Tournament!

Saturday, At Ease Games held a 2000 point tournament.  Obviously, I mention this because I was in attendance. 

After playing so many games at 1850 points, the extra 150 felt a little weird when I was trying to come up with a list.  I had just finished the Land Raider, so that had to be part of the list.  That meant Logan wouldn't be coming out of a pod, so I dropped two of them, plus a Lone Wolf and Dreadnought.  That meant I had points for a Thunderwolf to provide a running mate for the Thunderwolf Lord, providing him with just a little more protection and squeezing a strength ten Power Fist into a very fast unit. 

It really doesn't look like much at first.  And then it punches you in the face.

Going into the tournament, the thing I was most worried about was my general lack of experience with the list.  I've been playing my castling drop pods list for quite a while, and this was a pretty big departure.  I thought the theory was sound.  I wanted to alpha strike something significant with the drop pod, while the Thunderwolves and Land Raider raced forward to provide support.  It's always nice to have a theory, but putting it into practice can be interesting.

The missions were Bay Area Open style, meaning we'd be playing Seize Ground, Capture and Control, and Killpoints every game, with whoever fulfilled the most of these claiming the win.  After giving these a run, I have to say it's not incredible, but definitely plays pretty simply.  I guess my biggest gripe would be that it's not the most interesting way to play over the course of three games.  At the same time, not having to read the mission pack intently before every game to determine exactly what I need to do, then think through how to accomplish it while trying to deploy, is a big positive.

Evil St. Celestine

For my first game, I drew my favorite opponent, Chaos Daemons.  It was the same opponent as my first league game, though he was running a pretty different list.  Essentially, he tried to squeeze a bunch of Pavane's of Slaanesh on a Keeper of Secrets and three Daemon Princes into a list with a couple units of Flamers, plus some Horrors and Bloodletters.

He won the initial roll for turn order and elected for me to go first.  I dropped my Terminator pod deep in his end to put pressure on his Capture and Control objective.  My intent was to force him to defend that end with some of his heavy hitters, because most of the Seize Ground objectives were in my end.  If he didn't respond with enough resources, he'd be conceding one of the three win conditions and I liked my chances.  He ended up dropping all three units of Horrors nearby to try and shoot the Terminators to death.  Twenty straight saves later, I think he knew he was in trouble. 

I assaulted two of the units and did enough damage over two turns to kill all of them, then wiped out the third in the following turn.  At the same time, his Bloodletters came in on my end.  I put all my shooting into them, then charged in my Thunderwolves.  I cut them down to three, but they put three wounds on my regular Thunderwolf and he failed two saves, which really hurt.  He piled in with his Keeper of Secrets and finished off the Lord.  In the following turn, I had a choice to finish the Bloodletters or shoot the Flamers.  Despite the Flamer's potential damage output, I targeted the Bloodletters so I could pick up another killpoint and wipe out his last troop choice.  This ended up really costing me because the Masque and the Keeper of Secrets funneled two of my terminator units into one cone of death with the Pavane and Flamers put so many wounds on the terminators with Breath of Chaos, that it left just the Rune Priest and one Assault Cannon alive. 

What would turn out to be the deciding objective marker

As the game wound down, Logan and his bodyguard finally got involved killing a Daemon Prince and a unit of Flamers, putting me up by two killpoints.  On the final turn, the Keeper charged Logan's unit, while one of his Daemon Princes charged my immobilized Land Raider.  The Keeper put all his attacks on Logan and just barely managed to kill him, while my unit swung back and couldn't quite finish the job.  Then his Prince swung at my tank with the game on the line and managed to whiff three times out of five and failed to do anything significant on the damage rolls.  

We counted up the killpoints twice, but I had one more, and I also had my drop Terminators on a capture and control objective, netting me the win, 2-0.  I drew a Tau player next, which I'll cover in depth with my next post...