TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2023, Part 20: GW US Open Tampa, Day 2

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing journey through competitive Warhammer. Last Time around I talked about day 1 at the GW US Open in Tampa, and today I’m recapping day 2. Check back tomorrow for the exciting conclusion and the results on day 3.

Days 2 and 3 are always both more and less stressful than the first day. More stressful because you’re usually playing tougher competition; less stressful because you can show up nearly an hour later and you already know where to go and how the place is laid out. Norman and I roll over to the venue around 8 and grab some quick Starbucks breakfast with Condit, Alice, and Andrew. We put our stuff in their room overnight after Zach, the event organizer, suggested we not leave our stuff in the convention hall. That ends up being a good call, as Norman realizes that morning that his minis case – which he had left under a table – has vanished. We spend some time looking for it to no avail.

The other thing we do while we wait for the round to start is catch up on the Warhammer previews. I don’t know if you saw them but some of them were very bad. Some people think it’s good. They’re wrong. That said, Jack makes my favorite meme/joke version of it that morning and it gets me a good 20 seconds of laughter:

Hahahaha just look at that stupid asshole.

Round 4: vs. Sean Rice’s Space Marines

Coming into this game I can already tell this is going to be my first real test of the event. Sean’s a great player – he beat Siegler at ATC earlier this year – and while the list he’s running is kind of a meme, it does one thing in particular very well, and that thing is “murder marines from outside of line of sight,” and that’s a very strong play against an army that wants to get close.

Sean's List - click to expand

The deal with Sean’s list is simple: use the Land Speeders as spotters and use the Whirlwinds to blow anything they see off the table. Meanwhile the Aggressors can occupy the middle of the table and use bolter discipline to kill anything that survives the initial waves of whirlwind fire while the Inceptors can deep strike and Uriel and the Callidus act as lone operatives.

The Plan

The Mission: F – Supply Drop / Search and Destroy / Chilling Rain
Contagion: Rattlejoint Ague (-1 to saves)

Supply Drop is a really tough mission for me. I haven’t really figured out how to play it yet and it’s one that can create huge problems since it rewards being able to go wide and move faster than I’m generally able to move in a game. It also strongly benefits Sean’s list, with its ability to put out even more/worse damage on whatever objective I sit on and also move around the board. -1 to Saves makes the most sense here as most of the damage I’ll be taking is going to come from further than 9″ away and I need to make sure whatever I have left can do the damage I need it to.

I put the terminators and nurglings in Deep Strike, but I make the mistake of keeping the 7 plague marines with the Putrifier on the table. That leaves them open to turn 1 shooting from the Whirlwinds, but my big concern from the jump was that Sean’s list is so fast it can get insane coverage pretty much immediately and box out my deep strikers, preventing them from arriving. I need to go first this game so I can get them on the board early before he does that. I want to go first and drop some damage on units, most likely killing one or both smaller land speeder before they can act as spotters. That will likely mean dumping mortars into them but I can make that work with three of them.

I’m going Second.

That’s really fucking bad. It means I’m going to get shot by Whirlwinds before I can act, and I’m going to have to wait two full turns to bring in any deep strikers. Sean immediately wipes out my 7-model unit of Plague Marines and presses forward. I move up and attempt to retaliate, though he hadn’t left me any shots at this point so I use mortars to whittle down his land speeders. On his turn Sean pressed forward, spreading out and putting models in my backfield – the Inceptors – which pretty much ensured it’d be impossible to deploy my terminators anywhere except the area directly between most of my units behind that center ruin on my side of the table.

On top of all of this, I got diced incredibly hard this game – Sean crushed his shots and I biffed most of my saves, and that doesn’t even mention the lopsided luck when it came to pulling secondary missions. My only break was drawing Overwhelming Force on turn 1, though I drew it with Capture Enemy Outpost so it was at best a mixed bag. Turn 2 saw me pick up Behind Enemy Lines and Deploy Teleport Homer – neither scorable at that point – and turn 3 I drew Investigate Signals and A Tempting Target – and Sean promptly picked the objective marker which was about to be pulled off the table as the tempting one. Cool. I’d end up with only 12 points for secondaries in this forsaken game, and when I was unable to make a single save to keep a hold of the Omega objective Sean turned a low-scoring close game into a blowout.

Result: 22-75, Defeat

I hate that fucking mission. Otherwise, Sean was a great opponent and fun to play. He played the mission pretty much perfectly and I’m not sure there was much I could have done here going second – I probably should have reserved the seven-man unit but otherwise I needed my reserves to arrive before Sean locked them all out of arriving on the table. Sean’s list was well tuned for dealing with mine and also crushing it on this mission – My best-case scenario was having the omega objective be the middle instead of one of the corners.

