Nearly there! Five more events to cover this week, just in time for a weekend to happen, and there to be more events. It’s the circle of life.

Today I’m joined by a special guest, Peter “The Falcon” Colosimo. Peter joined Rob from the Honest Wargamer in the commentary booth at the Capital City Bloodbath, and thus got to see the top lists from the event in action, so is taking the wheel for coverage of the Showdown and top four from that event. You can see an archive of the streamed games on the CanHammer YouTube channel.

I’ll be covering the remaining GTs, and in total today we’re looking at:

The Capital City Bloodbath (Major)
Gameology Pasadena ‘Hammer of Wrath’ GT
GemHammer GT 2022
Swordcon
Korea Summer Slam

If you’re looking for any of the following, take a look at yesterday’s article:

Salt Lake Open 2022 (Major)
The 2022 Gateway Open 40K Grand Tournament (Major)
Tables and Towers GT
Feast Of Blades Singles GT August
Seasons of Waaagh! (The Return) A WH40k GT

Let’s start with the big one – take it away Peter!

Capital City Bloodbath – 40K Champs

122-player, 6-round Grand Tournament in Ottawa, ON, CA on August 20 2022. All the lists for this event can be found in Best Coast Pairings.

The Showdown

Matchup & Mission – Tide of Conviction

Sam Procopio – Blood Angels: Blood Angels with big Sanguinary Guard units.
Army List - Click to Expand

vs.

François Lalonde – Hive Fleet Leviathan: Leviathan Warrior Spam
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Thoughts

This match was either going to be an absolute Bloodbath (fitting for the event it happened at) or a nail biter of pokes and trades. Tide of Conviction feels like the perfect mission for these 2 lists to go toe-to-toe and vie for supremacy if they’re going to maximize their primary. Capital City Bloodbath went with a slightly different take on player placed terrain with 2 small obscuring L shaped ruins being fixed in the middle of the board to start and rotated based on deployment. This meant the remaining 4 larger Ls, crates and area terrain end up leaving ample room to create ‘safe zones’ for both armies to strike from.

Francois’ take on Leviathan forgoes Harpies for even more claws on the ground and that lead to him playing the list like an inevitable tide in most match-ups, pushing forward aggressively with the warriors and then using his Hive Tyrant with Reaper of Obliterax as a hit-and-run monster relying on Overrun to wind up inside his mass of warriors after every ‘feed’, while his second Tyrant plays backfield defender on the off chance an opponent is able to make a large enough hole in the ranks of warriors at his disposal. On paper, Synaptic Control is a massive nightmare for Blood Angels players as it generally negates fully half of their chapter tactic and forces them to rely on the weight of dice alone. Add in access to Toxic Miasma from the squad of Venomthropes, Warp Shielding from the Zoanthropes, and an impressive aura of Goaded to Slaughter and the Sons of Sanguinius are going to need to be tread lightly if they’re going to have a shot at going toe to toe. With all that said, in speaking to Francois before the match, he still put the game in Sam’s favor as Sam had a great deal of experience in the matchup and he did not.

Sam’s list has had quite a bit of success and has seen slight modifications over the last few months as he has stomped all over the Canadian scene and made multiple forays to the South. 3 large blocks of Sanguinary Guard and a unit of Death Company with Thunder Hammers act as the backbone for a list swimming with tech pieces built purely around maximizing scoring against many of the ‘big bads’ of the current meta. A Chapter Master with Visage of Death and Rites of War can easily be a critical 8 point swing or more in the right matchup, shutting down objective-secured on an objective to steal it away. A Librarian with Null Zone on hand trades off access to Abhor the Witch for the shot at deleting a pesky character or shutting down a key Warp Shielding turn for his Tyranid opponent. Even filled with Scouts, Land Speeder Storms guarantee at least a turn of relentless assault in most missions and a single Assault Marine squad opens up a cheap deep striking unit that can threaten backfield objective holders. Round the list off with Eliminators with Las Fusils and a Bolt Instigator and you have a recipe for speed and board control.

