The Winter I. T. T. Making the Cut

Charles Gould
Feb 6
3 min read

Winter ITT is the kind of event that exposes everything.

With 150+ teams in the room and 1,885 individual games played over the weekend, you don’t “ride” a good matchup or sneak through on reputation, you have to keep producing results round after round.

And at the very top of that pressure cooker, Veizla didn’t just win - they dominated.

They finished as the only 6–0 team at the entire event, beating Team Sigil in the final.

The Veizla headline numbers

Veizla’s weekend:

6–0 as a team
477 / 600 total team points
26 / 30 individual game wins

That 477 total is seriously impressive, but to highlight it even more:

79.5 / 100 points per round, on average
15.9 / 20 points per game, on average

In an event where the overall environment is simultaneously full of tight games and massive blowouts (nearly 1 in 5 games ended 20 - 0), that average tells you Veizla didn’t just “avoid disasters.” They repeatedly engineered matchups that let their players push differentials.

Their roster wasn’t just “strong”

Veizla’s five factions:

Astra Militarum — Björn Eriksson
Deathwatch — Emil Söderholm
Chaos Daemons — Joel Larsson
T’au Empire — Jonathan Sleigh-johnson
Necrons — Jesper Unander-Scharin (c)

On paper, that’s a blend of:

high-floor reliability (Necrons, Guard),
high-ceiling skew (Daemons),
pressure/shooting control (T’au),
and a specialist tech piece (Deathwatch).

This comp is brutally simple, use Necrons and Guard to get solid match ups and look for big scores from one of the remaining 3 lists. This is also backed up by a ridiculous amount of player skill on each of these players, easily able to pounce on a mistake and build a differential from nowhere.

And that last one matters: Emil, only dropped a single differential point across the entire event, which is basically the definition of “pairing leverage". How many teams do you think prepared to face a deathwatch list?

Their draft likely forced “two bad options”

At UKTC ITTs, the pairing mini-game is built around Defenders and Attackers (Here is a lightning fast recap):

You put forward a Defender
the opponent offers two Attackers
you accept one and refuse one back into the pool
repeat until the last matchup is locked

Veizla’s roster is basically a textbook for that system:

Stable Defenders (Guard / Necrons) who can take a hit and still score.
Must-answer Attackers (Daemons / T'au) that threatens 17–20 outcomes.
A second leverage piece (Deathwatch)

Whilst I can’t see their private pairing sheets and each exact round, the results speak for themselves. (477/600, 26/30 wins) are what it looks like when a team repeatedly drafts into “acceptable pain + spike elsewhere,” instead of playing five coinflips.

Aligning with the meta without becoming predictable

Winter ITT’s most-played factions were:

Necrons
Astra Militarum
Adeptus Custodes
Space Marines
Chaos Daemons

Veizla brought 3 of the top 5 (Necrons, Guard, Daemons), the proven staples and then complemented them with T’au and a highly-tuned Deathwatch angle.

That matters in a pairing room, because you’re not just asking “is my list good?” You’re asking:

What do we defend with?
What do we hunt with?
What do we use to create uncomfortable choices?

The teams that “only bring good stuff” can still be easy to draft against if the opponent has reps into it.

Veizla’s mix says: we’ll take the reliable points and we’ll also make you solve a problem you didn’t prep for.

the final hurdle was Sigil

Veizla’s statement win was the one you can’t argue with: they beat Team Sigil in the final.

And Sigil weren’t a soft landing:

Sigil were one of the favourites going into the event and highly ranked in the event to begin with, including beating Team Yōkai in Round 5 and having one of the toughest strength-of-schedule paths.

So Veizla didn’t win a quiet bracket. They closed the event by taking down a team that had already proven they could beat elite opposition deep in the win bracket.

See you at the next one

Coming up we have a range of events, with the next international teams tournament being the I. T. T. Spring. And for singles, we have the Manchester GT: Winter and Windsor GT... the catch is they are all SOLD OUT.

You can sign up for the waitlist today, or to ensure you don't miss out, grab your ticket to one of our other upcoming events now.