Welcome back, Dear Reader, to the log of my ongoing Warhammer 40,000 journey through 2022. Last time around I talked about getting to the KC Open and starting the event with a 2-1 record, losing to Tyranids. Today the adventure continues!

Day 2

If you’ve learned anything about me from reading these, it’s probably that I don’t sleep well in hotels. This event wasn’t an exception – I did OK the first night but slept like shit after day 1 after staying up to watch the World Series. Also, Thomas snores a bit. But I do too, so I can’t really get on him about that. We both slept with ear plugs in, and brought extras for the other person to use, which is adorable. Anyways, Day 2 rolls around I’ve had better nights, is my point.

Round 4: vs. Dan Sammons’ Tyranids

Dan Sammons is absolutely a name I recognize from hearing James “Boon” Kelling talk online, so I at least know he’s a pretty good player and Boon enjoys playing him. That’s a problem because I didn’t really want to play someone who is “a good player” or “Tyranids” this morning, as either one of those drastically reduces my chances of making the 4-0 bracket/top 16.

Dan's list - click to expand

Dan is supposedly “hate-playing” Tyranids, which looks a lot like “just playing Tyranids regularly, only you claim you never do this and are just winning your games in protest or some shit.” He’s also running Kraken, which is likely the stronger build and more likely to cause me problems since it can throw out AP-5 raveners with a million attacks and put even my dusty bois on 5+ invulnerable saves in melee. That sucks. Also there’s still plenty of mortal wounds here with the harpy, sporocyst, and biovores.

The Mission: Conversion

While I don’t like starting 18″ apart on any mission against Tyranids, the ability to just hold a second objective in no man’s land all game and pull in 42 points on primary is pretty solid.

My Secondaries: 

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

Dan’s Secondaries:

• Cranial Feasting
• No Prisoners
• Raise the Banners High

Mission four and my secondaries haven’t changed once. Goal here is still early scoring and to hold on to my banners objectives long enough to score 10 there. On the other side, Dan’s going purely for trying to wipe me off the table so most of this is also going to depend on how well I can roll saves, i.e. I’m fucked.

I’m going first.

That’s not great, but I get some mileage here out of paying 2 CP to forward-deploy a unit of rubrics to ensure I can score 2 VP on the first turn. This was a rough game dicewise; I struggled with Wrath of Magnus for most of it thanks to some bad tests and had a particularly disastrous turn 5 where I couldn’t seem to get off any of the powers I needed. That ended up being a killer as I was never able to do finish off Ben’s Hive Tyrant or put a big enough dent in his Raveners before they crashed into me. There isn’t a ton to say about this game – it was a close affair where I scored well early, but Dan was able to net some key kills at the end and got a bonus roll with Cranial Feasting that put him on 9 VP there. At game’s end the score was 42-45 on primary and I was ahead 34-33 on secondary, meaning I lost by 2 points.

Dan was a good opponent through the whole thing and we had a great game, so he did a decent job of repping the Outlanders.

Result: 86-88, Loss

Another close loss to Tyranids and now I’ve been firmly punted to the 2-2 bracket. That’s fine, I tell myself – I would legitimately prefer the 2-2 bracket to the 3-1, as the 2-2 bracket has far, far fewer Tyranids players and more Chaos Marines, T’au, Grey Knights, Marines, and Custodes. This is fine. Thomas and I walk over to Panera for lunch and end up stopping in the Legoland store next door, where we pick up toys/souvenirs for our sons. Bryce and I have been going nuts building every LEGO Mario set, and on weeks where I don’t have any games to play my gaming table looks more like this:

I pick him up a couple of blind bags of Lego Mario enemies and give him a call from the store. His second soccer game was that morning and he tells me about playing goalie for the first time, which he can be more comfortable with at the moment. Things seem to be going well back at home this weekend, which is always great because it makes my life easier when weekends away aren’t a hassle.

Anyways, back to the venue and it’s on to round 5 and my first game in the 2-2 bracket.

