The Corroad Goes Ever On and On: Autumn ITT

Last week, I talked about our practice scrim against our club’s A-team and our pretty dismal showing which resulted in us making some big changes to our team composition, specifically switching me to Death Guard from Blood Angels and my teammate Ash from Death Guard to Adeptus Mechanicus. It’s a big call to make with little remaining time to practice, and we weren’t sure it would work out. Since then we’ve played in the ITT event, so let’s see how it went.

The ITT is the UK Tournament Circuit’s quarterly 5-player teams event. I think it stands for International Teams Tournament but I honestly don’t remember and everyone just refers to it as the ITT anyway. These are huge events – this one had 320 players in 64 teams registered. If you’re not familiar with the event, you can find its event page here.

Our final team composition after the changes was:

Me – Death Guard (Mortartion’s Hammer)
Wings – Necrons (Canoptek Court)
Ash – Adeptus Mechanicus (Haloscreed Battle-clade)
Luke – Imperial Knights (Noble Lance)
Tom – Chaos Daemons (Daemonic Incursion)

Our lists were:

++ Liam's Death Guard list - click to expand ++

++ Wings' Necrons list - click to expand ++

++ Ash's Adeptus Mechanicus list - click to expand ++

++ Luke's Imperial Knights list - click to expand ++

++ Tom's Chaos Daemons list - click to expand ++

Based on the factions here, the basic goal is for me and Luke to try and win big, while Tom, Ash and Wings are able to take tough games and drag points out of them – ideally they still get good match-ups where they get decent wins, but into rough opponents their beefy, hard to beat lists ought to still get good losses which can be made up for elsewhere. Ash has an additional role as a counter to Knights, helping us with an otherwise tough match-up. The plan is ok, but 3 of us have changed factions for this event with very little practice, so it’s harder to evaluate match-ups than it ought to be.

With that in mind, let’s talk about how the games went. Given this is 5 rounds with 5 games each, it’s hard to meaningfully talk about how everyone did in every game, so I’m going to focus on how my individual games went in more detail than the others while also touching on our overall performance in each round. I’m not going to post images of the maps for each game, but you can find them all in the mission pack here.

Round 1

Opposing team: Hobby Henchmen II
Opposing players and factions:

Chris – Astra Militarum (Recon Element)
Freddie – World Eaters (Berzerker Warband)
Gary – Chaos Knights (Lords of Dread)
Jack – Genestealer Cult (Final Day)
Max – Death Guard (Virulent Vectorium)

Mission: Terraform
Deployment: Sweeping Engagement

Pairings

Looking at these in the week before the event, we were reasonably confident on pairings. We had decent matches for their two grindy horde armies, our plan to have an anti-Knight list paid off immediately with a Knights army to pair into, and we thought we had decent games into the World Eaters and Death Guard. In the event we got pretty much what we wanted out of it; Knights into GSC was probably the only one we’d have wanted to avoid, but Luke taking it and playing for a draw meant Wings could play the Guard, which was better than the other way around. I was left to last against Max’s Death Guard, neither team fancying picking us.

The final match-ups were:

Liam – Max (Death Guard)
Wings – Chris (Astra Militarum)
Ash – Gary (Chaos Knights)
Luke – Jack (Genestealer Cult)
Tom – Freddie (World Eaters)

My game

++ Max's list - click to expand ++

The Death Guard mirror isn’t exactly what I wanted from my first game, but at least Max would know my datasheets!

Looking at his list, I thought I had an advantage here – once I’ve shot his drones off he has no effective way to deal with my PBCs, and I’m not really worried about Mortarion, who is good but not great.

 

I deployed most of my stuff to the left there, with Poxwalkers on the right to hold down that objective.

Here’s an early mistake I made in playing the list – I convinced myself that I could only put two units of Deathshroud in reserve and the last one (the unaccompanied one) had to start on the table. Only when Rob yelled at me after game 3 did I put all three units in deep strike. Afterwards I realised that this is because I’m used to thinking about Blood Angels and planning around what I want to Rapid Ingress, so I don’t really want more than two units I’m planning to use that way. Stupid error #1 from not really knowing the army I’m playing (don’t worry, there’s more of these to come).

