Overview
This guide is a brief evaluation of the 24 NAF Tournament Official Teams in Bloodbowl for introducing new players to bloodbowl, and also three teams which are widely used, the Bretonnian Roster from BB2, the Khorne roster from BBCE and the fan made Simyin team.Key points include what aspects of bloodbowl teams are good for introducing new players to bloodbowl and what challenges you will face when starting with more complex and difficult teams.Helpful numbers are included in each sections header allowing users to use control-f (or clover-f if you’re on mac) to jump to a specific section.As a quick introductory aside I realize that many of these teams are not in Bloodbowl 2 but hopefully Cyanide will add them evnetually.The list of teams which are discussed in detail are as follows:AmazonBretonnianChaosChaos DwarfChaos PactDark ElfDwarfPro Elf (aka Elf)GoblinHalflingHigh ElfHumanKhemriKhorneLizardmenNecromanticNorseNurgleOgreOrcSimyinSkavenSlannUndeadUnderworldVampireWood Elf
Overview and Preliminary Notes
So You Want To Start Playing Bloodbowl
A Guide on Starting Teams
Now to be clear, this isn’t about tactics, or how strong teams are starting out, or even an introductory guide to bloodbowl. It is assumed that you have at least a cursory understanding of what bloodbowl is and some of the terms associated with the game. However, if something is unclear, please feel free to ask about it in discussions, or comments, thank you, the management.
Furthermore this doesn’t discuss starting rosters, those can be found in great detail at [link]
As such they’re not included in this guide.
If you don’t want to read this guide, and just want to know the best teams to start with, it’s Orcs and Humans. They’re the best teams to start with so just play them. The rest of this guide will emphasize why particular teams are good or bad for starting the game with and hopefully will improve your enjoyment of the wonder and woe of bloodbowl.
PRELIMINARY NOTE
Bloodbowl has somewhat of a learning curve, and like many other games your best bet is picking a team which appeals to you on a basic level. Maybe you think they sound cool, or like their aesthetics, if you have something which draws you into a particular team then by all means start with them as your first team, don’t let this guide discourage you from enjoying yourself. The disadvantages for starting with a particular team often isn’t about how they perform but instead what mechanisms they don’t teach you or what bad habits they encourage. This guide isn’t bible law, it’s merely an opinion piece which many coaches disagree with. Except the bit about orcs and humans, they’re universally regarded as the best first teams to play to learn the game. So pick them.
Final Note (lots of notes I know)
The Khorne Team, Bretonians and Simian teams have been excluded, The Brets aren’t widespread or tourney legal worldwide (yet), the Khorne team exists solely within cyanide’s Bloodbowl 1 and the Simians will never be GW official. In short these 3 teams are C tier in that they’re weird and a little silly. They’re not great to start with but they’re not absolutely abysmal.
Table of Contents
Originally this guide was intended to exist as a .txt file shared via pastebin, however with the decision to include this guide on steam this ToC is slightly redundant, but it is included for the sake of completeness.
Table of Contents
001 Tiers for Teams to Start With
002 Explanation of the Tiers
100 S Tier Analysis
101 Human
102 Orc
200 A Tier Analysis
201 Amazon
202 Dark Elf
203 Dwarf
204 Norse
205 Skaven
300 B Tier
301 High Elf
302 Pro Elf
303 Wood Elf
400 C Tier
401 Bretonnian
402 Chaos
403 Chaos Dwarf
404 Khemri
405 Lizardmen
406 Necromantic
407 Nurgle
408 Simian
409 Undead
410 Underworld
500 D Tier
501 Chaos Pact
502 Goblin
503 Halfling
504 Khorne
505 Ogre
506 Slann
507 Vampire
Tiers of Teams to Start With
001 Tiers of Teams to Start With
If you just mindlessly want to start with a team, look no further.
Explanations for placements are within the rest of the guide.
Note: Teams within a particular grade are supplied in alphabetical order, so they’re not ranked within their tier
S Tier
Humans
Orcs
A Tier
Amazon
Dark Elf
Dwarf
Norse
Skaven
B Tier
High Elf
Pro Elf
Wood Elf
C Tier
Bretonnian
Chaos
Chaos Dwarf
Khemri
Lizardmen
Necromantic
Nurgle
Simian
Undead
Underworld
D Tier (as in don’t)
Chaos Pact
Goblin
Halfling
Khorne
Ogre
Slann
Vampire
Now that you’ve glanced over the teams and gotten mad at my ranking, please remember this isn’t about competitive tiers, these are tiers for teams which help teach you the mechanisms behind bloodbowl. The gap between S tier and A tier is very large in my mind, while the gap between A and B is very small. The gap between B tier and C tier varies widely as some teams in C tier are downright awful for a first-time coach. But there are some good teams in C tier, and really any coach can overcome the challenges in learning bloodbowl if he or she puts their mind to it.
A short summary of the tiers follows.
Explanation of the Tiers
002 Explanation of the Tiers
S Tier
Just play these, they give you access to block, sure hands, pass, (humans even get catch) so you can move the ball, hit players, and enjoy bloodbowl. The roster helps guide you into learning what strength differences mean while you block and to be successful you’ll have to use assists so you don’t throw one die blocks. They’re risky! Sort of.
A Tier
These teams are very powerful, especially when starting out, they have an abundance of useful skills early on which help mitigate risk, they often teach you bad habits and misrepresent how risky certain actions are. If you don’t like humans or orcs these are a great place to learn the game, but they might not teach you the entire game as naturally as the S tier teams.
B Tier
These teams are elves. Elves are amazing at moving the ball, however these elves have only two players with block, and a lot of armour 7 pieces. The high elves are the sturdiest in this tier, but all of these elves suffer from expensive players, and if a few of them die, your team will have a hard time recovering into a strong formidable team. They’re excellent teams all of them, but not as nice for a new player. The Dark elves are in the A tier because they have access to four blitzers which means four players have block, that’s as much as a human team and it’s a good point to learn the game from.
C Tier
These teams don’t have sure hands, it’s pretty much that simple (note khemri has sure hands but they have a LOT of problems), all of these teams are somewhat competitive, hell some of the best teams in the game are in this list. These teams often have specialized players which punish new players for having the right guy standing in the wrong place. Success with these teams doesn’t come from the power of the rosters, but from coaches knowing how to use the versatility. If you don’t know bloodbowl very well you probably won’t be sure where to put your Bullcentaur or your Werewolf in order to win the game. These are great teams but they can be very unforgiving and there’s a lot to learn fast. It’s basically like jumping in the deep end. Feel free to start here, but be aware of the challenges.
D Tier
These teams are among the worst in the game, they don’t start with good skills, they often have weird positives to playing as them which might not be obvious to new players. The majority of these teams have huge flaws with no real benefits to compensate for it. While a couple of these teams can be extremely competitive, they’re high variance. If the dice go against you there might be nothing you can do to win. While this is true for all of bloodbowl, these teams are particularly inclined to soiling your plans.
S Tier Analysis
100 S Tier Analysis
When the question is posed: “What team should I start playing as?” the first answer is invariably “Orcs or Humans.” They’re the teams GW puts in introductory boxes, they’re popular teams even among veterans and they’re the face of fantasy. Humans so you can identify with the setting and orcs because who doesn’t like green monsters.
Why are these teams S Tier? Their only downside as a first team is that they’re overall average teams. They’re not particularly strong or overpowered. They don’t put up the best win ratios, they don’t have unfair players, people won’t complain about playing against humans or orcs.
The upside is that Orcs and Humans will teach you every aspect of Bloodbowl. They will reinforce how strength affects blocking and force you to learn how assists work. Both teams feature positionals which can handle the ball, positionals which hit other players, and you might even pull off some passing plays.
These teams are the mario, they are the middle mark, these are the jacks of all trades who can do anything in a Bloodbowl match, and a coach who plays these teams well in tournaments is a terrifying foe.
Human
101 Human
Whether humans or orcs are a better starting team is hotly debated, at first glance the human catcher is a liability and the only access to a high strength piece is the Ogre, and big guys add more inconsistency to an inconsistent game. In the end it comes down to two facts:
Humans are better than orcs at throwing the ball.
