We’ve finally reached the finale of our coverage of the NOVA 2022 event and we’re going out with a bang. This week we’re joined by current #1 in the ITC player Jack Harpster from The Art of War, who won the entire thing. Today he’s talking about his list, his games, and what it means to win NOVA.

An Intro to NOVA

The NOVA Open is a large event. It’s one of few supermajors and has more rounds than most, so winning it earns a massive ITC score and an excellent trophy to put on anyone’s shelf, but that’s not why the NOVA open means as much to me as it does. If you’ve only ever played 9^th edition 40k you may never have heard of NOVA before this weekend, but the event used to be THE signature event of the East Coast, the culmination of a year of furious competition at local RTTs and small regional GTs. It was the precursor to the modern LVO in a way, at least in my circles.

I moved to Florida just over a year and a half ago, but I played through 40k’s Dark Ages in the epicenter of American competitive 40k at the time – the Northeast and specifically New Jersey. 8-10 years ago, I was a kid just starting college and I couldn’t afford a plane ticket to Chicago for the other yearly event to rival NOVA, Adepticon. I could only go to events I could cram me and three of my friends into a car and drive to, and I could drive to NOVA.  I still remember how I felt when, after two years of playing, I was asked to play in NOVA’s Invitational, and I certainly remember how I felt when I managed to win it. I didn’t care that my performance in the more prestigious and difficult event, the Open, ended up being strictly mediocre. All I cared about was I had won the NOVA invitational! It was my first big win ever; it was a large part of why my local team, Roll 2 Wound, won best team in 2014 and it’s still my favorite plaque on my wall. I’ve chased success at the Open over the years, but I don’t ever recall even making top bracket. When COVID hit, NOVA shut down and three years later it was the last major tournament to open back up.

And when it did, I was ready to take a shot at my white whale.

Selecting a List

Initially I was set on taking T’au. I had just practiced them hard for the WTC and they were the army I was most proficient with. Tau is extremely strong now as shown by my teammate Andrew Gonyo’s run through the event with a list that was, at least for 9^th edition, fairly unique (Editor’s Note: See Competitive Innovations for more). However, as would become a theme, I had a Necron problem. I’d played a fair amount of games into them during the ATC with my Blood Angels and the lead up to the WTC with my T’au and I was sick of the matchup. Their sheer ability to score points gave me a series of very tough games, and by this point I was done playing around. I wanted a list that had the ability to beat the necrodermis-covered dorks and I would accept no substitutes. In my quest to play Tau I talked about the problem at length with Andrew and found no answer for the what-ifs. What if the Necrons go first? What if they burrow into two objectives and somehow find 92 points there while never poking their heads out? On most terrain formats the answer was clear. In the immortal words of Sean “Day9” Plott: “Just f@#$ing kill them.” End them as fast as possible, pack their models back onto their carrying tray, and get an early lunch.  Necron scoring is ludicrous but they need to see turn 4 at least to get their points.  Unfortunately, on GW’s terrain format (which NOVA was using), it is very easy for them to hide and avoid the tabling they deserve and as such I was running low on answers. I came up with a “brilliant” idea in the car on my way to the Stream House that is my workplace to run Grey Knight terminators.

Grey Knight terminator spam is an off-the-wall list that isn’t seen much, and I thought it had both a ton of hidden power and a great matchup into ‘Crons. My plan went thus: Jam a ten-man brick of Preservers Terminators with every conceivable buff onto the center objective, and watch as Necrons’ crappy early 9^th Edition datasheets struggle to kill them.  If Necrons aren’t able to take the center objective, they’re not able to win.  Armed with this simple yet powerful mantra, I set to work designing the list. And work it was, as it seemed that no matter how I twisted and turned, the points they didn’t want to fit. However, just a couple days before I was due to hop a bus to begin my journey to the event, I thought I had a list I was happy with. That’s when my plan hit what we’ll call “a snag.”

