Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of hobby and gaming progress through 2025. Last time around I was frantically prepping for the Ottawa teams event, painting models and scrambling to find two replacement members for the team. This week we’re talking about the Ottawa teams event, start to finish, and how it played out.

The Recap

While I’d generally recommend you read last week’s post, it’s worth doing a quick recap of what’s going on:

• There was a teams event (8-man) up in Ottawa this past weekend. Up for grabs at the event were eight golden tickets to the 2025 World Championships of Warhammer.
• Because of the timing (close to WTC), it seemed like it might be a relatively easy field.
• We put together an 8-man team of pretty strong players for the event, and booked our travel.
• Two of those players had to bail in the week leading up to the event, prompting us to scramble and find two replacements – we swapped out Chase “Gunum” Garber for Chris Johnson and Ben Cherwien for TJ Lanigan in the final week. This gave us Chaos Knights instead of Tyranids and let Erik move to Emperor’s Children while TJ took Thousand Sons.
• I made some final adjustments to my list.

The List

Here’s the final list I was working with after my adjustments on Sunday:

My Death Guard List - Click to Expand

The big final change here was losing the second Defiler for a Blight-Hauler and a Fleshmower Bloat Drone. The second Defiler just seemed too big to move around the tight confines of a WTC table, and I can only make one unit walk through terrain per Movement phase via a Stratagem. While I like the Defilers, they’re big and clunky and don’t work great on WTC terrain. And honestly after the weekend, I’m not sure I’d bring one along next time, especially with a 160mm base.

Our Team Prep for the Event

It’s worth talking at this point about the prep we did for the event. Playing a Teams event isn’t as much about winning your games as it is understanding and creating good matchups for your armies, and finding ways to avoid bad losses and score points for your team. You want to understand going into an event what your team strengths are and how you’ll fare in a given matchup, plus who’s more or less dependent on terrain.

That last bit is important – with each deployment, WTC terrain has light, medium, and heavy variants you can play on. When you’re picking matchups, you need to be aware of how your army responds to terrain and how it will affect the matchup. Because defenders get to choose maps, you usually want your defenders to have their pick of terrain. As Death Guard, I could go either, taking heavy terrain against shooting armies or light terrain against melee armies.

We put this info into our matrix spreadsheet, which I can link below now that the event is over:

You can find our Matrix Doc here

This isn’t particularly great – lots of teams usually do a better job with this than us, and we didn’t get most of this filled out until right before some of our matchups. In general, we were behind on prep – we had very little time to practice, and some of our players didn’t really get to experience WTC terrain until they got to the event.

We had a good mix of team veterans (TJ, Erik), players who had played in several teams events (Garrett, Chris, T), and players who had only played in a few and hadn’t done much with WTC layouts (me, Shane, and Boon). That meant we’d largely have to be carried by our player skill – and that’s the area where we felt the most confident. When it came to player ELO and win rate, we matched up very favorably with the other teams – especially when it came to games played.

While I don’t think ELO is destiny or anything, having this was helpful – it was useful for focusing our energy on the teams we thought would give us trouble and which ones would generally be matchups we could outskill. By far our biggest threats were team Blunt Force Trauma, made up of a killer’s row of Canada’s best players, including Francois Lalonde, Tim Deetlefs, Nick Jagiello, and Chris Hanes. That said, Stud or Scrub, Halifax, Quebec, Big Dice Energy, and Team Leg all had some good players who could give us a run, and some of those numbers can be misleading: StatCheck’s ELO doesn’t count teams events, so if a player only plays those, they’ll show up as a lower rank than they should.

This list is also heavier than we expected – in the final weeks before the event, several other teams came on board, presumably with the same aspirations. Suddenly a relatively weak field turned into a rough one as Canada’s best players showed up to throw down. We’d have our work cut out for us.

Thursday – Hobby Progress and Prep

Even as I was writing last week’s article, I was trying to get some last-minute hobby progress done. When we first asked TJ Lanigan to join the team to replace Ben Cherwien, he mentioned that he was on Thousand Sons but needed some help with models – in particular he was running something like 50 Tzaangor across Enlightened and regular foot Tzaangors – and asked if we could lend him six Enlightened on discs with bows. I had those but didn’t have them painted, only primed. So I volunteered and started painting them. The goal here was to just get them to “Battle Ready” so TJ could do his thing.