Humans are faster than orcs.
Humans are excellent starting teams because of these skills: Pass, Sure Hands, Catch and Block.
The positionals are fantastic at teaching you how to play, the high movement means you can make small mistakes when moving your pieces around without being extremely punished for it (obviously big mistakes are still disastrous). You won’t spend too many re-rolls picking the ball up (assuming you use your thrower to do it) and the pass+catch combo mean you can somewhat reliably throw the ball. 8 Movement on catchers means you can almost keep pace with some of the fastest enemy players, and 7 movement blizters means they’ll keep pace with all but the fastest of elves.
Humans can do any play (including two turn TD pass plays) fairly well, they have AV8 on almost all their players which means they’re not too bad at staying around and their linemen are easily replaced at 50k a piece, so you’re not set back too badly if you lose a few along the way.
The cons of the human team are their 3 strength and 3 agility. They’re not great at hitting, they’re not great at playing the ball. They come stock with abilities which help them with both, but against other teams which are developed their mediocrity weighs them down. Starting with human teams can be tough because their lack of strength means you have to know how assists work before you can truly start to do well with them, and most players don’t bother to learn how tackle zones work.
Orc
102 Orc
I could copy paste the “hotly debated” blurb but I’ll spare you.
Orcs have more strength than humans.
Orcs are harder to injure than humans.
So what do you, as a new player take away? Orcs hit and take hits better than humans. In fact orcs are one of the most resilient teams in bloodbowl.
You get two positionals devoted to hitting people, aw yeah lets take some skulls! Black Orcs are nifty because they have 4 strength, so they don’t need assists to roll two dice to block almost anyone. Blitzers are like human blitzers, they’re good, they’ve got block, block is a good skill.
Really there’s not much more good things to say about orcs, the troll is cheaper than the ogre, but you don’t need it for the strength since you have black orcs, you don’t have catch so your thrower’s pass skill isn’t as good as the human thrower’s. However don’t take this as thinking orcs are strictly inferior to humans, they’re just stacked to being bashy (hitting the other team a lot) and playing running plays.
Now the biggest downside to playing orcs are their move values. Your linemen move 5, your thrower moves 5, your blitzer moves 6 and your black orcs move 4. You’ll gnash your teeth in frustration as elves dodge away and run around you making your orcs look slow and stupid for wearing so much armour. The faster teams will outpace you, so you need to play more conservatively against them, and your slower linemen are easier to punish if you misplace them than humans. On the flip side you’re better at punching dudes, and much better at getting punched. You also have a hidden weapon in the form of the goblins and a troll which open up the possibility of one turn touch downs, but that’s a much riskier play which you should experiment with after you’ve got the basics solidified.
As a note the french ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ over at Cyanide absolutely trashed the orc blitzer cost because they have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idea how to play bloodbowl (typical french coaches) so if you’re playing bloodbowl 2 orcs expect a weaker start than you should have because french people hate you.
Besides the cons of being slow and orcs being strangely lower power (and they weren’t high power before) in bloodbowl 2 you’ll still learn a lot about hitting dudes and moving around your orcs all with the relative safety of 9 armour. Your thrower might even throw the ball to a few blitzers. In time you’ll learn just how valuable move speed is, how important positioning is, and hopefully how great it feels to force some enemy players into retirement.
A Tier Analysis
200 A Tier Analysis
Ah the A tier, now, every team in bloodbowl is fine, they’re all good in some regard. They all do things and they can all work, however the S tier teams are very average and they force you to learn how the game works to get the most out of them. The A tier teams are debatably much stronger teams (factoring in tourneys, leagues, what my uncle who works for nintendo told me) which in some cases can cause coaches to develop bad habits, rely on crutches, or just provide some shortcuts where you don’t necessarily learn the ins and outs of the game. You can certainly learn to play using any team, but these teams will incorrectly present how risky some actions are, which might leave you unconsciously making bad decisions later on down the line.
Amazon
201 Amazon
Ah yes, the lustrian babes oh mama they’re teenage inspiration alright, even if they don’t really exist in warhammer.
Now, Amazons are at first glance, better humans, they’re like humans but everyone has dodge, and dodge is one of the best two skills in the game (arguably). On top of that they have access to most of the skills which make humans great as a starting team, Pass, Catch and Block.The Blitzers here especially stand out since Block and Dodge means the enemy coach needs to roll 6s to knock down these bodacious babe blitzers.
So pros: Start with four blodge pieces (pieces that have block and dodge), access to pass, catch, everyone has dodge (so many starting teams need 6s to knock over your babes without causing a turnover), dodge is more forgiving about moving your girlies around if you misplace one. So why would you start with humans instead of amazons?
Two words, sure hands.
You don’t have sure hands and you probably won’t get sure hands until a second skill up on your thrower. So you get to suffer the pain and anguish of many teams where some games you simply won’t pick the ball up and you will lose because of it. This can be a huge turn off for newer players and even to this day frustrates veteran coaches. Bloodbowl sometimes isn’t fun because maybe you just don’t get to play (this delights some people and is a huge telling point on whether or not you’ll enjoy bloodbowl)
A more subtle con is the movespeed of amazons, they’re not fast, in fact they could almost be considered average with 6 movement across the field. However you will have to contend with faster teams, you’ll face elves with movement 7, annoying ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with movement 8 or even 9.
Movement 6 is actually kind of slow when compared against the full roster of positions, movement 6 isn’t necessarily bad, however your team has no access to anything faster. Having dodge helps but your human agility (agility 3) isn’t that amazing at dodging, even with dodge you have a frightfully high chance of failure (11%).
The final con is the amazon stat lines, 3 strength with no access to anything stronger means you will get bullied around by other teams, your 3 agility leaves you in the camp as the humans where you can’t do anything spectacularly well, you have a lot of skills which help mitigate your agility so you’re stronger earlier on but eventually other teams will catch up. At which point you will be behind in stats and playing at a disadvantage.
Along the same lines are the amazon’s armour value. It’s very low, these sexy babes are clad in naked skin and apparently leaves, they don’t wear very much which makes them hard to knock down but they will fall down and they will suffer. They’re almost twice as easily to hurt as armour 8 players, and they’re almost three times as easy to hurt as armour 9 players. Playing amazons means you will be playing with less pieces than the enemy team. Which can be difficult for new coaches.
Furthermore I mentioned bad habits, well, everyone has dodge, so you’ll frequently be doing lots of agility 3 dodges, you will be conditioned to dodge agility 3 pieces frequently. This is a bad habit. Most teams only dodge with agi3 for critical plays, when you absolutely need an assist to get a two die block on the ball carrier or something similar.
That said amazons are a very strong team, they’re an excellent tournament team, they’re great in a league, and by all means start with them, just be aware that they pay dearly for the advantages they tout.
Dark Elf
202 Dark Elf
Now the Dark Elf team has a lot of traps which can ruin a new player’s day.
Trap number one is the assassin, on paper he sounds cool as heck, he gets to straight up stab the other players with a knife. He’s an elf so he can still handle the ball, he has shadowing so he’s hard to run away from, sign me the ♥♥♥♥ up. However the math behind stabbing actually means it’s kind of a worthless skill, more often than not nothing will happen, and then your elf is standing beside someone else who will hit him and by the way the assassin is armour 7 and costs a lot of gold to buy.
Yeah, he’s a player that your enemy wants to hit and will hit and he doesn’t like to be hit.
Trap number two is the witch elf, she’s lithe, sexy, murderous starts with some great skills but again, she’s expensive. At 110k that’s as much as trolls. She’s also armour 7, so if you’re not getting the picture go read the bit about the assassin again, and the amazons. Armour 7 is not good, it’s bad. Your super expensive elf hottie is public enemy number one for the opposing coach, he will hit her and she will be injured a lot. She also has a secondary trap in that she has frenzy. Frenzy is a great skill, many coaches prize frenzy, but if you start out as a new player and don’t fully understand what frenzy is, what it does, and most importantly how to use it safely, it will be the source of a lot of turnovers and game losses.
Dark Elves do have an upside however.
