TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2025, Part 24: Prep for Ottawa

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of hobby and gaming progress through 2025. Last time around I was recapping my time at the GW US Open Dallas. This time around I’m prepping for an 8-person teams event in Ottawa coming up this weekend.

Last Minute Scramble

I’ve done my share of five-person team events. Well, I’ve done a few, enough to have a good idea of how they work and be comfortable with some of the pairings process and how you prep for them. But I haven’t done 8-person teams before. It’s a similar process in a lot of ways, but… much harder. Logistically, I mean. I’ve been playing a lot of Nightreign over the last week or so. And already with that game, Fromsoft is talking about giving players duos to solve the problem that “not enough people have a third friend to play with,” and “lining up three schedules to play on the regular is really fucking difficult when you’re all adults.”

Imagine that, but trying to corral eight people to travel internationally to play Warhammer for a whole weekend. Over the past week we’ve had two players drop suddenly from the event, one for a work emergency and the other for a medical emergency, leaving us to scramble to not just find players of that same skill level, but also players who could travel to Ottawa with less than one week’s notice.

It has not been easy.

That said, I’m really happy with the team we’ve assembled to work under the Goonhammer banner. Here’s the current lineup:

• Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones (Death Guard) – That’s me. I’m playing Mortarion’s Hammer. I’ve been tweaking the list and getting new reps. It’s a solid list and the Death Guard are so good right now that I don’t think they really have any “bad” matchups.
• James “Boon” Kelling (Aeldari) – Boon is, as you might expect, on Eldar, rocking his Seer Council bullshit. He’s probably the second best player on the team, and good enough that we can count on him to win some matchups through player skill.
• Garrett Moore (Blood Angels) – Garrett’s a local friend who I met through the Astros Militarum and someone who’s shown up in this column before, usually playing Space Wolves or Grey Knights. He’s on Blood Angels for this event.
• Erik Nelson (Emperor’s Children) – Erik’s another good friend and still up for this despite winning a golden ticket at Clutch earlier this year. He’s switched from Eldar to Emperor’s Children, who serve a vital role in our team as a melee pressure list.
• T Chambliss (Genestealer Cults) – T’s another local friend who writes for us and has been running Genestealer Cults for some time.
• Shane Watts (Votann) – Shane’s a longtime Goonhammer author and shareholder and he’s back on Votann for this one. He’s bee picking up reps with the army and crushing it.

Then we have our two replacement players subbing in for Chase Garber and Ben Cherwien:

• TJ Lanigan (Thousand Sons) – One of the best players in the world, TJ was able to fill in for Ben and keep us from missing a beat when it came to team comp and player skill. He’s on the new Thousand Sons book.
• Chris Johnson (Chaos Knights) – Chris is a local friend who I’ve played on teams with before. He’s a very solid player who has improved substantially and can play at the Chase level, albeit with less of that unpredictable flair.

From here, it’s all filling out matrices and figuring out matchups. I’m not an expert at that, but we have players on the team who are better at it than I am, so I’m leaving it up to them for the most part. My job now is to get reps and have the army ready to go.

My Practice Games

I played three practice games with the army in prep for the event this week – one on Friday against Luke’s Chaos Knights, one on Sunday against Erik’s Emperor’s Children, and then another on Tuesday against T’s Genestealer Cults. The big goal here is to just get more familiar with the Death Guard rules and the Detachment abilities. The good thing about Mortarion’s Hammer is that the Stratagems in it aren’t that great. The key ones to remember here are moving through walls for my Defiler, cursing a piece of terrain, and giving enemy units -2 to their charge distance for one of my vehicles.

The other thing was to get familiar with some of the WTC layouts. I wasn’t sure going into my Sunday game if double Defilers was viable, so I wanted to test that. WTC terrain is interesting for me if I play as defender, as I can play on either open terrain if I’m going into melee armies or armies without strong long-range shooting, or dense terrain if I’m up against a shooting army, and either one can play to my strengths.

The Friday Game

This game was into my friend Luke’s Chaos Knights, running two bigs (Abominant, Rampager), and some war dogs. It was a good test of my army’s ability to crack knights and train me on how I want to play with Deathshroud. Without a Lord of Contagion, Death Shroud become much less useful, even into war dogs. They’re more valuable in this matchup for doing actions and threatening points, and when they do drop into melee, it has to be against a dog with 2-4 wounds left, where the volume of their attacks can mean pushing 1-2 wounds through.

The Sunday Game

Even with Coterie, this is a very bad matchup for Emperor’s Children. The goal here is to stop them from getting to 3 pledge points until round 3, and that’s pretty easy to do if I set up back from the line on turn 1 and force them to come to me. If they decide to play coy and avoid coming out, I can pick off key threats with mortars and find angles to pick for my go turn while counting on turn 5 scoring to make up any differences.

That’s more or less what happens here, as Erik goes first and plays it safe, I pick off some key units, and then on my second turn I’m able to drop in and take out enough key targets that he can’t really recover. EC are super elite as an army, especially when they run three Daemon Princes.

The key takeaway after this game is that i likely don’t want to run two defilers. I revise my list, pulling one out – that frees up 165 points, and I already had 15 unused so now I have 180 to spend. I consider a Daemon Prince but ultimately I figure I can split the value of a Defiler into two units – a Fleshmower bloat-drone and a blight-hauler, giving me two fast, useful units that help solve a problem I have with action economy. I’ll end up carrying that into my next game and finalizing my list with those.

The Tuesday Game

This one was more interesting, because I wasn’t sure how the GSC matchup would go. I have good indirect fire and T’s on Outrider claw, who give me better vehicle targets to go into. I went back and forth in this one on -1 Ld/OC/Mv vs. -1 to saves for my army and settled on trying -1 Ld/OC/Mv. That worked out in interesting fashion – it made it hard for T to rush points – but was probably the wrong call, in retrospect. I should have gone with -1 to saves and just banked on killing more units quickly and aiming to table T to prevent him from being able to secret mission late.

T had some early luck in this game that kept it closer than I think it was – some wild explosions in my backfield from destroyed vehicles ate a ton of wounds off my Defiler and my tanks which he was able to capitalize on – but overall it wasn’t a good matchup for him.

My List

Here’s the list I ended up on after the Sunday game and our edits:

My Ottawa Teams List - Click to Expand

I’m pretty happy with it, and I like how much movement it has. The Fleshmower was the last odd pick, and I went with it over the spitter probe for one simple reason: If it’s by itself and can’t reach combat, I can have it do an action. If it has guns, I’ll be tempted to shoot, but if it doesn’t, I won’t be able to mess things up by shooting instead of doing what I’m supposed to.

Hobby Progress

It’s been a hectic week. I’m painting tow Heavy Blight Launcher Drones for my army. I’m going to have them done tonight, or at least good enough they can go to the event.

I’m about 50% of the way there so far. That one on the left is almost done with regard to being battle-ready. I reckon it’s two hours left of work from here.

Next Week: Ottawa Recap

That’s it for this week but join me next week when I’ll be back to talk about Ottawa, how things went, and what I learned, if anything. Until then, if you’ve been following along every week, thanks for doing that. Wish me luck in the comments.

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.