The First Turn

Hello Guild Ball fans, today I am going to talk about the importance of the first turn. The first turn is the most practicable turn in the game, as well as the easiest turn to theory craft outside of play. A strong turn one will put us in a better position for the second turn. If we continue to have a better turn than the last, it puts us in the best position to have a successful outcome from our game. So we should have a routine first turn for our team into many match ups to start out strong. The more practiced our first turn becomes, will give you more time on our clock for later turns.

Turn one begins at the kick off.
When we are kicking we want to apply as much pressure on the opposing team with our kick off model. Ideally this should be a striker model who can threaten to take the ball away from the receiving team, or by giving a superstar play an extra jog before the game to apply their threat to a larger area of the pitch. When kicking we want to try and mess up the receiver's turn 1 plan; this could be by kicking to the model they want to score a goal with, forcing a key player to retrieve the ball leaving them in a position we can capitalize on, or kicking to a spot that the other team has no way to get the ball for there team turn one which eliminates the benefit of receiving.
When receiving, we want to have our team spread out to cover as much of the pitch as possible to prevent getting burned by a perfect kick off. This doesn't mean to be so spread out to much that our team can execute any sort of turn one plan. After getting the ball, we should pass it around our team for free momentum or movement. Then later into the turn move in for a goal or putting our set-upped value player into the opponents team.

Different guilds do turn one differently, mainly those with access to character plays. An example of this would be Smoke Alchemists where the Alches want to stay as far away as possible from the other team with character plays, then have smoke condition the entire team. Blacksmiths are a foil to this turn one by having a very aggressive turn one having two buffed apprentices having the ability to do work. Finding out the ideal turn one for your team as well as play style when kicking or receiving takes some time, but after a few games we can narrow down what actions we tend to do.