Welcome back, Dear Reader, to the log of my ongoing Warhammer 40,000 journey through 2022. Last time around I was hard at work prepping for the Kansas City Open, getting in practice games, testing new lists, and uh, blackmailing Art of War coach John Lennon into providing me with some coaching advice for the event. But come Thursday, it was time to hop on a flight and head out.

I’m going to level with you, Dear Reader: I was not particularly enthusiastic about going to the KC Open. I had a somewhat demoralizing experience at Warzone Houston thanks to the paint judging situation (though it was buoyed by some great opponents and finishing 2nd in the event’s mini/squad painting competitions), and about a week before the event it turned out that neither James “Boon” Kelling nor JD “TheArmorOfContempt” Reynolds was going to be able to make it. That meant I’d be the only Goonhammer rep at the event.

Fortunately for me, I wasn’t going to be alone, necessarily. John Lennon and Nick Nanavati from the Art of War crew were attending, and I was rooming with Thomas “Goatboy” Reidy, who some of you may know from his artwork for FLG and articles on Bell of Lost Souls. I first met Thomas back during the 2021 Lone Star Open GT, and since then we’ve stayed in contact and done an art exchange. Thomas is a pretty rad dude and he and I are both on the “old Warhammer dads but also content creators in the space” wavelength. Also, he’s been walking that beat longer than me and knows pretty much everyone in the space.

How to Pack Everything

I’ve seen questions about this in the Goonhammer Discord, so I’m going to take a minute to talk about traveling to events with your minis. Here’s rule #1, the Golden Rule: Never check your minis unless you have to. Your minis case should always be your carry-on bag. In my case (ha), one of the big benefits to rocking Thousand Sons is that it’s a fairly elite (read: low model-count) army, and one that has a lot of relatively small-to-medium size models that can fit in a compact space. Marines holding bolters don’t take up a lot of horizontal space, is what I am saying. Because of this, I can relatively easily fit the entire army into a small GW carrying case.

The bottom layer holds the rhino and some Rubrics

The rest of the Rubrics and the Infernal Master go on top of that

All the Terminators fit into a single layer

Lots of space left over, really

close up the small case and we’re good to go!

This is incredibly important because I do not like to check bags. I hate doing it. When I get off that airplane, the first thing I want to do is get the fuck out of the airport, and anything that impedes that process – such as waiting another half an hour for a bag to come down a conveyor – is just not on my list of things to put up with. I can, for shorter trips, fit a couple of days’ worth of clothing into my backpack when I travel. However that doesn’t leave a ton of room for other gaming supplies and it makes my backpack heavy as shit. Plus this trip is a day or two longer than usual, in part because my options for flying back were either:

1. Leave at 6am on Sunday and miss the final day
2. Fly back on an airline I do not have rewards/status with
3. Fly back on Monday morning

Of these, only option 3 had any appeal, and the only risk there was missing Halloween with my son if for some reason I couldn’t fly back that day. So I opted to stay an extra day. Anyways, back to the packing. The solution here was to put the small minis case into my duffel bag, then pack all my clothes around it. The Duffel can be carried on to a plane and stowed in the overhead. This is ideal for avoiding a checked bag situation.

It’s a bit of a squeeze but I can fit three days’ worth of clothing in the duffel plus my toiletries. Everything else – the books, the dice, my laptop, and the disassembled FLG carrying tray – go into the backpack. It’s still heavier than I’d like, but it’s not too bad.

The flight from IAH to MCI is about two hours on the nose. That’s very tolerable, and it mostly zips by. I hit the ground about 30 minutes after Thomas (Goatboy) does thanks to his flight being delayed and we meet up. The Kansas City airport is one of the worst I’ve been to, by the way – it’s a set of long horseshoe-shaped semi-rings that have disconnected groups of gates. Everything is closed by the time I land at 6:30 and the vibe is Not Great. Thomas and I spend a few minutes texting about our location trying to figure out where we are relative to each other and for a few minutes I have to push away the horrifying idea that I might have somehow gone to the wrong Kansas City. Fortunately it just turns out there are two (possibly three) entirely disconnected terminals at the airport and we’re just not at the same one. One inter-terminal bus ride later and we’re catching an Uber to the hotel.