Max went first here and drew A Tempting Target and Bring It Down; with BID looking very unlikely he redrew and got Marked for Death. Oof. I Tempted him on the right-most objective, which he was able to take but would have to sacrifice something real to get.

His opening play here was not his best; he put both drones out into places I could see them while running the Prince out to grab his Tempting Target objective. Some Spawn came out into the centre to Terraform that objective, while on my left his Poxwalkers were able to Terraform over there too. The Prince failed to kill enough of the Poxwalkers and was denied that, so he ended up with no secondaries for the turn.

On my turn I had a pretty clear plan of action. I picked up both his drones, the Daemon Prince, the Chaos Spawn, and dropped mortals on his Plague Marines with the PBCs as well. Annoyingly I drew Cleanse early, which I was able to do but was bad from the point of view that I’m trying to use Poxwalkers to Terraform things early doors and had to use them to Cleanse instead.

With that big early swing I was pretty confident I had this sewn up, and Max’s turn 2 was good on primary but bad on secondaries again. I dropped my Deathshroud into his back corner to take his home objective, cleared out the objective on the left (but importantly without taking it, which matters as he has sticky objectives – in retrospect I might have been better off shooting the Poxwalkers there less and then charging onto it), and picked up his third drone which he’d brought in on my right. However, one key thing went wrong here – the Deathshroud failed their charge. That on its own wasn’t fatal, but it was a big reprieve for him as it stopped me from taking his home, which is a 10pt swing by itself but also means that my Deathshroud are now stuck in his back corner not doing much.

In his turn 3 Max began to rally strongly. He dropped one unit of Deathshroud to counter-charge mine, while the other came in on my right to my lightly-defended objective. Amusingly his unit also failed their charge, but he took my right-hand objective to hold down my primary for a turn and also stickied it, which was huge. Mortarion came out and did Mortarion things. That didn’t much matter this turn, but in my turn 3 I tried and failed to kill him, leaving him on just 2 wounds remaining. This was the second big mistake I made in this game, and not this time because of ignorance. I dropped my second unit of reserved Deathshroud in his backfield again and absolutely shouldn’t have – they’d have been best off coming down to give me insurance against Mortarion, hopefully also positioned to be able to charge my right-hand objective if needed, but instead they were hanging around in his back line. They did manage to tag his home and pull him off it, but I’d have taken 4 points off him either way and he could easily retake home whereas he’d have struggled on my right if I’d taken that from him.

Everything else from here pretty much went right – Mortarion failed to charge on my left after I used the -2″ to charge stratagem on a drone, and I killed him next turn, and I picked up his Deathshroud as well. On turn 5 I was able to flip some terraforms and hold 3 objectives to get a big primary swing, putting me narrowly ahead on points, but Max’s primary had been ticking up and up with me left unable to reach the right-hand objective to take him off it again.

Our final scorecard was:

Annoyingly that margin means a single turn of primary in either direction gets me the win – a huge oversight from getting over-focused on taking that backfield objective when it didn’t matter as much as the right-hand one.

The team’s games

How did everyone else’s games go?

The final results were:

Liam – 10-10
Wings – 11-9
Ash – 8-12
Luke – 10-10
Tom – 15-5

That gives a final score of 54-46, an overall round draw for us. A fine result, but a single point in my game would have won it!

Our opponents ended up in 50th place, drawing their first two rounds before winning in game 3 and then losing their last two on the Sunday. Neatly, there were five different Hobby Henchmen teams numbered 1-5 and they finished in order.

Round 2

Opposing team: Skew You
Opposing players and factions:

Paul – Space Marines (Gladius Task Force)
Danny – Chaos Daemons (Plague Legion)
Dash – Thousand Sons (Grand Coven)
Luke – Chaos Space Marines (Soulforged Warpack)
Laurence – Necrons (Starshatter Arsenal)

Mission: Purge the Foe
Deployment: Crucible of Battle

Pairings

Pairings in this one went very well for us. Nobody else much fancied the Plague Legion but Wings assured me I had the damage output to roll it over, and we got a big win when the Duel of the Lukes meant that our Knights were going into their CSM.

