Revenge of Tournament Mode

The right way to prepare for a tournament. 

I keep my eyes open for tournaments in the DMV, and this weekend was full of them.  On Sunday Games & Stuff (which I'll get to one of these days) had a tournament going and on Saturday my local group was trying to put together an end of Olgunholt tournament.  Unfortunately that fell through because of the other tournament going on Saturday, a 50 point Steam Roller down at Game Vault, which was already on the calendar for a number of the locals.  We ended up sending five people down south to take the fight to Fredericksburg, the first expedition of the still coalescing Nova Nomads (of which more will undoubtedly be written later, when there's more to write about).  I met up with Danny, Hawk, and Ron in Falls Church, where we all piled in Hawk's car.  After a quick drive down and a stop at Sonic, we got to Game Vault and saw our fifth local, Austin, making his way in.  There were 15 players when we got started, so the TO filled in to even up the numbers.  Fortunately there was another willing organizer who took over the administrative duties (also the same guy whose Skorne I played at Dream Wizards about a month ago, but whose name I still can't manage to hang onto.  Third time is the charm).  I'd played a handful of games over the past week to reacquaint myself with Legion and fielded the following:

Tournament Mode Redux

Path to improvement or plotting my own downfall?  

If you've read this blog over the last week or two it will be no surprise that today was my first trip to a non-local tournament.  (By non-local I mean not at my FLGS, even though the trip today was only about 30 minutes.)  I made the trip up the Beltway and into Purgatory Maryland, ending up at Dream Wizards for a 35 point Steam Roller.  While trawling the events forum on the PP site I see Dream Wizards come up a lot, so it was good to finally make the trip out to get a fix on where it is.  Turns out it's really not that much further than Huzzah Hobbies, though much of that is traffic-dependent.  Plus Huzzah isn't in Maryland.

As usual I over-thought my lists in the days preceding the tournament and ended up making some changes about 10 minutes before the first round.  Three lists were under consideration: pButcher tier 4 for armor-spamming zone-holding goodness, pIrusk for high DEF spam and general attrition grind, and eVlad for crazy assassinations and general entertainment.  The pButcher list was very appealing, but in the end I convinced myself I needed to be prepared for Incorporeal/only hurt by magic targets, and having just Lola to deal with those situations wasn't going to cut it.  The two lists I ran were:

Turning the Tables: pButcher vs Xerxis

Google returns this for "Turning the tables."

Last week I returned to the warm embrace of the Motherland in my first post-Gnarls game.  While thinking through a list the night before I engaged in an activity that I usually detest: I planned my list based on what I assumed EV would field.  This started mostly with planning a counter to Bile Thralls (Widowmakers), who are a rock-hard counter to the WGI I would be running (since I finished Kovnik Joe recently and wanted to field him.)  My distaste for list-tailoring sent me off on various themes, notably an all (or almost all) Stealth list, but as I was packing in the Kayazy I came back to tailoring.  While I'm against planning for a particular opponent, it makes no sense to do something like an all Stealth list that focuses on negating shooting when you know your opponent is all but guaranteed to take a melee-heavy force with little to no shooting.  Practicing in undesirable conditions is one thing, but bringing that Stealth list against a list packed with Banes, Biles, and Mech Thralls is an exercise in masochism.  After iterating for a while, I came back to my starting point of putting Joe (and Torch, also recently finished) on the table and came up with the following:

A hint of things to come

Family portrait.

I've let the battle reports pile up to the point that there are no less than four waiting for some love.  Some will be shorter than others, but it's a troubling collection no matter how long they turn out to be.  I'll start chipping away at the stack and hopefully get caught up by the new year. 

In the meantime, I have a little nugget here from one of the upcoming reports.  I played against...Steve? (horrible with names) a couple weeks ago at the FLGS.  It was his first game under mk 2, and first in a couple years.  It was also my first mirror match against a fellow Khador player.  The exact goings-on will have to wait for the actual report, but one of the things that came up during the game (Steve was very nice and chatty) was a Black Ivan comparison.  He did a so-called "Full Metal Ivan" conversion, using the old metal Destroyer as the base.  I've seen a couple of these across the interwebs, but this was the first I'd seen in person.  The plastic jacks are bigger than the old metal ones in my experience, and I expected the same results in this comparison.  Imagine my surprise when the two Ivans were more or less the same size.  My plastic Ivan is wider due to how I posed him, but height-wise there isn't much difference.  Plastic Ivan is a shade taller, but you'd have to do some looking to notice the difference and I don't think you'd be able to tell if they weren't sitting right next to each other.

