W.H.A.T Tournament Report

Hey everybody, it’s been a while since I last posted here on the Blog but I managed to find time to get out and play in a very awesome escalation tournament that was run in Shilo (near Brandon) by my good buddy Donny.  It was held right on the military base in the Junior Raks bar so there was plenty of alcohol and it started flowing early.

Mark giving me the finger.

Table 1 on the stage

Party on the dance floor!

As I mentioned the tournament was an escalation tournament so our first game was 1000pts, the second was 1500, and the last game was 1850.  The stipulation in army construction was that you could only add points to your list in order to get it to the next points limit.  So with that in mind I decided to take a very crazy list that was untested and very “iffy” at best, and it was unbound which bit me in the ass and cost me my last game.

All 1850 of it.

My list looked like this:

1000pts

Sorcerer, level 3, 5++, plasma pistol, force sword

5 Spawn MoN

Maulerfiend, lasher tendrils

Maulerfiend, magma cutters

Helcult formation:

                Helbrute, TL lascannon

                20 cultists, 2 flamers

                30 cultists, 3 heavy stubbers

So as you can see, I could actually make a normal army and make my cultists troops, but in the formation they are in makes them fearless, which I valued more than objective secured.  Now this list looks pretty scary, but I found that I just did not have any teeth.  The maulerfiends are great, but with only 3 attacks, 4 when charging, they are only really going to kill 1 marine a turn.

My first game was against Matt Brewet who was running Iron Hands.  He had a librarian with stern guard in a rhino, 2 tac squads in rhinos, an iron clad in drop pod, and a devastator squad with missiles.

For my warlord trait I rolled the one that lets me infiltrate 3 of my units and my warlord and I chose to deploy my 20 man cultist squad and the spawn on the right flank to try and bait him to getting close enough for me to assault him on my first turn.  I then “infiltrated” my other 30 man cultist squad in my backlines cause I didn’t want his Ironclad dropping in there to cause trouble.

My plan essentially worked, in theory.  He moved up with a tac squad and his sterguard to wipe out the cultists which allowed me to assault with both of my maulerfiends on my turn 1, which is where they stayed the entire game before getting ground down by krak grenades.

End of turn 2

This game ended with me having 1 cultists and 1 spawn alive.  I found that this list did not have enough killing power, as I mentioned earlier.  For other lists I’ll consider getting rid of the big cultist unit and taking marines, and then swapping a maulerfiend for a heldrake, because they are awesome.

As my next game will prove…

For my 1500 point list I had the above and added:

Heldrake, baleflamer

Heldrake, Hades autocannon

Sorcerer, level 3, 5++, Balestar (gives access to divination) combi-melta, force axe.

This game I play another Matt, and as it turns out I know him.  He used to live in the same little town that Donny and I grew up in.  Anyway, he is playing Ultramarines with a Librarian, 5 terminators, 3 scout squads, a tac squad, centurions and a devastator squad.  No vehicles though, not even a rhino.

This game went all my way.  Matt deployed across his entire table edge, and I deployed my whole army on my right flank, away from his centurions.  Again I rolled the warlord trait that allows me to infiltrate and I make good use of it infiltrating everything I could, and I got all the awesome psychic powers I wanted.

Deployment - my cultists were actually out of LOS

He had the first turn and didn’t do anything, maybe killing a couple cultists.  I moved up as far as possible and got off all kinds of psychic powers.  Ignoring cover, rending, the works, and I did some damage to his largest scout squad that had Tellion in it.

His second turn happens and he doesn’t get in his terminators, who were in deepstrike mode, and then did some superficial damage to the maulers and killed a couple more cultists.

My turn 2 was devastating.  Both heldrakes come in and BBQ his devastators, and everything I have assaults something and kills it.  At the end of my turn he is left with terminators in reserve, the centurions, and a tac squad with his Librarian, and he decides to call the game.  I though this was a bit premature because he still had a chunk of his army left, but we started playing his turn 3 and his terminators still didn't come in and his important shooting didn't do anything.

Start of my turn 3

This game everything went my way and it demoralized Matt pretty hard during turn 2.  He was pretty new to the game so I gave him some pointers and it turns out he won his next game, so I hope he learned something from the baby seal clubbing.

For my third game, and to bring my list up to 1850 I added another Helbrute formation which allowed me to deep strike 3 helbrutes.  Sounds awesome eh, only if helbrutes didn’t suck…

I was playing Jason in a cool mission called Bullets and Beans.  The idea was that it’s nearing the end of a long campaign and each force is beginning to run out of supplies.  At the beginning of the game you roll on a chart to find out what supply your army is running low on, then at the start of each turn, you roll again on each unit in your army and on a 1-2 that unit is affected by the supply shortage.  If you are holding one of the 6 objectives, you don’t have to roll as the objectives are the supplies you need.

Deployment - bubble wrap my backfield

I rolled hunger, so at the start of my turn each of my non-vehicle units that rolled a 1-2 could only move at half their speed.  Jason rolled bullets and any unit that rolled a 1-2 could not shoot, which came into effect a couple of times preventing his predator from shooting, and his stormfang gunship on a critical turn.

This game went pretty well until around turn 3 where I made a critical mistake.  I got carried away after having 3-4 double rye and cokes, and forgot to cast my psychic powers, which in my case was huge.  I needed to cast invisibility on my spawn who were in combat with Jason’s Thunderwolf cavalry.  Having forgotten to cast invisibility meant that the wolves chewed through the spawn and made it to my cultists and, more importantly, got close enough to contest my objective.

Needless to say I didn’t win, but I had a great time getting warhammered with a bunch of cool guys, and at least my games went better than Donny’s, who got spanked in both of his non-40k games he played while we wasn’t running the tournament.

I’ll be looking forward to the next one.

Until then, Happy gaming.