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I have often heard the word Cheese being slung in 40k discussions. There are a wide variety of things that are described as being cheese or being cheesy. This is unfortunate. Because of the loose definition of cheese, it is hard to tell precisely what it means. Generally, Cheesy (or Beardy, it’s British cousin) means that the speaker feels that the subject (usually a particular unit or combination of units) is more effective than the points cost would indicate. The problem here is that by saying it, the speaker is indicating that the person using the subject is almost cheating, since they would stoop to using such a unit. Understandably, this tends to put the person accused (note the word accused) of cheese on the defensive and the conversation can only go downhill from there. This is akin to someone calling you a jerk, instead of asking you to adjust whatever behavior they find offensive. I don’t play Eldar, but I’ll use them as an example, as so many people seem convinced of their Cheese-guilt. If I played Eldar and had a Wraithlord and someone said it was cheesy, I’d have a hard time playing with the person, since they would have just accused me of almost trying to cheat. If I won the game, it would make me feel that it wasn’t due to my tactical skill or careful planning, but simply due to the fact that I had that cheesy Wraithlord. If, on the other hand, they had told me that they felt Wraithlords were underpriced for their abilities, I could handle that. I could respond and say that yes, I do feel Wraithlords are a little underpriced, but not by much. Like a Dreadnaught, they are not especially fast, so they generally won’t get into combat until about turn 3 or so, which cuts down on their utility. In addition, although their high Toughness and Wounds gives them a lot of resilience, they are not bulletproof. Sniper rifles and S5 weapons cannot scratch the front of a Dreadnaught, but they can injure a Wraithlord. With the advent of the Tau, T5 weapons are certainly not in short supply. Given their extreme height, it is also much harder to get cover for a Wraithlord, much less entirely block Line of Sight to it. Wraithlords can also be tied up. Take a cheap unit and feed it to the Wraithlord. This can be Dark Eldar Warriors or Nurglings (love those invulnerable saves!) or Imperial Guardsmen, or Spinegaunts, or whatever you have on hand. While I don’t relish the idea of throwing models away, the Wraithlord won’t be able to take out more than 2-3 per assault phase and it can be easily worth it to keep it out of action while you deal with the rest of the army. Finally, you can simply avoid it. Most units will be able to simply move away from a Wraithlord for most, if not all of, the game, which will leave it as an overpriced weapon platform. I’m not saying that the Wraithlord is easy prey, just that it is fairly well balanced. Recently, a friend of mine found his army choice as a whole (Blood Angels) called cheesy, because, “They win all the tournaments.” Well, a quick search of tournament results indeed gave Blood Angels the top, winning 14 of 66 tournaments. So, 21% of tournaments have been won by Blood Angels. Somehow, I'm not impressed by that amount of overpowering. Incidentally, I’ve heard the same sort of claims about Eldar, which won 6 of the 66 tournaments (9%) so I will disregard these claims, as they are obviously not based in reality. There are some items out there that are perhaps underpriced for their utility, but they generally have drawbacks other than price. Despite the popular cries to the contrary, the 40k universe is fairly well balanced, and I believe there is no such thing as cheese, at least by the standard definition. If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know |