Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of hobby and gaming progress through 2025. Last time around I had returned victorious from Ottawa, having secured a golden ticket/invite to the 2025 World Championships of Warhammer. If you haven’t read that article, it’s worth going back and reading about my schwarma-fueled ordeal.
Winning a golden ticket puts a real change in my plans for the rest of the year. While it doesn’t change the travel I’d booked to Atlanta – I booked that flight for the Grand Narrative months ago along with the hotel room – it does change what I’m doing for the event.
Well, kind of.
What Do I Do at the World Championships of Warhammer?
I’m thrilled to have finally finished an event 5-0 (though technically not a huge accomplishment given it was teams) and finally punched my ticket to the world championships. Up to this point I’d been trying to win Best Overall awards to do that, and that was uh, clearly the harder way to do this. But there was a reason I was trying to get to Best Overall, and that reason is that I’m more of a 4-2 or at best, 5-1 player who can paint well.
And that’s more than enough for the Grand Narrative, where you’re often going to go up against opponents on their first games of 40k – though last year I played some solid veterans, including a round 1 opponent who absolutely wrecked my dumb Night Lords with a Baneblade-and-Dorn-fueled leafblower force. But the Word Championships is more a best-of-the-best situation, where even the soft players are other Best Overall guys who are on my level.
John Lennon may finish second again at this year’s World Championships, but if he does, it won’t be to me. The very real truth which I have to reckon with is that is that I can absolutely end up going 0-8 at this thing.
I uh, really do not want to do that.
Some people are good at losing. Mike Pestilens, of Warphammer fame and occasional Goonhammer author for daemon- and chaos-related articles, is really good at it. Just a wonderful, affable guy who has no problem eating shit in three or four consecutive games. That’s a tremendous skill, especially for someone as good at the game as he is.
I’m not so great at it. I’ve gotten better over the last few years – put in a real, concerted effort to not be such a salty shit when I’m losing. But I’m not great at it – mostly I’m just okay at it. And even when I am, I definitely don’t enjoy it. I don’t know if I have the constitution to lose eight consecutive games of Warhammer. If I walk into that final round 0-7 it’s gonna be real desperation hours.
On the other hand, I can chase other goals: Best Overall and Best Painted are both options for me, and with five months between now and the event, I can put in some time and effort painting the army I want to take, up to a standard that will legitimately compete for those. Part of doing well at the WCW is just picking an army that isn’t terrible, so as long as I’m not running a real garbage-tier army in the meta, I should stand a chance.
Making my goal “Best Painted” for the WCW seems like a copout. And in some sense, it is – I’ve been playing competitively and I’ve always seen Best Overall as the pinnacle of the hobby, moreso than Best General, which doesn’t take the whole thing into account. And while I’ll go for Best Overall, that probably requires winning six games, and I’m not so likely to do that.
So the plan right now is Emperor’s Children. They seem like a capable army with some very good matchups, they’re fun to play, they hopefully won’t get nerfed too bad before the WCW, and they’re easily the army I’m most excited about painting – the Rhino I painted for them is probably the best model I’ve ever done, or at least on par with my Ahriman and my Master of Possession. So the plan right now is: Emperor’s Children.
Hobby Progress
…but right now I’m painting Space Wolves.
Part of that is that I have them, but part of it is that I’m painting them for a friend. One of my closest friends, SD47, is Goonhammer’s chief backend engineer when it comes to our app ecosystem. He’s been picking up a lot of work on Tabletop Battles recently and working to make sure we’ve implemented things like the 2025-26 Chapter Approved missions and, right now, the General’s Handbook for Age of Sigmar. He’s just an incredibly solid dude and while he plays 40k, he doesn’t care much for painting and struggles with it. He’s also a Space Wolves player, and I happen to have a lot of Space Wolves.
We can’t really afford to pay devs what they deserve when it comes to the engineering work right now – a good full-time software dev’s salary could easily cost half of Goonhammer’s annual revenue (remember to support us on Patreon, folks!), and so painting all the new Space Wolves for SD47 is a small but meaningful way I can pay him back for the work he’s done since I trapped him in the endless grind that is “working to turn Goonhammer from a dumb blog into a real company.”
So to start, I’ve painted a unit of Blood Claws.
I’m very happy with how these turned out. They look good, but they’re also painted with a specific purpose: Being a scheme that’s relatively easy to replicate for SD47. He’s not going to hit this level of quality necessarily, but the goal is to give him something to attempt to match that won’t be insane. Each of these took maybe an hour, hour and a half, and some of that was shaved down by batch painting, so I was able to mash out all ten in about a weekend.
The general process here is pretty straigthforward:
- Prime with The Army Painter Wolf Grey,
- Black Legion Contrast for joints, gun, and sword <- typically done in batches
- Panel line the armor with Drakenhof Nightshade
- Edge highlight with Reaper Snow Shadow
- Skin/bones/hair are usually wraithbone with a wash- so I do a lot of Guilliman Flesh and Iyanden Yellow over Wraithbone, Agrax Earthshade for the bone
- The gold is Retributor Armor with an Agrax Wash, and I usually wash the gold and bone/flesh at the same time
- The metal bits are Leadbelcher with a Nuln Oil wash
- And then the base is Astrogranite, drybrushed with Celestra Grey and a bit of Valhallan Blizzard snow on top of that
This makes it relatively easy to get the basecoat down since it’s just bare primer, and there are some extra details I’ve done in red – those are Mephiston Red with Evil Sunz Scarlet for the edges – but the general idea is to not overcomplicate things and have a process SD47 can pick up and try and replicate and maybe improve at. It’s still a lot of edge highlighting, but not so much that it’s too daunting, and the end result looks pretty sharp.
What About Tacoma?
Right, shit. Tacoma is next. Well, it’s still a way’s off – not until late in July, so I have about a month before it happens, and really I have to decide what I’m taking. Normally I’d consider taking something other than my Death Guard, as the Death Guard typically do not win Best Painted awards thanks to being pretty drab. But with a Golden Ticket already squared away, I can focus on just bringing an army I want to play. And the Death Guard are both very good right now and an army I’ve played a bunch recently. So they get the nod.
That puts a little bit of hobby work back on my radar – finishing these two Bloat Drones and fixing up my Defiler. I have to put that big, stupid thing on a base. Or figure out what else to take with the 165 points he costs, but at this point I don’t really want to try and paint another vehicle. I could shoehorn in one more unit of Deathshroud and run 3×3 of them, but that feels less useful than having one more big gun unit. This is something I’m going to revisit a few times and test over the next few weeks, so stay tuned on that front.
Next Week: More Space Wolves and Testing Defiler Alternatives
That’s it for this week. Come back next week when I test out some of those Defiler alternatives and keep painting Space Wolves – my goal is to get them all done in the next few weeks to give to SD47 at the Goonhammer Open in Baltimore.
See you next Thursday.
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