Hello friends and welcome to my LiveJournal. Mood: quixotic.
If you’ve read the intro to Road to Nova article, or TheChirurgeon‘s or AnaMAL.Net‘s posts, you know the deal here. If you haven’t, go read them. I promise it’s worth it.
Part 1: The Journey
Last year I hadn’t remotely thought about going to Nova. I was pretty firmly back on the tournament train after a long break through 6th and 7th edition, but I was focused on UK events. Flying to Washington to play Warhammer seemed like an insane thing to do.
What changed was that the 40k Badcast dropped their pre– and post-Nova 2018 episodes, as well as a ton of people in the Something Heretekal Discord server going along and talking about what an amazing time they were having. I very firmly wanted in on this. In typical fashion, I started by vaguely saying it would be a fun idea, then idly checking out the costs in theory, maybe, and then there I was waking up at 1am to buy the tickets. One early morning scramble later and I was the proud owner of a GT ticket.
With that bit done, all that was left was to wait for the big FAQ 3 and the Ynnari Index. I’ve been playing Talos-heavy Drukhari for a while to some success, including two podiums in March, but Deathwatch was kind of taking it out of contention and I’m a little bored of it so I fully expected to be hopping on the Ynnari train when the Index appeared.
Part 2: The Plan
So, if you’ve read the Goonhammer review of the Ynnari Index, you’ll know that didn’t really work out. Which leaves me with an open question of what I’m gonna take to the event.
My overarching goal for this year was to build up an Aeldari army which cut across all three of Drukhari, Harlequins and Craftworlds. I owned pretty much everything I wanted for the Drukhari already (although I really need to update my Ravagers to actually have disintegrators on), and had some amount of Craftworlds already from using Eldrad and his wizard friends to support my Talos.
That’s still plan A, although I don’t know exactly what form it’ll take. Losing the cross-faction compatibility of Doom and Jinx makes Eldar soup less appealling, especially in the form I was using it. There’s still interesting stuff to be done, but you’re more likely to use self-supporting individual pieces from different books rather than getting cross-faction synergies – which isn’t much different to how Imperium already functioned, I guess.
Plan B is a wildcard – rolling out my Adeptus Mechanicus. I’ve had an Ad Mech army in a more or less completed state for about a year and only played 3 games with it (including the excellent Robot Wars game which was the first battle report on this site) and it’s a shame to have it sitting about not getting used. Ad Mech have gained a bunch of cool tricks between the Vigilus release and the Tech-priest Manipulus appearing, and that looks set to increase with the new transport/tank shown off at Warhammer Fest. Playing some kind of Ad Mech-heavy Imperium sounds like a good time which would be a nice change from what I’ve mostly been doing for the last month.
So, uh, the plan right now is that I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I guess you could call this the plan of no plan. Luckily I’ve got a bunch of chances to try out some different stuff over the year, so I have some room to experiment.
In the meantime, I’ve ordered the models to do all of the above, so I guess I have a lot of building and painting ahead of me. With a mere 15 14 weeks to go, I’m sure nothing can go wrong.
