Journey to the Dark Side - Game 3 - Goblins + Warriors
Posted: 24 May 2015, 10:43
So, it finally took place.
As I spoiled some days ago, I was up to go to my first “real” tournament (you know, the one outside your gaming group, with strangers ready to use any mean, justified just by the end of winning and blah, blah, blah...).
Last week end I actually attended it and I found it most enjoyable and really pleasant, althought a bit demanding in terms of physical endurance.
I would have dreamed to start my tournament “career” with my beloved Wood Elves and give a good show of awesomeness with a sub-par army in a super competitive environment.
I was dreaming of Wild Riders zooming around the battlefield, Scouts running away in small corridors through charge arcs and some fluffiness like an Eagle Lord spreading panic on the battlefield.
All grand and magnificent dreams, if they weren’t destined to never become true.
The tournament was a Battle Brother, so I needed a partner to team with at the very least.
A quick search among my club mates and the only one interested in attending a “real” tournament turned out to be my usual Chaos opponent.
Let me spend a few words on him.
He used to play exclusively 40k Daemons or Chaos Marines until the last year when we convinced him to try his Daemons in Fantasy. Since then, he liked WHFB more and more, up to the point he set aside all his 40k stuff and, with the pretext of End of Time, he finally bought models from both Warriors of Chaos and Beastmen to complete his army.
He’s a weird person: extremely competitive player, very competent and precise but, most of all, very quick to rage against his own luck, dice, models, chairs, walls (and anyhting around him, actually). I honestly think that at home he worships Khorne for real and his mind goes on repeating “Kill, Burn, Mayhem”.
The whole thing was starting to shape out really funny and interesting.
The only problem up to now was the fact that TOs did not allowed desperate alliances to take part at the event (or alliances took from the same AB, but I guess that was pretty much given).
Since my mate had nothing bar Chaos armies and was quite categorical about not wanting to run my High Elves along my army, I had to accept the worst compromise possible.
I would have attended the tournament with my wife’s Dark Elves.
To be honest, it was also a good thing, because the armies were going to be evalued on painting quality and my Wood Elves are not really at their best. Suffice to say that I rather use Dark Elves instead of presenting my army to a painting judge.
Once we settled for the alliance, we needed to find out the two armylists to submit, so we started playtesting.
The tournament was not comped at all, allowing any kind of silliness or special characters/rules. Even Forgeworld and End of Time add-ons were allowed as long as they were presented with original models and relative ruleset, but we were still limited by what we had ready to play.
The really interesting thing in all of this was that the first two classified received an invitation for the regional tournament held in the end of this summer, so we were motivated to perform really well and the scoring system being 20-0, meant we had to include something able to push for big wins as well as somthing that did not bleed points.
This was the first thing upon which we had divergent ideas.
First we tried a classic MSU Daemons army (Horrors, Beasts and Cannons) along a Black Dragon with two Steed Masters in a Dark Riders bus and a couple of RBTs, with magic covered by Horrors while shooting and combat were my job.
I really liked it. He did not liked the Dragon.
He feared cannons, doubted the Dragon effectiveness, accused a lack of models and so on.
He was clearly missing the point of kicking asses with a f**king Dragon!!
Too bad.
As a second step (thanks to Phil’s suggestions), I convinced him to go Nurgle and we were planning to have a block of Plaguebearers, some Beasts, 3 Flies and the ever-present Skillcannon along a mounted Sorceress on Beasts in a big Dark Riders pack, 2 x 5 Brolocks, RBTs and a Pegmaster.
It was pure murder.
We tabled every opponent we tested against and we started to feel really confident with the two lists.
We were ready to submit them, when we found out a little rule about alliances and Dark Elves in particular. In any alliance where Druchii start as trusted ally, you have to roll a D6 at the beginning of each turn, on a roll of 4+ your alliance moves to suspect and up to desperate.
It meant that by turn 4 on average we would have been forced to split Power Dice and Dispel Dice other than a lot of other smaller inconvenient. With our respective luck we knew it would have been turn 2 in almost any match.
At this point the time was starting to wear off and we were starting to go mad on list building.
We were changing lists several times to try and fit some sort of magic in both of them to avoid wasting too many dice. We even came up to the point where I would have had to run a Warriors filthiness (Disc Sorcerer, Daemonic BSB, Blasted Warriors blocks, Hellcannon) along his Daemons.
I’m glad we didn’t have to go that far.