Both players admitted later that this was a matchup of ‘who will blink first’ as if either player over commited to the mid-board early they would be punished. While experience favored Sam, if Francois held back and went for a game of singular trades it was the Leviathan player’s game to lose when it came down to dice. And that’s exactly how it went down. In a nail-biter of a game that swung back and forth repeatedly on the keen generalship of both players, the final score came down to a single Hive Tyrant surviving on 1 wound on Sam’s back objective after scything its way through 11 Sanguinary Guard. Francois played a tight game and never committed more than a single warrior unit at a time into Sam’s forces as he forced Sam’s primary down early with some impressive positioning and use of the fight phase but lost his Reaper Tyrant earlier than he’d have wished when it failed to kill a Sanguinary guard unit that had stepped on the middle objective.

Result

Hive Fleet Leviathan Victory – 77 – 76

François Lalonde – Hive Fleet Leviathan – 1st Place

The Best of the Rest

There were 6 more players on 5-1 records. They were:

5th – Tim Deetlefs – Harlequins: Light Saedath with 3×3 shooty Skyweavers. Great for Secondaries, and an increasingly common sight.
6th – Eric Marcoux – Imperial Knights: House Raven with an Errant and Crusader, then lots of Warglaives and a pair of Helverins where one has the Bastard’s Helm.
7th – Zach Comeau – Astra Militarum: An honest to god guard super-heavy in the 5-1 bracket, a Banehammer taking the field alongside Pask, a Tank Commander and a a couple of big Conscript units.
8th – Isaac Bates – Harlequins: More Light Saedath Harlequins, this time with three solo Voidweavers as a mobile shooty/positioning piece.
9th – Yves Jean-baptiste – Adepta Sororitas: Bloody Rose Goodstuff with a unit each of Paragons and Mortifiers.
10th – Nicholas Jagiello – Necrons: Eternal Expansionists with a couple of C’tan.
11th – Will Paul – Orks: Speed Mob with a big Deffkopta squad and a couple of Wazboms overhead.

GemHammer GT 2022

40-player, 5-round Grand Tournament in Dayton, Ohio, US on August 20 2022. All the lists for this event can be found in Best Coast Pairings.

The Showdown

Matchup & Mission – Tear Down Their Icons

Roland Hubert – Orks: Goff Pressure with Kill Rigs and Ghaz.
Army List - Click to Expand

vs.

Joshua Minnich – Tyranids: An unusual Psyker-heavy Jormundgandr list using Synaptic Ganglia for boosted cast ranges.
Army List - Click to Expand

Thoughts

OK, so if you’re the Orks here there are going to be some mixed feelings going into this, because on the one hand this might be the first and only time you get to play Ghazghkull into a Tyranid list without the Reaper of Obliterax on a Flyrant, but on the other hand that is…that is so god damn many Mortal Wounds. Good grief. Three units of Zoanthropes, multiple Neurothropes and all of the Spore Mines from a Sporocyst and full Biovore unit is just an appalling amount of damage.

On some level though, the Orks are actually better placed to deal with it than many armies would be. The mines are going to suck but at least their alpha units are either Ghazghkull (not immediately plinkable to death) or riding in high-wound Transports. They won’t last that long in the face of the sheer horror here, but at least they’ll probably succeed in getting the Orks to the mid-board, where this Tyranid list has quite a bit less crunch than the average. The Dakkajet is also pretty neat here, as it can fly around helpfully taking out Spore Mines that get placed somewhere the Orks don’t immediately need to be, and they should also be able to rack up points on Get Da Good Bits relatively easily. If they can pressure the Tyranids enough on primary then maybe they can make this work?

From the Tyranid point of view, what you definitely want to do here is lazily force the Orks to grind themselves to death against you. I’d likely pick Bring it Down (a fairly easy 9+, Assassinate also an option because of the Rigs), Banners and Psychic Interrogation, swing towards the nearby no-man’s land objective and Banner it, then aim to ensure that whatever the Orks put on the middle objective dies every turn, and build up enough Secondary score to win out. It won’t be the biggest win ever, but it should be enough…and it was. Just about. The Orks had a really good go at toppling the bug menace here, but were very narrowly defeated.

