Welcome back, dear reader, to the second installment of our BLUNDERDOME series. In the first article, we talked about the general concept and the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad lists that we’d be competing with. We then took the lists, randomly allocated them to our players, and set up the bracket. Today we’ll reveal who got which army, our seeding, and talk about the Round 1 matchups. Then we’ll go off and play those, and come back in a week with the results.
THE POOR BASTARDSPARTICIPANTS AND THEIR LISTS
In addition to our random list allocation, we also had our wonderful Goonhammer patrons vote on the lists to determine which one was the absolute worst. Nearly one hundred votes later we had our consensus on the worst lists, which we then seeded in reverse order to create our tournament bracket.
- Drukhari – Michael Pestilens
- Chaos Daemons – Scott Horras “Heresy”
- Dark Angels – Greg Chiasson
- Chaos Space Marines – Liam “Corrode” Royle
- Necrons – Innes Wilson
- Astra Militarum – Chase “Gunum” Garber
- Tyranids – Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones
- T’au Empire – James “One_Wing” Grover
This means that our seeding is:
- Drukhari vs. 8. T’au
- Chaos Daemons vs. 7. Tyranids
- Dark Angels vs. 6. Astra Militarum
- Chaos Space Marines vs. 5. Necrons
THE MATCH-UPS
Over the course of the next week we’ll be furiously(?) playing these games, but as we set up for that, it’s worth talking about each of these match-ups and what we can expect.
- T’au Empire (James “One_Wing” Grover) vs. 1. Drukhari (Michael Pestilens)
This is as true a “David and Goliath” match-up as they get. On the one side you have a T’au list made almost entirely of models that can’t shoot or fight against a Drukhari army that many of us think will comfortably go 3-0 in this event.
The Drukhari list is one of several near the top that can hold objectives, and they have the ability to actually kill things to boot. This one is heavily in favor of the Drukhari list, and as much as Liam tried to make it easy to score Grind Them Down by killing small units of Kymerae, this T’au list will struggle to do even that. I honestly don’t know how the T’au list kills even a single model in the three games it will play. Well, except for the dozens of spore mines it will inadvertently destroy when they blow up.
- Tyranids (Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones) vs. 2. Chaos Daemons (Scott Horras “Heresy”)
If there’s a single “good” matchup for this dogshit awful Tyranids list, this is it. The Chaos Daemons have only three ranged attacks, and their massive blobs of multi-wound models are incredibly vulnerable to spore mine explosions, which can chain and cause real problems for the flesh hounds. This means that if they want to clear the spore mines, they have to do it the old fashioned way – by charging directly into them and just dying in large numbers and hoping the remaining models can clear off the mines.
On the Tyranids’ side, the shooting on the Tyrannocytes has Blast, making those 12-model blobs of Bloodcrushers a potential liability. But it’s still a massive uphill battle for a list whose combat answers are ineffectual against even T4 models and for whom half the list can’t score and will explode in the first two turns.
- Astra Militarum (Chase “Gunum” Garber) vs. 3. Dark Angels (Greg Chiasson)
Greg is possibly the only person here getting a list for an army he’s familiar with – the rest of us are playing armies we’ve never touched before – and that’ll be to his advantage as he tries to make a list of “oops, all ancients!” work here. The big advantage Chase has is that firing Deathstrike missiles and Vanquishers directly at unprotected characters is actually a pretty solid strategy, but ther’es always a good chance that today will be the day the Darkshroud is useful and stops them from destroying things. In Greg’s favor is that he can actually probably remove those threats and the Deathstrikes only get one shot each.
- Necrons (Innes Wilson) vs. 4. Chaos Space Marines (Liam “Corrode” Royle)
The immovable object meets the ineffectual force. This is a really good matchup for the Chaos Space Marines, who despite being completely unable to actually damage anything in the Necron list – they’ll be lucky to kill even a single unit – has lots of ObSec bodies against a list that literally can’t move, and so while the Pylons will pick up 3 rhinos per turn and trivially score To the Last, there’s not likely to be much they can do to stop the cultists from winning on primary objectives and banners. CSM aren’t likely to win this whole event, but they aren’t going to be the big losers, either.
FRIDAY: The Round 1 Results
That wraps up our preview for round One. We’ll be back on Friday with the results of these games and the match-ups for Round Two, and we’ll look at the standings after one round to see who is ahead and who’s falling behind in our blunderdome competition. Until then, if you have any questions or feedback, email us at contact@goonhammer.com.