I very much could have finished these guys by Thursday night but it would definitely have been a ton of work – that guy up there is about the furthest along of any of them and I was quickly getting to the “just base the damn thing and call it a day” step of things. While initially TJ suggested he needed 15 goats on disc, it turned out he only needed 6 with bows, which meant he could just borrow Erik’s, and I could leave mine at home. That meant the only models I had to do any hobby work on were my two bloat-drones and the Nurgle Chaos Spawn which still needed basing. So I quickly slathered some paint and wash on those and based them to get them up to “battle ready” standard.

Honestly they look finished enough from a distance that you can’t really tell they’re not up the standard of the rest of the army and I don’t know if that’s an endorsement of what I was able to accomplish or a sick burn on how the rest of my army is painted. Either way, they were good enough, so I stuffed them into the case and packed up.

We’ve talked about packing and traveling with minis before, but I tend to travel light even in comparison to that. The first rule is “Never check your minis” – those *always* go with you on the plane. You can figure it out if your clothes don’t make it, but if your minis aren’t at the destination, you can’t play. For this trip I was able to fit the whole army plus a spare Mutalith into my big GW minis case, and all the clothes I needed fit into my backpack.

Friday

The Texas members of our team were all on the same flights – a 7:30am flight to DCA followed by a one hour layover before a flight to Ottawa. This splits things up into roughly a pair of 2.5-hour flights, or 3/2 depending on which direction you’re going. That’s relatively pleasant, since it meant very little time in customs and a nice break between flights to grab lunch. As it turned out, my wife was also traveling this weekend – going to NYC for Go Fest, so we went to the airport together (albeit a bit early) so she could catch her 7am while our son stayed with my parents for the weekend. This makes for an early, but pleasant, start to the day where we can hang out together for an hour or so before having to go to our separate gates.

These flights were pretty uneventful, and we were joined on the second leg of our journey by Shane Watts, the Votann player on our team and that gave us 6/8 team members. The final two team members – James “Boon” Kelling and TJ Lanigan – were meeting us in Ottawa. Boon was flying into Montreal and renting a car to drive down, while TJ was just going to white knuckle the entire 7ish-hour drive up from southern PA. Suffice to say, we got there first, hitting up the Airbnb we’d rented for the weekend. The house was located about 20 minutes from the venue, and boasted three upstairs bedrooms, a converted fourth upstairs bedroom with a fold-out couch, and three basement bedrooms plus another fold-out couch and two bathrooms. That meant we could comfortably sleep all eight people, but I did feel bad that it meant TJ got the short end of the stick and didn’t have a private bedroom to himself. That said, he was also the only person not staying until Monday, so that made sense.

We kicked off our arrival by walking to the grocery story down the road – about four blocks away – picking up some snacks and drinks to last the weekend. We prioritized sodas and healthier options like lunch meat, cheese, apples, and uh, chips. Which are technically on the healthier side when it comes to Warhammer trips.

Around 4pm we found out that TJ was going to be delayed with some extra hobby work he had to do and wouldn’t be able to leave until around 5pm, meaning he’d get in some time around 3am. That was pretty brutal – and he hit some nasty weather on top of that – but there wasn’t much we could do about it. Jeremy stopped by to pick us up around the same time and drive us over to the venue, where Erik and I borrowed a mat and a set of terrain to practice on. As I mentioned before, we didn’t have much time to practice as a team, so we wanted to get in some Friday games to recap and solidify our Matrices, making sure we had the right values in there.

Friday’s Games: Floorhammer

The dining room table wasn’t wide enough to hold a neoprene mat, so we moved the coffee table in the living room out of the way and played on the floor, high school style. This was kind of terrible because I’m 41 and so I shouldn’t be doing anything on the floor. We opened with Erik (Emperor’s Children) taking on T (Genestealer Cults), while we waited for Boon to arrive. He was still a ways’ out, and wasn’t expected to show up until around 8pm. 

