TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2025, Part 22: GHAST and Dallas Prep

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of hobby and gaming progress through 2025. Last time around I was prepping for the GHAST teams event and doing some final tweaks to my Death Guard list. This time around I’m going to talk about GHAST and my hobby progress/list updates for the GW US Open in Dallas this weekend.

The GHAST Teams event was an eight team store belt event run at Dragon’s Lair, which isn’t too far from my house. With only eight teams (five players each), it’s simultaneously a decent size (40 players) and also kind of small, with only four rounds. That’s awesome, because it means finishing each day at 4:30pm. Which is something I want to do on the weekends anyways. All hail two-round days, the perfect way to play competitive Warhammer.

My List

Here’s what I ran with at GHAST:

My GHAST List - click to expand

It’s… very vehicle-heavy. I did some last minute test games against Space Wolves and walked away feeling like I’d gone too far in that direction, leaving myself open to bad matchups into melee pressure armies. That’s a problem because it makes me a bad defender in teams and that’s not ideal for Death Guard.

GHAST

I checked our pairings the night before the event to do some last-minute research and discovered that our round 1 opponents had to drop the event, meaning that our official round 1 opponents were “a few bottles of Dox Equis and some Enchiladas.” I got to sleep in a bit – which was good because I was up late working on the review of Codex: Thousand Sons, and meant Saturday was a single round.

Round 2: vs. Steven Salazar’s Ynnari

Steven's List - Click to Expand

Round 2 is against team Sanctum, one of the best teams in the area. It’s a tough matchup for us, made tougher by the fact that there’s a lot of overlap between our team and theirs, and so they kind of know most of our tricks. I’m paired into Steven Salazar, a wonderful person I’ve played against on several occasions. He’s on Ynnari, which is a tough matchup for me – while the PBCs are good into elves, the fire dragons and dark reapers are a real issue as they’ll just absolutely carve up my vehicles.

We keep this one pretty close, but Steven gets a solid string of luck on round 2, dropping 8 mortals on my Deathshroud with Yvraine before bouncing off them in melee (having two fewer models meant I didn’t finish them off), and out-drawing me. My single Lord of Virulence held down the fort OK at mid-table but ultimately it’s very, very hard to keep Ynnari from scoring – being able to zip across the entire table at the end of your Shooting phase if you killed a single unit is just brutal to deal with.

On paper, I lost this game 76-77, but in teams it’s a 10-10 tie. Great game against a tough opponent.

Round 3: vs. Ryan Bridges’ Drukhari

Round 3 was my favorite game of the event. Ryan was an absolute joy to play against. He was filling in for another player, and opted to play Drukhari instead of Aspect Host as he was more comfortable with them. That’s great for me, as I’ve played against Skysplinter on multiple occasions and I think they’re a really good matchup for Death Guard, even my list which focuses more on vehicles and may have issues with melee pressure. Incubi really struggle when you make them -1 damage and Lelith is likewise only 1 damage on her attacks, making her only a threat into Plague Marines and Poxwalkers.

I go first on Purge which isn’t great but I can make do here – I spend most of the early game holding back to avoid charges out of Raiders and picking off his transports while using the mortars to soften key units. When the Deathshroud do arrive, they walk across the middle of the table pretty much with impunity. This one ends in a tabling on round 4 and a 17-3 win for me.

Round 4: vs. Zach Meyer’s Imperial Knights

This was a frustrating game. Not because of my opponent, mind you – Zach was a lovely opponent and we had a fun game.

Zach's List - Click to Expand

No, this game was frustrating because it felt very winnable and then I lost it all on a single dice roll. My dice were outright mutinous for most of it, but it was a single terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad roll that did me in here.

My plan into knights is simple: Kill the Armigers first and deal with Canis as soon as possible. The armigers are the melee threats; if I kill them I can tie up the Helverins in melee and keep them busy. Zach had first turn in this one, getting an early Poxwalker kill and taking the top objective. I retaliated with some good damage, and to my credit, I had Canis Rex down to 2 wounds by Zach’s second turn, and was able to kill him in Overwatch.

No, the problem was that on Zach’s second turn, I used Rapid Ingress to drop my Deathshroud into the middle of the table, to go after one of his two remaining armigers. I moved out 5″, then failed a 4″ charge.

This was the entire game. I didn’t capture the middle objective – a five-point swing on Take and Hold, and that Armiger combined with the Helverins to kill all six of my Deathshroud, who were now unprotected instead of being able to kill an Armiger and sweep into the next target. To add insult to injury, the remaining Armiger with 2W charged into my PBC and killed it, then when I shot it to death, it exploded and wounded all of my units. Just rancid shit.

I had a couple of late plays to try and keep this closer but it never panned out. I took a couple of big swings that didn’t pay off and that was it. A 3-17 loss. We ended up in a team tie with Forge Masters and finished third behind them and Sanctum.

Overall, this was a great event. Mostly because it finished early every day. Teams events are fun, and I’d do this again. I particularly enjoyed playing with and practicing with my team, and they put in good work over the course of the event, carrying my dumb ass through some tough breaks.

Making Tweaks

GHAST further confirmed that my list is just not good as an all comers list; it folds too easily to melee pressure and I expect I’ll be seeing a lot of Emperor’s Children lists. So I dug into last week’s winning lists and put this together. I had just enough time yesterday to get in a test game against Ed, one of the locals at my GW store.

My Revised List - Click to Expand

This is a big departure – I’ve dropped the PBCs for Mortarion and a Daemon Prince, basically. I got sick of the Tallyman not rolling me new CP at GHAST – I literally only rolled a single 7+ with him all event – and so I’m going with DP instead. This list has a lot more anti-melee play, and did well into Ed’s Coterie of the Conceited. Mortarion gives me a solid way to avoid those turn 1 charges with a 5″ reactive move and dropping to 2×3 Deathshrouds saves me points and lets me move to two units of three with Lords of Contagion, which I think actually hit about as hard as a single six-man.

Hobby Progress

I have two bloat drones to paint but they’re not as important as having a workable Daemon Prince – I think most people will be cool with random drones being used as HBL drones, but it’ll be confusing to show up with a winged Daemon Prince and say he’s walking. Fortunately, I had this fat tub of shit in my bitz closet, ready to be assembled and painted:

That’s a Forge World Daemon Prince of Nurgle, and while he comes with another goober to follow him around, I don’t need that guy to run him. I was originally planning to dig up my old 40k Nurgle DP – the really sick metal model – but I couldn’t find him, so this guy was the pick I went with. He’s easier to paint, in that I don’t have to spend as much time picking out details on him. I spent Tuesday assembling him, primed him on Wednesday, and painted him last night and this morning. He’s ready to go:

Not my favorite paint job, but it’s serviceable and I’ll replace him eventually. He’s just not an amazing model – there’s too much non-detail on him that gets lost – but it works.

Next Week: Dallas Results

That wraps up my final prep for the GW US Open. Hopefully this time next week I’ll have something to show for my efforts. In the meantime, it’s about time for me to drive up to Dallas – I’ll see you next Thursday.

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