With the end of the year, Blackbox Trophy Season 6 is ending. After an exciting end where happygrue took over the #1 spot from fxiii who's held it for most of the season and Burtblahblahblah fairly solidly holding third, we have the podium for the first Trophy on the BB2020 ruleset.

With the end of Season 6, the next season is about to start, with fresh teams and updated tiers and scoring. There are a number of changes put in place for season 7 with the most impactful being that the points for unused squad budget is reduced to 1 instead of 2.5. The season 6 number for this was an early mistake that I chose to not change after noticing it (since there were already a large set of created squads). Essentially, it meant that the best way to get to the top was to run low-point teams. Totally a mistake on my part, but I don't think it's been a critically bad one and has basically given a strong "underdog" flavour to a season where we had a completely new ruleset anyway.

Beyond that, there have been a number of roster tier adjustments. The new list is as follows:

3 point rosters:
- Amazon
- Orc
- Dwarf
- Necromantic Horror ▲
- Norse ▲

2 points:
- Underworld Denizens ▼
- Chaos Dwarf ▼
- Shambling Undead ▼
- Human ▼
- Skaven ▼
- High Elf
- Tomb Kings
- Dark Elf
- Old World Alliance ▲
- Wood Elf ▲
- Chaos Renegade ▲
- Black Orc ▲

1 point:
- Snotling ▼
- Lizardmen ▼
- Elven Union ▼
- Imperial Nobility
- Chaos Chosen
- Halfling
- Khorne
- Nurgle
- Ogre ▲

0 points:
- Goblin
- Vampire

The new list is heavily based on results from season 6, primarily looking at how each roster performed and contributed to scores. However, there have been a couple of adjustments to even out the tier sizes slightly by looking at popularity of each roster (in an attempt at increasing diversity). A couple of notable changes are both Chaos Dwarves and Lizardmen both being reduced in cost despite already being popular in season 6. I fully expect both of these to be fairly common choices in their respective tier. Another notable roster are Amazons, who continue being the strongest performer of them all, and at the same time continues to be one of the least played rosters (being saved from the least played in season 6 by Snotlings). From a purely mathematical perspective, they will hold the highest average expected score for season 7 (and would have been set to 4 point cost if that wouldn't have been so awkward from a system perspective).

For more details on how this new list was set up, I did a stream of the analysis on my Twitch Channel. I don't really stream all that often, but there is a VOD of it for a while for those of you who are interested.

Season 7 starts at January 1st (at midnight server time, just as the year ticks over) and will run for 4 months (until the end of April), and I am very much looking forward to seeing what people bring. Good luck!