Result

Tyranids Victory – 74 – 72

Joshua Minnich – Tyranids – 1st Place

The List

See showdown.

Archetype

Jormundgandr Zoanthrope Spam

Thoughts

Someone has found another way to do something horrific with the Tyranid Codex. Neat. Love that for us. It is, to be fair, a very smart assembly of horrible brain bugs, so well done to Joshua on the win.

The Best of the Rest

There were 7 more players on X-1 records. They were:

2nd – Brenton Weiss – Asuryani: Biel Tan with a mighty three Phoenix Lords, then lots of Dire Avengers coming out of a Webway Gate.
3rd – Roland Hubert – Orks: See showdown.
4th – Nathan Gould – Black Templars: Helbrect with Crusaders, Dreadnoughts and a Land Raider Crusader filled with Assault Centurions, the most stylish choice.
5th – Garrett Stacy – Adepta Sororitas: Bloody Rose Goodstuff.
6th – Cody Stacey – Space Wolves Successors: A mix of spicy wolf units plus a Leviathan Dread and some Assault Centurions as Heroes/Whirlwind.
7th – Ben Wilson – Necrons: Novokh with lots of Warriors and Flayed Ones.
8th – Kevin Ponder – Tau: Bor’kan with two big Crisis teams.

Gameology Pasadena ‘Hammer of Wrath’ GT

35-player, 5-round Grand Tournament in Gameology Pasadena, Pasadena, CA, United States on August 20 2022. All the lists for this event can be found in Best Coast Pairings.

The Showdown

Matchup & Mission – Data-Scry Salvage

Matthew Green – Tyranids: Leviathan Goodstuff.
Army List - Click to Expand

vs.

Kyle Parry – Harlequins: Extra Speedy Light Saedath with boats and bikes, plus all Shadowseers in the Character slots.
Army List - Click to Expand

Thoughts

Tyranids are very much the nemesis of Harlequins at the moment, and big Leviathan Warrior blocks are definitely part of it – once you stack an invulnerable save onto them on top of Leviathan’s permanent Transhuman, they’re just a bit too chunky to reliably shift, and being able to stonewall Harlequins from flipping a key point goes a long way towards neutering what makes them good, and that tends to be exacerbated on hold 2/3 missions.

That said, this Harlequin list looks better suited for this matchup than most – it’s unusually skewed towards doing most of its damage with shooting, and is well set up to actually use the wide deployment to its advantage. With three Shadowseers, one is almost always going to be able to snipe Weave Veil onto a bug unit from outside of deny range (at least if the Tyranids are contesting objectives), and from the other side the bugs are going to have a far harder time than normal scoring a Warpcraft secondary, as all valid targets can throw a deny at it. The Tyranids are also slightly shorter on ground coverage than you might normally see, which makes picking up some Primary points more reasonable than it could be (though still hard in the early game).

I think the Harlequins do end up accumulating a fairly convincing advantage on Secondaries here (especially as Take Your Places is good on this map), but I’d probably still tap up the Tyranids to take this on a mix of Primary, Banners and maybe Grind most of the time. The Harlequins best shot is swinging hard to one side, taking out whatever the Tyranids have put there, then creating some layered defences around it. They do have more units to work with, so this isn’t an unreasonable plan, and it looks like they managed to pull something like that off – the Harlequins flipped the win rate script and took a close victory here.

Result

Harlequins Victory – 71 – 62

Kyle Parry – Harlequins – 1st Place

The List

See showdown.

Archetype

Light Saedath

Thoughts

Armies with a small number of datasheets like Harlequins are always a bit deceptive when it comes to calling a list different, but as hinted at in the showdown I think this one is. Kyle’s list plays an even more effective keepaway game than Harlequins normally do. Packing in a whole bunch of Shadowseers makes sure Weave is a lock, and 3×3 shooty Light Saedath bikes is perfect for maximising other available Secondary options. Very hard to cap the scoring of unless you can just brutally overrun it, and Capricious Reflections makes that challenging. Definitely like this as a way of adapting to Tyranids being a hard matchup, as it plays around some of what makes it so, and thus big kudos to Kyle on the smart list design and win.