Erik’s game against T was about two things: Erik getting another EC rep, and T learning how to handle Emperor’s Children. It’s a good matchup for Erik, who can mostly enjoy a target that Infractors are ready-made to kill.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth in this one… I think. I don’t know; I didn’t watch most of it. Boon showed up around 8pm and we immediately hopped in his car to go get dinner. We’d been trying to order pizzas for about 20 minutes, but found it difficult to actually order because the delivery websites all required a Canadian zip code for credit card validation, which meant they wouldn’t accept our cards. So dumb.

On our way to the venue hall, Jeremy had mentioned that Ottawa has a massive Lebanese population, and this meant that you could get tons of great shawarma around town. Shawarma is incredibly good – I used to eat it all the time on Mondays back when I worked in downtown Silver Spring – and so I was absolutely not going to pass that up.

We found a place called Shawarma Palace and immediately went about ordering 15 pounds of food, to the point where we were eating leftovers all weekend. I have no regrets about this; it was absolutely delicious. I picked up two plates each with beef, lamb, kafta, and falafel and took those back to the fort, where the team promptly housed most of it.

Once we’d housed enough food, I challenged Boon to a throwdown. Boon hadn’t played vs. new Death Guard yet and hadn’t spent much time on WTC tables, so it was worth having him play a game. His Seer Council Aeldari were annoying… but not a particularly strong match for Death Guard, who are just broken good. It was a good warmup either way, and I was happy to get in another game against Fire Dragons and Eldar, since playing Steven Salazar at GHAST had left me wondering if Ynnari might be a problem for my list.

After the game we packed up the terrain again and shared drinks and stories. For the record, this is the best part of a teams event – and events generally. Playing Warhammer? That’s fine. I like 40k enough. But what I really enjoy is hanging out and doing Nerd Summer Camp with my crew. We were up until about midnight playing our second Floorhammer game, at which time we collectively called it for the night, hoping TJ would have materialized by morning. I put some sheets and pillows on his couch and pulled it out. It’s not the most comfortable bed – it has that common futon issue of having a split down the middle that just sucks – but it’s workable for a single person.

Saturday

The captain’s meeting was at 8am, so we all had to start getting up and moving around 7. We were delighted to find that TJ had indeed made it the night before, and let him sleep an extra half hour while Erik (our team captain) went over in the car with half of our team and TJ would shuttle over the other half.

The venue itself is a community rec center. It reminds me a lot of last year’s Oxford GT, which was at a similar location in the UK. We don’t have these exactly so much in the US, but imagine if your next GT was held at the local YMCA and that’s about the same vibe. The space itself was open and comfortable, but a little loud and standing on concrete all day isn’t ideal. Still, can’t argue with the space itself, and it was easy to get to. 9/10.

We sit down and do some quick discussion of the pairings matrix and our next opponents. We’re starting things off with team Stud or Scrub, and one of the four best teams at the event. In particular, they’ve got Ridvan Martinez, who’s better known as “Skari,” leading them, plus Cody Brown and Eric Marcoux. They’re a good team and while Drukhari are not a particularly strong faction, no one on Earth knows them better than Skari.

Round 1: vs. Cody Brown’s Thousand Sons

My Death Guard like having the benefit of terrain and so we put me out as first Defender in these early rounds. In retrospect, I think that was the wrong move, but it works out here.

Cody's List - Click to Expand

Cody’s list is more or less what I’d expect to see for Thousand Sons moving forward, and it’s not far off from TJ’s list. The triple Mutaliths can be a problem for me if they get close, and the Tzaangor Enlightened can use their AP-2, ignores cover bows and lethal hits to drop drones at a distance, while being protected with Exalted Sorcerers on Disc from more than 18″ away. The good news is that it’s a pretty open board, so if Cody tries to make a play for the middle, he’ll lose whatever he puts out there.

My plan was to threaten the sides of the table and those long shooting lanes to push him back into the middle, where my defiler and PBCs could step out and cause problems. I need to bait Magnus out early and kill him as soon as he’s visible. Doing that will hamstring Cody’s ability to kill big targets and force him to bring out the Mutaliths, and I can kill those pretty quickly too. I can use the poxwalkers to jam him early – a unit of Rubrics is not good at killing them in melee – and then I just need to weather a bit of Tzaangor shooting.