Round 5: vs. Logan Nuessen’s T’au

This game got off to a bit of a weird start with some vibes that were all wrong but fortunately we managed to right the ship very early on and had a great game. Sometimes it’s worth having a quick chat to get things back on track and set expectations. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault, it was just a misread of intent here and a bad reaction there and suddenly things weren’t as friendly as they could be, but we got there.

Logan's list - click to expand

T’au aren’t really a problem for Thousand Sons. Sure, I don’t get Wrath of Magnus, but I can usually make up for it reasonably elsewhere and on GW terrain the short sightlines favor me OK, plus I don’t have any big targets for his Hammerhead to shoot. My goal here is to do the same as every other mission and bait him out while scoring more secondary points.

The Mission: Tear Down Their Icons

My Secondaries:

• Psychic Interrogation
• Raise the Banners
• Grind Them Down

Logan’s Secondaries

• Decisive Action
• Abhor the Witch
• Raise the Banners

I finally have to change things up a bit. Despite T’au being bad at melee I don’t really want to be on their half of the table if I don’t have to; I’d rather use my Terminators to make Grind happen on more turns and take out the Kroot early. Grind isn’t great but I think it’s doable here, especially with units like the bomber – if he gets aggressive with it early I’ll punish him by killing it for 3 VP after it doesn’t kill a unit. Likewise, the Kroot Hounds are a liability in this matchup if I go with Grind, and if in the worst case scenario I score 0 on Grind because Logan sits inside all game, he’ll also score 0 on Abhor and I can beat him on Interrogate handily, where Decisive Action can only score him 12 VP max and we can go 10-v-10 on banners or 10-v-11 for whoever goes second. That’s a really bad situation for Logan to be in.

I’m going 2nd.

That’s a big help since it lets me sit back and react to Logan’s actions, and it’s a major help when I’m on Grind, since I’ll always know how many kills I need to score to get my VP. Logan makes a big mistake out of the gate by pushing a unit of Kroot Hounds forward and attempting to plant a bomb with them; they aren’t ObSec so they won’t finish until the next turn, so I can pop out out of my hiding spot and kill them for 3 easy Grind points on turn 1 without exposing myself. Logan attempts to jump out to kill my Tzaangor Shaman but I get lucky and he fails to do so, giving me another 3 on Interrogate free of charge the following turn. Logan also hides his Sunshark T1, which puts it out of mind for a turn but ultimately saves me some additional trouble.

Logan gets another bad break when he can’t get his Riptide back into the ruin on a thruster move, leaving it in cover and allowing me to move forward with the terminators, pop Empyric Guidance on them for 30″ range, and then proceed to dump the Infernal Fusillade and Wrath of the Wronged buffs into them to wipe it off the table. This is just a bad matchup for Logan, as I’m able to pick apart his weaker units like Kroot hounds and Kroot as they cross the table to try and score for Abhor while trading favorably each round with Grind.

Ultimately this was an uphill battle for Logan from the jump and he just didn’t have the tools to trade meaningfully with me, and he couldn’t afford to be aggressive enough early to throw me off my game. It’s not a free game like Death Guard, but I’m never in danger of losing.

Result: 84-73, Win

I’m now 1-0 in the 2-2 bracket and looking at the standings. There are only two Tyranids players in the 1-0 group and that means my odds of getting matched into Nids are pretty small. I’m feeling very good about dodging them for another round.

Round 6: vs. Ben Fredriksen’s Tyranids

Ah fuck

Ben's Tyranids - click to expand

Ben’s running a list very similar to Dan’s, only with a bit more psychic punch, which is not what I want to see. There are also a buttload of mortal wounds here as well, and plenty of nasty shit to throw me off my game. There’s enough psychic juice in the list that I think it’s not worth being on Wrath of Magnus, since I worry about hitting 10 VP with the secondary. That may or may not have been a mistake – hard to say.