The Best of the Rest

There were 6 more players on 4-1 records. They were:

2nd – Daniel Reddehase – Death Guard: Ferrymen Plague Marine spam.
3rd – Lucas Jessick – Adepta Sororitas: Bloody Rose Goodstuff with a squad of Paragons.
4th – Matthew Green – Tyranids: See showdown.
5th – Jason McKenzie – Adeptus Mechanicus: Mars Veteran Cohort with a big unit each of Ironstriders and Dragoons.
6th – Brendan Molloy – Orks: Goff pressure with Kill Rigs and Ghaz.
7th – Arthur Tu – Chaos Space Marines: Wordbearers with lots of Venomcrawlers and Possessed, plus three individual Obliterators.

SwordCon WH40k

28-player, 5-round Grand Tournament in Cape Town, Western Cape, ZA on August 20 2022. All the lists for this event can be found in Best Coast Pairings.

The Showdown – The Scouring

Matchup & Mission – The Scouring

Heinre Stander – Necrons: Two C’tan, two big Skorpekh units, two big Scarab units and the Silent King
Army List - Click to Expand

vs.

Orion Adams – Hive Fleet Leviathan: Leviathan Goodstuff that cuts down on melee stuff and Warriors for some shooty bugs.
Army List - Click to Expand

Thoughts

This matchup is weird, as there’s all sorts of odd ways that the units line up. On the one hand, the Tyranid big shooty bugs don’t do that much here – not nothing, because the acid spray is prety neat into those Scarab bricks, but also nowhere near as much as you’d like. However, flip round to the other side and the C’tan aren’t doing a huge amount either – the powers are kind of mediocre in this game, and if they get overconfident the Reaper Flyrant is ready to pick them up. Flip round again though and as the Tyranids you really wish you had a second big Warrior unit here, because The Scouring is the perfect map for that, as there’s essentially no way the opponent can avoid them.

OK, so weird unit line-ups. How do the Secondaries look? Mostly they favour the Necrons, but even there not entirely. The Scouring is easily the worst mission for Treasures of the Aeons, which is otherwise one of the best Secondaries in the game. It’s really good for Ancient Machineries though – if the Necrons go first here, there’s almost zero chance they’re scoring less than 12pts on it. Purge the Vermin is also exceptional on this map. providing some extreme scoring inevitability for the Necrons. Tyranids can get some good points from Psychic Interrogation (unless the SK shuts it down), and should easily pick up a 12 on either No Prisoners or Synaptic Insight (good into Scarabs), but might struggle a bit beyond that. With that in mind, the fundamental issue in this matchup is that both sides can score decently on Secondaries (with the Necrons slightly ahead), but the Necrons have the agency to just reach out and switch off the Tyranids Primary scoring for at least one turn, and it’s going to be tricky for them to recover from that. The best bet for the Tyranids is to try and clear out the Necron army at speed and roll them over, recovering points later on, but with the Silent King and some C’tan ready to make a last stand, that’ll be tough to do fast enough. The Tyranids did walk away from this one with a decent number of points, suggesting that they were able to apply some pressure

Result

Necrons Victory – 89 – 73

Heinre Stander – Necrons – 1st Place

Skorpekh Destroyers. Credit: Chris Cowie

The List

See showdown.

Archetype

Eternal Expansionists

Thoughts

This list is just a lot to chew through, and having two C’tan means that any amount of time the opponent is held up for (at least in most games) is time where they’re bleeding mortal wounds. The big Scarab units are high risk, high reward on some level, because some stuff absolutely murders them, but if the opponent doesn’t have a good answer, they rule. In addition, even if you do come up against opponents with the right answers, Scarabs are pretty easy to hide, and you can use them for one big blowout turn of flipping the Primary (as I suspect happened in the showdown). A very strong army overall, and well done to Heinre.