While my gameplan was extremely basic, I still hadn’t actually played with the army and I wanted to get a proof of concept game down on the table. With the last-minute nature of my whole endeavor, a practice game against Seeg’s (Ed: Siegler) Necrons fell through. Seegs told me it was okay as the matchup was so one-sided I didn’t even need to practice it but even he can be wrong sometimes and I just had to make sure. I ended up convincing John [Lennon] somehow to play a game into me with a generic Necron list just to get a feel. I won the roll off to go first, redeployed a bunch of Terminators to the front line, and planted ten shiny silver models proudly on the center objective with every buff at my disposal. John looked at me and we both said “Man this feels really bad for the ‘Crons here” and I felt great. On the following turn John killed all ten with room to spare, I failed to cast several key powers, fumbled my Psychic Actions and left a unit of Skorpekhs alive in the center of my army. It turns out, my army was bad. Like, really bad. Grey Knights probably had builds I could play, but the 30+ terminator build just wasn’t it and with fewer than 36 hours before I had to pack my army up and head to NOVA, there wasn’t enough time to craft a version I was happy with.

The List Spiral

That night, I dreamed about Grey Knights. It wasn’t a happy dream. I was in what we call “The List Spiral,” a place where you go in circles just trying to figure out what army you’re playing with no answers to be found. I’ve never started a spiral this close to an event. I had a minor mental break and rewrote that day’s stream Daemon list from a well thought out, balanced approach to one Greater Daemon of each type plus Be’lakor thirty minutes before the stream started. In a weird turn of events, my silly list happened to be paired against Seegs’ 30+ terminator Grey Knight build, similar to where I was at the night before. The Terminators never stood a chance. I had less than 18 hours left at this point to come up with an army, assemble it and leave for NOVA, and it could not have been more obvious that Grey Knight Terminators were not it. I had little sleep and no answers.

It was at this point that Seegs came to me, like a cult leader recruiting people in their lowest moments, to offer me salvation. We decided to roll a die; on a 1-3 I play the Tau I’d been playing for the last couple months and had won the Cherokee supermajor with, on a 4+ I play ‘Crons, an army I have zero practice with in any edition. I had John select the die and I left my fate in Richard’s cold metal hands to roll it.

It was a 5.

The majority of this list is a Seegs list near point-for-point but I did include some units that he disagrees with. I insisted the list have a unit of Destroyers in it after they killed half of my terminators in one phase during the preceding practice game. Seegs still isn’t a fan of the Lokhusts, but he did hand me a list which included them, albeit with an air of “If you must be wrong then here you go.” I crowbarred in a unit of Immortals for the sweet, sweet Command Points that a patrol provides and the list was done (Richard is currently on a vanguard/outrider and has no patience for mere mortals who desire CP but I intended to crank the Lokhusts’ Extermination Protocols lever until it falls off).

This list’s plan was far better than my half-baked terminator list’s was: Sit behind waves of scarabs and score points. Force my opponent to commit to fully buffed Scarab units, pick up the resources they use in their vain attempts to kill them, rinse and repeat. Eventually the Skorpekh and Silent King will rampage around the board after the enemy uses their damage on the scarabs and even if that doesn’t happen, Necrons score so well that your opponent has to aggressively force a fight or else risk you building a runaway lead. It’s a no-win position for your opponent: Accept that the Necrons get a 97-100 or table yourself trying to stop it. What happened in most games was both.

I live in Tallahassee for some reason and while the local airport is quick, clean and overall a great place – five stars – you can’t actually fly anywhere from there. Flights out usually have multiple layovers and are very expensive and this meant I had to get creative. I eventually decided the “best” plan was to buy a cheap-as-chips flight from Orlando to Washington D.C. and take a bus between the two cities in order to make the flight. Usually I would drive to Orlando and see if I could leave my car at my friend Quinton “Rampage” Johnson’s house but I was visiting family in Washington state directly after the event and my return flight was into Tally so that option was right out. The end result of this was a day spent on a bus, an Uber, a plane and then another Uber. I spent the bus ride reading Necron lore and the plane flight reading my rules.