The final match-ups were:

Liam – Danny (Chaos Daemons)
Wings – Paul (Space Marines)
Ash – Matthew (Adepta Sororitas)
Luke – Luke (Chaos Space Marines)
Tom – Laurence (Necrons)

My game

++ Danny's list - click to expand++

A very Nurgley opening two games for me so far. I hadn’t yet played against Plague Legion and didn’t know what to expect, but Danny was gracious in explaining it thoroughly before we started.

Fun fact: I reserved a drone this game and totally forgot about it until midway through my turn 4.

I went second again, which is very good on Purge. Danny came forwards with a Beast of Nurgle to take my right-hand objective, and moved a couple of Plaguebearers up on to the one on my left. The rest of his army moved towards the middle but didn’t cross the ruin wall, so I had very little to do except shoot at the Beast.

My right-most PBC duly did so, and with an assist from the others shooting indirectly I killed the thing, which held down his primary on turn 2 and also gave me an early 4VP for getting a kill. On my left I sent some Poxwalkers onto the objective there to out-OC the Plaguebearers. So far so good.

The Battle-shock part started to bite over the next few turns. My right-hand Poxwalkers kept rolling 8s, which is fantastic except he constantly had a -1 or -2 debuff on their leadership. They tried their best, bless them.

Secondary draws went a little against Danny here – he drew Display of Might which he had no realistic way to do, and also Area Denial which he absolutely could have but forgot about and ran his Plaguebearers back again to hide them when he probably didn’t need to. Meanwhile he took my right-hand objective off me by Battle-shocking the Poxwalkers, and moving a GUO onto it, but this also meant I could Storm Hostile over there.

This was a very pleasant game, but not a very exciting one. Danny’s plan is basically to set up and not cross the halfway line while forcing Battle-shocks so that you struggle to hold primary. His units can kill stuff and he was smart in using them to push to stop me having the run of the board, but it’s a very defensive plan. I was lucky a few times here that I was able to keep him off holding more, and then on turn 3 I was also able to take his home objective by dropping the Deathshroud into a tight gap behind the Nurglings he had covering it.

A key difference-maker here was that I was consistently able to pick up kill more, while holding him off hold more, so that his primary scoring was only ok. Meanwhile his secondaries just didn’t go well at all – he drew Defend Stronghold when I’d already picked the Nurglings to be afflicted so that I could take them off home with very little he could do about it, and Marked for Death where he was unfortunate to not even kill the Gamma target. On his final turn he stepped Rotigus onto his home to out-OC my Deathshroud and save himself on Extend, but I’d kept his score down well and even with 9pts from Challenger cards he was stuck on 72pts.

Our final scorecard was:

The team’s games

Wings was playing on the table next to me and I thought from the board state he pretty much had it sewn up – in the end he got a 10 after a couple of things went against, but his job is to take lists like Guilliman Ultras and stifle them, so good job. At the far end our Luke played their Luke, and ours looked exultant while the other was wishing for death. When I went to see how their game was going I had to double-check which sides they’d deployed on as there were Knights all over the table, including both home objectives.

The final results were:

Liam – 13-7
Wings – 10-10
Ash – 11-9
Luke – 18-2
Tom – 11-9

That gives a final score of 63-37, an overall round win for us. After such a close one in the first round, it was pretty satisfying to stick a decent score on the board and get a strong team win.

Skew You had a rough run of it – after an opening draw and then a loss to us, they drew again on Saturday night before losing both rounds on Sunday on 42pts each time to finish 58th overall.

Round 3

Opposing team: Deal No Pain
Opposing players and factions:

Martyn – Leagues of Votann (Oathband)
Alaeze – Deathwatch (Black Spear Task Force)
Nikhil – Death Guard (Mortarion’s Hammer)
Matthew – Adepta Sororitas (Champions of Faith)
Patrick – T’au Empire (Retaliation Cadre)

Mission: Hidden Supplies
Deployment: Search & Destroy

Pairings

Pairings here went well enough. Wings was scared to death of the Deathwatch, and gave me them expecting it to be a tough loss. On our Discord, Rob and Mike Pestilens disagree strongly, and Rob is incensed by my deployment photo (see below). Ash got a tough game, but the others look good for us.