GW events are definitely a cut above the rest when it comes to quality and style but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that part of that is picking more expensive hotels. The Sheraton at the Crown Center is very nice and it’s located in an area that, while not quite “in the middle” of things, has a lot of walkable restaurants nearby, partly owing to being next to the UMKC campus. Thomas and I meet up with John Lennon. The three of us are on the same wavelength when it comes to “the ideal size for a group of people going to a dinner” so we break off from the rest of the AoW crew and make for another restaurant. We end up going to Jack Stack, one of the big Kansas City bbq places I had recommended to me (the other was Arthur Bryant’s, but that wasn’t walkable).

We end up sitting at the bar and crushing some extremely tender burnt ends, which I thought were pretty damn good. They came with a side of bbq beans (solid) and cheesy corn, which was fine but made me wish I was just eating mac n’ cheese instead. We had fried mushrooms for appetizers with a horseradish sauce that were also solid, but they were huge and we ordered too many of them. All in all the meal was pretty good and it wasn’t crazy expensive. We ended up hanging in the hotel bar for a bit after that and called it a night relatively early.

Day 1

GW events have some interesting quirks, and it’s worth talking about a few of them here.

• They tend to start later in the day – registration runs 8 to 9, and round 1 starts at 9:30.
• GW events also tend to have longer rounds, giving you three hours per round. This is pretty great if your army can take a bit longer or you get into games that have less eventful early turns that lead to longer late turns.
• They don’t use chess clocks and instead employ an “every game should finish” mentality. This works a lot better with three hour rounds and active, informed judges, but also leads to unnecessary problems – more than one person I talked to over the weekend had an issue with a slow opponent that could have been better resolved with a clock or a judge stepping in early to help keep the game running. I don’t care for the experience of playing with chess clocks personally but I see their value, especially in these situations.
• GW events will typically run late on some rounds to get games completed, particularly if it’s the first or final round of the day. This can help mitigate the no clocks issue but sucks if you end up missing lunch, though that’ll only happen to 1-2 tables at the event, usually.
• Because they start late and have 3-hour rounds, GW event days finish late. My final games of the day usually wrapped up around 8pm.

Anyways, we grab breakfast and check in at the event. In a classic move of being a complete dumbass, my name is on the list twice. It turns out I’ve booked two tickets – one regular and one premium. I immediately understand how this happened: I bought the first, premium ticket in order to get an event t-shirt, then, two weeks before the event, forgot I had bought the ticket, didn’t see one in my inbox, and frantically went back online to purchase a standard ticket. The upside(?) is that I now have two water bottles, a helpful visual reminder that I fucked up.

The venue is still pretty empty at this point, and it’s cold enough I’m glad I brought a hoodie. It’ll warm up in the afternoons but I keep pants + sweater for most of the event, and that’s about the right temperature to keep things at.

40k tables, ready to go

The GW store setup

Big art banners line the wall where paint judging will occur

After registration it’s time to wait for round 1 to start. Let’s recap what I’m working with here and what I’m hoping to accomplish.

My Army

Here’s the list I settled on last time:

My list - click to expand

I’ve traded out some Chaos Spawn for a Rhino on Lennon’s suggestion; the spawn seldom did much for me anyways. I’ve also moved some powers around, but I think I ended up taking too many instances of Empyric Guidance and I really could have used a third malediction; Perplex might have been a better pick in there or another instance of Cacodaemonic Curse. All the champions have warpflame pistols as well now.

The general plan is to split the army into two wings, each led by a unit of Terminators, and use those for board control and damage output. I generally want to play passively/reactively, scoring points with Interrogate, Banners, and Wrath of Magnus while opponents come to me and I can counterpunch/charge them and make them pay for doing so and use my teleports/mobility to get out of sticky situations.

My Goals

Generally speaking, I know I’m not going to win this event. I’d like to make the top 16, and doing that means starting 4-0. That said, I’d be happy with 5-3 or 6-2 overall. I’ve also put a lot of work into my Thousand Sons and while WZH took some air out of my sails I’m still hopeful that a strong day 1/2 finish can get me to Best Overall if I can win enough of those games.

And if I don’t make the 4-0 bracket, I kind of think I’d rather end up in the 2-2 bracket than the 3-1. The 3-1 bracket tends to be filled with a hateful bunch of competitive also-rans and the competition there is fierce. The 2-2 bracket is much more likely to be chill dudes with weaker or flawed armies where I can hopefully finish out on a 4-0 run.

