Last weekend was the Twin Eagles doubles tournament, held for the 4th(?) year at Comic-Con. Armies are made up of two armies of 1000 points for a total of 2000pts. There is no ally matrix, so your team mates army is considered "friendly". With key words being so prevalent in warlord traits, special abilities, and psychic powers, this didn't really cause any problems and would actually benefit teams that took armies with themes and similar keywords.
The venue was the RBC Convention Centre and we were located in one of the side rooms. While not very big, there were only 10 tables for the 20 teams and we had tons of room with only one place where I bumped butts with the guys on the table behind me. They even had space to set up a live feed rig where they broadcast on Facebook Live and you can check out the footage here: https://www.facebook.com/40belowgaming
The tournament itself is not a "hyper competitive" event. It doesn't use the ITC system or format for anything and every table has it's own themed mission, so every one is playing a different mission throughout the tournament. The missions we played were super fun, but I could see how they could become very lopsided if you happen to have taken the wrong army and I'll show you how when I get into the missions. Before each game you could choose your warlord trait, psychic powers, and relics. Each player was required to have a warlord, but each team could only have 1 relic unless extras were bought with the appropriate stratagem. They also had a new concept of the re-roll die that so many tournaments offer. Instead of a re-roll, you would take your "Destiny Die" and roll it before the game starts, at any point during the game, you could swap out a result with the result of your "Destiny Die". You could not do this for weapon damage rolls, but everything else was fair game. They also created an additional detachment called the Twin Eagles detachment which is the old generic detachment of 1HQ and 2Troops minimum for +2CP. Games comprised of a primary mission, secondary mission, and the tertiary missions of First Strike(kill something first battle round, both teams could score this), Slay the Warlord(each team had a warlord so this could earn 2 points), and Linebreaker(you could earn 2 points if both players had this)
My team mate was Homer from Brandon Wargaming League infamy. Our lists looked like this:
Death Guard (Me)
Lord of Contagion
Malignant Plague Caster
Biologus Putrifier
20 Poxwalkers
10 Cultists, heavy stubber
10 Plague Marines, 2 axes, 2 blight launchers
2 Bloat Probes with the lawnmower attachment.
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| Cultists not shown |
Alpha Legion (Homer)
Chaos Lord on Juggernaught
2 x 10 Cultists
10 Bezerkers, 9 chainaxes, 9 chainswords, power fist
3 Oblits, MOSlaanesh
Relic Predator, plasma destroyer, 2 las cannons (Forgeworld)
Diemos laser destroyer vindicator (Forgeworld)
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| Ignore the cultists in the back right |
Our general strategy was to "Alpha Infiltrate" the Bezerkers as either a turn 1 hitter or a distraction while my army slowly makes it's way up the table. With DR and some good defencive spells (I took Miasma of Pestilence and Putrescent Vitality every game) I was going to be a tough nut to crack. We also used all those cultists to flood our back field so no one can drop in and ruin our day. My Warlord took the trait that DG units within 7" can re-roll failed wound rolls when using plague weapons and Homer took a 6" re-roll 1's to wound aura. We stuck with those traits all tournament.
Game 1: For this game's missions, we had to choose our primary and secondary from a set of 5 cards and keep them secret form the opponent. We chose Big Game Hunter(kill monsters and vehicles) and Kill Points. I can't remember what our opponents chose, I think Big Game Hunter and hold table quarters. This one was a little weird because you could potentially have 4 different missions in play at the same time, and all 4 could be achieved. For example, say that instead of Big Game Hunter, our opponents chose hold objectives(there were 4 objectives). That means we could have killed more units and vehicles/monsters, but our opponents could have held the quarters and the objectives meaning we each successfully complete all of our missions. That didn't happen, but it could have.
Our opponent's, Chris and Andrew, list looks something like this:
Necrons
Lord
2 x 10 Warriors
Ghost Arch
3 wraiths
2 pylon things of death
2 destroyers
Iron Warriors
Warpsmith
Sorcerer with jump pack
2 x 10 cultists
Helbrute with lascannon and missile launcher
3 predators with all lascannons.
Deployment looked like that. Homer's stuff is a little to the right off camera but who cares about that? We get the first turn and Homer put the Bezerks right in front of the Dread and 2 Preds. I advance everything and watched homer shoot. His laser destroyer super charges it's shot and blows a Predator away easy peasy. He then charges the Predator with the berserkers and tears it down to 1 wound through both his rounds of attacks. The oblits came down and chewed up the pred to our far right a bit.
They hit back as best they could but with my Bloat Drone making 7 5+ saves in a row and not taking a single wound, they only managed to wipe the berserkers and put a couple wounds on the oblits and the Relic predator.
Turn 2 was another good one for us as Homer was able to eliminate the Dread and a second Predator. I was able to get the Drones into combat and do not enough damage.
Their turn was, again plagued with bad luck as while they did take out the Oblits, that was about all they killed. The necron player was having some real bad luck when his 3 wraiths charged my 10 cultists and they did 2 wounds to each other while his pylon needed help from the Ghost Arch and Warriors to bring down one Drone. The cultist/wraith combat lasted for 3 more rounds before the wraiths finally killed the last cultist on the last turn.
The game ended with Homer and I achieving our 2 Objectives and them achieving none for an 11-2 win.
Game 2: This game's missions were maelstrom objective as a primary and kill enemy characters as a secondary. Now do you remember how I was saying how missions could be lopsided? With so many of the new codex's getting cool new elite slot characters there was a real potential for teams to have only 2-3 characters while others could have 5-6. Homer only had 1 character, so it was a good thing that I decided to take 3 so that we ended up having the same number of characters as our opponents, Matt and Mark. This happened to be their first tournament but they came to win and had a pretty good list. Each team also got a free Vindicare assassin, and he had absolutely no effect on the outcome of the game.