They get four blitzers, you remember these guys, four players with block, that’s great to start out with. Furthermore these guys are move 7 just like human blitzers, they also have armour 8. These guys are awesome, and for even more icing, they’re ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ agility 4. Yeah they’re elves. Agility 4 is amazing, you dodge on a 2+ (most of the time), you pick balls up off the ground on a 2+, so long as you don’t roll a one the elves will leave your opponent dazed, confused, and a little angry that you walked all over them and there was nothing they could do to stop it.
On top of this cherry pie (or is it blood?) your linemen are very similar, they’re av8 so they pass the “is this made out of paper” test, they’re movement 6, they’re agility 4, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ these are some amazing linemen. However as I mentioned before movement 6 is actually kind of slow, so your linemen won’t really be outrunning most enemies (you’ll dodge away only for them to walk over to you and put a tacklezone on you again). But overall they make for a catcher or thrower in a pinch and can do amazing things frequently that other linemen rarely do.
The runner is an interesting positional, dump-off isn’t a particularly amazing skill (but it will score you some TDs) but it is movement 7 which will help against faster teams, that is to say that the runner isn’t all pros…
Cons?
First off, you’re elves, your players are good, but they’re expensive, elf teams and really most teams, have what’s known as a “death spiral” where in a league, or even a persistent tournament, you’ll have some players die, it happens to everyone, however elves are very expensive, it can take two games to replace one elf, and in two games it’s not uncommon for two or three elves to die, sure there will be games where nobody dies, but you want to spend some gold to expand your team, it’s harder to do that safely for any elf team.
On the upside you’re dark elves, you have a lot of armour 8 which makes you at least a little safe from the death spiral, however it is important to remember that none of your players are expendable.
Finally have you considered just how expensive dark elves are, I reiterate that the witch elf is as expensive as a str5 piece which has 9 armour and regeneration to keep it alive. Holy crap witch elves are expensive, they’re high class ladies, wearing almost nothing. They will die and get hurt and you will be out a lot of gold.
Remember: Death Spiral. It’s real, it can happen to you. So if you see a dark elf coach on the side of the road, remember to give generously.
As far as skill cons go we come to yet another repeatable con, you don’t have sure hands. Now, this is mitigated by the fact that literally all your players have an 84% chance to pick up the ball, so just don’t roll ones. You don’t have access to pass or catch without some skill ups, but again, all your players are great at passing and catching, say it with me, just don’t roll ones.
Now dark elves will teach you the most bad habits out of any A tier team. Having agility 4 across the board means you can just dodge your way out of anything. You will go entire games without failing a dodge. You’ll have insane streaks where you rack up loads of touchdowns and SPPs. You won’t truly grasp how risky something is, how likely you are to fail it. Positive reinforcement will naturally condition you to think that risky plays are safe and when you switch to another team you’ll probably have to recondition yourself that dodges, passing and catching aren’t just free actions with almost no draw-back.
Dark Elves probably have the most drawbacks of any A tier team, but they are, in my opinion, the strongest team out of the A tier or S tier. They’re excellent at low TV, high TV, mid TV, they’re great in tournaments. Once you know your weaknesses, and play to mitigate them, the dark elf team is a terror on the pitch.
Dwarf
203 Dwarf
Ah dwarfs, these stout little bastards are something everyone understands. Your mom knows what a dwarf is, she saw lord of the rings. She loved gamil.
Dwarves are like an extreme version of orcs. You’re slow, but they are really good at punching other teams.
The pros of dwarves are easy, they have a ♥♥♥♥ load of block, they have sure hands, they’re almost as good as orcs at passing plays (you don’t have pass, but neither team has catch). The pros of dwarves is actually extremely small, you have lots of block. That’s it.
Tackle is also great, if you run a fresh dwarf team into a fresh amazon team it will be carnage.
Your players start with tons of skills that are all quite good. Dwarves are awesome……………………… except
The cons could be long and rambling but I’ll keep it short.
Dwarves are slow, so if you don’t manage to catch the fast annoying players you can easily get destroyed, so positioning is extremely important with them. I reiterate, your linemen are movement 4, if they have to chase after movement 6 players (the average) they won’t ever catch them. Even orcs, will outpace your little guys. If you put a dwarf in a bad spot, he’s going to be in that bad spot forever. And don’t even think about this fancy “dodging” that other coaches do, almost none of your dwarves will successfully dodge. Just don’t do it.
A lot of bloodbowl is pressured fast touch downs, the dwarves almost never make a fast touch down. If you give a dwarf team two turns to score, they have to take big risks. You don’t have any passing skills, and few players have agility 3, so forget passing plays, if you’re throwing the ball as a dwarf you’re probably doing something wrong or desperate, possibly desperately wrong.
So dwarves are actually really powerful, especially at low team value, however their speed is a huge negative, especially in tournament games.
Since you’re probably reading this guide about playing casually you can ignore that, however the slow speed of dwarves means they don’t have the comeback potential that other teams have. Fortunately dwarves are the best team for punching people. A well developed dwarf team is hell on the line of scrimmage. Just don’t expect to get good at fast touchdowns.
Norse
204 Norse
Norse are like humans, but they have block on almost all their players, and they have access to strength 4, awesome. However you don’t have access to sure hands off the bat, and you’re agi 3 or worse, and like the orcs, you don’t have any catch, unlike the orcs your thrower doesn’t have sure hands, so he might not even be worth it, since again, you have no catchers and all your players are agi 3 or worse.
So you’re not good at moving the ball, at all. However your whole team has block (except the werewolves, more on them later) so many teams will have difficulty fighting you, especially early on. You fair a little bit better than amazons as TV inflates because access to higher strength, frenzy, and block is harder to counter than dodge, but passing plays are fairly difficult for the norse team.
On the flip side your movement values are pretty good, you even have a move 7 block piece out of the gate, albeit probably only 1, so you’re a bit slower than humans.
The cons are small, which makes sense, you’re like a dwarf team but faster, more agi 3 so you can play the ball in tough situations about as well as any non elf team (tough situations involve mad scrambles with linemen and what not). Your movement is slow, but you do have access to some faster players.
Essentially Norse are closest “direct improvement” to humans of any team in blood bowl. You have a big guy, you have access to str4, you have block all over the place, but you won’t be pulling off pass plays the way humans do.
As far as bad habits go? One die blocks. Almost every Norse player can throw a 1d block with only a 16% chance of failure. That means you’re looking at a success rate of 50% or 33%. You stuff one die blocks, you even stuff chaos teams, you just thrash some teams sometimes. Norse (like dwarf) will teach you that blocking is nothing, you’ll just stroll on through throwing blocks everywhere and often coming out ahead, at least until you run into teams which specialize in making your life hell.
In the long run the lack of ball handling will be your biggest weakness, and as I mentioned before and will mention again, sometimes you lose games because you can’t pick the ball up.
Skaven
205 Skaven
Alright, buckle up, because Skaven are another one of those high powered teams which scale well with TV and offer a lot of crutch type players which can develop bad playing habits. For starters you won’t learn how to do a MA6 one turn touchdowns because gutter runners are notoriously “easy” to skill up into OTT machines.
The skill list is pretty good, you have some block pieces, sure hands, pass, there’s no catch, but your catcher is literally insane. Movement 9, Agility 4, Dodge. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this guy makes the human catcher look bad (the actual perspective is the human catcher looks pretty good compared to this guy since he can almost keep up).
Now, obviously the pros are glaring, with pass and sure hands you can somewhat reliably pick the ball up and move it forward into the arms of a gutter runner who can score from almost anywhere on the pitch. You have some block so you can throw some blocks here and there.
The rat ogre is even pretty good, he’s not that bad since he comes with prehensile tail which means you don’t have to move him or use him for him to be worth his value, he could stand next to three elves and then suddenly moving them around becomes very risky.
Now the Cons for skaven are a little more subtle
For starters you only have two blitzers (or stormvermin, or whatever you want to call them) so you don’t start out very good at punching people, and you also have a lot of armour 7, so you’re not very good at getting hit. Even as you develop your team you have limited access to strength so you’ll almost always be out gunned when it comes to a fist fight.
