WTC 2023 has passed and already I dare to claim this was the best event of 2023. With 280+ players for the Warmaster GT and another 288 players (+supportstaff) for the WTC teams event this is one of the bigger events in Europe with an enormous international character. players and teams from each end of the world come once a year down to the beautiful city of Mechelen to celebrate our love for the hobby and claim annual bragging rights over each other. 1 Week in the year, Mechelen is the Epicenter of 40K and if you haven’t been there I strongly implore you to go next year! In this article i’ll try to give you a glimpse of how the event was this year and hopefully we’l see you there next year ;)

THE WARMASTER GT

OK, small disclaimer: I wasn’t at the Warmaster GT for personals reasons but I was really looking forward to keep track of everyone’s progress and if they enjoyed the event. In total there were 32 Dutchmen playing in the singles events, the Dutch top 10 was:

11th Ruud Steenbakkers (Team NL captain) with Aeldari
61th Thomas Verkooijen (Team NL coach) with Adeptus Custodes
66th Rob Goossens (team NL) with tau
70th Daniel Thomassen with Grey Knights
72nd Florian Den Uijl (Team NL vice captain) with Thousand Sons
79th Thomas Beckers with Thousand Sons
82nd Jort Kassies with Grey Knights
85th Tom Roks (team NL coach) with Imperial Knights
109th Ron Eliyahoo with Tyranids
112th Arjan Fintelman with Genestealer Cults

Congratulations to the top 10 and to all players going out there and having a great week!! A special shoutout to local hero Sjap Horwitz who managed to snag a win with the Stompa family!!

PREPARING FOR WTC 2023

And now it’s time to get into the main event, the WTC itself! Last year, team NL managed to end in 8th and we really wanted to improve on our results this year. For me and some of the other boys 2022 was our first WTC and we learned a lot that year. This year we really did our best to be more prepared but at times that has proven to be quite challenging with a new edition. Thanks to Tabletop Kingdom who is our main sponsor of hobby supplies we all managed to get our copy of 10th edition right on time, meaning we’ve all clocked in at least 50-games before the WTC.
In the end we settled on the following team roster:

Ruud Steenbakkers (captain) Aldaeri
Florian Den Uijl (vice captain and pairingwizard) Thousand Sons
Justin Jansen Genestealer Cults
Christopher Clayton Custodes
Dick van der Harst Necrons
JC van der Lee Deathwatch
Christian Domburg Imperial Knights
Dino Kho (the other pairingwizard) T’au

The general idea was to have 3 options for a first or 2nd defender being Custodes, necrons and Thousand Sons and depending the situation we could use t’au or Imperial knights as a 3 defender if needed. In our practice games we’ve noticed that our custodes list was really strong and high scoring, Thousand Sons and Necrons will score at least 7 points in most matchups with the potential to head on out to 12 to 14 points. Deatwatch, Eldar and GSC were obvious attackers and we expected them to score highly. Sadly enough we noticed our t’au and Imperial Knights would run into quite a lot of problems in the pairings so they needed a bit more babysitting but team FUSION (Florian & Dino) were well prepared and had schemes to make it all work..

*Overlord Dick scheming and plotting the downfall of his opponent.*

THE RESULTS OF WTC 2023

The WTC consists of 7 rounds, a 3 round pod phase and after that a swiss pairing to see who ends up where in the ranking. We had games against Czechia, Latvia, Austria, Spain, Canada, Switzerland and Australia. I can say we all had without a doubt great games and great opponents.

When the dust settled we managed to stay in the top 10 with 9th place overall! Now this may seems a worse results than last year but with the increased amount of teams this was an actual real improvement on last year😂 More importantly, we’ve learned a lot more this year and we’ve managed to use those learnings and turn them into results! team Netherlands is already looking forward to next year and I genuinely believe we can take a shot at the top 5! I’d like to thank the WTC organization and all our opponents for a greet weekend but I would most certainly also like to thank all our supporters, friends and family who have helped us this past year. It literally takes a nation to get us so far! Thank you Tabletop kingdom being our main sponsor, Thank you Lost Legion and Wardice for the training facilities and a huge thank you to our prospects keeping us sharp! Team NL is taking a small little break for now but we’ll be back soon enough! In the meantime we have some snapshots of the weekend to share with you all ;)