Hold the Cheese

So in my area the 40k fightclub is present at every tournament, except for those are Merlyns, I am usually the only fight club member there and it usually falls on me to represent the club at those events. Since the fightclub has such a presence in this area it's core ideals have become ingrained into tournament organizers standards. As such sportmanship, the club's pride ideal, is a huge factor in most tournaments in this area. Meaning that if people don't like your lists for being too "Cheesy" (that's the local term for powergaming your list) or you have a bad attitude or even if you are a RAW (rules as written, as apposed to as intended) player you have a good chance of taking heavy hits on your score and not winning anything.

That's why I take a different approach. For one I try and write fun lists that focus on synergy as apposed to efficiency. That way people don't see double lash and immediately mark me down. I have always been told that I am just a nice person in general so having a bad attitude is never a problem for me. Rules interpretation is where I usually take the hit but usually I am winning by enough or losing enough where I can just let things slide when I need to. But sometimes in the right circumstance I can use my superior rules knowledge to my advantage and gain the unforseen loophole not anticipated by GW.

An example of such a tactic is the necron shuffle. In the codex when you succesfully we'll be back roll you are told to place the model in coherency with the unit. (except lords) What it doesn't say is that you must put it anywhere near where the model currently is. So for example my unit of warriors could have taken 5 casualties last turn and I would pull them from the back of my unit. Now say I make 3 we'll ba backs. using the Necron shuffle tactic instead of me just standing them back up and putting them in the back of the unit again I would place them 2" ahead of my front rank. Essentially moving the unit 2.5" (counting the base as approx. 1/2 and inch.) Best part is the unit didn't move. so I can still fire at full range if I need to. A lot of players see this as cheating and alot of the time if I know I am playing a player that frowns upon this kind of playing I will "hold the cheese" as it were and just stand them up where they fell over.

But if I happen to know that my opponent isn't going to mark me down for the tactic I make damn sure to use it if neccesary.

The important thing is making sure that I feel out the situation and know when the time is right to do it.

That's it for now. Next time I think I'm going to write up my list for Spocon, I want to take something competitive yet fairly friendly and very fluffy so joing me next time when I talk of the Children of Avarice.

Bringing the lash

Yet another tournament today, once again at Merlyns. It's kind of nice having a bunch of stores around each with a different feel. Merlyns is the hardcore store in the area with no sportsmanship or painting scores, just straight up battlepoints so I figured I would bring an actually semi-hard list for once. So for 1500 points I brought:

Daemon prince w/ lash, Wings, and MoS
Terminator sorceror w/ lash and MoS
10 Plague marines in a rhino, 2x melta, champ w/ pfist + Rhino w/ Extra armour
10 Plague marines in a rhino, 2x melta, champ w/ pfist
6 Chaos Marines, flamer, icon of chaos glory
6 havocs, 4x lascannons
Land Raider W/ Daemon possesion, 2x lascannon, heavy bolter

I'm restricted by models (because I'm horribly broke, being trans is not cheap and neither is 40k) so that's why only 1 rhino and I picked up the havocs used SUPER cheap so I figured might as well since I lacked any other real anti-tank.

I was expecting a ton of Mech and/ or tervigon spam so lots anti-tank was an absolute must.

So battle reports

First round I ended up getting a bye... which is totally fail and was the first nail in my coffin towards not winning. It counted as a minor with 1 battle point (14 points)

Second round I was up against mech eldar w/ 3 units of avengers, a unit of dragons, and a unit of scorpions in 3 serpents and two falcons. W/ Eldrad support and 5 spiders in reserve. The mission was black crusade from battle missions. I honestly can't remember the battle point mods but I know neither of us got any. I should have dominated this game based on statistics. He was a relatively weak opponent and I was able to get some decent shots at his serpents. The only problem was that even with all of my anti-tank weaponry all I could do was shake his vehicles. I dominated anything of his that got out but most of his stuff stayed embarked most of the game. I finally destroyed a serpent on turn 5 by assaulting it with a unit of plague marines and krak grenading it to death. but otherwise my phasers were set to shake.(not even stun...) I ended up pulling forward by 1 kill point but the mission still counted that as a draw. So end of round two I had a grand total of 24 battle points... I was going to have to get a massacre next mission or I was in trouble.