I reiterate you’ve got a lot of armour 7 so it’s common that you’ll be down a player or two, but your speed usually makes up for it since rats always seem to find nooks and crannies to be extremely annoying in. Furthermore, on the flip side of AV7, you have cheap players, they’re easily replaced. So having a few guys die isn’t that bad, in fact you’re going to have to replace some guys, it’s just a fact of your life. However the death spiral isn’t very common with skaven since the gutter runners often win you a bunch of early games, giving you a good bank account to work with.
In this list skaven also suffer the most from “star player syndrome.” Technically the humans also suffer from it as well, with their catchers, but the general idea is: Gutter runners are very good at earning SPP, but SPP doesn’t really make gutter runners better at winning you the game. You ideally want SPP on your blitzers and linerats, to get more guard, block, wrestle, tackle. There’s not much you can do to improve agi 4 ma 9 dodge at getting the ball into their end zone. Catch is nice, nerves of steel on doubles sure, but the other team won’t be too worried if they run into a good gutter runner, they will however be quite annoyed by well developed blitzers and linerats.
As far as bad habits skaven is loaded with them, your gutter runners will win a lot of games for you, if your opponent stumbles a bit early on your rats will be in his half immediately and make his drive extremely difficult.
Your high speed means positioning isn’t that important since you can probably reposition your guys anyways, and your movement 9 agi 4 dodge guys will get away from everything except extremely dedicated coverage, in which case you probably have another gutter runner loose somewhere. These little ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ can get away with some of the most ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ plays in all of bloodbowl, especially with mutations or stat increases.
B Tier
300 B Tier
Ah “B” Tier, more like “E” tier. Now, there’s a lot of debate about elf teams and if you’re reading through this guide top to bottom you’ll notice a lot of similarities in this section. These teams are right on the heels of the A tier, they just have the death spiral to deal with.
High Elf
301 High Elf
Ah the High Elves, the most regal and arguably the face of fantasy elves everywhere. These guys are frequently referred to as the “worst elf team” but they’re still really freaking good. Being the worst chocolate bar means you’re still a chocolate bar, you’re not a rice cake, you feel me?
Now, for starters, you have pass, catch and block, all out of the gates. Your catchers are strength 3, and everybody and their dog is agi 4. Elves are awesome. So you’re very good at moving the ball around, you have a good deal of movement and your catchers are incredibly fast with 3 strength. Did I mention how sick these catchers are?
Your throwers also have this sweet skill called “safe pass” which makes interceptions almost an impossibility, and you can’t fumble the ball when passing it.
The big stopping point comes to the number of blitzers you get, two, that’s it, you have two guys with block. So while you have lots of armour 8 (your only low av guys are your catchers who will be beat up a lot) you don’t start with very much block, which makes the running game hard to play, your passing game is your strong suit, and it’s really good. However your players are super expensive.
The death spiral is real, especially on a high elf team, if you lose a catcher or thrower early it can be devastating. Sure you’re wearing a lot of av8 but that’s all you have going for you, you’re not the best passing team, you’re not the best elf team at hitting other people, you have below average skill access, and all the money in the world can’t buy you wins (it’s a bloodbowl joke that money is easy to come by but skills and stat ups are rare).
In short high elves are very good at passing, and they’re very durable for an elf team, but they suffer from early setbacks the hardest due to their limited defensive skills in the early games of the team’s life.
Bad habits? 4 agi. Anyone on your team can pickup, throw, catch, and dodge. You’ll frequently race about the pitch leaving your opponent cursing. Tackle zones mean almost nothing to an elf and frequently, high elves can make amazing plays to score touchdowns.
Pro Elf
302 Pro Elf
The Pro Elf team is also known as the “Elf Team” they’re not high, nor wood, nor dark, but they are damn good at playing bloodbowl, hence, pro elf.
So the pro elf team passes the general skill check for new players. You get pass, catch and block and a nifty little one called side step.
Just like the high elves you have only two blitzers, but they’re arguably the best blitzers in the game, and anyone who has played against pro elves, knows and fears the blitzers. Side-step is amazing, it’s a defensive skill, it lets you glue a player to the ball holder, and it lets you get closer to scoring position. The blitzers are great out of the gate, they even have AV8, but boy do they pay for it.
The catchers have a nifty skill too, nerves-of-steel, which means you can just throw them the ball whenever and they will catch it, they’re insane. If a catcher is in scoring range and standing up the pro-elf player is probably about to score a touch down. The SPP hog problem is even less of an issue since the linemen are so good already. In a pinch any player on the pro-elf team can act as a catcher or thrower, they’re extremely versatile, have great stats, offer a good amount of skills for beginners and even some tricky skills, they’re just really good.
Now, they’re terrible for a first team, because of the death spiral, your catchers are 100k a piece, and your blitzers are 110k. On top of that your whole team except the two blitzers are AV7. Catchers will die, and it will be extremely expensive to rebuild your team.
Pro Elves win a lot of games, but they almost never win without a cost. If even one player dies or retires they’re losing money on that match. Pro Elves get injured and they frequently play with less pieces than the enemy team, more so than other elves even.
As far as bad habits go you learn all the elf bad habits about dodging, passing, catching, and then some, your catchers are amazing that they can catch the ball all the time. Nerves of steel is very effective on an agi4 piece. You can be in 3 tackle zones but if they don’t have any support skills and aren’t in the right position it’s often a 2+ dodge out to score.
The take away is that pro elves are very powerful in the hands of the right coach, however if you get punched too much, or get unlucky you may being a losing streak, it’s not uncommon to lose a game because of the losses suffered from the previous pro elf game.
That said even with a battered team you’ll definitely amaze other coaches with crazy wins off the back of agi4 and nerves of steel. Just watch out for any mighty blow pieces because even one of those will systematically destroy your team.
Wood Elf
303 Wood Elf
The wood elf is possibly the best elf team in bloodbowl, and they have a lot of crazy things going for them.
As usual we see pass, block, catch all returning, agi4 across the board, and even access to more than 3 strength, the only elf team with a big guy (note the big guy doesn’t make elves the best team, don’t get funny ideas), they have an above average move stat across the board, they can easily get out of almost any tricky situation!
But by far, the biggest pro and con of the elf team is their blitzer. The wardancer starts off better than what most players ever end up being. He’s fast, has the two most useful skills in the game, which will be used almost every single turn in the whole 32 turn match, that’s on your turns and your opponent’s turns.
Ok, I glossed over the benefits of wood elf skills, obviously you’ve got agi 4 and pass meaning you’re very good at moving the ball places, your catchers have catch, dodge and move 8, however they’re only strength 2, so compared to other elves they’re much easier to knock down, sprint is a bit of a trap since the success rate on 3GFIs is about 58%, 67.5% with a RR. So in a pinch it’s not that bad but you shouldn’t ever get desperate enough to sprint so much.
As I mentioned above the wardancer is a con as much as a pro. Wardancers are incredibly good at getting SPP and leveling up, however you don’t want them to level up, they’re amazing at level 1 and after getting maybe tackle or strip ball they really don’t need anything else to make them good. What you need are skills on your other players, wrestle, sidestep. Wardancers are hard to get on the ground, but they will fall down and AV7 won’t protect them very much. Especially when other teams will be looking to wrestle your wardancer down and then foul him.
On top of that Wood Elves will teach you some of the worst habits in all of bloodbowl, it’s very likely you won’t learn how to play defensively, because wood elves have the best defensive gimmick around, with leap and blodge you throw a wardancer at someone’s offense and more often than not you’ll put the ball on the ground. Then with your movement 7 and agi4 surround the ball in tackle zones.
Finally you don’t have av8 on any of your elves, and your wardancer is the most expensive player who isn’t a big guy, he’s even more expensive than trolls. If you lose a war dancer it’s an average of 4 games to save up money to buy a new one. Sure you might get lucky and roll some big winnings to pay for a new one faster, but losing a wardancer cripples elf teams. And in a league? Everyone, and I mean everyone will be trying to kill him.
Wood elves play from behind more often than any other typical team (more on this later) and if you don’t like losing players, never play a wood elf team.