Now thoroughly tired, I met my friend Brady offline for the first time and linked up with Old Man Brad Chester for what has to be the millionth time. We grabbed Brady’s friend Alex and went to a steakhouse after Brad vetoed the Chipotle-esque restaurant the large group we were with had picked out.  Chester ain’t one to let the man tell him where to eat and he wanted to sit. We ate and drank and I eventually passed out from lack of sleep in Nick’s room after getting back.

The Event

Day 1

Justin's List - click to expand

Round one started at the ungodly early time of 8:30. I rolled myself out of bed, jammed coffee into my face and saw my first pairing was against Blood Angels piloted by Justin Alfon. The Necron/BA matchup was the reason I hadn’t taken BA to this event and here I was, immediately in the matchup, but on the side of The Bad Guys. In a premonition of what was to happen throughout the tournament, he slammed his damage into scarabs that had gotten aggressive on his objectives, my shooting and combat picked them up and then the Silent King and Skorpekh rampaged around the board. He got the moral victory of having killed all the scarabs before going down and I left the game mentally patting myself on the back for winning two of my three Necron games with Blood Angels at ATC. That matchup is rough, and in a sick twist of fate Justin played all three games that day into Necrons, but he was no slouch and  and managed to win one.  I felt like I just watched someone get hit with a bullet that I dodged, as I know I would have gotten the three ‘Crons day one if I brought BA.

My following two games were the Necron mirror played by Drew Rhodes and Chris Joyner.  This was the point where I realized that Seegs and my plan to annihilate the Necron mirror hadn’t failed. Drew was an absolute madlad and brought three models that totaled 1120pts between them. The obligatory Silent King, the Nightbringer and finally a goddamn Tesseract Vault. He got turn one on Recover the Relics; I pregame moved just outside of his threat range and he moved up the field. His Skorpekh banged charges into skirmishing units I had on both of my forward objectives. The Nightbringer moved up but couldn’t quite bring his Gaze of Death to bear (yay premeasuring) and the Tesseract vault rained mortals upon me, including sniping my Technomancer out with a Time’s Arrow. In response, my shooting plus the Ophydians killed the Vault and my combat killed his Skorpekhs. I tossed the Nightbringer a nine man scarab unit to chew on forever and the game effectively ended.

The next game was against fairly standard Necrons but with the Deceiver and two Doom Scythes, the “Seegs ATC special” as I call it. As far as I could tell, Chris wore a different, oversized, Star Wars planet-themed shirt each day and to me that makes him One Cool Dude.  Unfortunately for him I went first and the Silent King and Destroyers killed both planes and pinned him in his deployment zone. 18 scarabs with full buffs proved impossible for his now-neutered army to deal with and the Skorpekhs behind were just icing on the cake. Again, my opponent’s C’tan got bullied around the board by a unit of nine scarabs and was basically impossible for him to use. Both of my opponents were great players (they both only lost to me in their first four games), and incredible people to play against but my list was designed to beat the mirror and it was outperforming expectations.

Checking in with Brady I found out he had had a rough day one – his large, golden Custodes bois decided that saves were for other people. I listened to his bad beat stories as a good friend should and tried to keep his head in the game. Blake Law and I linked up with a friend of Blake’s who was playing in the NOVA narrative event and who showed us an excellent hole-in-the-wall Chinese place a short walk away located next to a “gentleman’s club” that had what I would call an unnecessary amount of advertisements about their steaks. I didn’t think that’s why people went to strip clubs but I guess I’m not as tapped into the market for that kind of thing as the people who run the place.