The Ritual isn’t the best mission for me, but it’s very doable and I don’t have a strong use for Poxwalkers here except to spread affliction and drop objectives. I can drop objectives near my deployment zone and work on killing Cody off his.

The Mission: The Ritual / Stalwarts / Hammer and Anvil

I’m going first. I took -1 to saves on this one (Rattlejoint Ague) as I’ve learned you need it to threaten Magnus. You have to get him on his 4++ or he’ll never go down.

My other big play this event was cycling secondary missions: I was determined to aggressively cycle whenever I didn’t have 7 CP, and I started with this game, cycling Marked for Death into Secure No Man’s Land turn 1 for a nice 10-point turn with Extend Battle Lines. Immediate gratification is hard to beat.

On the whole, my plan worked – Cody played it safe on the first turn trying to hang back and out of sight, and took some shots, but ultimately there was nowhere on this board to move out with Magnus and the MVBs without opening himself up. He stepped out too far with Magnus and I shot him to death across that big firing lane in the middle of the table. From there things spiraled and I was able to stay ahead pretty much all game. This was also the game where I realized I should be using Deathshroud to Ingress onto objectives for easy scoring. I won this one 85-60.

Result: 14-6, Win 

Cody was a great opponent and I enjoyed playing him. I enjoyed playing everyone at the event.

That’s a great start and it’s starting to dawn on me how good Death Guard are, even into an army like Thousand Sons. The rest of the team plays well – Erik gets a 20-0 against Orks, Chris gets a 13-7 over their Death Guard player with his Chaos Knights, and T won big over Konrad Motyka. Boon ate a 7-13 loss to Skari, and we did well enough in the rest of our games to snag a 101-59 win.

Team Result: 101-59, Win

Starting off 1-0 is a good deal but a quick glance at pairings shows we’re up against Blunt Force Trauma in round 2, the toughest team at the event in the next round. We head over to A&W for lunch. The burgers are surprisingly good but they only have one flavor of milkshake and that’s strawberry… which is honestly just insane. TJ wanted a root beer float so bad and it just wasn’t in the cards. We house some burgers and head back.

Round 2: vs. Chris Hanes’ Death Guard

Death Guard were the ongoing problem at this event – they were on everybody’s team roster, and they had no bad matchups. That meant going into them was often a question of “how do you mitigate this?” The good news was that we had a pretty easy answer after seeing their list.

Chris' List - click to expand

The big problem here is that Chris’s list doesn’t have the anti-vehicle punch it needs to threaten mine. Plaguespitters on the PBCs and Autocannons on the Predators just won’t get there, and the big brick of Deathshroud, while scary, doesn’t have the mobility or versatility you want in this matchup – once those are on the table, they’re basically stuck where they are so they have to do a lot to get their points’ worth in value.

The plan here is to just be aggressive and table Chris, forcing him to play coy while I screen my backfield and do enough damage that by the time his reserves show up they can’t mass effects to do anything.

The Mission: Take and Hold / Raise Banners / Tipping Point

I’m Going First. Chris not having good ranged anti-tank means I can play aggressive early and bully him, making it hard for his Deathshroud to get into good position later and building a strong scoring lead early. I put two MBHs in reserves along with my Deathshroud in this game in order to have some surprise anti-tank pop out later, but those won’t end up mattering that much. I’m able to get the drop on Chris early, taking out two of his vehicles and putting him on a clock while the Defiler runs across the middle of the table. Chris had to reserve too much of his army out of fear he’d lose it if it started on the table and could be seen and as a result had to wait to get up to full strength.

I think I had a positive matchup here but the back-breaking moment was when I charged Chris’ Lord of Virulence with my Deathshroud and Chaos Spawn and he Intervened through the wall with his Deathshroud. Because they double charged, he ended up spreading himself too thin across both units, and was only able to put two Deathshroud and a LoC into min, while two went into the Chaos Spawn. The Spawn got lucky on their FNPs and survived, doing 5 mortals back to the Deathshroud, while I didn’t lose a single Deathshroud on the other side, and ended up nearly dropping his full unit without them killing anything.

