TV1000 Halfling Starting Roster

TV600 Halfling Starting Roster

This is an extreme roster that is often used by a lot of good Halfling coaches, specially when joining in a new league where all the teams start from scratch. You need 400k in inducements as I said for the Master Chef and Deeproot Strongbranch, so against brand new 1000k TV teams, that means you need to be at a maximum of 600k. Thankfully with Halflings being so cheap you can easily do this. Ten Halflings and both Treemen give you twelve starting players which is usually more than most starting teams (though with Halflings being fragile don’t be surprised if you don’t out number them all match).

To stay under the 600k mark the only other thing you can afford is one reroll. While only one reroll isn’t exactly great, you should be able to steal at least one a drive (though this isn’t guaranteed) when you induce a Master Chef. That can hurt other starting teams and you can severely hamper them if you manage to get the maximum three rerolls from them. You should also be able to get Deeproot Strongbranch as well which gives you thirteen players now and three of those are at least strength six! That gives you a Line of Scrimmage that is hard for most teams to deal with and a lot of space to hide your Halflings behind.

You can come unstuck though if your opponent hasn’t spent all their starting mine like you didn’t. It is getting more common now (no thanks to this site) for teams to save the odd amounts left over towards an Apothecary (or whatever) after their first match, rather than dump it into Fan Factor or something else. Against those teams you won’t get the 400k inducements you need. You can either select some other options along with the Master Chef, or you could start the team with one less Halfling dropping your team value to 570k. If you are playing a scheduled league and know your first opponent is likely to save some money, then that might be the best option.

While this starting lineup can be very successful it isn’t without problems. You start with a lot less players than if you spend the full amount of money. You can quickly become out numbered if the other team ties your Treemen up well and gets at your Halflings. If your Master Chef fails all his rolls then you are left with just the one reroll. Your Treemen might then Take Root right away and the match slips away rather rapidly. With less players you may not be able to gang foul so well as you don’t have the reserves to replace those being sent off. A TV1000k roster may counter most of these points and while you may not be able to steal opponents rerolls you can still win the Kick Off rolls and are guaranteed three each half. What you give up compared to this cut down roster though is that you also can’t hire Deeproot Strongbranch who can make a game winning difference.

Halfling Starting Rosters Summary:

These are really the two extreme ways of starting a Halfling team, one affords you pretty much everything possible to start with while the other strips down to the bare minimum in order to get those useful inducements. Of course with so much money to spend and various options to consider you can tweak these to your own preferences, such as starting with lots of rerolls and dropping the staff and Fan Factor if you prefer.

Whatever you choose as the team develops though you will find inducements play a big part in your game plan as even if you don’t get them in game one, a Halfling team doesn’t develop as fast or as much as other teams. You can start with a full roster from the get go, so you tend to spend your money replacing players rather than expanding by hiring more like other teams do. If you start with the stripped down roster then you can buy more players as other teams advance looking to stay behind 400k of the next lowest team in the league. Starting with the full roster the amount of inducements you get will grow as the other teams develop at a faster rate.

There is some middle ground to both these rosters though they tend to apply when joining an existing but still fairly new league. In this environment teams may already have advanced their team value by a couple of hundred, so if most the teams in the league are around 1200k, you can start with around 800k. So the higher the value of teams in the league you are playing in, the more you can spend of your starting million.

The biggest decision really just comes in totally brand new leagues where you need to decide if you want to go full out or stripped down. You could go with some middle ground and spend around 900k in order to get at least the Master Chef from inducement money but still afford more players / rerolls / team goods than the stripped down roster. If you have the option to play some practice games you can test the various options out and see which suits you best.