C Tier
400 C Tier
I actually sometimes questioned my resolve, that maybe I didn’t have enough determination or gumption to finish this guide. It wasn’t easy but I made it to C tier, by far the largest of all the Tiers these teams have severe drawbacks for new players. These feature some amazing teams, and some terrible teams, and teams that take a bit more understanding to make work right. These aren’t as straight forward as the teams in higher tiers, but if you absolutely must play them as your first team it’s possible.
Bretonnian
401 Bretonnian
I still don’t know what these little guys grunt when you click on them in bb2.
Bretonians offer arguably the best 40k linemen in the game, they’re super cheap and surprisingly useful, and the roster comes with a lot of great skills, but you do struggle to move the ball around. Overall it’s not a bad team but you could be in a bad spot if you lose some blitzers early on.
So a quick glance at the skills show that you’re missing the crucial sure hands and pass which make ball handling that much more forgiving. So yeah, you have block and catch on some great pieces, unfortunately they’re very expensive pieces and your re-rolls aren’t cheap either.
Fortunately out the gates you don’t need to worry too much about passing the ball because you’re incredible at blocking, maybe not incredible at hurting people but you get to field 4 block pieces and 4 wrestle pieces, so if you ever throw a 2die block with your knight-guys it’s probably safe, you might not always hurt guys when you knock them down, but sometimes all you need is to remove a tackle zone.
The downside to bretonnians is their lack of ball handling, they don’t have anything to help them pickup the ball but once they have the ball you can use handoffs to move the ball to blitzers without too much risk (considering of course this is bloodbowl).
As far as disadvantages bretonians teach you that blocking and getting blocked is a lot safer than it actually is, and you don’t have any immediate tools to help you pick up the ball. Overall though bretonnians are pretty good as a starting team. Just don’t let your expensive blitzers die.
Chaos
402 Chaos
You’ll probably read this guide, and then pick chaos anyways, because they’re the “kill team” so if you want to hurt other people and make them sad that their player died, you’ll pick these guys and try to inflict as much harm as possible.
Chaos are terrible for a first team.
The only skill you get out of the box is Horns, you can get mighty blow if you take a Minotaur, but that’s not recommended, it can be fun, but big guys are something newer players should shy away from, and to reiterate, you don’t have any skills.
No pass, no catch, no block, no sure hands. Your players will need your team re-rolls. A minotaur in the hands of a new player will cause turnovers and they will lose you some games.
Yes chaos are the best kill team in bloodbowl, later, much later, once you have some players leveled up to level 4 (block mb claw piling on) the only upside of chaos is they actually have the easiest time skilling up their strength 4 players because chaos warriors are agi3.
Your armour across the board is good, but you will run into dwarf teams and norse teams and chaos dwarf teams and you will lose early on unless you know how to play a very technical game, with untechnical pieces. The low TV chaos team is very bad, chaos is a very bad tournament team, chaos isn’t even a strong league team. Chaos is strong if you plan to play 100 games online in a perpetual league and inevitably skill up death machines.
If you want to learn bashy teams pick orcs or dwarfs.
If you absolutely have to play chaos, bring some re-rolls and a healthy attitude to things not going your way. I’ve lost many chaos games because I failed to pickup the ball for all 8 turns in my drive.
Chaos Dwarf
403 Chaos Dwarf
Chaos Dwarf is actually not a terrible team to start with, some teams in this tier I will flat out tell you not to play, chaos dwarves are pretty good, you should play them if you want.
Taking a quick look at the skills, you get block, you get a lot of block, not as much as some of the other teams, but six chaos dwarfs make for one hell of a team.
You have access to strength 4 pieces which come with agi 2, sprint, sure feet and thick skull. Bull Centaurs are amazing, however, they’re really hard to skill up.
The other piece, the lineman, is an armour 7 human, the hobgoblin. He’s actually pretty terrible all things considered. His skill access is below average, his armour is below average, the hobgoblin has only one real advantage, he’s inexpensive and he’s agility 3.
Dwarf teams don’t have unlimited access to agility 3, so the hobgoblin is pretty good there, as far as most teams in bloodbowl are concerned agility 3 can handle the ball in a pinch.
The gameplan of a chaos dwarf team is to kill the other them, and then use a hobgoblin to give the ball to a bullcentaur.
Hobgoblins are great for fouling other pieces (be aware that fouling is a huge risk though, you almost never should foul), and chaos dwarfs don’t need a bunch of skills to become scary.
There’s virtually no “death spiral” for a Chorf team, your chorfs are cheap, and the cows have av9 (well the mino has av8 but we won’t talk about him for now) the chorfs are good out of the box for hitting people, there’s lots of strength access so guard and mighty blow will be plentiful as you level up.
Chaos dwarves are actually a really good team.
The downside is your lack of ball handling, pretty much every team in bloodbowl struggles with the concept of moving the ball around (except for the elf teams and teams that start with sure hands), in other teams I’ve actually been really hard on agi3 with no skills to move the ball, and chorfs are a team where your goal is to give the ball to an agi2 piece. So yes, you will sometimes have a really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ time picking up the ball, and chorfs are only move 4, almost everything can run away from them. You will get slapped around by other teams if you make a positioning error, but you have way more move 6 than a dwarf team, you’ve got more strength, you just lack a few ball handling skills. In this analysis I realized that chaos dwarfs play a lot like a hybrid team that’s part chaos and part dwarf, who would’ve thought that.
Khemri
404 Khemri
I almost put Khemri in the D tier, because they’re honestly really bad but they are indeed forgiving and tough as nails.
Don’t expect to win every game you play, don’t even expect to win many, but your guys all have regeneration, your linemen have thick skull and are cheap as sand, you’ve got a lot of strength, sure hands, block, all in all it’s not that terrible.
The pros are four players with strength five, to reiterate, four of your players are usually worth about six and a half of theirs. Your biggest guys have high armour and with all the built in defensive skills the AV7 on your cheaper players isn’t much of a downside since at 40k a piece you can afford a few extra skeletons as spares.
The cons should be apparent to you if you’ve read any of this guide or even learned a little bit about bloodbowl and how it’s played.
Your skeletons have AG2, they are without a doubt the worst team at moving the ball some coaches don’t even start with a thro-ra so they don’t even try to hide the fact that they’re all about hitting the other team a whole bunch.
Even then Thro-Ras only have a 75% chance of picking up the ball, and you can’t use a team RR to improve your chances, man you thought ag3 was bad…
So yeah, technically I’ve got khemri in C tier, because they’re very forgiving, very robust, but keep in mind that many people think that they’re the worst team in bloodbowl. You must really like Egypt to rock this team and you’re more courageous than me. Good luck anon, may nuffle favor you.
As far as bad habits go, I guess in theory it might train you to be over protective when picking up the ball? Maybe reliant on your horde of strength 5 guys to hit people down, you’ll probably get used to using your linemen
Lizardmen
405 Lizardmen
Lizardmen, are considered by many coaches to be a great team, one of the best, and it might surprise people that I have them this low as far as a new team goes. In short I believe lizardmen are a crutch and won’t help you become a good coach.
On top of that Lizardman have no skills to move the ball, they have only three types of players, they start with either all their strength and only a couple rerolls or they get three rerolls but they don’t get their kroxigor.
Lizardmen have highly specialized (and effective) players, the big guys absolutely have to protect the small guys, and you still want to score TDs with the big guys, so you want to block people a lot, but you don’t have any skills so every block has an 11% chance of causing a turnover.
When things go bad for lizardmen they go really bad. The easiest way to beat lizardmen are to injure all their skinks. Other coaches will do everything possible to kill your skinks, and with AV7 and stunty your skinks will die, very rarely does a lizardman team have 11 players on the pitch.
One of the main strategies for lizardmen is to kick the first half (almost everyone wants to receive first to punch as much as possible, or score as much as possible), lizardmen want 11 players to stop the opponent from scoring and maybe steal the ball.