Things snowballed from there. Chris was a great opponent but the dice weren’t on his side in this game – I had some very solid luck early and that turned into an insurmountable lead late. What I saw as maybe a 12-8 or 13-7 before ended up becoming a 20-0 when I scored 100 VP to his 48.

Result: 20-0, Win

That’s huge for our team and we needed it to narrowly pull off a tie – Erik did well into Emperor’s Children and T scored 14 into Jason Sparks’ CSM but T, Shane, and Garrett got shellacked. Boon  was able to hold his game to 9-11, and that meant we’d end up narrowly squeaking out a tie against Blunt Force Trauma.

Team Result: 75-85, Tie

That’s a tough one for us but in the grand scheme of things it’s not a bad result. Me getting 20-0 against Death Guard was huge for us – and not something I’d have expected – but we might have had better luck getting Chris into that list instead and throwing me into Emperor’s Children. To his credit, Chris held Lalonde to a 10-10 draw, which was massive given how good a player Lalonde is. Blunt Force Trauma were fun to play on the whole – good opponents and we’d talk to them multiple times over the rest of the weekend.

Round 3: vs. Edouard Denommee’s World Eaters

World Eaters are an army I know I can handle. Daemonkin have some strong scoring tricks, so I just need to be aware of those and work on keeping my objectives protected from sudden Bloodletter incursions.

Edouard's List - Click to Expand

My plan here is to go with -1 to hit for my Contagion (Skullsquirm Blight), as a lot of these guys just don’t have saves worth reducing. This will make Skarbrand and the Forgefiends a little more of a challenge, but Forgefiends hitting on 5s are pretty bad. My plan here is to kill Skarbrand and the Flesh Hounds as quickly as possible. Skarbrand can kill vehicles too easily and the Flesh Hounds are the bulk of Edouard’s scoring.

The Mission: Linchpin / Fog of War / Tipping Point

I’m going second. Which isn’t really what I want in this matchup but I’ll live with it for the easier endgame scoring. KDK are like Coterie in that feeding them Poxwalkers just gives them free Blood Tithe points, but not like Coterie in that they can also just not score the points and they aren’t as useful as pledge points. I use one unit of poxwalkers to stop nasty early scout moves, and use the other to threaten the bottom objective.

I had a pretty rancid first turn here – I threw everything I had at Skarbrand, only to drop him to 2 wounds. Then I made a 9″ charge with the Defiler, hoping to finish him off… and ended up getting 0 goddamn wounds out of it. Skarbrand then killed the Defiler, but I was able to at least pop Skarbrand in overwatch on the following turn. Not a great start, but losing the Defiler isn’t the end of the world.

With KDK the key is to kill the Flesh Hounds early. They’re key to scoring, and once the free up/down is gone the army loses a lot of value. I’d end up scrapping with the Juggernauts for two turns before killing them but once those were down Edouard just didn’t have much left. The biggest problem here was that Edouard did not appreciate what PBCs could do – he drew Sabotage turn 1 and attempted it with his Jakhals. So I killed them with Mortars, blanking him on it and forcing him to have it the second round. Then he tried it again with Flesh Hounds and I mortared them off the table. He finally got the message round 3 and paid 1 CP to discard it but by then the damage was done. I took this one 81-43.

Result: 17-3, Win

Team Result: 84-76, Tie

Blunt Force Trauma won their third round so we’re looking to keep up with them. Unfortunately we didn’t quite get there this round, and end up in an 84-76 tie. This is primarily because Shane had some rancid dice in his matchup against Deathwatch and what should have been more like an 8-10 point game ended up being a 5-15. Nothing he could have done, but it’s frustrating.

1-0-2 is a solid start given how tough our route has been so far. We’ve played three of the top four teams on our spreadsheet, and only Halifax Privateers and Big Dice Energy are left. That said, Team LEG has also been marching up at the event; so far they’ve been feasting on the lower teams but they’re a real sleeper at the event.