Ultramarines
Lt. with jump pack
3 x 5 assault marines each with 2 flamers
Thunderfire cannon
Stormhawk
Leviathan dread, grad flux, storm cannon
Raven Guard
Shrike
Lt with jump pack
9 Vanguard with jump packs
10 stern guard
2 x 5 scouts
venerable dread, twin lascannon, missile launcher
Devestator squad 2 lascannons
Deployment was the pointy hammer and anvil one. I lined the front line with Poxwalkers followed up by the Plague Marines and characters. The Drones go on each flank and Homer's tanks go on the left side and he infiltrates those Berserkers into a building on the right side near their deployment zone and the oblits go into reserve. Then we flooded out backfield with cultists so they couldn't drop in and surprise us.
They deployed most of their stuff in reserve, of course, but put their heavies on the table near the back of their deployment zone. Their big shooting has a range of 48" while our super killer tank only has a range of 36".
They won the roll off for first turn but didn't drop in any of their units. They focused all their fire into the berserkers and left 2 or 3 alive. They may have done some other damage elsewhere but it wasn't significant.
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| The horde slowly advances |
Turn 2 is when the reinforcements arrived and they dropped EVERYTHING in to take out the obliterators.
This turns out to be their undoing. Despite their speed, dropping in everything all in the same location will really hamper their ability to score maelstrom points. In fact, all it takes is Shrike to make the charge and wipe the Oblits out.
I manage to move my horde of infantry to the right and pen in the jump unit that push up right into the quagmire of bodies and get stuck in, slowly drowning. The turning point of the game is when we draw a maelstrom card that says something to the effect of: draw another card, if your warlord accomplishes the task on the card you gain the points on the card +3. Well the card we drew was kill a unit...and there just happened to be a half unit of scouts right in front of him. Armed with the Blade of the Hydra he made short work of those scouts. That pretty much solidified us winning the primary mission for a final score 7-4.
Game 3: This was another of those wonky missions that, as it turns out, was skewed way to far to our favour, to the disappointment to Cory and Ronnie. The deployment was Vanguard, and in no man's land was a Baneblade superheavy and 5 Leman Russ tanks. The primary objective was to do the most number of wounds to the tanks. While you think about that, I'll run down their army.
Orks
Big Mek, big choppa, KFF
Warboss, kustom shoota, power klaw
29 boys, 3 big shootas, Nob, power klaw
29 boys, 3 rokkits, Nob, big choppa
Painboy, killsaw
10 lootas, 2 meks, 2 kustom mega blastas
trukk, big shoota
Sisters of Battle
Celestine with 1 Geminae
5 Dominions, combi-melta, power sword, 4x meltagun
5 Dominions, combi-melta, power sword, 4x meltagun
5 Dominions, 5x stormbolter
7 Seraphim, power sword, 2x inferno pistols
3x Repressors, 4x heavy flamers, 4x stormbolters
I didn't get a pic of the deployment, but this was taken after their turn, and after we moved. They had moved up and put a bunch of firepower into the tanks with some success. They killed one Leman Russ, put 3 wounds on another, and put 7 wounds on the Baneblade. They did some damage to the Berserkers who are off to the right just out of frame, but they focused most of their firepower on the tanks. Now it's our turn.
I moved up as far as possible, but didn't advance. I was able to get all of the Plague Marines to within 6" of the Baneblade and decided to unleash the Blight Bombardment. Now I talked of this in my Death Guard review, and combined with Veterans of the Long War I was able to put 16 wounds on to the Baneblade, and this was actually a rather dismal result. Out of 10 marines tossing grenades I only managed to generate 21 shots. Had I gotten 35(average for 10D6) I would have caused around 20 wounds. Homer did his fair share and killed 2 Leman Russ, and I managed a couple more wounds on the Baneblade in the assault phase. All in all we did 47 wounds on the first turn clinching the primary objective for us as there are only a total of 86 wounds.
The rest of the game is a meat grinder as they try to achieve the secondary which is 4 objectives, one in each quarter. The orks push hard but get stuck on the Death Guard and Celestine leaps over the press of bodies to get at all the characters and hopefully grab both warlords.
She could do it too, if it wasn't for Homer charging in "The Beast". With the Hydra Blade, re-rolling 1's to hit and to wound, he is getting 6-8 attacks and generating more on 6's to hit, -2AP and 2D so he pulps her the first time. When she regenerates, they decided to drop her right back into the fray and have another go. Again it doesn't turn out well and "The Beast" kills her again. Then with a final round of humiliation Homer makes 5 6+ saves to keep his Cultists holding onto the one objective they could take from us to win us the game 9-4.
So with 3 wins Homer and I were feeling pretty darn good. We had a bit of a hodge dodge army and I didn't really expect to do as well as we did. Admittedly, we got some lucky draws, lucky missions, and some lucky dice when it really counted.
As you can see, we came in 5th overall. Other than our first, we didn't have big wins, my army wasn't completed in the painting department but that didn't seem to hurt because we came in 4th in the painting rubric and 2nd in player's choice. However, it turns out that Homer and I are assholes because we came in 14th in sportsmanship. I guess it doesn't help that in the first game, on the first turn, Homer and I got into an argument and I called the judge on him. I was right by the way.
There we go, another report in the bag, and while Homer and I didn't place, I won something.
Some laser cut terrain, from Northern Lights Terrain and Gamin Supplies, and a couple rollers and tentacle maker from Green Stuff World. I highly recommend checking out Norther Lights Terrain. They have all kinds of terrain for all genres of games as well as paint stations and shelves. Check it out.
Until next time, keep them dice rollin.
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