Round 1: vs. Landon Payne’s Alpha Legion

Pairings go up and in the first round I draw CSM. Alpha Legion aren’t a top competitive choice and already I have a pretty good idea I can start 1-0. I’ve practice a few times now against Creations of Bile and Black Legion and I have a good handle on how to beat them.

Landon's list - click to expand

The biggest problem CSM have against Thousand Sons is that they pretty much always bring at least one psyker, opening me up for Wrath, but seldom have enough casts or good enough powers to make up for what that loses them on the VP front. Additionally taking psychic secondaries is usually a mistake against me – I can absolutely knock out a few 3D6 deny attempts by keeping two psykers near the caster and keep someone to a very small amount of VP. The big wrinkle here is the Maulerfiends, but I think I can handle them if I can separate them.

The Mission: Recover the Relics

My Secondaries: 

• Psychic Interrogation
• Wrath of Magnus
• Raise the Banners High

Landon’s Secondaries:

• Assassination
• Warp Ritual
• Engage on All Fronts

Warp Ritual is the big mistake here; with Interrogation it’s at least semi-plausible you can keep out of range of two of my casters and limit me to regular deny attempts but having to be within 6″ of the middle of the table makes getting off Warp Ritual near impossible. Assassination is a mixed bag but my characters aren’t particularly durable if they get into the mix.

I’m Going First. 

That’s fine for this particular matchup. I spend 2 CP in deployment to forward deploy, and when I go first on Recover the Relics that means I net an extra CP for my trouble. I get aggressive with my Tzaangor Shaman early to get off an Interrogation, plant three banners, then spend the rest of the early turns racking up points as Landon pushes toward me. The game here is basically putting up road blocks to stop from losing units too quickly and popping open his Land Raider and engaging with things like the Maulerfiend one at a time. In that, the Rhino proves to be an invaluable speed bump:

Landon’s game plan starts to turn around a bit after he brings in his Terminators, which I’ve screened out to the point that they have to spend a turn mired in difficult ground, but they can still shoot my out-of-place Tzaangor Shaman off the board. The next turn they hit a long charge to take me off my backfield objective, dropping me to only two banners, though I still hang on to hold two objectives through those turns. One of the big challenges Landon has is that he wants to use cultists to screen mortal wounds for his Maulerfiends and other key units, but I’m more than happy to kill those early since they’re his only ObSec units and the only thing he has to hold backfield objectives. His cultists are mostly dead by turn 2, and that gives me a 12-point primary coming into 3. The big challenge with this kind of chaff-and-elites approach for melee armies is that if you lose your chaff you end up having to commit elite melee units to holding objectives, and that’s as good as killing them.

Landon has the resources to clean me out on one side of the table but not two, and I’ve been pushing up the left side of the table and capturing that objective to keep myself on primary, plus killing a lot of units, not to mention Landon only scored 4 VP on turn 2 after I shot him off two objectives. Late in the game I teleport my Warpflamers to harass him in his deployment zone, clean the cultists off his rear objective, and plant a banner on it. Some bad psychic phases late-game and character losses keep me off 15 for Wrath but I end up scoring 11 on it, 15 on Interrogate, and 13 on Banners, while I hold Landon to only a single Warp Ritual.

Result: 94-73, Win

Landon was a great opponent and this was a fun game that looked like it might turn a bit when Landon managed to score some clutch character kills off some truly rancid saves I rolled for Ahriman and the Terminator Sorcerer but ultimately he didn’t have the speed he needed in the final turn to catch up to me and there’s nothing you can do to take down a banner after the Command phase on the final turn. It’s a good game to kick things off with.

There’s a Jimmy John’s around the corner so Thomas and I walk over that way. He’s also 1-0 and feeling good about his Creations of Bile list. I’m feeling pretty good about my win as well – I maintain that the round 1 win is one of the sweeter wins you can score, as it immediately takes a weight off your shoulders. Anyways we aren’t gone long and it’s on to round 2.