For dinner that night we opt for pizza. We stop at a small hole in the wall place near the venue and grab what ends up being a staggering amount of pizza. It’s super thick – think Pizza Hut style – and very dense. Of the pizzas we ordered, the meat lovers’ was very good but the standout was a Butter chicken pizza they had, which was topped with peppers, spicy peppers, and onions in addition to the titular chicken. It was as good as it sounds. We hang out and talk and drink until about midnight, then turn in.

Sunday

The final day. Only two rounds to play, and we’re still in it. With only 14 teams, five rounds means a one-loss team can win… or a two-draw team, in our case. If Blunt Force Trauma loses a round, we can take the gold. We just need to win our matchups.

As it would turn out, we were paired into the Halifax Privateers, another name in our top 5 teams at the event. Whatever route we thought we were going to take to winning golden tickets, it turned out to be the hardest possible one.

Round 4: vs. Justin White’s Ynnari

Because of the event timing, we were still using the pre-nerf version of the army. Which means lots of insane movement at the end of my Shooting phase and the ability to just flat ignore my army in order to score if need be. Yvraine is a particular problem for my Deathshroud.

Justin's List - Click to Expand

Unfortunately for Justin, I’ve played against Ynnari – a few weeks ago, testing against Steven Salazar – and I know how to play the matchup now. Also in my favor is defending; on the table I pick, Justin can’t fit his Wave Serpent down the middle of the table, meaning he’s stuck trying to go around. This means I can jam up those lanes and stop him from getting anything done. I go with -1 to saves to ensure my shooting gets there when I need it to.

The plan here is to take care of the Banshees and Fire Dragons first. The Fire Dragons are the only real threat to my vehicles, while the Banshees will tear up my Deathshroud and cause problems. Once those are gone, there’s nothing left in Justin’s list to worry about. Yvraine’s block is big and durable but slow, and the Warp Spiders will die quickly. There are a lot of neat pieces in this army, but not enough to actually cause me problems.

The Mission: Scorched Earth / Inspired Leadership / Crucible of Battle

I’m going first. That’s horrible news for Justin, as I spend turn 1 decimating his Banshees and dropping his Wave Serpent to 2 wounds. I charge into his Dark Reapers and make the mistake of forgetting Yvraine has fights first, so her brick intervenes into my Poxwalkers but they manage to survive with three models, locking both units in combat. The Wave Serpent battleshocks on his turn and I pop it with Overwatch, forcing the Fire Dragons to get out and walk. And by “walk” I mean “die to mortars.”

There isn’t a lot to say about this one. It’s a bad matchup for Justin and once the Fire Dragons and Banshees are off the board nothing he has is much of a threat. I’m able to control the board pretty handily and close this one out 100-42.

Result: 20-0, Win

The team did well in this one and we’d switched strategies, putting out Boon as first defender so he could pick favorable terrain. After an 0-3 run yesterday he needed a bit of a boost and got it in this round. We go 7-1 against them, with Chris taking a rough 19-1 loss to Death Guard that could have been closer, but we aren’t complaining. Blunt Force Trauma beat team Leg, so we need them to lose or tie in the final round to have a chance.

Team Result: 110-50, Win

We house a bunch of McDonald’s for lunch and talk about our strategy for the final round. We’re up against Team LEG, who have been on a tear this event. They have some very good players, and we can’t look past them.

This is where we find out that Blunt Force Trauma only want one golden ticket – of their eight players, seven are not going to attend the World Championships. This is because America is making international travel to the event as unappealing as possible and I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to risk dealing with that bullshit. What that means for us is that if Blunt Force Trauma wins, we could still get tickets for everyone on our team. We just need to win in the final round.

Round 5: vs. Cody Bourgeois’ World Eaters

The final round matchup against Team LEG. I’m paired into Cody’s Khorne Daemonkin and having played against this once, I think I’m in a good spot. That said, the terrain here is much more dense, and the deployment map does not favor me at all – Search and Destroy puts us much closer.