We declined the prospect of steaks next door, I got the General Tso’s Chicken and listened exhausted as they talked about their good old days playing the Lord of the Rings tabletop game.  Apparently the Large Eagle faction was super cool, I really wouldn’t know, but the food was delicious and I made the decision to return later that weekend.  On our walk back, we saw a very short lady in a security guard uniform furiously screaming into a phone while standing on an island in the middle of a busy intersection.  I couldn’t see if she had a gun or not but I was very glad to not be whoever she was mad at.

Day 2

At an unreasonable time in the morning the following day, I woke up to discover that my round 4 was against Wallace O’Donnell and his Chaos Daemons. I know that Wallace has done well at events with his outdated book and I only kind of understood what Daemons do.  This was the last event of the old Daemons book and I resolved to not lose to it; against an old book the worst thing you can do is disrespect it only to run headfirst into every trick the old book has. Wallace had built a kind of Necrons-lite list centered around great secondaries and something like 450 summoning points that he could pour into either one pink horror unit splitting or use to summon obscure daemon units that could combine weird rules in ways his opponents couldn’t predict.  It’s so easy to mess up against a list like that against an opponent as experienced with it as Wallace, one misplaced attack sequence could end with pink horrors splitting onto my objectives in my turn and costing me the game.

Luckily, I had more wiggle room than most in the matchup, as every model in my army being Objective Secured helped secure my objectives from his split shenanigans and my shooting kept his Dreadblade War Dogs back in his deployment zone. I went first, shot his big brick of pinks a little, jammed models on every one of the center objectives and made sure to get my Ancient Machineries action completed on his furthest objective before he could get there and lock it down. He split the Horrors a bit and made a play for my nearest objectives with the brick of Pinks and now a few Blues, a psyker and Abbadon. I triple checked to make sure I wasn’t risking my objectives and wailed on the pink unit, draining points en-masse from his summoning bank and tied the ‘Don up with a unit of nine Scarabs to keep him off my back for a turn.  From that point on, I stalemated the board and focused damage into the pink horrors until his summoning points ran out and his army collapsed across the board.  He was a phenomenal opponent and gained tons of points as the game went on, but the wind left his sails once his summoning ran out and I was able to take over.  It’ll be interesting to see what Wallace does with a proper 9^th Edition Daemon codex.

The reason I know how my round one through three opponents had done in their first four games was that NOVA was implementing Opponent Game Win percentage as their tiebreakers. If I lost my next game before top cut occurred, I’d need a high OGW% to get into top sixteen. After a long attempt to figure out how the numbers for OGW% that BCP were showing made any kind of sense, I determined that none of it mattered if I just won my next game. I went and got lunch at the food trucks outside the event and chatted with my teammate, Matt Schuchman, who was also 4-0 with an awesome Ulthwe list very slightly inspired by my Adepticon army. He took a couple concepts I had (notably the Avatar of Khaine) added plenty of his own and fine-tuned it into a secondary scoring and skirmishing machine. He had beaten two Tyranids and one Tau so far, both matchups I didn’t want, and I thanked him for his service bodyguarding me from bad matchups while we ate a pair of personal pizzas. That joke become way funnier when I ended up playing him in the finals after he had successfully bodyguarded my pairings against four Tyranids and three Tau. What can I say – the man played out of his mind that event.

My win-and-in round five was against Necrons again played by Nick Antzoulatos and I was excited to get back to the mirror.  I had large scarab units and Destroyers for shooting, he had whip coil Wraiths and a Ghost Ark.  During deployment he informed me about the ludicrous number of attacks whip coil Wraiths had (10?!?) and made a fun bet that he’d get me to talk about how good they were on the Art of War podcast.  Unfortunately for Nick, what he got instead was a wall of Scarabs to wail on as I removed resources from his side of the board.  A Skorpekh unit on his side made a baller charge and picked up one of mine, but in karmic revenge for his good luck, he biffed a combat sequence in the middle of the board against a unit of Skorpekhs and I lived with one model that was far away from his remaining units to activate that combat.  I then rolled god mode on reanimations and got three back, allowing me to wipe a unit of Wraiths on his turn.  Unsurprisingly the remaining whip coil Wraiths did not, in fact, get there for him and his army started to crumble.  The Scarab bricks meant he had to continuously overcommit resources to deal with a nonsense skirmish unit and the Destroyers kept his Silent King pinned back and removed resources every turn with little to no return fire.  Nick played fantastically, has put up good results in the past and is one to watch out for at events in the future but the Scarab menace proved to be too much for him to handle that game and I was through to the top 16!

