Team Malice consists of four people currently: Doug Lee, Richard Pennertz, Buddy Porter, and Jason Phillips. Each person at various times contributes ideas to warband construction. When Team Malice constructs a warband, we first look at the community as a whole and make sure no one else has already constructed the warband and given it a title. When it is found that no title exsits for said warbands, out of simplicity, we call it "Malice X". This serves two functions.
1) Placing "Malice" first then placing a figures name that is included in the warband second (Malice LRD, Malice LSD, Malice HEBI, ect) makes for a simple naming process. It would become hard, over time, to name many warbands as you would have to think of colorful adjectives that captures the essence of the figures in the warband and the way the warband plays.
2) It shows where Team Malice stands on issues concerning bands of the specific archetype. For example, it is highly debated what the best commander is to place in a Dual Large Red Dragon band. Team Malice feels that, at this time, the Drow Wizard is the best commander for this warband. Thus Malice LRD consists of:
2 LRD
1 Drow Wizard
1 Abyssal Maw
Now, when ever anyone hears the term "Malice LRD" they know its a dual Large Red Dragon warband that uses the Drow Wizard as its commander.
It has become apparent to me that there are those out there who resent the name "Malice" appearing in warband titles. At no time has any member of Team Malice demanded, dictated, or complained in argument of any band being forever immortalized as "Malice X". People are free to call what ever band what ever they want.
To those of you who are upset by this practice, let me refere you to the game Magic: The Gathering. For the many many years of this great games life people have come and gone along with specific deck builds. People name their decks after certain fuctions within the deck or they name them goofy things that they come up with. Ever heard of "Hulk Smash"? How about "Tools and Tubbies (TnT)?" How about "Keeper"? Yep, those are names given to those decks by their creators. Yet, in the nearly seven years I played MTG, no one has ever complained about any particulare name given to a deck that I know of. So I ask you why, fellow DDM players, is Team Malice catching grief for this practice? I could continue and list off my personal views on why this may be the case but that would only cause more conflict so I wont. Many of DDM's patrons were once or are currently MTG players so we should all be used to this practice by now.
Indeed, many are used to this practice and have used warbands released by Team Malice, and call them as such when they give their tournement reports. This is only common practice as it has occured in many games in the past and even exsisted in DDM before the creation of Team Malice. To those of you who show respect to Team Malice and use the names given to these warbands by us, we thank you.
Jason Phillips aka Shadow Fox, 1/26/05