Welcome back, Dear Reader, to the log of my ongoing Warhammer 40,000 journey through 2022. Last time around I wrote about my experiences at the WarZone Houston Major. I put in six games and had a decent time, finishing 4-2 and 26th overall at the event, and potentially having finished my tour with Thousand Sons. As we head into the fourth quarter of 2022, what’s next on the horizon?

Planning for the Rest of the 2022 Season

The 2022 season wraps up in late January with the Las Vegas Open, which will likely be the biggest tournament of the year. Between now and then I’ve got two big events planned:

• The GW US Open in Kansas City takes place at the end of October and is a 3-day, 8-round event. It’s only about a two-hour flight for me and the timing works out just well enough that I’d like to make it work.
• The GW US Finale Narrative Event in Albuquerque, New Mexico is happening in late November and that’s an event I’m not only hype to attend but also bringing the missus along for as well.

On top of those I’ll likely attend 1-2 RTTs between now and the end of January, though I’m not sure which or when – but Asgard is the most likely location. As for LVO well, I kind of hate Vegas and while it’s neat to think about improving my overall ITC standings with an OK showing it’s also not something I really need. I’ll come back to this in my year-end review article but something I’ve been thinking about is where I’m at as a competitive player and how much harder I want to push myself, if at all. But that’s for another time.

In the meantime, I find I’m simultaneously preparing for both of the events listed above.

The Kansas City Open

This is the biggest question mark for me right now. I have no idea when the next balance dataslate drops, or what it will contain. I suspect it’ll happen before KC, but that means I’ll want to see it before deciding which army I’m going to take. That said, I’m leaning toward Thousand Sons right now, since they’re likely to survive the dataslate intact and I’ve just played many more games with them.

The Finale Narrative Event

This is the other big event I’m preparing for and as the title indicates, it’s a Narrative event. As much as I’ve put in time playing competitive 40k this year – and I think everyone should play a little comp 40k (specifically, the occasional RTT) – I’m a narrative player at heart and I love designing and playing in campaigns. The GW US Roadshow finale is a three-day event with 5 games to decide the fate of the Szyburne system. Naturally, I’m on Team Chaos.

For this event I fully intend to bring my Black Legion. They’re easily my best-painted army, and the event itself, which uses power level over points, is well suited to bringing a more eclectic mix of units. Specifically, I’d like to get one unit of each of the cult troops painted and ready to go for the event, as that seems like a cool way to run the army. My plan is to use different Ezekarion models I’ve converted as champions for the different units I’m running.

I’m also planning some cosplay for the event, which I’ll talk about more in a future article as we get closer to the event itself.

Hobby Progress

With my Thousand Sons done from a hobby standpoint, it’s time to move on to my Black Legion. I’m undecided on whether I want to run any named characters in the Narrative event – on the one hand I find running named characters in Crusade to be lame, but on the other hand I’m very proud of my Abaddon and Haarken models. What I do want to do however is run one unit of each special god troops in my army, i.e. one unit each of Berzerkers, Noise Marines, Rubrics, and Plague Marines. I’ve already got my award-winning Berzerkers, as shown off last time:

But now I’ll need to get some of the other units knocked out. Because the event uses power levels instead of points, it makes sense for me to prioritize units of either 5 or 10 models; anything between 5 and 10 will incur a massive PL penalty. So I’m going to start with some 5-model squads and go from there. The good news is that I’ve already painted a number of great champion models for these units which I can use when I worked on my Ezekarion. I’ll show off more of them next time as I finish more of these units. In the meantime, here are a few shots of models I’ve finished recently:

Credit: Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones

Credit: Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones

Credit: Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones

Playing Some Practice Games

I’ve also had time to play some more practice games. Two, specifically – one against Andrew “Hero of the Imperium” Corban and his Salamanders and one against T, who I met recently at the Ettin RTT back in episode 18. I’m going to run through these quickly since they were mostly over quickly due to a mix of luck on my part and some misplays that blew the whole game open early on.

Game 1: vs. Andrew Corban’s Salamanders

Andrew’s list is one I’ve played against before in this column; it’s a triple Redemptor list running three units of Eradicators, a couple units of marines, and a Gravis captain. More notably, I was testing out Black Legion in this game. Specifically, this list:

My Black Legion Test

Basically this isn’t terribly different from other black legion lists. I’ve got the terminators and Chosen to bully units off objectives, the Possessed and Disco Lord as fast melee threats, Abaddon as a force multiplier, and the Rubrics as an absolutely nasty unit for short-range combat.