The final match-ups were:

Liam – Alaeze (Deathwatch)
Wings – Martyn (Leagues of Votann)
Ash – Matthew (Adepta Sororitas)
Luke – Patrick (T’au Empire)
Tom – Nikhil (Death Guard)

My game

++ Alaeze's list - click to expand ++

Rob got mad as hell about this photo. It’s not great deployment – for one thing I just straight fucking forgot about holding home until I’d put all the Poxwalkers down, and should have just left a unit back there as I didn’t need them all out front. The Deathshroud we’ve already talked about, but also I should really have reserved all three drones in this game. After forgetting about one last game I was gunshy about it, but that’s stupid. Reserving them would have let me bunch up the PBCs more to keep them out of line of sight, and given me the chance to respond to Al’s kill teams instead of letting them swing on me first.

And swing on me they did. I compounded my error here by putting a PBC and drone out to kill some Deathwatch Veterans on this right-hand objective to absolutely no effect – his combi-weapon LT is unassailable behind that ruin so it changed nothing about primary, and I didn’t have Overwhelming Force or No Prisoners, so who cares?

In return Al dropped down both his Kill Teams and fucking annihilated two Plaguebursts and a drone. This is a big, big problem. I am down significant assets and he has so much shooting to work with.

On the right-hand side I was able to all but delete one of the KTs, but on the other I have to leave them untouched. I’m also unable to meaningfully harm his Terminators in the middle or do anything about the Storm Speeders. For the third game in a row, I drop Deathshroud down and take home with them, which is a funny trick and caused him problems, but the thing is that a Ballistus Dreadnought equals their OC so he was able to take it off me on turn 4 and then I failed to kill it until my turn 5, which was too late really.

This is a short write-up not because I’m salty about the game but because there’s not a lot to say – I made two serious errors early on in the game and they cost me mightily. I don’t think Al could believe his luck; probably supporting Rob’s opinion on all this, he was worried about the game from the beginning and seemed surprised to win it. He played well with a good list and exploited my mistakes harshly, so well done to him.

Our final scorecard was:

(There’s a slight discrepancy here – the result went into BCP as a 6-14, but Al found me the next day to say he’d realised I’d missed my last points of primary when totting the scores up. We won the round anyway so it didn’t matter, but annoying nonetheless.)

The team’s games

On the table next to me, Wings was absolutely annihilating Martyn’s Votann. Martyn actually played with us a couple of weeks ago to fill in for Luke at the scrim, so we said hello before the round. I don’t think he was expecting to win his game, but everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong and he looked a beaten man by the end of it. Luke also did well into the T’au, while Tom pulled out a narrow win over the Death Guard. Ash held up a credible loss to the Sisters.

The final results were:

Liam – 8-12
Wings –19-1
Ash – 7-13
Luke – 14-6
Tom – 11-9

That gives a final score of 59-41, an overall round win for us. Two on the bounce and we were riding pretty high!

Deal No Pain picked up a second win the next morning before losing their final round to finish in 35th place overall.

That was the end of the Saturday, and it had all gone pretty well – two wins and a draw for the team and we’d nearly won that first round as well. The way that the event was scheduled meant that we didn’t wrap up until nearly 9pm, and after a 6am start I decided I’d rather just check in to my hotel and get something delivered. That took three attempts – the first time my key didn’t work, then the second time my key did work but it turned out the original problem was that someone else was already checked into my room. Luckily they weren’t in it when I came barging in the door. At the third go around I managed to get a room that nobody else was occupying, ordered a McDonald’s, and played some Switch for a while before getting my head down ready for the next day.

Round 4

Opposing team: Team Sigil
Opposing players and factions:

Mickey – World Eaters (Berzerker Warband)
Danny – Necrons (Starshatter Arsenal)
Sam – Adeptus Mechanicus (Haloscreed Battle Clade)
Gustavo – Astra Militarum (Combined Arms)
Chris – Chaos Knights (Infernal Lance)

Mission: Linchpin
Deployment: Dawn of War

Pairings

This was a tough one. I think the only game I really want here is the World Eaters, though I can’t say I really know enough about the Guard or Ad Mech to know how that goes. Before the round I’d been talking to Danny on the way in about the Necron mirror and he was very confident about winning that one, and about the Guard beating Wings too, which given that his job is to take this kind of game and grind it out didn’t bode well. I ended up being given the Knights, on the basis I had the least-bad game into them after Ash and we wanted him on something else to try and similarly grind out points. We also ended up on stream for this one, which didn’t really help!

