Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of hobby and gaming progress through 2025. Last time around I was dealing with the post-event hangover from the Ottawa GT, working on some Space Wolves, and figuring out my plans for the World Championships. This week I’m still painting Space Wolves and getting in some practice reps with Death Guard to stay frosty.
Practice Game: vs. Luke’s Chaos Knights
You may remember Luke from a few weeks ago, when I was testing my army against Codex: Chaos Knights. Well, Luke was back again this week, mostly because he had to drop something off at my house, and we played another game in the meantime. Luke has been testing new builds with Chaos Knights and this time around decided to test something with the War Dogs detachment and a heavier dose of Daemons, packing Bloodletters, Flesh Hounds, Nurglings, and Beasts of Nurgle. This is all a net negative against my list, as the mortars love killing Flesh Hounds, and I’ll gladly spend a turn or two picking up cheap scoring units to make the dogs worse.
This time around we were running the Chapter Approved 2025-26 missions, with Take and Hold and Tipping Point, testing Layout 7 for the terrain. I haven’t tried that particular layout yet and this was also a good test with the Defiler, which I was playing on a base for the first time. The base isn’t massively bigger than the Defiler, but it does add a bit of length to it, and that’s generally a problem when it can only move 8″. That largely meant that on this terrain, I had ot go around the center ruin to see out into the table, as the base was too large to sit wholly within the 10″x5″ area terrain base.
I’m going first.Â
That’s great news for me and I use my first turn to do three things:
- Take angled pot shots at any knights left near the open – and I am able to kill two War Dogs this way.
- Mortar the Flesh Hounds to remove them from the game, ensuring I won’t have to deal with any uppy/downy bullshit (Fun fact:Â When Flesh Hounds do this, it’s called “puppy downy”).
- Advance my Poxwalkers to jam Luke in his deployment zone and prevent him from being able to emerge on the first turn, letting me deal with half of his army at a time.
That’s exactly what I end up doing. The Poxwalkers roll a 5 for their advance, and their move looks like this:
This is one of three key ways to use the unit. You don’t want to do this necessarily against a Coterie of the Conceited army, where they become free pledge points, and you probably don’t want to do this against Daemonkin, but against knights it’s fantastic. It slows their advance and takes away their amazing movement characteristic and it also kind of forces them to trade down, which they really don’t want to do.
In fact, the entire Death Guard army is great for forcing Trade Downs. Between my MBHs and Drones, I have seven vehicles that cost 100 points or fewer and if I trade each of them for a War Dog, I’m in very good shape.
The other two ways to use the Poxwalkers are as back/midfield objective holders and screens – when I’m playing into Coterie, I tend to drop back into my deployment zone far enough to prevent turn 1 charges, and I may screen key vehicles with the Poxwalkers to ensure they aren’t getting tagged and killed too early. But if the Coterie player is smart, they’ll stage and play a bit more coy, going for a round 2/3 assault with many units to try and jam me instead of outkicking their coverage with a couple of faster units that don’t quite get there. In Luke’s case, I can afford to sacrifice the Poxwalkers to stuff him while hanging the Fleshmower out as a juicy target to lure out a war dog or two. I can reliably kill three war dogs per turn, maybe four, and that’s the maximum number I want to deal with at a time.
As I’m moving around the table, the goal is to pick of Luke’s dogs one at a time, and I drop the Deathshroud into his face after he does a clever reactive move to my Chaos Spawn to prevent me from dropping them on his home objective. The Deathshroud have a much better game into war dogs now that they’re T9 base, as it means I’ll be wounding them on a 4+ with no support from a Lord of Contagion. Between them and the Chaos Spawn, they kill two out of the three War Dogs protecting Luke’s home objective, and the other unit drops in the following turn to finish the job.
By the time round 3 rolls around, I’ve more or less tabled Luke – he has three war dogs and a beast of Nurgle left, and while he draws a Challenger card, it doesn’t make a difference. We finish the game and I win, 98-42. The new missions here were interesting, but didn’t make much of a difference in this particular game.
Result:Â 98-42, win
Hobby Progress
I mentioned last week that I’ve been painting Space Wolves for my friend SD47. That’s still happening. Here’s my current progress, in terms of fully completed models:
That’s ten Blood Claws, four Grey Hunters, and three wolves. It looks like a slowed pace, but there’s some stuff in the mix I can’t show you yet (come back Saturday for those), and I have the other six Grey Hunters about 50% complete as a batch right now, so I’m making good progress there. Plus I’ve got some basic work done on the characters as well.
I painted these three wolves for the Headtakers, who are also on my list of units to paint:
These went very fast, and I’ve settled on a new method for painting them and fur pelts which I really like. The general process here is:
- Prime Wraithbone
- Cover in Snakebite Leather Contrast. I go heavier on the thick fur coat parts
- Cover the inner parts of the coat – the top/thickest parts in Wyldwood Contrast
- Drybrush the model with Flayed One Skin
- Drybrush the edges with Reaper Polished Bone
- Pick out some of the details – highlight with flayed one skin on the muzzle, paint the nose with Black Legion Contrast, pick out the gums with Emperor’s Children, and do the teeth with Reaper Polished Bone. Dot of pure white for the eyes.
That’s it, and all three took less than an hour, when you discount the time spent waiting for contrast paint to dry. I’m definitely going to use this same method for all of the wolf tails and cloaks from here on out.
Those Grey Hunters are looking pretty good so far, and I like their models a bit more than the Blood Claws.
I think the helmets take a little more time to paint than the faces on the Blood Claws, but it may not make much of a difference. It’s a tiny bit more time spent edge highlighting, at least.
The most time-consuming model in the bunch is definitely the champion, and he’s done so the rest should be pretty easy from here. I have six more to do and like I said, at this point they’re more than halfway done so I expect they’ll be finished before this weekend and I’ll be on to the Headtakers.
I try and do the panel lining, shoulders, edge highlights, and weapons as batches, then the rest of the details are individual model things.
Next Week: Final GHO Prep
That’s it for this week’s update but come back next week when I’ll be finishing this Space Wolves project, doing my final prep for the Goonhammer Open Narrative event, and maybe getting in a little more practice – though I expect most of my time will be hobby-related before then. See you next Thursday.
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