After a tense wait for pairings I got my friend Brad Townsend, who’s been on a bit of a tear recently with his Thousand Sons. He’d narrowly lost to Matt the round before but made it into top 16 nonetheless on the strength of his tiebreakers. This was one of the potentially losable matchups I identified going into the event. Brad knows his army, it isn’t bad into Crons and he was determined to win – no rolling over and dying for him. To make it worse, we’re playing on Conversion and if he goes first, it’s open season for him to teleport a Terminator brick above my deployment zone, double move a second one that starts deployed on the line, and light my army up. It’s not unwinnable from there but it’s sure very hard and I can’t bank on outplaying Brad.

To my absolute dismay, he goes first, sees that aggressive line and sets to implementing it. He applies all his buffs to a Terminator unit hiding in the back, preparing to teleport them across the board, marches his front unit forward and then, in a move I’m sure he’s still kicking himself over, elects to roll the Cult of Duplicity teleport power instead of auto-passing it with Cabal points. The power fails with a reroll and now all his buffs are stuck on a unit that won’t shoot or see combat that turn. Hey, I’ve made mistakes like that and if someone says they haven’t then they’re lying. I have every bonehead play I’ve made that cost me a tournament game saved in my head just so I can think about them every so often. On my turn, I kill the ten terminators in front of me and move to block his second unit from teleporting into the spot that was open on turn one. Brad plays an amazing game from that point, and it gets very bloody, but he had sacrificed too much momentum turn one and I take what was my hardest game of the entire event. Brad and I have a bit of a bromance going on and we smack talked so much that judges stopped coming over and checking to see if there was a problem. After the game I picked Brad up and carried him around like we’d just been married, I’ve only had the most fun games with that man.

That night, I grabbed Brady again along with Andrew Gonyo and Brad Townsend and we ended up going back to the same steakhouse I went to the first day.  I proposed going to the Chinese restaurant from the day before but as soon as Andrew found out it was next to a strip club, he vetoed it.  He’s a proper gent and the steakhouse wasn’t bad, so why not?  Brad and I talked a load of nonsense over complimentary garlic pickles, Andrew was still in it to win it, so we joked about our chances of pairing into each other the next day over food and Brady had stabilized from his disappointing day one and was in the middle of his comeback.

Day 3

The following morning, I hooked an IV of coffee up and got to work in my fourth and final Necron mirror of the weekend. I was up against Steven Crawley and his double Doom Scythe build, a new development from the list that had been the straw that broke the camel’s back against my Blood Angels at ATC and convinced me to not take them to NOVA.  Speaking of breaking backs, my boneheaded choice to pick Brad up the previous night and the constant leaning over the table had thrown my back out and it would only get worse as the rounds continued. By this point I knew I was heavily favored in the mirror and anticipated things would slide downhill for him after a couple turns of Scarabs jammed onto the center and Destroyer shooting.

