For those who don't know much about Adepticon, it used to be considered mostly a Warhammer 40k/Fantasy event. However, more recently, it's become much larger in scale. There's Warmachine/Hordes, Malifaux, Flames of War, Battletech, and tons of other gaming going on. It's up in Chicago and it's something I'd love to go to someday.
For Hardcore games, you can only have one list. This is pretty major. You also have fast turn time limits (7 minutes) and everything in your army has to be painted. There's also variable round lengths so you don't know exactly how long the game will last (unless you win by caster kill or scenario early, of course). You can find the PDF of the standard Hardcore! rules here.
I can't find any easy way to post a chart using the Blogger editor and I'm not about to dig out raw HTML to make a chart of my own. So here's the Top 15 in a crappy cut-and-paste format:
| Rank | Player | Faction | TP | SoS | AP |
| 1 | Langendorf, Walter | Circle | 6 | 3.9 | 113 |
| 2 | Shonkwiler, Chad | Trollbloods | 5 | 4.6 | 139 |
| 3 | Boland, Ryan | Trollbloods | 4 | 3.5 | 175 |
| 4 | Jahr, Jeff | Protectorate | 4 | 2.8 | 187 |
| 5 | Carpentier, Joshua | Trollbloods | 3 | 2.5 | 105 |
| 6 | Malake, Mike | Skorne | 3 | 2.3 | 142 |
| 7 | Christensen, Trevor | Skorne | 3 | 2.3 | 136 |
| 8 | Patterson, Jeremy | Minions | 3 | 2.3 | 130 |
| 9 | Zappia, Dominic | Protectorate | 3 | 2.3 | 104 |
| 10 | Christianson, Keith | Cryx | 3 | 2.1 | 205 |
| 11 | Nach, Jordan | Cryx | 3 | 2.1 | 156 |
| 12 | Van Meter, Jake | Legion | 3 | 2.1 | 200 |
| 13 | Watt, Jason | Skorne | 3 | 2.1 | 149 |
| 14 | Lust, Matthew | Trollbloods | 3 | 2.1 | 135 |
| 15 | Horn, Lee | Protectorate | 3 | 2 | 164 |
The first thing I see here is that 4 of the top 5 were Hordes players. 7 of the top 10 were Hordes, and 10 of the top 15 were Hordes. That's not the greatest of balance at the top. 3 of the top 5 were Trollbloods, which is surprising.
61 people played in the tournament. The faction breakdown is:
5 Circle of Orboros (average placement 23.4)
9 Cryx (30.8)
8 Cygnar (40.8)
4 Khador (36.3)
6 Legion (27)
2 Mercs (38)
2 Minions (19.5)
5 Protectorate (26.2)
4 Retribution (47.5)
7 Skorne (29.1)
9 Trollbloods (24.9)
The Circle list that won Hardcore was:
Epic Baldur
Woldwatcher
Woldwatcher
Woldwatcher
Megalith
Woldguardian
Shifting Stones
Shifting Stones + UA
Druids
Gallows Grove
Gallows Grove
Celestial Fulcrum
Strange list and the guy who won it all details all his battles here. It is a Tier Four list which made all those Woldwatchers 4 points instead of 5. From reading the reports, it sounded like he put their Shield Guard ability to good use.
People are so worried about Colossals and Gargantuans dominating the game but you can see that clearly didn't happen here. The top Cygnar player (who was probably playing a Stormwall) was 24th. There were only 2 Mercenary players so it's not like the Galleon was everywhere either. Proxies aren't allowed so there were no Mammoths on the table.
Other interesting things? The top troll player was playing pGrissel. Only one Borka player took Family Reunion T4. Lots of pMadrak. Because the 2013 Hardcore scenario (there's only one) favors attrition so much, you can see why Trolls did well.
People were building lists to stall out, from what I've read. They weren't playing to win the game... only to win when they called dice down. That's not a fun play style to me, but that's why they call it Hardcore.
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