In the end (which means the night before the submission term) we decided to ignore anyhting completely and just run whatever we felt to.
As I spoiled some days ago, I was up to go to my first “real” tournament (you know, the one outside your gaming group, with strangers ready to use any mean, justified just by the end of winning and blah, blah, blah...).
Last week end I actually attended it and I found it most enjoyable and really pleasant, althought a bit demanding in terms of physical endurance.
I would have dreamed to start my tournament “career” with my beloved Wood Elves and give a good show of awesomeness with a sub-par army in a super competitive environment.
I was dreaming of Wild Riders zooming around the battlefield, Scouts running away in small corridors through charge arcs and some fluffiness like an Eagle Lord spreading panic on the battlefield.
All grand and magnificent dreams, if they weren’t destined to never become true.
The tournament was a Battle Brother, so I needed a partner to team with at the very least.
A quick search among my club mates and the only one interested in attending a “real” tournament turned out to be my usual Chaos opponent.
Let me spend a few words on him.
He used to play exclusively 40k Daemons or Chaos Marines until the last year when we convinced him to try his Daemons in Fantasy. Since then, he liked WHFB more and more, up to the point he set aside all his 40k stuff and, with the pretext of End of Time, he finally bought models from both Warriors of Chaos and Beastmen to complete his army.
He’s a weird person: extremely competitive player, very competent and precise but, most of all, very quick to rage against his own luck, dice, models, chairs, walls (and anyhting around him, actually). I honestly think that at home he worships Khorne for real and his mind goes on repeating “Kill, Burn, Mayhem”.
The whole thing was starting to shape out really funny and interesting.
The only problem up to now was the fact that TOs did not allowed desperate alliances to take part at the event (or alliances took from the same AB, but I guess that was pretty much given).
Since my mate had nothing bar Chaos armies and was quite categorical about not wanting to run my High Elves along my army, I had to accept the worst compromise possible.
I would have attended the tournament with my wife’s Dark Elves.
To be honest, it was also a good thing, because the armies were going to be evalued on painting quality and my Wood Elves are not really at their best. Suffice to say that I rather use Dark Elves instead of presenting my army to a painting judge.
Once we settled for the alliance, we needed to find out the two armylists to submit, so we started playtesting.
The tournament was not comped at all, allowing any kind of silliness or special characters/rules. Even Forgeworld and End of Time add-ons were allowed as long as they were presented with original models and relative ruleset, but we were still limited by what we had ready to play.
The really interesting thing in all of this was that the first two classified received an invitation for the regional tournament held in the end of this summer, so we were motivated to perform really well and the scoring system being 20-0, meant we had to include something able to push for big wins as well as somthing that did not bleed points.
This was the first thing upon which we had divergent ideas.
First we tried a classic MSU Daemons army (Horrors, Beasts and Cannons) along a Black Dragon with two Steed Masters in a Dark Riders bus and a couple of RBTs, with magic covered by Horrors while shooting and combat were my job.
I really liked it. He did not liked the Dragon.
He feared cannons, doubted the Dragon effectiveness, accused a lack of models and so on.
He was clearly missing the point of kicking asses with a f**king Dragon!!
Too bad.
As a second step (thanks to Phil’s suggestions), I convinced him to go Nurgle and we were planning to have a block of Plaguebearers, some Beasts, 3 Flies and the ever-present Skillcannon along a mounted Sorceress on Beasts in a big Dark Riders pack, 2 x 5 Brolocks, RBTs and a Pegmaster.
It was pure murder.
We tabled every opponent we tested against and we started to feel really confident with the two lists.
We were ready to submit them, when we found out a little rule about alliances and Dark Elves in particular. In any alliance where Druchii start as trusted ally, you have to roll a D6 at the beginning of each turn, on a roll of 4+ your alliance moves to suspect and up to desperate.
It meant that by turn 4 on average we would have been forced to split Power Dice and Dispel Dice other than a lot of other smaller inconvenient. With our respective luck we knew it would have been turn 2 in almost any match.
At this point the time was starting to wear off and we were starting to go mad on list building.
We were changing lists several times to try and fit some sort of magic in both of them to avoid wasting too many dice. We even came up to the point where I would have had to run a Warriors filthiness (Disc Sorcerer, Daemonic BSB, Blasted Warriors blocks, Hellcannon) along his Daemons.
I’m glad we didn’t have to go that far.
In the end (which means the night before the submission term) we decided to ignore anyhting completely and just run whatever we felt to.