Round 2: vs. Karl Nielsen’s Death Guard

Round 2 and I’m blessed by Tzeentch with a game against Death Guard. Karl’s running a fairly standard list and he’s on the younger side. Unfortunately, Death Guard are basically free for Thousand Sons, who have no problem shrugging off their 1-damage weapons and burning through them with mortal wounds. Plus they basically have to take a single psyker.

Karl's list - click to expand

The Blightlords are tough but won’t last long to mortal wounds and massed D1 fire, which my list can absolutely push out. The Fleshmowers are the biggest problem, since they can be in melee early and cause me some issues, but I should be able to take care of them before they become a problem.

The Mission: Abandoned Sanctuaries

Oof. This mission. Not terrible in theory for Karl since he wants to get into the thick of it more than I do, but also means he’s forced to walk into the open early and eat a bunch of smites in order to compete and that works in my favor.

My Secondaries:

• Psychic Interrogation
• Wrath of Magnus
• Raise the Banners High

Karl’s Secondaries:

• Assassination
• Despoiled Ground
• No Prisoners

Psychic secondaries are a big no-go for Karl on this mission so he goes with his next best options and none of them are great. I might have picked Spread the Sickness here since it’s easier for him to push up and hold the middle and do the action and once it’s done those points are locked-in. The only real threat here is losing terminators in combat to plague marines but they’re never going to make it to me and I don’t have to engage with the middle of the table to score reliably – just take whichever side of the table Karl’s not on and hold the objective there.

I’m going 2nd. 

Good for me, bad for Karl. He moves out first and I take advantage of that to immediately start scoring and killing some of his units. The Fleshmowers are my primary target since they’re fast and D2 in melee, and I’m able to pick them both up before they can kill more than a single terminator. On turns 2-3 I pick up all the terminators, and my Warpflamers make a valiant push into Karl’s backfield but aren’t able to kill his Tallyman in a single volley after they roll horribly on their shot count.

It’s a tough game for Karl but a fun one in the sense that I could teach him a few tricks. For example, he wasn’t aware that the Tallyman rolls for CP in every Command phase, and that ended up netting him an extra 2 CP in the game. I also showed him that melee plague marines with a cleaver and flail have 3 attacks and not 2, since they retain their knives as a second melee weapon. These don’t make a big difference in our game but hopefully they helped him out down the road.

Either way, Karl was a good opponent and fun to play against.

Result: 89-57, win

I’m at 2-0 and there’s only a 30-minute break between the final two rounds of the day. I’d been very lucky so far with pairings, matching into opponents for whom I was well-suited to win but I knew it was only a matter of time before I had to play a real competitor. I had hoped that would come in rounds 5+, however. Unfortunately, my luck was about to run out, and on the worst mission for it.

Round 3: vs. Nick Fuller’s Leviathan Tyranids

I knew I was going to have to play Tyranids sooner or later. Nick’s list is probably the weaker of the top-tier versions, running Leviathan over Kraken, but it’s still a complete terror and capable of throwing out buttloads of anti-terminator shooting and mortal wounds.

Nick's list - click to expand

It’s a list I’ve seen before, and one I’ve lost against. The big challenge with Tyranids is always “can I score enough points to create an unbeatable lead before they hit my deployment zone and kill me with superior datasheets?” And that’s never certain.

The Mission: Tide of Conviction

This is the worst-case scenarios for me. The mission forces me to come out and play semi-aggressively in order to keep scoring 8 VP per round, and that makes it easy to lose a unit or two and suddenly be in a 12-4 round. It’s a lot harder to sit back and play defensively when you have to go out and meet the enemy head-on.

My Secondaries:

• Psychic Interrogation
• Wrath of Magnus
• Raise the Banners High

Nick’s Secondaries:

• Spore Infestation
• Psychic Interrogation
• Assassination

Spore Infestation is a good pick here – it’s trivially easy to get within 6″ of the dawn of war deployment zone and there’s nothing I can do to stop it once Nick starts it. Interrogation should be a mistake, though as we’ll see it doesn’t go as poorly for him as it should have, and Assassination will likely be something he can snag big points on once he hits my back lines.

I’m going second.