The final match-ups were:

Liam – Chris (Chaos Knights)
Wings – Gustavo (Astra Militarum)
Ash – Danny (Necrons)
Luke – Mickey (World Eaters)
Tom – Sam (Adeptus Mechanicus)

My game

++ Chris' list - click to expand ++

If there’s any faction which is more of a problem than Death Guard right now, it’s Chaos Knights. Chris’ list had fewer bigs than others and felt much more beatable as a result, and in the early going here I was looking pretty good. If you consult the scorecard though, you’ll notice I score 43pts by turn 3 and then don’t get anything again until turn 5 where a Poxwalker gets a very fortunate Establish Locus in his backfield.

In retrospect this game has an annoying rules mistake in it which mars the result a bit – Chris told me that the indirect from PBCs would hit on 5s because of the Chaos Knights army rule. That is wrong though as while the indirect rules mean 1-3s to hit fail they don’t change your hit roll, and indirect also applies a -1 to hit penalty – so for PBCs you’re on 4s either way. The extra -1 to hit doesn’t stack, so I should have been hitting them on 4s the whole time. It mattered less than it might have because my PBCs rolled incredibly hot in the early going, but it was definitely important later on.

In the first couple of turns my play is quite defensive, as it ought to be. This was the only game where I went first, and I moved my Poxwalkers up to the left-hand objective, bombed the left Despoiler a bit, and that was it. On his turn he brought the Karnivore on my left out to charge the Poxwalkers while also putting the Beast of Nurgle on my leftmost objective. I lucked out big here as 4 Poxwalkers lived, enough to out-OC the Beast and also pin the War Dog so it couldn’t get on to the objective itself. He also brought his right-hand Karnivore out to stand on the objective and stop my Poxwalkers there from flipping it from the Beast of Nurgle.

Most of turn 2 goes well for me. I killed both Karnivores and put 14 wounds on the left-hand Despoiler. However, I didn’t properly think about my distances – I should have afflicted his Despoiler and the Nurglings in his backfield, which would have let me charge it with a unit of Deathshroud. Instead they come down and kill his third Karnivore, which I could have done with something else instead if they could have gone where they were needed.

On his turn 2 it all starts to go wrong. The Rampager charges a Blight-hauler in my deployment zone which I meant to place to screen the PBC behind it and just didn’t measure. The Despoiler I have not killed picks up another drone. His other Despoiler comes out and kills the Deathshroud on my right.  Amusingly he does fail to get Behind Enemy Lines because the Rampager Battle-shocked itself coming over the ruin, but that’s about the last thing that goes right for me. On my home objective, my Poxwalkers fail Battle-shock and I have an MBH which could be helping hold it down just sitting uselessly next to it instead.

I now make my most cursed mistake of the event. With the Rampager locked in combat with a PBC, I line up a bunch of shooting on it and… forget that BLAST means I can’t shoot any of the drones or the PBC mortar into it. I’ve already put the last Deathshroud unit over by his left-hand Despoiler at this point; they then aren’t needed to kill it because my shooting does instead, and then fail to charge his Beast of Nurgle. Their role in this game is to stand still and then be murdered by the Atrapos.

With three big Knights up and all my Deathshroud and half my vehicles dead this turns into a squash as Chris rampages around stomping things flat. On turn 5 I draw a Challenger card I can’t score, but I do get to use the Stratagem to run a single Poxwalker up into his deployment zone and score Establish Locus after it miraculously passes Battle-shock on a 10.

Our final scorecard was:

This was a tough game and an uphill one, and I think the mistakee on indirect fire doesn’t help but probably doesn’t change the result as much as me playing a lot better would have.

The team’s games

How did everyone else’s games go?