That game ran pretty long but still finished before time was out. I’m now 3-1 and while my first three opponents were solid guys, they also weren’t going to help me out much on the OGW% front, so I finished outside of the top 32 and missed the top bracket. That’s largely fine; I have yet to succeed at the 3-1 bracket so it feels like a good fit for my skill level.

Round 5: vs. Evan O’Brien’s Chaos Space Marines

Evan’s running CSM with Abaddon, a Terminator brick, and three vindicators. It’s an interesting list and it has some real anti-vehicle punch.

Evan's list - Click to Expand

Evan’ts got a solid list. The Vindicators are particularly nasty for hitting my PBCs and Mortarion and I can’t let them double up for clean shots – I can take one firing at me, especially with a cover save and Cloud of Flies, but if two get to shoot at the same unit it’s toast. I can stay out of range of them as I need, and make sure I’m the one who gets to act against them first. They’re also fairly nasty at killing terminators and hitting them in melee does nothing to blunt their shooting effectiveness but my hope is that by the time I hit them in melee they’ll be weak enough I can just finish them off. Abaddon’s also tough but if I can take away his terminator support he’s just a guy with a dangerous sword.

The Plan

The Mission: O – Vital Ground / Crucible of Battle / Chilling Rain
Contagion: Rattlejoint Ague (-1 to Saves)

Evan’s got several of the usual tricks here but I notice he’s only got one unit of Chaos Cultists and that means he’s very vulnerable to indirect fire – if I can go first I can take them off the table before they make the rear objective sticky I’ll put him in a horrible spot, forcing him to dedicate a real unit to backfield objective holding. The home objective is only worth 2 VP to him but it’s worth 6 to me and if I can take it I’ll quickly make the game unmanageable. I’m on Rattlejoint Ague here – it’s the best bet for dealing with the Terminators and Vindicators, though -1 WS/BS would also work just fine since I expect him to press forward early and try and kill my vehicles. Still, he’s got a lot of 2+ saves and putting him on 3+ is going to be much more effective.

My plan is to play coy and whittle down the Vindicators early, then kill them off in melee with Mortarion and the Fleshmower and occupy the middle with the Plague Marines – Abaddon and his Terminators are nasty but putting them on 3+ saves and loading them full of anti-infantry flamers and the fighting first will basically put them to bed – even if I lose the unit It’ll be after I kill half the unit and then I can finish it off with the rest.

I’m Going First.

That’s the nightmare scenario for Evan. I dump two mortars into the Cultists and wipe them out, then take out 2 Warp Talons with the third. Now Evan has to use them to hold the objective. I press around the corner to prep a turn 2 charge on one of Evan’s Vindicators while prepping for some shots down low on the other two. On Evan’s turn he draws Investigate Signals but opts to keep the Warp Talons on his objective rather than use them to screen the corner. So I drop Typhus and his Deathshroud back there and wipe them out. The Fleshmower circles around the top of the board and with some help from a mortar kills one Vindicator while the other two work with Mortarion to kill the other two. At midboard I kill the other unit of Warp Talons, and as Evan starts his turn 2 he’s got Abaddon + terminators plus Syll’Esske and the Obliterators left, none of them can come down anywhere on the board outside of that lower right corner, and he’s scored zero on primary. He concedes after taking down Mortarion (who only had 2 wounds left) and I buy him a drink.

Result: 92-29, Victory

Going first here helped turn this into a rout, but even without that I think I had the tools I needed to deal with Evan’s list pretty handily – going all-in (to the tune of 700 points) on a big unit of INFANTRY is pretty much the best way to have my list wreck yours, as I have a ton of great anti-infantry shooting and the ability to really negate those 2+ saves. Likewise the Vindicators are a potential problem but I can throw them off their game with Cloud of Flies and weaken them from out of line of sight. If I’d gone second it would have been much more of a game but going first put Evan on the back foot almost immediately in a mission that really wants you to hold on to your home objective.

I’m at 4-1 and feeling good going into game 6. Only the first six games count for Best Overall Scoring, so my hope is that I finish 5-1 and my army’s paint score can carry me the rest of the way. I’m not sure why I want Best Overall – I mean it’d be a great award to get – but the World Championship Qualifier would absolutely be punching way above my weight class and I’d be lucky to go 2-6 in that particular event. Still, I want those awards.

