Cronch’s Road Through 2025, Part 3: Down With The Sickness

Welcome back to your fortnightly insight into my hobby goings on! This was scheduled to be another bumper episode, with two different events scheduled in one weekend, but disaster struck and I ended up catching COVID-19. It’s probably the fifth or sixth time I’ve had it since 2020, so at this point I know what to expect, but it’s still bad enough to lay me low for a few days alongside being responsible and staying isolated.

So unfortunately, it’s going to be a shorter one. I did get a good chunk of hobby done though, and one pick up game before the illness struck.

Hobby

Being ill did unlock quite a lot of hobby time, almost all of which was spent on Goonhammer projects! Up first, I painted the cool new Lord Vitriolic for Nighthaunt. I’m really happy with how he came out, he’s a great improvement on the Nighthaunt designs of 7 years ago.

Hot on the Lord Vitriolic’s heels (wisps?) was High Falconer Felgryn, a new named character for the Flesh-eater Courts. In progress I thought this sculpt was quite noisy and I wasn’t really happy with how it was going, but it all came together in the end. You can read about these two here.

A slight diversion from Age of Sigmar, I got asked to paint Miao Ying the Storm Dragon for our Warhammer: The Old World coverage. The new Cathay range is full of amazing sculpts but this pair of models really is the amazing capstone on the collection, in my opinion.

In a bit of my own hobby time, I started working on the new Ossiarch Bonereapers Spearhead box, adding in an extra three Stalkers which I had lying around. These should be quite quick to finish, I’m trying to replicate my Black Templars scheme on them as a fun project in switching schemes between settings. Perhaps I’ll try to do some 40k stuff in one of my AoS schemes too, one day. I’m pretty happy with how these are going, I hope to get them finished in a spare couple of evenings over the next fortnight.

As well as painting, I’ve been doing a bunch of clearing out, or trying at least. I’m doing way more Goonhammer work at the moment, which I’m very grateful for, but it’s certainly helping to stoke some feelings that my personal shame pile is altogether too large, so some projects are making their way to new homes and I’m really trying to thin the collection of models that I own “just to paint some day.”

Club Game – Passing Seasons vs Rich A’s Blades of Khorne

Although I’d had a pretty appalling result at the Welsh Open, I was keen to keep playing and had pre-arranged to play my friend Rich in our regular Monday club slot the day after the event weekend. I was keen to get straight into practicing with the Iridan-based Sentinels of the Bleak Citadel list that I actually planned to use this season, rather than the Karazai list I’d chosen to take to the Open.

Rich’s list - click to expand

It’s not particularly complicated – between Iridan, the Relictor and the Stormcoven there’s quite a lot of magic/prayer support, and Scourge Iridan is pretty capable of lifting units too. The classic Terminos/Reclusians combo anchors on an objective and trades well, and the Prosecutors are a good deep strike threat with their 3d6” charge. Vigilors are an efficient unit, and the Knight-Judicator keeps some quality shooting without costing nearly as much as Longstrikes.

The Celestant-Prime is a bit left-field, but I think he’s really good for his points, he’s fast, fairly resilient, and most importantly with damage 4 Crit (Mortal) attacks, your opponent can’t afford to just ignore him. Just a note on his deep strike ability – I’d normally choose to start him on the board if there’s not an immediate risk of him being sniped. His large move characteristic means you can often get closer to the enemy than you’ll be able to deep strike, even factoring in his special rule to reduce drop distance.

Rich A was running the new Blades of Khorne battletome with the Murderhost formation to get extra moves with his Daemon units at the end of his turn. He was running a pair of Bloodthirsters, a couple of units of Bloodletters with the hero, a Slaughterpriest, 6 Bloodcrushers, 10 Blood Warriors, and 10 Bloodreavers. Rich won the priority roll but knew I’d outdrop him, so made me place units first. Fully deployed, I gave him the first turn.

Rich took a cagey first turn, grabbing the two active objectives for a 10 point score but not overextending in pursuit of battle tactics. He brought the Bloodcrushers and the Wrath of Khorne Bloodthirster towards the top objective, and the Blood Warriors took the other one. He passed the turn, and I set about deciding what to do. Ultimately I decided to stick to the plan of putting the Reclusian block across the middle of the board, while the Prime went left to try and steal the Blood Warriors’ objective (successfully, scoring me the first part of Restless Energy) and Iridan went right to challenge the Bloodcrushers, as well as shooting units dropping to support them. This was ultimately an error I think – Iridan did OK but the ‘crushers are a huge health sink and I was never going to do enough damage for a decisive alpha strike, and put myself in Bloodthirster range in the process. A hasty Power Through at the end of the turn brought Iridan mostly back to safety, sacrificing 5 points of primary scoring in the process. Shout out to the Stormcoven, whose shooting attack this turn somehow killed an entire unit of Bloodreavers in one activation. I was impressed, until remembering that this was just giving Rich Blood Tithe points to spend.

Rich won turn 2 priority, and had a pretty impactful turn. Some Bloodletters tied up the Prime and took his objective back off him, although failed to kill him. On the other flank though, the remaining Bloodcrushers and the WoK Bloodthirster wiped out the Judicator and Vigilors, as well as the Knight-Relictor thanks to some bad positioning by me, giving away an Intercept & Recover score. The rest of his army moved forward in the centre. On my turn, I had a chance to strike decisively, but kind of ruined it. The Terminos and Reclusians as well as Iridan charged the Bloodthirster of Insensate Rage in the centre of the board, but positioned themselves badly and Rich got a counter charge into them with the other Thirster. Both were damaged at this point, so I fought first with the Terminos and then split attacks with the Reclusians, playing to try and take both off of the board. Instead, I killed neither, and to add insult to injury Iridan whiffed and failed to confirm the kill on the BoIR.

The pain didn’t stop there, as in the backfield I dropped my Prosecutors in a perfect semicircle around Rich’s objective to challenge the Slaughterpriest. Unable to snipe the priest who was protected by the throne, I opted not to shoot them in case they destroyed the building and gave themselves a much harder charge. They made the charge into the throne, then the Slaughterpriest fought before them and killed three, which caught me totally by surprise. They did nothing in return, but did take the objective at least to score a full 10 on primary and the Strike of Restless Energy. I was flailing though, at this point I’d killed none of my Intercept & Recover targets and lost a lot.

Rich won prio for turn 3 and completed his tabling of me, leaving us with a pretty savage final score.

Result: 30-70 Loss

Not a great first outing back with the new list. New Khorne seem like fun though, although there were a couple of rule interpretations that we weren’t sure on and had to come to an agreement on in the moment. I think I’m broadly happy with my list composition here, although I definitely think I didn’t use it to its full potential. I’m used to being very mobile and teleporting about with my previous Stormcast lists, and I think this one wants to castle and rely on wards a little more.

Next Time: Changes?

I’m struggling a bit with Age of Sigmar at the moment, to be honest. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the game, but I’ve gone from feeling like a really competent, skilled player at the end of last season into a string of losses and making constant stupid mistakes. I’m getting frustrated with myself, for the most part, I think. Still, there are a lot of positives on the horizon – I’m really positive about both the Nighthaunt and Flesh-eater Courts battletomes, so I think I might actually rotate into one of those for a while. I’ve played 43 games of 2,000pt AoS this year, and the vast majority of those have been with Stormcast Eternals. At this point, perhaps a change is as good as a rest.

Catch you in two weeks to see what direction I’ve gone in!

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