What kind of player are you?

Ready yourself, shit's about to get deep.

There's 4 camps for me in terms of table-top games:

• The story-driven casual player who likes to bring one of each unit, regardless of their effectiveness and adhere to cinematics and fluff.
• The competitive player who min-maxes his list, picks only the most points effective and stellar units for the purpose of winning games.
• The WAAC player is a competitive player but will do anything to win.  This includes cheating, calling the judge for random shit, being a horrible sportsman, running the clock, and is generally the type that gives competitive players a bad name.
• And then there's me.  I have no idea what happened over the years, but I think I'm somewhere between casual and competitive now.  Probably around ~5 years ago, I was definitely the competitive player:  Taking only the best choices without looking at anything else that's ineffective.  If Dark Eldar came out then, I would of probably went pure Venomspam.

However, something happened to my personality between then and now and I think it's changed for the better.  Shhh.. I'll tell you a secret:  I started off this hobby being very casual, only playing with what I like, loving the fluff, never fielding an army if it's not painted, and enjoying every facet of the hobby.  Sometime around the time where I'm constantly getting my teeth kicked in by better players using min-maxed armies like Nidzilla and Eldar, I changed.  If I started at year 1, my second year was devoted to becoming a better player.

Given my personality, this seems fitting because I'm by nature a min-maxing Tuner Spike.  From year 2 to year 7, I became a very good player.  During that time, I attended and won a lot of tournaments, placed well in many GTs and become to go-to person at local shops for strategy and tactics.  I also taught GW Academy during some of these years and I'm actually quite proud having introduced, taught and mentored many fine tournament players today.  I still get emails from them from time to time to talk about the hobby and how things have changed since I moved to the West Coast.

At year 8, something changed.  I refused to play the units I thought were lame fluff wise or didn't look good on the table top.  I found myself running themes like Kabal-only and no weird Haemonculi shit.  Hell, I don't own a single Thunderwolf because I think the idea of Space Marines riding giant wolves is a crapmix of Sci-fi and Fantasy.  Even today, I own a single constructed Venom lol.

I look back and see what has happened in the last 5 years and I see the following:  I started working at Blizzard (where a lot of people play casually), I got married, I got a house, and I'm looking to have kids in the near future.  Could this be me maturing as a gamer?  Or am I just getting old?  I find myself focusing more on the design of the units and talking about how things should be a lot more.  Part of this is because I work in the gaming industry, but maybe the other part is that I just don't find cutthroat games fun anymore.  Shit, maybe some day I'll paint again.

What about you guys?  How do you play your hobby?