I got a bit ahead of myself, so here are the pros:
You have the best blockers in bloodbowl. You have the best runners in bloodbowl. Skinks have movement 8 and stunty, they have an unreasonable amount of mobility, they can get just about anywhere and when you’re in a tight corner you can just let dice fly and you’ve got a reasonable shot at a skink pulling of an amazing play that leaves the other coach questioning whether their god is real (hint he’s not, only nuffle is real). Some of the things lizardmen pull of are jaw dropping.
Saurus, as I mentioned, they’re up there as some of the best blockers in bloodbowl, they have high movement, high strength, high armour, their skill access is fine and you get six of them. There’s not much to say about them, they’re a wall of muscle and they’re highly mobile. It’s effortless to build one into a blitzer with break tackle along side their normal block/guard/mightyblow, they do their one job really well.
Kroxigor are great, they’re a bit pricy but they’re one of the most useful big guys even without spp, prehensile tail means that as long as he hasn’t bone-headed he’s a huge pain for even elf players to get around, so often the best move with the krox is to just leave him be.
So in closing, lizardmen is a great team, but for a new player it can be challenging to use your highly specialized players effectively, and you might end up getting all your skinks beat up and lose. It sounds straight forward in that your big guys protect your little guys, but it’s bloodbowl and things rarely go as planned.
Necromantic
406 Necromantic
Necromantic is another very powerful team which I don’t recommend for new players.
From a skill and stat point of view they have a mixture of high speed, slow speed, dodge, block, overall high armour, and regeneration on most pieces, unfortunately your most fragile piece (the ghoul) doesn’t have regeneration, but over all the necromantic team is very durable, which is great because you don’t have access to an apothecary.
Now, if you’ve been reading this whole guide top to bottom you probably know what I’m going to say next, there’s no ball handling skills out of the gates. You don’t have sure hands, you don’t have agility 4, picking up the ball is a liability. Like most teams you’re not guaranteed to pick the ball up, possibly you’ll need to use a re-roll, and unfortunately there’s no easy way to build the Nerco team at 1000 tv.
On the up side there’s a little bit of everything in a necromantic team, you’ve got some block (only two mind you), some strength 4 (again only two), some movement 8 (sensing a pattern?) some movement 7, some agility 3 to go around, all in all the necro team has a variety of specialized players. You have two blockers in the Flesh golems and Wights, you’ve got two speedy guys in the ghouls and werewolves (unfortunately weaker than their norse brothers, albeit these guys regenerate, move faster and start with claw, very deadly later in their career).
Unfortunately the spread of these players are the necromantic teams true disadvantage, and largely that’s why they’re low in my list. You need to really understand bloodbowl to know where you want your guys, they each differ in many ways and skilling them all up to a point that you’re happy with them is quite difficult.
It’s kind of like an even more advanced lizardmen team where instead of having two guys to do two jobs, you have four guys, two of them are really good at blocking, two of them is really good at dodging, and the werewolves can be built into murder machines (mainging you get 5 guys who are good at blocking, maybe even 6), and planning ahead on where you want them can be overwhelming.
All of this gets piled onto a team which has difficulty moving the ball around early on, have some extremely expensive re-rolls on top of a very luxurious roster (who doesn’t want two wights, two flesh golems, two werewolves, oh wow you’re out of gold).
So yeah, Necromantic is a great team, but you don’t have access to passing skills on normal die rolls, half your roster has agility two, but on the up side necromantic is forgiving about keeping their players alive, and raise dead is a very cool mechanism. So I can forgive you if you are tempted to play the cool greatest hits of classic horror, just be aware that player positioning is more important on only one other team in all of bloodbowl, necromantic is hard to play, rewarding, but hard to play.
Nurgle
407 Nurgle
What team has a worse statline than default chaos and can’t take an apothecary? That’s right it’s nurgle!
Now, I could just tell you “go read the chaos section” but nurgle actually have even more downsides than just chaos, I’m not saying nurgle is a bad team, on the contrary they’re quite good (as are most teams in bloodbowl) but I am saying they’re a bad team to start with.
At first glance you get, absolutely no skills to help you with playing the game. Your “beastmen” (now called pestigors) are also much more expensive than normal, however you have access to a trash lineman and you get funny skills like “Nurgle’s Rot” while your re-rolls are incredibly expensive.
On the plus side you don’t have to pay for an apothecary, on the downside your players have the built in cost for regeneration so you end up paying way more than an apothecary, on the up side regeneration is statistically way better than an apothecary.
As I mentioned the statline for nurgle is like chaos but worse, your warriors are slower, your warriors are agi2 and your linemen are move 5 and don’t have horns.
The big draw to playing nurgle is the Beast of Nurgle, you get a guy with the absolute worst negative trait in the game but he starts with tentacles and costs slightly less than the most expensive big guys. That said the beast of nurgle is undoubtably the most effective stock big guy without you ever activating him. So long as he’s standing up everything is chummy. Your warriors and beast get disturbing presence which is kind of a strange bad high variance defensive trait, but every little bit helps and in the grand scheme of things they could be worse.
Progressing with a nurgle team is a difficult challenge of filling out your positionals and skilling up your guys to get block at least.
I know lots of people adore nurgle, they’re a very funny team and nobody can stop the giggle which stems from a failed block due to foul appearance. Disturbing presence will hamper the enemy team from moving the ball, especially if you’ve got your warriors coordinated together.
Nurgle’s not a bad team, they’re just rife with disadvantages and their advantages just aren’t as consistent as other teams. It might be a long time before your Nurgle team starts picking up SPP where they need it, and it can be very frustrating playing against opponents who are faster to start than you.
I didn’t mention the biggest positive is that you get to melt their players into rotters to play games for your team which is fun in a sick, twisted and mean way, but remember the downsides, expensive rerolls, reroll hungry, no ball handling, no block, they’re a very unforgiving team for playing the game.
Simyin
408 Simyin
Ah the Simyins, the monkey team, who doesn’t like monkeys. Now many tournaments don’t allow the Simyin team, however there’s no reason they shouldn’t allow the team. The simyins aren’t incredibly overpowered, they’re actually somewhat average, they share a lot of similarities to the Slann, with many odd starting skills.
At first glance you might think the simyins are a terrible team to start with, after all they have agi 3 across the board with their bashy positionals at even lower agi and there are none of the typical skills we are looking for. No block, no pass, no catch and no sure hands.
But rejoice because monkeys do have one thing going for them! They’re monkeys, so they can use their feet to handle the ball! Everyone has extra arms which gives +1 to pick up, catch or intercept rolls. So fortunately all your strength 3 guys can pickup the ball on a 2, just like an elf.
Also, while there is no block present, you do have two chimpanzees who start with wrestle which is very useful, and the chimps are fast little devils so they’re your go to guy to knock down a ball carrier.
Finally, while you don’t have pass, your orangutan does have strong arm which sort of helps out passing when you’re playing early games, and once you do develop the Orangutan strong arm is a great skill that you wanted all along.
So the simyin has a weird pseudo elf feel with some access to str4 and even str5, grab isn’t a terrible skill by any stretch of the imagination, but if you’re playing simyin there’s almost no guides out there on how to build the team and gorillas are the strangest +str positionals in the game.
Honestly it’s just a solid bloodbowl team, sure there are more disadvantages than advantages to playing as them, but they’re more weird than bad. So go bananas.
Undead
409 Undead
Ah undead, you might ask “what’s the difference between necromantic and undead?” well necromantic is the horror-movie team with werewolves and frakenstein monsters, while undead is pure undead, it’s like a combination of Khemri and Necromantic, so you get some advantages from both, you get some disadvantages from both, it’s an undead hybrid, it’s weird. You get two choices of linemen, fast or slow with av 7 or 8. You get more ghouls than the necro team has access to, so lots of movement 7 to dash around with. Two wights for pretty good blitzers, they’ve got a standard statline, regeneration, they’re not amazing but not bad by any stretch of the imagination.
Then you get the mummy, which is kind of cool, it’s like a stripped down big guy, but you can have two of them. Movement 3 is really really bad, like unbelievably bad, but strength five is really good, and no negative trait, but the movement 3 is really really bad.