The final results were:

Liam – 4-16
Wings -3-17
Ash – 0-20
Luke -3-17
Tom – 3-17

That gives a final score of 13-87, an overall round loss for us. That one hurt – James and Tom rarely lose in a teams format, let alone get blown out, so when they both got 17 against it was already going badly. We had a good chat with the Sigil guys afterwards and they asked if we thought we’d got the pairings we wanted, because from their point of view it was all green. I think the answer is yes we did, but the difference is we were making the best of a bad job and got the least-bad match-ups, whereas they got the games they thought they’d win heavily. On reflection I think the main thing is that we’d got the World Eaters game very wrong and shouldn’t have put Luke into it – probably we wanted me and him the other way around.

Our opponents Team Sigil ended up in the top cut, facing off against Carnage in the bonus sixth round on Sunday night. Unfortunately they weren’t able to go all the way, taking a pretty heavy beating to finish on 4 wins, a draw, and a loss.

Round 5

Opposing team: Vanguard Tactics
Opposing players and factions:

Lee – T’au Empire (Auxiliary Cadre). It says James in BCP, but he was ill and replaced for the event by Lee playing his list.
Matthew – Space Wolves (Saga of the Beastslayer)
Sam – Death Guard (Mortarion’s Hammer)
Ben – Orks (War Horde)
Luke – Aeldari (Aspect Host)

Mission: Take and Hold
Deployment: Search & Destroy

Pairings

This is a good team, but we had three pretty favourable pairings to try and get – me into Orks, James into Space Wolves, and Tom into T’au. Ben is a very good player, but War Horde into Death Guard is a rough game for the greenskins, and Be’lakor makes the Daemons game very rough for Lee. Luke and Ash get stuck with games that are only ok, but they should be able to get at least something out of, which should be ok if the rest of us can put wins on the board.

The final match-ups were:

Liam – Ben (Orks)
Wings – Matthew (Space Wolves)
Ash – Sam (Death Guard)
Luke – Luke (Aeldari)
Tom – Lee (T’au Empire)

My game

++ Ben's list - click to expand ++

Ben’s list is scary has an absolutely massive go turn, so if he can put me under early pressure he has a good shot at winning this. I really wanted to go first in this one, whereas usually I prefer to be second, but alas it wasn’t to be. I did at least deploy mostly intelligently for once, backlining everything hard to keep away from his Advance and charge melee and putting two drones in Strategic Reserves, although on reflection it should have been all three.

First turn here is pretty low-key – some Stormboyz come and punch (but don’t kill) my Poxwalkers on the left-hand objective, who then spend the next two Fight phases killing Stormboyz back and regenerating themselves, and he takes mid-board and my right-hand objective. I have zero interest whatsoever in coming out this turn and Ben is welcome to his 15 primary. One big problem for Ben is that his staging here is all in that one big central ruin in his deployment zone. In my turn I use the Blighted Land Stratagem to make everything within 3″ of that massive footprint Afflicted, which is hilarious with the PBCs firing into it as it both reduces the Ork Toughness down to (mostly) 4s so I wound on 2s, and also means that it’s easier to get the mortal wounds off from their datasheet ability. I do make a mistake here which I have noticed only when looking up the strat name – this was my sole use of it in the event and it turns out it costs 2CP. I think I also pushed the MBH out through the building wall this turn, so apologies to Ben for that one.

Plagueburst bombing picks up most of a squad of Gretchin, five of six wounds on his Meganobz, and an entire squad of Breaka Boyz and most of their attached Warboss, which isn’t bad. The MBH and PBC also kill a Trukk, which was probably not worth doing – I was hoping to kill it and line up shots on the Snaggas inside, but Ben is able to place them out of line of sight of the drone and on balance it seems better to bomb the Breakas again to clear them out and try and put more mortals on the stuff around them.

Seeing how this is going, Ben calls a Waaagh! in turn 2 and pushes more or less his whole army forwards. By the end of this Ghazghkull will be where the MBH was, and there are Snaggas in my deployment zone having killed the drone over there and tagged the PBC. The Breakas then kill that PBC and tag the other one plus the Lord of Virulence. I do get two lucky breaks – over by my home objective, the Breakas fail an 8″ charge I’ve turned into a 10″ with the stratagem there, while the Flash Gitz fail their 6″ as well, a big help as it means that I get to score 5 for holding home!