From my perspective, the only thing I could see myself being worried about was him going first and the Doom Scythes somehow killing my Destroyers through the 4+ reanimation from the Reanimator’s hastily switched Nanoscarab Beam. Steven, on the other hand, was worried about me going first and dropping both planes, as he didn’t have the Deceiver to redeploy them into reserves, so he made the decision to spend CP to start both planes in strategic reserves. At that point, I was fairly confident I was on lock to win going first or second. The planes overperforming was the only way I saw for him to swing back my edge in board control ,and I had no plans to let the planes deep strike near enough to my vulnerable targets to get shots off. Scarabs ran buck wild on the center objective and my board advantage led to me zeroing out his Primary for multiple turns and denying him points on all his Secondaries. Eventually the planes came in and shot Scarabs before being downed by Menhirs and Destroyers and the game snowballed in my favor.  I ended up going first, so the distinction of whether his planes should have been on or off the board to begin with was kinda moot. I didn’t see a path to victory for him going second either way and at that point having the planes on the board would have led to them getting shot down.

The top four consisted of Andrew Gonyo and his blast from the past triple Riptide build, Matt Schuchman and his Ulthwe, Tony Phillips and his Sisters of Battle and myself with Necrons. We were in the endgame, there were only three pairings possible from that point and while chatting over lunch with Matt and Andrew all of us wanted them to go differently. I had the best list of the four, there was no debate between us about that, Necrons simply score too well right now. It was theoretically possible for a hyper aggressive gameplan out of Andrew to kill me before I scored my points, but it wasn’t likely.  Neither Matt nor Tony felt rosy about their prospects into the Crons and were hoping for me to pair into Andrew while Andrew was hoping to pair into me in the final mission, one he thought was more favorable. My hands were rated E for everyone, but I preferred not getting shot by Andrew if I didn’t have to, I wanted to play into Tony and let Matt take care of Andrew for me. They play every weekend it sounded like, I figured he’d be okay with it. Pairings came out, I was against Tony and Matt was playing Andrew.  I thanked Matt for his continued bodyguarding, received an eye roll and got to work.

In an absurd coincidence, the last time I’d played Tony was also in round eight of the NOVA open three years prior. That year we were playing for bracket two, now we were playing for the top spot.  He had a fairly standard Bloody Rose Sisters build, similar to the one John, me and seemingly every Sisters player not suckered into Order of Our Martyred Lady had been playing.  It’s a list very similar to my own Necrons, it sits there and scores a ton of points.  Unfortunately for Tony, Sisters have about six points less in the bank than Necrons do and there’s not a whole lot of ways for him to even that up. He certainly gave it his best shot and played a phenomenal game; he traded resource for resource and was the only player to outright remove all my scarabs early.  He attempted to push me to make a mistake, play risky and give up my lead but I never did, and we ended the game with a truly Necrons vs Sisters score of 97-91.

He was a truly great opponent and played it the best he could have but we both knew from early on it was going to be near impossible for him to overcome the points deficit.  I walked over to Matt and Andrew, and it looked horrible for Matt.  His army was pinned in the corner and Andrew controlled the whole board.  I was resigning myself to hiding from guns in the finals only to hear that all their practice games looked like that, whether Matt won or lost. If anyone could take out the Tau menace in the hands of someone as skilled as Andrew it was Matt.  Sure enough, he ended up taking the game by four points after defusing a brilliant last turn play by Andrew where he attempted to complete Aerospace Targeting Relays on Matt’s home board edge with a Coldstar Commander by bodyguarding it with a pair of planes.  The finals were set.

Matt and I wandered upstairs to grab me some coffee and chat.  We went over lists in what was mostly a formality at that point and we chatted about the event so far.  The last time we had played was also the previous NOVA open, a round before I played Tony Phillips.  We were extremely proud of our runs through the event. We’ve both deeply doubted our own abilities in the past and it was intensely rewarding to stand on the mountaintop next to him, alone as the two undefeated players at the entire event, happy no matter how the last round shook out.  We were also extremely tired and my back was so done at this point Matt actively asked me during our game to stop standing up as it physically hurt him to watch my back spasm when I moved the wrong way. Out of sheer stubbornness, I never did.  We hugged, my back twitched and the final game started.