So overall, the undead team is a slower necro team, you have some more strength, your blitzers are the exact same, and you can have four ghouls. The ghouls are pretty good, they’ve got an ok stat line, they don’t have regeneration and you have no apothecary so if they get hit they’ll die.
Since I haven’t mentioned it, you get absolutely no ball handling skills, so the undead team isn’t particularly great at moving the ball, they’re kind of weird when it comes to hitting other players, like you’re great at the line of scrimmage but your mummies are literally the slowest thing around.
The starting rosters for undead are particularly good and you can gamble on whether you want skeletons or zombies but again, sometimes you’ll just flail around, unable to handle the ball, move 7 dodge ghouls help a little bit with that.
I guess if you really like mummies this is possibly the best team (sure khemri are all mummies and the khemri mummy is better, but ghouls are pretty cool) but I’m definitely biased since I prefer Frakenstein’s Monster and Werewolves any day. Just remember that this team has some serious issues moving the ball around, and your mummies and linemen are incredibly slow.
Underworld
410 Underworld
Underworld is one of the more unique teams, as it features skaven players, goblin players, and a weird funny troll and everyone can take mutations. Mutations are very fun, underworld is very fun, but should people play it as a first team? Probably not.
Underworld has a funny little rule called animosity, and at first glance you get some really good skills like pass, block and sure hands, which is great. You also have goblins and a troll, so you can do some funny shenanigans with throwing goblins. Between throwing goblins and skaven just flat out running places you’ve got a very fast team. Goblins are also surprisingly mobile and forgiving for positioning.
However right off the bat you’ve got a strength disadvantage. Goblins aren’t very good bloodbowl players, they get hurt very easily, and your skaven get hurt very easily, so very rapidly you’ll be losing players and feeling the burn.
Underworld is one of those challenging teams, where you get a lot of bad players, the upside is you get an amazing troll and a bunch of skaven who are really good at doing things. You start with some block and goblins are very good at assisting your blocker, and sure hands helps you move the ball, but getting used to how poorly goblins take punishment will take some getting used to.
If you really want to play the smelly rat goblin team then I won’t fight too hard to stop you, it actually does a pretty good job of teaching you how to play blood bowl, however all of your players are susceptible to being killed at all times and you don’t actually have a catcher, but fortunately your roster is all extremely cheap.
Overall underworld has a great troll who can become a murder machine, amazing blitzers which easily become murder machines, goblins which become insanely annoying to deal with after a few level ups. Underworld has some good movement. You can also afford to staff 13+ players relatively easily. So if you don’t have a problem with your players dying then by all means play underworld. They’re a fun team who have a lot of tricks up their sleeves but they can’t take a punch. Especially be careful if you put catch on someone, since they’re a likely target for enemy coaches to kill. I never actually explained animosity but basically it’s racism. Your rats hate your goblins and don’t want to give them the ball, if you try to they have a 1 in 6 chance of not giving them the ball, there’s no turn over, but it has a small chance of losing you the game. Assuming you can’t or don’t play to cover your bases, specifically the base where you fail to throw or hand off the ball to a goblin and then your rat gets blocked by the other team and you lose the ball.
D Tier
500 D Tier
I jokingly refer to D tier as “do not play tier” and to be nice most of these teams are not good, they feature a lot of players which are easily injured and most of these teams have more negatives than positives. I hold these teams in my heart and I hold coaches who play these teams with respect, especially if they win frequently (note that some of these teams are expected to win about 30% of their games).
So read on about some of the most fun and least competitive teams in bloodbowl. Start here if and ONLY IF you don’t care about winning and just want to see some crazy ♥♥♥♥.
Chaos Pact
501 Chaos Pact
I’m going to preface this blurb by stating something most new players don’t understand, big guys are not good. They’re high variance pieces in a high variance game, inevitably they will roll a one and something bad will happen, maybe it’s a turnover, maybe they lose their tackle zones, maybe they refuse to stand up and play the game. Big guys are fun, wild, powerful pieces, which can make your opponent wish he never played bloodbowl but they can just as easily make you wish you never played bloodbowl. With that out of the way, we may continue.
Chaos Pact is easily one of my favourite teams, and they have the easiest draw to understand, they’re also technically the most competitive team in D tier, but they’re absolutely terrible in teaching you how to play blood bowl.
To start off with you don’t get any skills that you’re interested when deciding if a team is easy to play or not. Fortunately you do something, you get one dark elf. So one played with agility 4 is pretty good, sure on a dark elf team he’s just a line elf, but on a chaos pact team he’s the star player.
Their “big easy” draw that I mentioned is the fact that a chaos pact team can have an Ogre, a Troll and a Minotaur. For the low price of almost half a million gold you get fifteen points of strength.
If you want to play a weird team with a bunch of giant dudes, you can play chaos pact, hell if you ditch the elf, you can start with all three and a good amount of re-rolls.
It’s like playing chaos, where you get a bunch of strength, but no skills. Big guys aren’t particularly good, and you start with average ones, your troll doesn’t even get mutation on a normal skill up.
You can only have one fast guy, who isn’t actually that fast in the grand scheme of things, the three renegades all have animosity (you know, the racism rule. Your linemen are actually really good, marauders are really cool and they can easily be built into a variety of roles.
So you get a weird kind of average team who doesn’t start with great stats, you don’t have any skills, but you can take three monsters. It’s not particularly good but it is very fun. You might not win, and the win rate for chaos pact over hundreds of thousands of games by thousands of coaches is around 48% which place them about right near the middle of the pack, albeit on the lower side of the bell curve.
That said they have the potential to be decent, it just won’t be easy.
Goblin
502 Goblin
Ah goblin teams, now we’re getting truly into the tip of the stunty iceberg. Goblin teams are terrible. You can take two trolls, which aren’t great, and 16 goblins, which aren’t great.
What you do get, which is great, the absolute nuffle loving chaos.
Goblin coaches aren’t even playing bloodbowl, or they’re playing a more true bloodbowl than everyone else, here’s what positionals you get:
Goblin with grenades, yes grenades, you throw bugs bunny looney toon like explosives about the pitch. When your Bombardier (that’s his name) is throwing grenades he has the potential to devastate other teams who have low armour, which means he has the potential to absolutely ruin your day, and he’s unlikely to throw the ball well at all. However he’s dirt cheap so, I mean, I always take one. Why wouldn’t you, he costs as much as a regular goblin.
Goblin with a chainsaw. This one doesn’t really need an explanation, it’s just friggin’ awesome. Alright it does need an explanation, the looney also costs as much as a regular goblin, however he’s much more consistent, he’s like a rocket, you put him into something you want dead, and maybe it will, there’s a lot of rules governing the looney, just know that he’s best used against people lying down or people who have low armour and if he doesn’t manage to hurt them you better have something that can push the opposing player away. When the looney is knocked down his own chainsaw cuts into him, giving a +3 to the armour roll, which means he’s probably removed from the pitch.
The other positional is goblin with a giant mace that weighs more than him but he still manages to fling it about. You could probably write a whole article about the fantatic, just know that he has the ability to destroy the game, knock over even the toughest of enemy, and he’s actually pretty safe, so long as they don’t manage to block him down, because if he falls down he’s gone.
You also can buy a goblin with a pogo, which, can hop around, and move slightly faster than normal. He’s definitely your best goblin, at least he’s the best goblin without secret toys that the ref will take away.
So yeah, goblins have a lot of upsides, and needless to say they have absolutely no skills which help you in moving the ball or hurting other players, and being successful with a goblin is more about luck than any other team in bloodbowl.
The cons are pretty self explanatory, your entire team are goblins. They’re bad at hitting people, bad at moving the ball around, the troll wants to eat them, the ref will eject your players with fun weapons, so you’ll need between 13 and 16 players, since some will be ejected, some will die, some will get caught stomping on a wood elf neck, you know typical hazards of playing bloodbowl.
I wasn’t lying about the troll thing either, they will eat goblins if you roll snake eyes when you throw a goblin. Of course it’s worth it because if you throw a goblin into an enemy player you might kill them.
Halflings
503 Halflings
You don’t actually have a roster, I mean you can say they do, but what you can do is take 0-16 halflings and 0-2 trees. And you will always take two trees.