The mission here was Data-Scry Salvage and that benefits me right off the bat as I’ve got more units for board control and faster units to work with. Andrew’s biggest issue with his list is that, while the units he has hit hard, they’re very slow and they top out at 24″ range. Plus I can likely weather some shooting from them with my Terms if need. So I can afford to be aggressive early on, and I do, dropping my Lord Discordant and Possessed on the line for my deployment zone. As it turns out, I win the roll-off, give the Disco Lord advance + charge, and plow right into Andrew’s forces with the lord and the Possessed on turn 1, bracketing out a dread (I had some terrible rolls) and a unit of Infiltrators and putting him on the back foot as they consolidated into other key units.

Andrew never quite recovered from this; it pushed him back into his deployment zone early and kept him off primary on a hold 2/hold 3 mission. As a result, he’d go on to score only 4 primary points the entire game as the rest of my army swept forward and kept him from engaging meaningfully.

Abaddon would eventually get dug in and finish the job the Lord Discordant started, though he’d miss a few key kills for Rise to Glory and I’d end up only scoring 10 points on that one and 12 on Psychic Interrogation as I managed to accidentally kill Andrew’s last character before I could finish the secondary.

The Warpflamers performed admirably, doing some insane damage output to even Eradicators and just generally being a complete pain in the ass. Overall an OK game but we probably could have re-racked after a couple of turns and gone again.

Game 2: vs. T’s Chaos Daemons

I decided to go back to Thousand Sons for this one as I don’t think I’ll have my Black Legion done in time for KC. T’s playing Chaos Daemons, or more specifically the Be’lakor Army of Renown. He’s running the dark prince, a trio of Korvax War Dogs, and a Daemons battalion with 2×10 Bloodletters, 1×10 Daemonettes, 1×3 Nurglings, 2×6 Flamers, a Fateskimmer, a Poxmonger, and a Contorted Epitome. It’s an interesting list that can drop a real hurt – although I’m largely on 2+ saves against flamers with terminators the sheer volume of shots means I’m likely to lose 2-3 models each time they shoot, and charging them is as big a pain.

The Mission here is Recover the Relics and I opt to not forward deploy any of my units, while T gets a leg up on CP by deploying his Nurglings on the southeast objective in that building. He puts Be’lakor, both units of flamers, and one unit of bloodletters in deep strike. This is ultimately too much – he’s left his backfield completely open (see above), and this means on turn 1 I can teleport my unit of 7 warpflamers behind him and wipe them out completely – this will keep him off the top objective most of the game and slow him down for a turn.

My shooting otherwise goes horribly and I put only a few wounds on one war dog. T will commit a war dog to attempting to kill my Warpflamers but with only 5 attacks three of them survive. On the following turn they teleport to the other corner, where they’ll end up killing the Nurglings to take T off the other objective close to home for him.

This is also basically the game – even though T has a lot of stuff coming in, he’s far behind on both primary and the action economy needed for his units – he’s got to do actions on each objective for the Daemons secondary he picked, and he can’t do that and charge with them and fight me. Be’lakor and the bloodletters drop one of my Scarab units down to one model, and that model teleports away the following turn while the rest of the army smites Be’lakor off the table – here I can use the middle ruins to my advantage, putting my psykers where the rest of T’s army are out of line of sight thanks to Obscuring rules, but Be’lakor is easily visible with 18+ wounds. I’ll take him out one turn after he shows up, along with most of the bloodletters.

We likely should have re-racked this one as well but after having a game only go to turn 3 at WarZone Houston T wants to practice using a chess clock. This is good practice for me too and we go through the whole game. We run a *bit* long – 1:25 on my side and 1:20 on T’s – for a 2.5 hour game, but we also had pizza and other distractions mid-game to eat a few minutes here and there. T pulls 35 on primary because this is a 6-objective hold 1/hold 2 map, but I only miss 2 points on Banners and win 98-66.

On the whole, fun games. T’s a good player and rapidly improving and we talk out the results. I think he needed to screen his backfield or at least put more back there to make me feel a T1 teleport was too big a risk, but at the same time he didn’t have the units to do it so he probably needed to put more stuff on the table turn 1. And I also think he should have taken banners. That’s basically the problem with these faction Shadow Ops secondaries – you have to ask: “is this better than the near 10 guaranteed points I get from banners?” And the answer most of the time is “no.” It’s a good talk and I’ll be playing against T many more times in the future, I’m sure.

That wraps up this update but look for another one in a week or two as I start to crunch for KC. Or not; depending on what’s in the Dataslate I may just rock Thousand Sons again and not worry about any of this. Or Death Guard. (Probably not Death Guard). Either way, more hobby progress and practice games are on the horizon for now.

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