The Corroad Goes Ever On and On: The Line of Scrimmage

Last week I talked about the upcoming teams scrim against our club’s A team and promised to write about it. The good news is, we played the games. The bad news is, it went terribly!

Going in to Tuesday, our team composition was:

• Liam – Blood Angels
• Wings – Necrons
• Tom – Chaos Daemons
• Luke – Imperial Knights (replaced at short notice with a guest playing Votann)
• Ash – Death Guard

This is basically what we’ve used for previous practice and for our last event, with the exception that Luke was playing Aeldari before that army was smashed out of competitive relevance. It’s not the best set-up in the world, but it’s armies that all of us are familiar with and comfortable playing, so it was working ok.

Looking at the opposing line-up for the scrim it became pretty clear that it was not going to keep working ok. Our opposition was Imperial Knights, Chaos Knights, Genestealer Cults, Adeptus Mechanicus, and Dark Angels. We had a good plan for the GSC and the Dark Angels, putting our Necrons and Death Guard into them, but our team doesn’t really have much of an answer into either Knights player except for our own Knights, which weren’t present. What that means is that we have two games we’re likely to take medium to heavy losses in before we even start pairings (both Knights), two games where we’re looking for narrow wins (GSC and Dark Angels), and then a toss-up on the Ad Mech. That isn’t really a winning formula.

The pairings went ok, given the above, but there’s only so well they can go when you’re starting from “we probably lose 3 of these games.” In the end we got:

• Necrons into GSC
• Death Guard into Dark Angels
• Chaos Daemons into Imperial Knights
• Leagues of Votann into Adeptus Mechanicus

Which left me on Blood Angels into the Chaos Knights. The good thing is that this game was educational.

My list was the same as last weekend:

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

Opposing me were Olly’s Chaos Knights.

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

This feels fine. I lost the Scouts, after pulling Engage early and hauling them out there to score it, but I have several hammers up and I have a reasonable chance of killing two Knights on the right-hand side (the Castellan/Tyrant is proxying for a Despoiler). Olly failed his Battle-shock roll for the central Abominant which was super helpful as it locked him out of using any Stratagems on it like Counter-offensive. My plan here is basically kill those two, which degrades his capabilities sufficiently that I can get through turn 3, and then hope to pick up another one each turn until he runs out of assets to play the game with. The Death Company also rolled a huge charge, positioning them to jump onto his home objective, flipping it and potentially shutting down some of his other scoring.

I missed the kill on the Despoiler by 3 wounds and the Abominant by 1. None of my shooting achieved anything at all, and Olly high-rolled the saves on the Despoiler all the way through the Death Company punching it including rolling 14/17 3+ saves to keep it alive at the end.

From here the game turned around on me pretty quickly. Olly picked up all of the Bladeguard and Dante’s squad of Sanguinary Guard, and although he didn’t finish off the Death Company completely he did kill Lemartes via the Abominant using the Epic Challenge Stratagem to Precision him out. I was able to kill both the wounded Knights in my turn 3, but again missed the kill on his second Abominant on his home objective, which ended any hope of closing the scores up.

I did at least kill a third Knight and flip his home, but it was a pretty dismal effort in the end and our final scorecard was:

2-18 isn’t the worst it could be but it’s not great. There were a couple of things I could have done better that would have narrowed the scoreline a little, and I could have taken Fixed instead, but I would have netted 30 instead of 25 there – which is relevant but wouldn’t have been enough. Potentially I ought to have held back another turn before putting any hammers out, which would have limited how much his Despoilers could have helped him out, but not by much.

Around the room our other games didn’t go a lot better, with the final scores being:

Necrons win 11-9 against GSC
Death Guard win 12-8 against Dark Angels
Chaos Daemons lose 5-15 against Imperial Knights
Leagues of Votann lose 1-19 against Adeptus Mechanicus

For a total of 31-69, a chunky loss. A couple of factors make this hard to evaluate – there were apparently some massive errors in the Ad Mech game that affected the result, and we’d normally have had our own Knights player which would have meant maybe we have a better game by putting them into one of the Knight players if we can, but there’s not a lot of getting around the fact that in a metagame where Knights are very strong and very popular we have no good answers for one Knights player and many will have two. I am sick of the word Knights.

With that taken into account, we’ve had a bit of a discussion and shuffled the team composition around. Our Death Guard player also has Ad Mech, and indeed it was his army being used against us, and the purpose of that list is to have a good game into Knights. The Blood Angels are probably our weakest link at the moment. As a result, we’ve switched around so that I’m now playing Death Guard, while Ash plays Ad Mech, on the basis that Mortarion’s Hammer has among the highest skill floors in the game so I probably can’t fuck it up too much. That gives us some much better options – Death Guard have a lot of favourable match-ups right now (the entire meta, minus Knights), and we have an army that will hopefully match well into Knights. It’s a drastic change given how little practice either of us have had with these factions, but it will hopefully work out.

To save myself some energy I have ripped off Steve Trimble’s list winning list from the Tacoma Open, in the hope that its proven formula will carry me.

++ Steve Trimble's Tacoma Open list ++

Fingers crossed that the raw power of netlisting is enough. Ideally I would get a practice game in before the event, but it’s not looking likely – let’s find out how little you need to know about Death Guard to succeed with them. I do actually have some painted Death Guard stuff, but I am largely going to be borrowing from Ash, and also supplying him some Ad Mech from my ancient and unloved army of those.

Hobby-wise, I am getting back into the swing of painting after a couple of weeks off after jetting off to Sardinia at the start of July. These models predate that, but I haven’t posted them anywhere yet, so here is a Biologus Putrifier and a Painboss:

Looking at Steve’s list, I realised I own quite a lot of it already from the Codex release, and there’s really not that much painting lift there, so this week I’ve been assembling Death Guard models and have gotten a Myphitic Blight-hauler painted. I highly doubt I’ll get it all done for Saturday, but I like to play with my own models if I can, so even if I am just putting down a handful of my own to go with the borrowed rest that’ll be nice.

Next week I’ll return to talk about how the ITT went, and whether our drastic pre-event changes worked out.

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