So halflings play a bit like goblins, except they don’t get any toys at all.
You get two trees, and ideally, you keep your team value really low, so you get a bunch of inducement money, because you want to play with deeproot strongbranch, you just do. You want to play with three trees and hopefully pull off some incredible nonsense leaving the other coach stunned.
There’s no skills at all which will help you move the ball, you get halfling chefs for 150k inducement money which might leave your opponent with no rerolls, of course it could just as easily do nothing at all.
There’s really no reason to play halflings, unless maybe you identify with them. If you like food more than anything in life, don’t mind watching trees throw diminutive cheerful fellas around and don’t mind dying and losing a lot well then, good luck I guess. Just don’t blame me when you never win a game and all your players die. That said, there’s no greater shame than losing to a halfling team, and they’re technically more consistent than goblins. Just a bit.
Khorne
504 Khorne
To put it bluntly the Khorne team is a terrible joke, it looks like the French designers over at Cyanide took chaos and norse and mashed them up into one team that doesn’t make any sense. I’m going to attempt to keep this short, so we’re just going to get into the meat of it.
Immediately we’re greeted with the tried and true problem of absolutely no useful skils out of the gates. No sure hands, no pass, no catch, and above all else no block.
Instead of block you get juggernaut, which treats both down results as a push while you’re blitzing. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that you can only blitz once per turn so having it on possibly 7 players is less than ideal.
To make matters worse your re-rolls are 70k and you defnitely want to start out with 3 or 4. Your linemen are extremely expensive at 60k, (as much as a pro elf line elf) and your big guy is the most expensive big guy in the game.
The khorne team is a poorly designed mess where you get a lot of weird skills off the bat and everyone except your linemen want to blitz.
What you do get is a lot of frenzy and I mean a lot of frenzy. Almost every single player you field starts with frenzy (needless to say you probably don’t want to put frenzy on your bloodletters who don’t have frenzy).
While frenzy is a good skill which opens up a lot of plays, it’s not a “free” skill. It’s not something like block where it just works all the time.
Frenzy lets you push other players around a lot, moving key pieces away, openning up holes in defense, surfing people from a great distance, but frenzy requires setup, planning and very careful positioning. To be successful as khorne demons you really need to know how bloodbowl works and where your guys need to be standing. You need to know which enemy players need to be moved and not having strength access on your linemen will be a huge hurdle to overcome.
Khorne teams are fun, they shove people around a lot, but they’re overburdenned with bad skills which are only used during blitz actions and their statline is terrible compared to other teams.
Please don’t start with them, they’re really bad for learning the game. They’re not even good when you’re a good player. They are potentially a lot of fun for shoving other players off the pitch.
Ogre
505 Ogre
Technically worse than halflings, which you know, is a thing. Go read my blurb about halflings, skim it, it’s short.
So, ogres get 0-16 snotlings and 0-6 ogres.
If you buy 6 ogres you can’t start with rerolls.
You get no skills to move the ball, no block, nothing.
Your only agi 3 are on strength 1 snotlings which are incredibly super tiny.
Yeah they make for pretty good ammo for throwing at coaches, but your strength five players have a 1 in 6 chance of standing around drooling. Now you have something like four or six of these jerks, which means you’ll probably have one stop and drool for a turn, and then there will be synchronized turns where half your team just stops doing anything and drools.
Like ok sure, you can throw tiny miniature goblins around, and you can use tiny miniature goblins to stomp on people’s throat when they’re down.
Ogres don’t really have an advantage, like yeah you get six huge strong guys, but they’re all stupid and never want to play bloodbowl and the tiny jerks who hang out with them are extremely useless, they’re practically free SPP for other players.
If you play ogres you’re conceding that you’re not going to win, but maybe you’ll slap some enemy players around and throw some snotlings into their faces and mess them up good. Probably not, but you can live on a prayer all you want.
If you’ve seriously bothered reading this to decide if you were going to play ogres or not, you’re probably just going to do it, so go ahead, roll some dice and have some fun. The odds are stacked entirely against you and there’s no “build” or “tactics” which will help you out. Just stack all your poker chips up then slap them off the table, because it’s bloodbowl, not poker. You can’t bet chips on anything in this game. At least not legally.
Slann
506 Slann
Slann are actually pretty good, but uh, they’re kind of a joke team but they work better than the other joke teams, so they’re playable.
They’re comparable to simians honestly, but simians aren’t “tourney official” as far as the big bad NAF says so I didn’t cover them.
Since this is a more serious team (albeit only when compared to teams which are designed to be funny) the slann don’t get any skills to play bloodbowl with, at least no skills to make a new player’s day easier.
Instead all your frogs have leap, which is a funny skill. It’s a skill which makes wood elf wardancers insanely good, but when it’s on everyone, and more importantly low agility players, it’s actually just a liability. Sure the very long legs make leaping…good-ish…
And the kroxigor roster entry is riddled with typo, slann get froggigors, which are like kroxigors but are frogs instead of crocodiles, and they get prehensile tongue instead of prehensile tail, but the rules are the exact same. Just know that it’s not a giant crocodile man but it is indeed a giant frog man. And please don’t comment about how frogs don’t have giant tongues. It’s a fantasy game, about four foot tall frog people who jump around playing football.
So yeah, the frogs all get weird skills, Your blitzers have diving tackle, which means they’re actually kind of bad at knocking people down, unless the people are running away from them, in which case they’re aggressive hunters who throw themselves onto their prey. Actually the more I think about this the more it makes sense, it’s just weird like, nobody told these guys to play football, they just showed up and started throwing themselves at the evil non-frogs and trying to get the weird brown egg forward or something.
Slann have a huge problem in that their catchers have agility 4, which means they’re good at catching the ball, picking up the ball, throwing the ball, them having leap means they can do some crazy levels of movement. But you really want your blitzers to level up, because they’re actually weirdly competent blitzers, like they have strength access, you can take four of them, so you can build them into block, dodge, guard (or mighty blow) monsters who are awesome. Then if any of them roll a +agi you get to start doing some insane things because they’re suddenly better than a wardancer.
It just takes time, patience, and scoring with agi3.
At least your rerolls are cheap.
Vampire
507 Vampire
Alright, you might not think so, but Vampires are one of the joke teams, the players themselves actually get some really cool insane rules, their linemen are bad, but they’re appropriately cheap, and vampire as players are freaking cool, they’re like bloodbowl gods.
You get the “vampire statline” which comes up a lot in games, 4 strength, 4 agility, a ball handling, player punching machine. They’re gross, they can do anything, vampires can be skilled up into any roll and they excel at it.
They would even be a really good bloodbowl team if they would stop eating the other players, and sometimes if they can’t eat a team mate, they will run off the pitch, into the crowd, and eat a fan.
This of course causes a turn over which ends your turn and is generally really bad.
Vampire teams are possible to do well with, but they’re hungry, they desire re-rolls, they desire bodies to feed upon. If you get a well developed vampire team you are a terror to everyone else, and a group of well developed vampires can overcome any obstacle in bloodbowl, so long as they don’t get cranky and eat too much of their team. But it’s bloodbowl, you’re going to roll a one and eat your thralls.
So yeah, no skills for handling the ball, or hitting other people, but vampires are the pinnacle of bloodbowl playerhood, except for the whole eating part, on the upside vampires won’t actually kill their thralls, but they will drain them dry leaving them out of the game to recover. Maybe.
Closing Thoughts
600 Closing thoughts
Wow, this was a lot longer than I originally planned, and it’s a lot more about personal opinions, ultimately I hope this overview was useful to someone, and I can’t thank anyone who gives me comments and criticism enough. Yes tiers are subjective and everyone will be mad that their favourite team wasn’t on the correct tier blah blah.
Look, this is about teams to learn the game with. I feel like I did a pretty good job explaining why some teams are worse to start with (hint it has to do with block, sure hands, pass and catch, as well as how their players can move), it’s not bible law either. You can learn the game with any team, you’ll need to read the rulebook, watch youtube videos, and work hared if you pick a team which has glaring disadvantages. Except it’s not work, it’s play, so play hard.