The Best of the Rest

There were 4 more players on 4-1 records. They were:

2nd – Ashley Clutten – Adepta Sororitas: Bloody Rose Goodstuff.
3rd – Michael Higgo – Dark Angels: Whoops all Deathwing.
4th – Orion Adams – Hive Fleet Leviathan: See showdown.
5th – Charles Freestone – Harlequins: Light Saedath with six Voidweavers split over three squads.

Korea Summer Slam

All the lists for this event can be found in Best Coast Pairings. The event was slightly short of GT numbers, but it’s Korea’s first two-day GT, so we’re very happy to include it anyway!

The Showdown

Matchup & Mission – Unknown

Byungwook Kim – Tyranids: Leviathan Goodstuff

Army List - Click to Expand

vs.

JD Carter – Imperial Knights: House Taranis with three big Knights up front and three Helverins at the back.

Army List - Click to Expand

Thoughts

I don’t have the mission for this one, so that ends up meaning we need to look at how these armies line up on rate, and the auspices are not that fantastic for the Knights. They are very scary, but Tyranids very much are as well, and I think there aren’t going to be too many missions where the Knights can stay on the board long enough to really contest this. Their best chance would probably be on something like Recover the Relics – with three Helverins and a nasty Crusader, they do have the numbers to potentially blast one or both Harpies out of the sky, and on the Recover the Relics map they’d have some amount of agency to force the bugs to then try and come at them, potentially mowing them down (and getting decent points on the mission Primary) as that happened.

On pretty much any other mission though, I think it’s a bit too easy for the Tyranids to remove a couple of the Knights mobile units, and after that it’ll be very tricky for them. The option of just oblierating the Harpies as absolute priority remains, but it’ll be tough going for the Knights, and the bugs ended up pretty comfortably ahead.

Result

Tyranids Victory – 82-49

Byungwook Kim – Tyranids – 1st Place

The List

See showdown.

Archetype

Leviathan Goodstuff

Why it’s Interesting in 9th

Nice reminder that Carnifexes are extremely good, and here provide some relatively cost-effective roving killers, helping to cover for the fact that the army doesn’t have too many units. A great win by Byungwook – first GT win in a country is something that few people can boast of!

The Rest of the Best

Two more players finished on 5-1. They were:

2nd – JD Carter – Imperial Knights: See showdown.
3rd – Haemin Gang – Black Legion: A mix of lots of different Black Legion toys with Abaddon and a powerful Disco Lord at the head.

Wrap Up

Too much Warhammer, all of the time. See you next week! Questions and suggestions to contact@goonhammer.com.

Competitive Innovations in 9th: The Tyranid Is Somehow Still In Effect pt.2

Capital City Bloodbath – 40K Champs

The Showdown

Matchup & Mission – Tide of Conviction

Thoughts

Result

François Lalonde – Hive Fleet Leviathan – 1st Place

The List

Archetype

Thoughts

Jeremy Atkinson – Imperial Knights – 2nd Place

The List

Archetype

Thoughts

Sam Procopio – Blood Angels – 3rd Place

The List

Archetype

Thoughts

Hamza Syed – Harlequins – 4th Place

The List

Archetype

Thoughts

The Best of the Rest

GemHammer GT 2022

The Showdown

Matchup & Mission – Tear Down Their Icons

Thoughts

Result

Joshua Minnich – Tyranids – 1st Place

The List

Archetype

Thoughts

The Best of the Rest

Gameology Pasadena ‘Hammer of Wrath’ GT

The Showdown

Matchup & Mission – Data-Scry Salvage

Thoughts

Result

Kyle Parry – Harlequins – 1st Place

The List

Archetype

Thoughts

The Best of the Rest

SwordCon WH40k

The Showdown – The Scouring

Matchup & Mission – The Scouring

Thoughts

Result

Heinre Stander – Necrons – 1st Place

The List

Archetype

Thoughts

The Best of the Rest

Korea Summer Slam

The Showdown

Matchup & Mission – Unknown

Byungwook Kim – Tyranids: Leviathan Goodstuff

Thoughts

Result

Byungwook Kim – Tyranids – 1st Place

The List

Archetype

Why it’s Interesting in 9th

The Rest of the Best

Wrap Up

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