In other teaser notes I had my first game of Hordes today facing off against EV's Skorne.  I thought it would take some time to get used to how Fury works, but turns out it was pretty natural.  Looks like Hordes is, or at least can be, exactly what I hoped it would be: a game of beasts with some infantry support.  Looks like this week won't work for gaming at the FLGS, but next week I'll be faced with a tough decision: fight for the Motherland or spread Everblight's influence? 

Victory for the Motherland

Played my first non-battle box game last night against Etna's Vassal, the man who bears some responsibility for my return to wargaming in general and Warmachine in particular. I was concerned going in on two fronts: first because it was my first game with infantry, and second because he was playing Skorne and I had never faced a Hordes army before. It turns out I didn't need to be concerned as I won handily, losing only a Juggernaut and a Manhuntress. Army lists were as follows.

The Valiant Armies of Khador
PSorscha
Juggernaut
Destroyer
Widowmakers
Greylord Ternion
Winter Guard Mortar
Manhuntress
Man O War Kovnik
Kodiak (marshaled by the Kovnik)

The Scurrilous Armies of Skorne
Archdomina Makeda
Titan Gladiator
Cyclops Savage
Cyclops Brute
Praetorian Swordsmen
Cataphract Centrati
Paingivers
Agonizer

That's my best guess at his list going by what I remember and the PP Skorne gallery page. I was initially dismayed at the amount of infantry EV was fielding. Infantry was, as noted, a big concern of mine going in and I was worried about being swamped. It turns out that I did end up swamped by infantry and it wasn't such a bad thing, though that owes as much to EV's poor dice rolling (consecutive rolls: 3, 2, 2, 2 on 2d6) as it does to solid Khadoran armor plating. In the end I think the game turned on a couple events. One, his Titan came up a couple inches short of charging my Destroyer, which led to my Greylords freezing it in place and the Destroyer following up with liberal amounts of axe to mouth. Second was the aforementioned poor dice rolling, where 5 charging swordsmen left the Kovnik standing with 1 unmarked box, and another 4 swordsmen scratching the paint a little on my Kodiak.

EV surrendered after the death of two of his three warbeasts with his warlock exposed, staring down the barrel of Sorscha's feat and an angry Destroyer fingering it's axe and eyeing the locks mouth. I learned a lot about how fury works and I think I have a firm grasp on the mechanics of it now. He had a lot of models still in the game and I was less convinced he was screwed than he was, but we were under something akin to time restraints and he was in store for some serious axe to mouth action, so it probably would have worked out as he expected anyway.

I was very pleased with the Kovnik/Kodiak pairing. It was my first time using either one and they worked together as well as I had hoped they would. The Kovnik's Drive ability seems tailored to the Kodiak's method of assualt, allowing me to boost the initial attacks and also the throw attack with his 'jack marshal bonus. Unfortunately I couldn't manage a 7 on 3 dice to land the throw, but it was glorious when it worked in my mind. I was underwhelmed by the Widowmakers, though they played a big role in taking down the Titan. I was downright disappointed in the mortar, which has been highly touted all across the interwebs but failed to do anything at all to any target it happened to hit.

Though it wasn't as complete a victory as I would have liked, a win is a win. I'm 1-0 for the Motherland, so no visits from the Butcher just yet. I may try out Vlad in my next game as I've only used Sorscha to this point and I want to get a feel for what other casters are like. I may also swap out the mortar, though I'm not sure what I'd do with the points just yet.

On the painting front things are not progressing as quickly as I had hoped. School has interposed itself between myself and my hobbies once again, so painting time has been scarce. I've been enjoying OwlandMoonGuy's blog over at bolterandchainsword.com, especially how he tracks his painting progress. Since I haven't gotten a camera together for pictures yet, text will have to do. In rough order of priority, the status of my projects is thus:
Sorscha - 65% done
Manhunter - 75%
Destroyer - 45%
Juggernaut - 20%
Widowmakers - 5%
Ternions - based and primed
Mortar - 10%
Winter Guard Infantry - primed, needs basing

When I got the bulk of my Khadorans from EV he had already painted a Kodiak, Devastator and Vlad, so those are finished. I also picked up a wardog yesterday and am fixated on painting it up like a friend's English Bulldog, so that will probably shoot to the top of the priority list once I get it assembled and based. As of now it sits in the blister though.

Post #2 complete, one more than I'd realistically thought I'd get done. Hopefully next time I'll have pictures up and running.