My Personal Win/Loss Record

I've just been looking at my own win/loss record over the past year or so, and I've been struck by something notable. When I first started playing Warmachine, just prior to the advent of Mk3, I did so because my friends Mark, Rich, and Chris had gotten into the game. I'd resisted quite a bit at first, but eventually got into the game. Nowadays, Rich and Chris hardly ever play, but Mark and myself still do. I refer to the small group of the four of us as our "mini-meta". Mark plays Mercs and Khador, Rich plays Cryx, and Chris plays Convergeance, Circle, and Trolls.

Let me briefly summarize the seventeen games I've played since the beginning of 2017.

• February 3, 2017 - (vs Khador) Mark played Old Witch into Nemo1, and I out-attritioned him, mostly by hiding Nemo behind a large building to thwart his single-minded assassination.
• February 23, 2017 - (vs Khador) Mark played Old Witch into Stryker2, and although the Behemoth left Stryker on 2 boxes, I won on scenario. This is the game that appears in this website's main photo.
• April 12, 2017 - (vs Mercenaries) Mark played Ossrum into Stryker2 and destroyed me. He brought up his forge guard behind a wall of gun bunnies, and my stormblades could do nothing to ARM21 gun bunnies. Forge guard charged through the bunnies because of Ossrum's field marshall, and wrecked my whole army.
• June 7, 2017 - (vs Retribution) I went out to a game store and played someone outside my mini-meta for the first time. I used Nemo1, and despite a decent assassination attempt by a Fane Knight, I ended up out-attritioning my opponent.
• June 28, 2017 - (vs Mercenaries) I played Mark in a Stryker2 vs Ossrum rematch. It turned out mostly the same, although my last-minute assassination would have worked if I hadn't needed to burn one focus to stop a free strike from killing me during the charge.
  
• July 12, 2017 - (vs Mercenaries) This was an awesome game at Mark's place during a thunderstorm. Auspicious for Cygnar. I played Stryker2 into Gorton. My plan of using Rowdy to stop Gorton's feat was a good one, but Rowdy was needed elsewhere, and Gorton pulled Stryker into two Rhulic heavies. Then, after somehow surviving that, I made a second mistake of only using a two-dice overload which left a driller with two boxes: cortex and drill. Stryker was assassinated.
• July 22, 2017 - (vs Circle) I played my friend Chris, who hadn't played warmachine in many months. His Kaya army annihilated Nemo1, although I'd have had a decent assassination attempt with Thunderhead if stupid druids didn't have 2" reach weapons.
• October 8, 2017 - (vs Mercenaries) Mark and I played a game to prep for my first tournament, and I played on deathclock to see if I could. Turns out I couldn't. Although my Nemo1 army clocked out, I ended up winning after we played through. This did let me know that playing an attrition caster like Nemo1 on deathclock isn't ideal for me.
• October 21, 2017 - (Steamroller Tournament)  I lost the first two games, and won the third game which I played off-clock with the Tournament Organizer.
• December 2, 2017 - (vs Mercenaries) -> Mark played his Gorten supertough list, and I got destroyed like I never have before. I was so tilted that I couldn't even battle report the game. He made 8 consecutive tough checks, and my entire army failed to kill a single forge guard. Then, in a critical maneuver, my lightning shrouded hammersmith with four focus attacked his Earthbreaker. The plan was to get seven attacks at dice minus one each, which should have netted 42 damage and taken out one side plus some. Instead, my first attack which missed on snake eyes rolled - you guessed it - snake eyes. This also meant no chain attack. Continued subpar rolls meant I failed to take out even a single side.
• December 29, 2017 - (vs Legion) I played a game at a local store and met up with a Legion player who turned out to be a really great guy. He apparently wasn't aware of Stryker1's pop-and-drop assassination, so I won the game.
  
• February 2nd, 2018 - (vs Cygnar) My first mirror match, I played Stryker1 into Stryker2 Storm Division, and my Stormstrider was nothing but a roadblock. But my opponent exposed Stryker after overloading to kill a heavy, and I was able to earthquake and shoot him down.
• February 2nd, 2018 - (vs Khador) The Imbroglio game at CaptainCon. My opponent brought Kozlov and lots of jacks. My pop-and-drop failed because Kozlov was immune to knockdown. But he ignored the lancer, and it was able to move in and get an unlikely assassination.
• February 3rd, 2018 - (vs Mercs) A super-rushed game at CaptainCon against Mark. This was my first attempt at Nemo3, and Mark was running Durgen. On my feat turn, I melted his Siege Crawler, but he was then able to move in and assasinate Nemo3.
• February 16th 2018 - My friend Rich played warmachine for the first time in over a year. He played his favorite Denny1 Ghost Fleet list, and I played Stryker1, the list with which I was most familiar. But it was Spread the Net, and I was stupid and withdrew my chargers instead of keeping them in the zone. He won on scenario.

So here's the thing. My overall win/loss record in these games is 8 wins and 10 losses. But amongst the mini-meta, which is mostly Mark, but also includes one loss against Chris and one loss against Rich, it's 3 wins and 7 losses. If you exclude the two Old Witch games (because Old Witch is a subpar caster) then it's 1 win and 7 losses. I do really poorly against my closest friends.

Against folks outside of our mini-meta, my record is 5 wins and 2 losses. If you exclude that local tournament (because of course I would lose in a tournament) it becomes 4 wins and 0 losses. I've done surprisingly well against local folks I don't know.

So I don't know what to take away from this. On the surface, it seems like I'm a mediocre player amongst above-average players, and that my three friends are pretty good at the game. But if you go back two years ago, they entered the CaptainCon tournament as "Denny Durgen and the Gearbats" and lost stupendously. So I'm not deluding myself that they're amazing players. They're just better than I am.