Round 6: vs. James Watkins’ Chaos Space Marines

Coming to the table, James tries to lay the usual line of “I’m just here to have a good time, I’m not that good a player” on me but I stop him. We’re both 4-1; I know he’s a good player and I want to win this game and I know he does too. Neither of us has ever started 5-1 and we’d both like to. That’s fine, honestly.

James' list - click to expand

James is running a more modern version of the CSM list, with the big unit of Accursed Cultists that’s an absolute chore to kill. He’s also geared his list much better to doing actions, and as a result picks Fixed secondary against me, opting for Deploy Teleport Homers and Assassination. That’s to be expected – he’s got the Blue Scribes and every one of these layouts lets you drop the scribes in the corner of a ruin at midboard and deploy homers ever turn for 15. I think he’d have been better off with Behind Enemy Lines than Assassination, though I do have 6 characters for him to go after.

The Plan

The Mission: H – The Ritual / Chilling Rain / Hammer and Anvil
Contagion: Rattlejoint Ague (-1 to saves)

During the pregame I note that James doesn’t seem familiar with this mission. That’s going to hurt him badly because this is a kind of insane mission – you can, as an action, have a unit just create an objective in No Man’s Land, but it has to be exactly 9″ away from another objective. There’s one place you can drop one within 9″ of your home objective outside your DZ, so with planning you can make that work and then chain from there. I opt to start with one unit of Nurglings on the board – the plan is to have them move forward and drop an objective under one of my PBCs, who will then sticky it the following turn. They’re more useful to me as a screening unit. Ditto my 7-man unit of marines, who I spread out wide as a diversion and to try and box out homers teleporters. My goal is to create objectives on rounds 1 and 2, hold those all game, and keep shooting James off the rest. He can’t afford to spend a lot of turns creating objectives early with his units if they also have to deploy homers, and that works in my advantage – he doesn’t have great action economy so if I can kill his action doers early he’ll blank on points late.

I’m going first. 

That’s very lucky for me. I rush the 7-man PMs to the right, then drop all three mortars on the cultists, killing something like 12 models in the unit. They’ll get some back each turn but I want to kill their alpha strike effectiveness and it works – when they charge my PMs they’ll end up failing to kill the Putrifier, who’ll fall back and force them to pursue for a turn, buying me time to get over there with Deathshroud and finish the unit. James plays it safe, using his Terminators to make an objective and holding the blue scribes back. That backfires when, on turn 2, I drop behind his objective and Typhus blows them off the board with mortal wounds. I whittle the Terminators unit down to 5 models before they charge into my Plague Marines and while they eventually kill them I weaken the unit to the point where Morty can finish them off.

James’ obliterators arrive a little too late to help and while they charge my PBC on the left they aren’t able to kill it outright, buying me more time to kill his Flamers after they hit my backfield to deploy homers. This one briefly swings back in James’ direction when he gets some very good dice in that middle of the table combat, but ultimately tying his Obliterators up in combat proves to be a mistake once they whiff at killing the PBC (I charged them with Nurglings to put them on -1 to hit) and are forced to remain locked in combat.

Result: 93-40, Victory

This was probably my most contentious game but still fun enough and while James and I both got a little salty at times, it was an amicable game and I’d play James again. This was another time where I think I was in a good place to deal with his list owing to being able to handle big Terminator bricks, but that notion would get put to the test later.

I’ve been invited to showcase so I set my army up, get it paint judged, and then collect it. I’ve managed to finish 5-1 but the Death Guard are far from my best army. In particular I’m up against Sascha Edelkraut, who started 6-0. I think my army is pretty good but even if it’s better than his from a paint standpoint (and I’m not convinced my Death Guard army is), it’s not a whole win better – I’m pretty sure at this point Sascha will have best overall locked up. That just means I’ll have to go 7-1.

On top of everything else, it’s Norman’s birthday. He still hasn’t found his travel case and that sucks, but we’re going out to get some birthday dinner. Our first attempt is at Noble Rice, a sushi place near Sparkman Wharf, but they can’t seat a table for 8 on a Saturday night with no reservations. So instead we go to Jotoro, a Mexican place and Tequila bar next door. The food there is pretty good and we drink and toast Norman. We end up back at the Airbnb and in bed by 11:30ish.

Tomorrow: The Final Day

Ending day 2 at 5-1 was huge. My literal first 5-1 result. I’m a 4-2 player by all accounts, only having recently shed that with a 4-1-1 result at Warzone Houston that was kind of a fluke in that I inadvertently submarined. This time it’s for real and I’m feeling the pressure going into day 3. I don’t sleep great that night, but it could be worse.

Check back tomorrow when I talk about the final two games, how I finished, and what i learned at the event.

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