Cody's list - click to expand

Cody only has two Forgefiends but those Helbrutes are going to be a nightmare if they get into combat with me. He reserves one but the other two start on the table. I need to whittle this down as much as possible as quickly as I can. He also puts two units of Bloodletters and the juggernauts into reserves. My plan here is to take out those Helbrutes quickly – they’re an issue and I need to be careful about spacing my units 7″ away from each other so I don’t get hit by a 6″ consolidating monster. This will in fact happen after I fail to score a kill mid-game, but fortunately I only have to really deal with one helbrute. The good news is that a Helbrute hammer hits on 4s, so giving them -1 to hit gives me a real fighting chance… so long as Cody doesn’t spike the damage rolls or I don’t biff the saves (spoiler: both of those happen). Cody has two solo characters – Kharn and the Slaughterbound – who can be early distractions to soak up damage.

The Mission: Take and Hold / Hidden Supplies / Search and Destroy

That mission isn’t doing me any favors, either – it’s as high-scoring as they come and getting a lead will be tough. That said, I’m going second, which helps a teeny bit.

Cody was a great opponent. Just a chill dude to play against and I enjoyed playing him. That said, everything went his way early on as my dice were just brutalizing me, preventing me from picking up units I needed to kill. At one point I dumped every non-blast gun I had into one of his Helbrutes only to watch it shrug them all off and stay alive on 2 wounds. It then killed a PBC, a bloat-drone, and a blight hauler before I brought it down. I kill Kharn and the Slaughterbound early and I think they might have been better used round 2 to oversaturate me with threats, forcing me to handle them instead of just getting killed.

This was a very tough game and involved a lot of tough decisions and some big mistakes. At one point I had to make the conscious decision to not kill a unit to keep my scoring up (dropping the second helbrute would have meant losing an objective to Bloodletters showing up). On round 3 I dropped a unit of Deathshroud on the side of the table expecting to use them to Establish Locus. Then Cody ingressed a helbrute to fight them the turn after. Then we both realized I’d put them in the deployment zone for Crucible of Battle and not Search & Destroy, and had dropped those two units in the middle of nowhere. No one was happy with this outcome, and it was hilarious. I ended up doing locus with my Chaos Spawn at the middle of the table instead.

The good news is that Death Guard are broken, so I could just throw more units at it. The early dice were such a big deal in this game that it threatened to turn it from a 15-5 for me into an 8-12 or 7-13. What helped me was that Cody was struggling with the clock, and ran out of time on the final turn. I gave him a couple of minutes and we talked through a few things but I was able to narrowly secure a 15 VP primary on turn 5 to max primary and score my secondaries to make it 92-91.

Result: 10-10, Tie

A tie isn’t what I wanted and I felt like I was letting the team down after a string of big wins, but it turns out the rest of the guys did pretty well, giving us a 4-2-2 run against Team LEG and pulling out a win.

Team Result: 93-67, Win

That puts our final record at 3-0-2, which is very respectable given the competition we faced. Every team we played was filled with great players and fun opponents, and I don’t believe anyone on our team had a bad experience. Unfortunately for us, team Blunt Force Trauma managed to squeeze out a small win over Quebec to win the event. But fortunately for us, that means we scored golden tickets!

I cannot tell you how satisfying this was. Did I want first place? Yes, of course. But the goal here was to go to Canada with a team and win golden tickets. And with TJ and Erik already spoken for, this meant that our entire team now had golden tickets to the 2025 World Championships of Warhammer. It is so incredibly, amazingly satisfying to have done all of that work and succeeded.

And on top of that, there’s something oddly poetic? narrative? about winning a ticket this year – after three years of writing my Road Through column, trying again and again at Best Overall, wining Best Painted at the Grand Narrative last year, and now pushing through to the WCW this year feels like both the logical next step in the journey and simultaneously too good to be true.

On that note, it kind of is – I was only able to go 5-0 for the first time at an event because Death Guard are too good right now. And while that’s often the case for top players, it’s a bit bittersweet to know that a lot of it boils down to being in the right place at the right time, army-wise. Still, this is everything I wanted to get out of the event and a major milestone I wanted to accomplish this year, so I’m going to stop overthinking it as I happily check off this particular box.

Next Week: The Long March Begins

That’s it for this week. Come back next week when I answer the question: “What the hell do I do now?”

See you next Thursday.

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