Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing hobby and competitive progress blog for Warhammer 40k in 2025. Last Week I was recounting my experiences at the Tacoma Open, recapping my games and figuring out what was next. I haven’t had a chance to get any games in over the last week, in part because I’ve been working on reviews for Codex: Grey Knights and Black Templars, but I do have some hobby progress to talk about. Additionally, I thought now would be a good time to check in with my goals for the year and see where I’m at.
If we go all the way back to My First Post of the Year, I laid out some big goals for the year. It’s time to check in and see how I’m doing on those.
Progress on This Year’s Goals
Last year was a pretty good year for me. I won my first RTT, made a top cut at a GW event, generally had some solid 4-2 and 4-1 finishes, and I won Best Painted (Master of Parades) at the 2024 Grand Narrative. Let’s see what I set for myself in 2025 to follow that up:
- Play 100 games. As of this writing, I’ve played 63 games this year. That’s just ahead of pace to hit 100 games this year (I need to average just under 2 per week to hit that mark), and while I’ve had some off weeks, those are offset by weekends like Tacoma where I get in 8 games. So right now, I’m on pace here.
- Attend 10 events. I’ve attended seven events so far this year – GW Opens in Dallas and Tacoma, an RTT in January, Teams events in Ottawa and Houston, Wardome, and the Clutch City GT. I have another GT in late August, Challengers Cup in September, and I’m attending the World Championships, which will bring my total up to 10. So I’m in a pretty good place with regard to the event count!
- Win Best Painted at a GT or Major. I’ve come pretty close on this, pulling second a couple of times, but the big challenge here is that my Death Guard are just not that great when it comes to their paint jobs, particularly when I’m running the Mortarion’s Hammer Detachment. If I’m going to win Best Painted at a big event, it’s going to have to be with my Emperor’s Children.
- Win Best Painted at the 2025 Grand Narrative. Welp, I’m not going to the grand Narrative this year, so this one’s out. But I am currently working on trying to win Best Painted at the World Championships. So we’ll adjust this goal accordingly.
- Win a Golden Ticket. Secured! I won my golden ticket back at the Ottawa teams event in June.
- Log 10 games with my son. I’m really far behind on this one – we’ve only played two games this year. He hasn’t been super invested in playing – mostly he’s into Minecraft now – but I’m going to try for a few in the next week or two before school starts again.
- Help my son finish out 2,000 points. He’s pretty close since we finished his Canis Rex! We have a few models he needs to work on that will get us there.
- 52 Articles. I haven’t missed a week yet! We’re at 32/52 right now and it’s the 31st week of the year, so I’m ahead of pace so far. I suspect I’ll hit more than 52 with a the World Championships recap broken out into several parts.
That’s pretty good progress! Two of these were kind of out of my hands – the Golden Ticket and Best Painted – but hitting one of them already is pretty great. Especially given it’s the more important of the two – attending the World Championships for the first time is definitely a bigger deal.
On the other hand, if I want to win best painted at a big event, I need an army capable of doing that. And that likely means actually building toward Best Painted and not Best Overall or winning games. It turns out the World Championships may be my best opportunity to do that, since there’s approximately a zero percent chance I can actually win that event, or even win six games at it. I win most of my games – around 75% – but at the WCW I’ll easily be in the bottom fifth of players, hoping to win games against the other Best Overall players and people filling in for players who chose not to attend. I strongly suspect Death Guard will be nerfed by then anyways, so I won’t be able to count on them just being completely broken as a way to win games.
That’s a good thing, honestly – I like my list but being able to take a busted DG list would likely be too tempting to turn down as a way to win 5 games instead of something more like 1-2. If I build an army with paint score in mind and lose games well, that’s a little easier to swallow.
Hobby Progress
At this point my goal is to finish my Emperor’s Children. I really like the army and they lend themselves so well to best painted in a way that other armies just don’t. I’ve already made some great progress on models in this one, particularly with my Rhino and some of the Infractors I’ve painted, but I need to finish the army and keep up the standard if I want to have a shot.
This week I’ve been working on my Daemon Prince. I showed my work in progress shots of him last week and since then I’ve been working on finishing him, but it’s taking a little longer than I’d like. I liked how the orange wings looked last time, but they were too plain – big, open spaces like that need detail or something to really make the model stand out, and so I decided to give him leopard spots. It looks great and tacky in the best way.
I should have him done by this time next week, and after that it’ll be onto a unit of Tormentors and a unit of Noise Marines. I need to get them done and do another pass on Lucius and my Sorcerer before I can really call them done, and I think there are some easy ways to fix those up.
Wait, Sorcerer? Yeah, well – my focus here is going to be on Best Painted, not winning games so much. And that means focusing on where I can vary up models and paint models that stand out. I don’t think I have another one of those winged Daemon Princes in me, so I don’t know that I’ll field a second one. That’s not great for my army’s competitive chances, and frankly once that Winged Daemon Prince is done he’s going to be locked the fuck into my army barring them moving him to Legends before the WCW. I’ll also look at painting Fulgrim for the event as well. He’s a huge amount of points and a big, centerpiece model that will both be eye-catching and also reduce the number of things I have to paint.
Next Time: More Practice
That wraps up my update this week, but expect some more games next week – I want to start actually playing more with Emperor’s Children, and I need to get some more game and hobby time in with my son if I want to meet those goals. Plus, I need to finish this Daemon Prince and get on to the next thing in the army – November is going to sneak up on me pretty bad if I don’t start knocking these models out.
See you next Thursday.
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.