This is rough, but luckily I’m playing Death Guard. I bring on the two drones and drop two units of Deathshroud in – the solo unit, once again, drops in to take his home, while one of the units with a Lord of Contagion arrives basically on my home objective again to start the fightback. The Deathshroud fail to kill the Grots, but I otherwise have a huge turn here, picking up the central Grots, both units of Flash Gitz (barring one model who survives the Deathshroud charge), both remaining Breakas, a Trukk, and a chunk of the Snaggas over in that big ruin on my right. I am still gonna score zero primary, but whatever.

With a ton of assets down, Ben does his best to keep things going. Ghaz comes over to fight the Deathshroud, and kills the unit but not the Lord of Contagion. He chooses not to consolidate here so that he can stay on my home objective to deny me primary, which frees up the Lord to kill the single remaining Flash Git he’s stuck with.

Over turns 3 and 4, I pick up almost all of the remaining Orks. Makari and his 2+ invulnerable keep Ghaz alive on turn 3, but I get him on turn 4 after he’s killed most but not all of the Poxwalkers on my home. My last Deathshroud arrive on the right to take the objective over there, blanking his primary for the rest of the game and leaving him with nothing to work with except a handful of Snaggas and a Warboss on his left side and a Beastboss in the middle. I get some very favourable draws here, pulling in consecutive turns Recover Assets, Behind Enemy Lines, and Sabotage when I have units positioned in his deployment zone to maximise them. I’ve also picked up 6pts on Challenger cards right before getting the massive turn 5 primary swing and a deployment-zone Sabotage.

Our final scorecard was:

The team’s games

Wings did a similar job of taking a minor win over a list that he has a good counter into, while Tom was absolutely annihilating poor Lee. Luke saved a few points into an Aeldari list designed to kill his, which was all he was asked to do. The less said about Ash’s game the better, and not just because he took a heavy loss.

The final results were:

Liam – 12-8
Wings – 12-8
Ash – 0-20
Luke – 3-17
Tom – 20-0

That gives a final score of 47-53, an overall round draw.

Our opponents ended up in 15th place, with a similar record to ours but bigger wins.

Post-event Summary

When the dust settled, we won 2 rounds, lost 1, and drew 2, for an overall 2-1-2 result, and finished in 26th place of 64 teams overall. This was parring the course for us, and probably about our level at the moment. Taking such a rough loss to Team Sigil hurt us and that’s the round I’m most disappointed by as at one point we were worried about even getting into double figures.

Having played the event, I think the faction switches we made were only a partial success. Luke and I both went 2-1-2 in our individual games, and did our job for the team in those games, so that’s arguably fine, but I think really we’d have wanted better results from those two factions. Writing these games up, it’s notable how many play errors I made – I think the only rules mistake I made was the Blighted Land cost, but in all but one game I can see a significant thing I would do differently in a replay that I think would have a big impact on the result (the exception is game 2, where I think I played basically correctly, but also forgot to bring a drone in so maybe that counts too).

Ash had a very rough weekend, picking up a single win and then losing his other four games, a couple of them big losses. I think we overcooked it by switching him to Ad Mech, a much more complicated faction than either of the other two with a more difficult playstyle. It would have been better to leave him on Death Guard and for me to run Guilliman Ultramarines, a list I can easily put on the table and which is very flexible and capable of playing against more or less anything. This is probably our biggest lesson learned from the weekend. For our first event in April we had very little time to prepare so we just played whatever factions we were used to and did our best, and for this one we hadn’t really thought much ahead about team comp until the scrim a couple of weeks ago when we got rolled and made a panicked change with little time to prepare ourselves. There’s a reason that the WTC teams all spend months thinking about this and practicing so much! Looking towards our next event in November, getting a more intentional team composition together is the thing we’re going to focus on. I can’t actually make that event in person, but I can both provide armies to play and work with everyone to plan and practice, so that’ll be my role for the next few months.

After a full weekend of gaming, I gave it a miss this week, so next week’s post won’t have a game write-up and instead will focus on something else – likely a mix of hobby progress, future planning, and whatever other thoughts strike me. The football season will also have kicked off, so I’ll be exulting or screaming depending how that went.

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