Mission 3 was prepared assault from battle missions. dawn of war deployment, 2 objectives. I hate this mission... the way the TO set it up is you have to control both objectives or the best you can do is a minor. This was going to be an uphill battle for me from the get go.

My opponent brought a list that would be hard for any other of my armies to deal with by far, he had:

Master of the forge, conversion beamer
Dread, assault cannon, dread cc, pod
Dread assault cannon,dread cc, pod
Dread multi-melta, dread cc, pod
Dread multi-melta, dread cc, pod
Dread multi-melta, dread cc, pod
Ironclad, seismic hammer and something else, pod
5 tacs in a rhino (not sure on special weapons on these)
5 tacs in a rhino
5 tacs in a rhino
like 6 scouts, bolters, camo cloaks.

This game could not have gone any better for me.
Turn one two MM dreads and an assault cannon dread pod in, scouts and MoF are hiding in the backfield.
I start with rhino 18" forward hugging the table edge (I was scared of the Str8 Ap3 blast from the mission) chaos marines w/ sorc 18" away from MoF
Turn one prince, havocs, and raider all come on, raider at 6" to get a shot with lascannons. foot plague marines in reserve.
Havocs run to hid in ruins but only roll 2, end up in a horrible position with limited field of fire and did little all game. Landraider fails to do anything, imobilized and Weapon destroyed in such a way that it was useless rest of the game. Rhino pulls around and meltas a MM dread to death, prince assaults the other MM dread, rips it to shreds. Sorc and tacs pull the scouts out of cover and just start picking off scouts all game. Long story short The prince ends up walking across the table killing 5 dreads total and ending up in 6" of opponents objective (battle point there) plague marines get blown out of their rhino and foot it the rest of the way to clear one of the two units on the objective while prince lashes the other off of it. I ended up getting a massacre with full battlepoints.

This was a tense game going to turn 7 if it would have ended any earlier I would have only gotten a minor.

As it was I scored 24 points for this game, making 48 total. It was enough to get me 3rd place. Overall I had a very fun and very tense tournament. My next coming up is the fight club challenge. This is the biggest tournament for me in the year and I am taking part of my vacation time for it. Unfortunately armies need to be painted for the challenge so I will be bringing my necrons, but I've got enough tricks up my sleeve to make sure that that isn't an auto loss for me.

I'm thinking I am going to be bringing the following list:
Necron lord, orb, veil
Destroyer lord, phase shifter, gaze, phylactory, chronometron, warscythe
11 Warriors
10Warriors
15 Warriors
3 Destroyers
3 destroyers
10 scarabs w/ disruption fields

anyway that's it for now, I'm gonna be talking necrons sometime soon.

Doubles tournament lessons

I won't be doing a tournament report on the tournament at hobby town mostly because that day just blew by. But I would like to note that the tournament was AWESOME. The turn out was huge compared to most tournaments in the area and everyone seemed to have a ton of fun. I learned a few things with this tournament. 1: I am not a good enough general to be able to take on two opponents and guide a teammate through the processes of the game. I took my roommate, Kayla with me to this tournament and she is still relatively new to the game. I had to be very careful about keeping track of what she was doing and not letting my opponents push her into making poor tactical decisions and/ or taking advantage of her lack of rules knowledge. We ended up going 0 and 3 but that is mostly due to the fact that we ran out of time in every game. We went to turn 2 first game (against horde orks, with another beginning player so it was doomed to happen), turn 3 second game (against drop pod marines) and turn 4 against footslogger marines with lots of shooting (they ended up taking best general... and worst sportsmanship) So the biggest problem there was that we were working on a reserve everything tactic so in only our last game did our whole army come in and we didn't have enough time to get into position.

Long story short I learned that time is very limited in doubles tournaments, almost no one finished their games throughout the whole tournament. As such I'm thinking that a gunline army might be better to bring in future tournaments.

I also learned that making sure your partner has a decent grasp of the rules is very important so you don't have to watch over their every move.