My game plan was clear, score points. Matt’s was equally clear, he had to stop me.  He got first turn and brought his Falcons down in a safe position where he could shoot my mispositioned Silent King and I lost a Menhir for my hubris. He also struck at my ability to control the board and launched an attack on the Scarab unit I had been positioning to take the center. Unfortunately for him, they lived through Baharroth and a unit of Banshees with one model and reanimated two back and chipped away at the Banshees. Baharroth saw the writing on the wall and jumped away before Destroyers annihilated his anti-Scarab strike force and my second unit of Scarabs received the Chronomancer’s invulnerable  save and the attention of the Reanimator’s beamers, then planted themselves on the center objective. His Avatar came out to play while all his skirmishing units attempted to force a weakness in my defenses. He was scoring points well, it was what his army does, but Necrons are just flat out better at it. It became clear to both of us that his best chance at evening the points with the speed he needed was if his Avatar slammed into my army and somehow managed to make it out the other side. A low chance, as Destroyers, Skorpekhs and the Silent King all hit very hard, but it was higher than the 0% he was looking at if he continued to take his time. He committed the Avatar fully and finished off my remaining Scarabs. At this point, the table boss, who had been hanging around and chatting during the game informed me that Twitch chat was going crazy for the Reanimator and they wanted it to be the Hero of the Imperium and charge into the Avatar. I declared that if Twitch chat wanted me to do it, I would. Nick Nanavati and Paul Murphy declared on commentary I was just memeing and wouldn’t actually go for it but I, in the end, could do both.

After Matt was done killing my Scarabs, he positioned the Avatar within 3” of the whole objective so I couldn’t contest it away without eating a Heroic and a plan formed in my mind about how to justify the Reanimator charging the Avatar. You see, it did kind of make sense to charge the Avatar with the Reanimator to stop the Heroic while using a separate unit to steal the objective back. I thoroughly confused the commentary with the move so it was totally worth it. The best part was since I move blocked the Avatar with my objective taking unit, I got an extra turn to shoot Matt’s army so I can’t even say it was a bad play.  The Reanimator exploded and took the first wound of many off the Avatar. What a hero.  The Avatar then smashed through my screens and it was time for me to commit. Every gun and melee weapon in my list focused on the Avatar and brought it down partway through my fight phase. Matt and I calculated the points, found it was no longer possible for him to win and he extended his hand for the handshake and then the hug.  I had won the NOVA Open!

I grabbed several of my friends and went back to the Chinese place for a celebratory dinner. Somehow, I managed to get ahold of the TO, Sam Lucidi, my friend from way back in the day and a truly excellent Death Guard specialist, and bring him with us. It turned out Brady had fully rallied from his rough start and pieced together an undefeated final stretch and ended up winning his bracket. I ordered every appetizer that looked good, we chatted for an hour or two and then wandered back to the hotel where I passed out for the last time of the weekend.

Final Thoughts

The NOVA open was a truly excellent event as it always is but that isn’t why it meant so much to me, nor is it the ITC score it gave.  After my first taste of victory eight years ago and the following Battle for Salvation win a month later, the wins turned off.  They stopped coming.  I never performed poorly, per se, but I always fell short of the top.  I’d lose a heartbreaker and go x-1 so often that it felt like it could turn out no other way.  I understand that consistently placing x-1 is what many players aspire to but we don’t choose the metrics our own brains use to gauge our success.  I considered quitting 40k for good.  However, I didn’t quit, I stuck with it and have a whole community here of people who I’m happy to call my friends, who’ve supported me when I need it and celebrate with me in my successes.  I got back into 9^th edition after a full year off during COVID and I got back to work.  I’ve had a couple other big wins over the last year but NOVA was special.  It felt like me reaching back to who I was several years ago, struggling away at NOVA after NOVA, and giving that guy the win I felt I needed so much at the time.  I don’t know, maybe this is all too sentimental and I’m in a way better place than I was at the time but it felt good.  More than that, it felt cathartic, like I’d put the ghost of 40k past to bed and could move on to the bigger and better things in both my and 40k’s future.

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