Skills that help Marking Players:
There are a number of skills you can take that make marking players even more effective. One of the best ways to keep a player marked it to make it hard for the other team to just simply push your player away. Both Agility and Bashing players have options they can take without needing doubles skills. Agility players can get Side Step and the hitting guys can get Stand Firm.
Skills that help keep you upright are also useful as well, so Block and Dodge, the old faithful combo is useful for so many situations.
The other way that players avoid getting marked it by simply dodging away. The skills that help prevent this are therefore also helpful to have. Diving Tackle is great for this and Shadowing is a great follow up skill for the fast players as well. Some players have Prehensile Tail which makes the dodges harder and those who can get Mutations may consider this too. High strength players may also consider Tentacles to really pin down weaker opponents. Tackle is also well worth having to counter Dodge that opposing players may have.
Skills that help Against Getting Marked:
On the flip side there are skills that make marking your players harder. These are mostly narrowed down to skills that help with dodging away. Strong, low agility players will often look to getting Break Tackle, it only works on one dodge per turn though, so if the opposition set up to force multiple dodges then it can be countered. Dodge is obviously helpful for dodging (if you needed telling that, I think you are beyond my help)! Leap can make it really hard to pin a player down, though only really an option for the agile players.
There are a couple of Extraordinary skills that can help as well, Stunty is great as it ignores all the tackle zones for dodges. Hypnotic Gaze is also very helpful to negate marking players, you can use it somewhat as an extra blitz on move actions to free up team mates.
Pain causing skills can also help as players simply won’t want to mark them. This may not be the case at the end of the drive when the opposition really needs to stop you scoring but earlier on in a drive it can keep them free. So skills like Mighty Blow, Piling On, Claw, Frenzy, Juggernaut are good skills for this.
Summary:
As you can now tell from the length of this article, that marking players is a key component to playing this game well. You might want to go over this more than once and if you get in any situations where you weren’t sure where to place players, then draw it up on Play Creator and post it in the forum for some help and feedback. If you can think of a situation I’ve missed or have any other comments then please feel free to let me know.
Good to see you back Coach
Great article, Coach, but one question: while you never state it outright, it seems from your examples that you primarily want to mark players when you’re on defense. How often do you mark players when you’re on offense?
The diagrams were as it was easier to explain those for defensive situations with some visual examples. For offence you don’t as desperately need to contain players like that. Combine that with the fact that protecting the ball is of a bigger concern, you usually aren’t going to have enough players to spare to be able to do it either.
You still want to mark certain players to at the very least cause them to do more dice rolls. You would rather not have a big guy ploughing into your cage for example, so sticking a Lineman on them will usually stop any without Break Tackle. Making the route harder to the ball carrier for the opposing sacking specialists is also worth while.
Excellent article, I will attempt to apply this stuff to my future games 🙂
Frenzy players deserve a mention. Marking them will help in stopping your players getting crowd surfed.
With good marking you can force them into multiple 1 dice or 1/2 blocks should they decide to blitz free of just throw a block.
Minotaurs can be dragged far, far away from the action with good marking, providing they dont eat the player you are offering up.
Thanks for that, you just gave away my play book.
This is still a concept many coaches struggle with. Just look at the discussions on troll being a crap player. Could you wish for better when marking a star saurus?
Actually, the by far most awesome marker is someone with the Iron Man (all injury rolls are only stunned) Handicap result from LRB 4. I recently had this on a Skink, and used this Skink to mark a Claw-RSC-Tackle-Multiblock Monster for half game.
THE classic chainpush is the one countering the “mark-the-non-agile-player-so-he-can’t dodge-out-easily” ploy:
1,2 -> elf linemen
B -> low AG ball carrier
1
2B
As you explained there’s no way B can blitz himself out of this without making a dodge. But with 2 extra players a chain push can be set up to free B.
H = helping player on B’s team
First fill the free square for the push with one of your players:
1
H2B
Next blitz 1 from above (L = blitzing player on B’s team):
L
1
H2B
Hopefully, he gets a push+knockdown making the situation like this (L follows up, P = prone player 1, meaning no TZ):
L
H2P
B
B has been pushed an extra square closer to the EZ and is free to move without dodging (another option would be to push 1 into 2 and 2 out of B’s tz).
Thank you very much for this article Coach, this was a very weak part of my game, especially the marking stronger ballcarriers like in your CW example. I’m sure I’ll come read again for a quick recap at some point.
Redvenom, thanks for your tips on Chainpushing to free up a low agility ballcarrier. Very helpful.
Coach, I think you should attempt to write an article on chainpushing at some point. For many inexperienced players like me it is something we never use or spot and very frustrating when a more experienced player uses it against you.