Exactly, remember last winter, everyone gung-ho about blocking that finally was in real-time. And also rather robust.
Guess what, Canadian 10 temp means where very warm, and depite the NW flow we had very little meaningful cold to trigger baroclinic feedback/storms and also no deep cold that would be hard to scour out.
We need arctic cold in my opinion combined with blocking. Some fear this combo leading to cold and dry. I actually like to play that card because we may score here in the low lands.