The Mission: The Scouring

Not terrible for me, honestly – I can still hold the outside objectives from the middle and anything Ben puts in the middle I can take off the spot. Ideally I’ll go second on this one for the free 12 on the final turn.

My Secondaries: 

• Psychic Interrogation
• No Prisoners
• Raise the Banners High

Ben’s Secondaries:

• Cranial Feasting
• No Prisoners
• Raise the Banners High

I go with No Prisoners over Wrath here; Ben can give up a lot of points on it and chewing through raveners is something I’ll need to do anyways if I want a chance at winning this one. Per all Nids players, Ben’s playing secondaries that favor tabling me.

I’m Going First.

That absolutely sucks.

I’m not going to lie to you, Dear Reader: I was pretty tired going into this game and that led to an early mismatch on the vibes. Ben was animated and highkey and a Bit Too Much for me at the moment – no offense to him, he was fine – and it took a good turn or two for me to get into what was my sixth game against Tyranids in my last 10 tournament games. This ends up being the only game I don’t take photos for, and I absolutely regret that because it was a close game and Ben’s army was painted well. We go back and forth in a tight game that runs slow, in part because Thomas comes over in the middle after finally losing his first game to Mani Cheema, a quick one that ends early.

Early in the game I score a quick win by teleporting my warpflamers to kill ben’s Gargoyles and survive the retaliation but they manage to completely whiff on the following turn trying to kill any of Ben’s Zoanthropes and spend the rest of the game being a minor annoyance. Most of my game revolves around trying to take Ben’s south objective while he mercilessly tears through my army on the north objective, and the backbreaker moment comes in round 4 when Ben gets off a long charge I’m not expecting on my Exalted Sorcerer with two Raveners, then scores 5 wounds on him and I respond by failing seven of my 4+ invulnerable saves, essentially losing the game on that sequence.

I put up an OK fight from there – I’m able to keep Interrogate up most of the game but on the final round Ben absolutely tears my army up and I’m not sitting on enough gas – and some failed charges into his Pyrovores on the South objective don’t help. We’re coming on time and we talk out the final round. This is a game that I could plausibly have won if we had gotten a judge over and played it out but if we’d done that it would have taken another hour and Ben definitely wants it more than I do (again, I mean that in a positive way – he’s a very nice guy and a good player and he’s earned this one). We talk out the final turn and tally up scores and I think he has it by 1 point.

Result: 75-76, Loss

Ben was a great sport and a fun person to play. I don’t think I was particularly shitty but I definitely didn’t match his energy in the game and a good portion of that was just being exhausted after a night of bad sleep, two straight days of 40k, and too many Tyranids lists. I’d love to get in another game against him sometime. At 3-3 I’m now hoping to finish strong so I can go home with a winning record.

Thomas and I are both exhausted so we head over to a local taco place to grab dinner. As Texans, neither of us is particularly enthusiastic about Kansas City tacos but it’s one of the closest places to the hotel and some of the AoW crew recommended the place the night before. In contrast to Friday night things are a bit more lively that night – you can tell we’re close to a campus and everyone is out in halloween costumes. Immediately I can tell the taco bar is not going to be great because they are charging for chips; always a bad sign. We eat three tacos each and two of them are some of the driest tacos I’ve ever eaten. My mouth is like the Atacama after downing these things. We make our way back to the hotel and watch the rest of the world series game 2 over drinks, talk to Nanavati for a bit about the day’s games, then head back to the room.

Overall it’s been a good day of games and opponents even if it hasn’t been a good day of results. I didn’t want to be 3-3 and by this point I’m certain my chances of Best Overall have slipped away firmly. It’s more than likely that Gonyo will win it anyways, same as he did at NOVA.

Next Time: Day 3 and the Results

That’s it for part two of my write up but check back tomorrow for the final installment to read about my final two games, find out how I did, get my thoughts on the event, and find out where I’m headed next. And if you have any questions or feedback, drop me a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.