That’s a big break in my favor, I think. It lets me force Nick to make the first move and helps me score primary on the game’s final turn. I get off to a pretty good start – during deployment Nick and I talk about the ruins and establish that the Neurothrope is tall enough to be seen over the top of the Ork ruins if it’s in the ruins, and so he deploys behind the ruins to avoid being hit. Then he promptly moves the Neurothrope forward on turn 1 to attempt to Interrogate, rolling an 8, which I attempt to 3D6 deny, twice, for 2 CP, and fail both attempts. That sucks, but I get a big advantage by then moving my psykers up to the top floor and smiting his Neurothrope over the wall – it’s protected from shooting by Look Out, Sir, but not psychic powers. Of course, Nick will shoot my Tzaangor Shaman down his turn but I’ll trade a shaman for a Neurothrope any day.

I manage to stay roughly ahead early but continue to have terrible deny luck on Nick’s Interrogates – I’ll end up spending 8 CP to try and deny those attempts with 3D6 and re-rolls, and in the end I’ll only prevent three of them. The daggers come on turn 4, where Nick manages to pull me off the mid-table objective for a turn, putting me on 0 VP for primary and 0 CP and I have an awful psychic phase where I’m only able to do 8 mortal wounds to a carnifex as I roll 1 after 1 after 1 on the number of wounds, including two big smites.

I try to salvage things on the final turn by holding two objectives and swinging my rhino around but thanks to some bad saves from my Exalted Sorcerer done by the Carnifex that lived I just don’t have the bodies to do more than hold my own objectives. I get an extra few points by swinging the rhino around the carnifex and surviving its swings, but the final score sits at 72-79. I didn’t realize at the time that I could put another banner up, but that also would have only made it 73 on my end and Ahriman can’t put up a banner as a Cavalry unit (but also, that only makes it 74 on my end, still a loss). Nanavati and Lennon are by the table and talk to me after about a potential play to take Nick’s home objective, but I need to keep him off mine to prevent him from scoring 5 VP and I only have three units left at this point.

Result: 72-79, Loss

Nick’s a great opponent and was a pleasure to play but this one stings. I thought I had it but bad dice on the final rounds really screwed me over, although I was also lucky Nick never made his Hive Guard charges on the game’s final turn (he needed a 6 to get onto the top floor of the ruins and failed it twice). The Biovores really put in work this game for him and did a buttload of mortals to my terminators to keep them from boxing out key enemy units. Losing two characters on round 5 ultimately cost me the game, and that could have been prevented if I hadn’t had two rounds of awful psychic phases in the game’s final turns, or if I hadn’t lost so many CP trying to hold Nick to 6 Interrogate VP.

Three rounds down and three good opponents – that’s a great day 1 for me, even if I was hoping to finish 3-0 instead of 2-1. Still, if I can win my next game there’s a chance I can make the 4-0 bracket with a good opponent win rate, though I’m very doubtful Karl and Landon went 3-0 after losing to my Thousand Sons. I’m informed in round 3 that my army was picked for the top cut of painted armies, so I walk it over to the paint judging area. I’m very proud of my work but not real hopeful it’ll win anything; for one, I don’t have a display board and there are some very lovely display boards at the event and my experience has traditionally been that armies without boards don’t even place. That sucks but I get why it happens.

On that note, it’s worth pointing out that Andrew Gonyo has continued to press his game with his T’au, adding a display board with smoke effects, which he’s brought to the event. His army placed second at the GHO US for best painted. He’s really taken it up a notch and the display board helps him improve on the overall visuals.

Andrew’s isn’t the only army with an amazing display board so I get photos of mine and then toss my army, still on the pain MDF tray, onto the judging table. I do not expect to compete here, but I am hoping to win enough games that it won’t matter.

Lennon joins Thomas and I for dinner again and we opt for something that isn’t bbq, choosing to walk over to an Italian restaurant next door to Jack Stack that we passed the night prior. This ends up being a very good pick – the place has some great pasta and runs a daily special for unlimited pasta of the day’s three specials – in this case fettucine al pesto with tomates, parmesan and mushroom ravioli, and a shrimp penne al diovolo – for only 24 bucks. We house some pasta and talk about the day’s games for a while. Lennon and Thomas are both 3-0 after the first day of games and looking good for the 4-0 bracket. My best hope is to match into someone easy in round 4 but again, I’d prefer the 2-2 bracket over the 3-1.

Next Time: Day 2

That wraps up my day 1 recap but come back tomorrow for my write-up of the day 2 games, where I talk about battling against incredible odds. And in the meantime, if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.