed’s only loss was to Chris Rees which ended 12-12 and lost by only 30 kill points.

4^th Harrison Burki 

As I said about George’s list I’m not finding Clone list building exciting but it is consistent. Everyone takes Fives with a shotgun. Everyone is taking Anakin along with a sprinkle of Clone Commanders or Captains in your arc squads. The biggest difference for Harrison is he has dropped the Clone Commander so has no Direct but does have arc strike teams with snipers for some early long range damage and some guaranteed pierce to help in the red save match ups. Harrison managed to pilot this list really well over the weekend with his only loss being to Dave Grant. You can watch that game on stream here. I wonder if Harrison will look at taking force push on Anakin since not taking it cost him the game.

3^rd Chris Rees  

The superior Rees is showing us that Experimental Droids are still really strong. Though he had to drop a unit of BX’s he got to add a second snail to his Worlds list which he placed 53rd at this year. The snail in Experimental was written off by people in the old version for not being any good. Now it’s much different. Not only does it have access to another ordnance slot, allowing it to take big Arsenal 3 shots at range 3. but it has better access to aims as well. In 2.6 the snail tank can now use aims and dodges from exemplar from both the STD and the T-Series increasing the amount of aims it can get access to and making the aims work harder for the army since they can be used as needed. Combine that with an 11(!) dice attack when using both ordnances and…it’s a lot. The other buff the battle and the entire CIS faction got was red save B2’s which every ExS battle force already contained two of leads to a a list that had good fire power already to now have some more red saves back up by cheap heal bots. Chris’s only loss was to Dave Grant. 

2^nd Matt Haslam 

We all have expected clones to do well from this update vs some of the other factions like Rebels who will probably take longer to surface to the top. The two things people are saying about clones consistently are that the DC-15x snipers are over-costed and that Anakin is the best force user and it’s not even close!  

Here we have a 6-0 undefeated Kenobi list with snipers in full arc squads which goes against everything everyone is expecting which is amazing! The list has so much survivability with the commandos having the kataran armour and once that’s been spent then you have Obi Guardian 3 hit’s plus the shield making it hard to remove them. If you shoot one of the other units then Obi will Guardian them instead. There is also a portable scanner unit available for Obi to be able to have access to a dodge so if he does blank out he can spend a dodge to reroll his saves. The list also contains a couple of medics to help keep Obi at full health or for restoring a fallen commando.  

Overall the list is built around kicking out high damage which we know Clones can do along with surviving longer then your opponent by spreading the damage around which with the cover changes does help a lot. To go undefeated with this list at such a huge event is a great achievement!

1^st Dave Grant 

This list is quite infamous in the UK as “Immortal Vader.” This is a great example of why Commander Vader is still strong. Dave has always been a strong advocate of Commander Vader and has presented some evidence that he is still better than the Operative version even in the new edition. If you decide to shoot Vader, he can have up to Guardian six. Now has surge to deflect without needing a dodge and any wounds that do get through there are four med bots to heal the damage. This was the list concept before Dave got 200 extra points he can now add three Dewbacks and Krennic to help extend that compel bubble and also give the Dewbacks compel as well.

While you are distracted by Vader and Dewbacks charging at you on turn two there are still six units of T-21 shooting you generating suppression and usually a decent mix of hits and crits.

In his postgame interview after securing first place, Dave he mentioned one of the things he is able to do with Vader and the new progressive scoring which help him win several games was to burst into an enemy unit killing them or maiming them if they are a mega squad and contesting the objective. This leaves your opponent with two options to either stay and fight Vader and you will either die or be force pushed off the objective. Or you can choose to run away at which point Vader scores the objective. The important thing was to make sure Vader was close to the center where he could have the biggest possible effect on all the action.

All of these things add up and that’s without talking about being able to give Vader a standby from Krennic’s two pip which can’t be shot off and he can choose to trigger when he wants to do a move and charge into a unit and attack or even just move and saber throw any unit of his choice with the relentless getting around the new standby restrictions. 

There are several games of Dave from the weekend that you can watch how he plays this list on stream and after lots of top four finishes, it’s great to finally see Dave clinch that all important 1^st place in one of major UK tournaments. 

Factions 

Clones were overwhelmingly the fraction du jour at this year’s event, so I wanted to give a shout out to the top in factions that are not in the top 8 as well. 

Top Rebel was Justin Read in 13^th place with Echo Base Defence going 4-2. The next Rebel was in 32^nd with a 3-3 record which seems to echo most rebel players experience currently struggling with the new changes but hopefully they will find their feet once people have more games. 

The top Shadow Collective player was David Fraser in 9^th going 4-2 with a fury road list beating Olly Dier who finished 27^th also going 4-2. 

The get all five factions in the top 13 is okay but the balance of one rebel, one shadow collective, three droids, three empire and five clones doesn’t seem great. 

MK:GT was the first and largest event taking place only three weeks into the new version and I think is a great snapshot of the early meta. However, with more time I think there is still so much to learn so hopefully this will balance out more as people continue to get to grips with it.

The future of MK:GT 

As mentioned at the top of the article, this is our third year of running MK:GT and it is only me and my wife Louisa who run it. I do all the judging, rule calls, terrain set up and everything Legion related while she looks after all the administrative tasks, ticket sales, getting sponsors and ensuring the event runs smoothly on the days of whilst also handling the Bingo Bounty over the weekend. We both help with painting and building the terrain but it does take a lot of our time. Even with all this stress during the year and prep work, when it comes to the weekend of the actual event, to see everyone playing and enjoying themselves and saying how much fun they had all weekend makes all of the above worth it! As always a big part of that was the Saturday night social, organised by none other than Mr Olly Dier himself, consisting of a private karaoke DJ with a private bar to match! 

However, we have decided that 2024 will be our last year running MK:GT. Instead for 2025, we are rebranding the event as Chopper Base Open! This event will be 128 players in a new location (this time with air con!) but will follow our same great formula for the event. We have outgrown the current venue and it could not accommodate the continued growth of the event we want to run. We’re hoping to continue to attract more international players so if you fancy a trip to the UK’s biggest two-day Legion event, keep 16^th – 17^th August 2025 open and we hope to see you there! 

Best Painted

Photos from the weekend