Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2024. Last time around I talked about the cancelation of the GW US Open in Tampa, and how that basically changed my plans. This week I’m going to be talking about my weekend – both the practice game I played against Andrew Corban and the Armies on Parade event at my local Games Workshop. Let’s start with the practice game, since that’s become much less interesting in the wake of new points and balance updates from Games Workshop.
With Tampa off the schedule, I needed one more event to hit six GT+ events for 2024, and as luck would have it, Dragon’s Lair is in my area – about 40m away, north of Houston – and running a GT this weekend. It’s not Tampa, but I’ll take it, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to get to. I’m not about to rock the boat, so I’m taking my Thousand Sons to the event, running the same list I ran at Tacoma and Warzone Houston. Ten Scarabs, four units of Rubrics, Magnus, Tzaangors, a Rhino, and a bunch of characters. It’s not great, but I’m not interested in painting anything else right now so it’ll do.
Practice Game: vs. Andrew Corban’s Astra Militarum
The Astra Militarum are a tough matchup for Thousand Sons. They can deep strike all over the table, recur units, and generally speaking trying to kill multiple tanks per turn is pretty tough. It’s even worse for my list, where the volume of 3-damage shooting they can dump out absolutely destroys my Scarab Occult Terminators. My general game plan against Guard is to destroy at least one Dorn before it can shoot me, and try and minimize the number of shots I take early. I haven’t really had much success in that vein yet.
Andrew’s list runs triple dorns, two hellhounds, two scout sentinels, a basilisk, and three chimeras full of kasrkin. Plus Leontas and his usual regiment of buttholes.
We’re playing Scorched Earth / Search and Destroy / Stalwarts, the first mission from the Dragon’s Lair Open this weekend. It’s good to be back on a GW layout, but it’s also fairly open vs. Andrew’s guard. As usual, I want to go second but end up going first. So my play is to try and go hard – I send the Terminators across the table to hold an objective on Andrew’s side, deciding that’ll be my primary play since Scorched Earth caps at 10. I kill one Dorn and try and hide magnus from being shot by the other two – even if they want to shoot him, they both have to move move move to even get into range, meaning they’ll need 4+ to hit, and hopefully that will help.
Long story short: It doesn’t. I made a lot of moves this game designed to keep Andrew’s units off full accuracy – pushing him to 4+ and 5+ to hit – and he just managed to spike his hit rolls anyways, killing Magnus on his first turn and tearing through half the terminators and a unit of Rubrics. I managed to kill Leontas and his entire squad when Andrew got aggressive with him early, but by that point I’d lost too much to be able to actively deal with the Dorns. Toss in a mix of really bad shooting from the Infernal Masters – they refused to roll more than 4 shots – and you have what was already an iffy plan (get too aggressive going for a turn 1 “win” with the Scarabs) – backfiring spectacularly when the dice didn’t work. I needed to play this one much more coy. There’s possibly a route where I hide magnus from the second Dorn on turn 1 and maybe survive, but Andrew was spiking shots all game so there’s no guarantee of that – at one point I moved a Rhino around that wall and he overwatched with a Dorn and hit it with 3/6 multi-melta shots, just evaporating it completely. Not much you can do against such wanton hate.
Despite that, this feels like a big mistake I made early, getting too greedy and trying to do too much when Andrew wasn’t giving me that much – only killing one dorn isn’t worth the amount I invested, and realistically I could have afforded to hang back and stage for a counter-punch on turn 2, which is what I should have done. The better plan was probably to aim for the top objective on my half and force Andrew to come around, though that still ends with me eating two dorns worth of shooting on round 2 or 3, most likely.
Result: 63-89, Loss
Tough loss but it’s a rough matchup for my list in particular and Andrew’s a good player. As far as games to keep the rust away go, it’s a good one.
Hobby Progress
With Armies on Parade at my local store quickly approaching I decided to crunch and get my Terminators done, wrapping up the final model Saturday morning. These are based off some Contekar Terminators I got off Rocco forever ago, with modern plastic arms and some other bits attached. I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.
I ended up taking these in and using my display board from Atlanta last year. It’s not super complicated, but it travels well and I’m happy with the job I did on the stained glass for it. That said, bringing it was a mistake – there were two categories going on at the event: Best Painted and Best Display, and I think I’d have had a better chance winning best painted, given my display was nowhere near as nice as some of the others there. I ended up taking second to Kevin McCormick’s lovely Necrons display, and I think I had a better chance against his Chaos Knights without a display. Always read the packet, kids.
Still, it’s hard to be upset with that result given a third of the army was painted this past week. I think I need to step things up and add more detail to that Rhino to get it ready for Atlanta, and I’ll be thinking hard about how to improve the board – maybe a backdrop I can paint for it? Something like that would be fairly easy to set up and foldable, and that might make it a good thing to do here.
After the event I hit up Max to ask about why I placed second, what I needed to do, and how I could get more out of the army. Kevin’s a great painter and is going to Atlanta on a Best Overall ticket from Wardome earlier this year, but his armies are beatable paint-wise. Max gives me some good pointers on the display board (and lets me know that Kevin’s fantastic Necron display board is what did it for him – no arguments from me there), and some great feedback on my Rhino and some of the other units. I only have about a month until Atlanta so next week I’ll need to do some more measured planning around how I want to tackle the rest of the army. I think my Night Lords are more striking than my Black Legion, but not necessarily better painted, and I need to think about how I want to approach the competition in Atlanta this year.
On the other side of things, Bryce’s army turned out great. He was the only Youngblood in attendance, but Max informed me that even if the other kids who frequent his store had shown up, Bryce would have won give his army was actually painted and based.
We ended up leaving the buildings behind – Bryce didn’t get them painted in time – but the whole thing turned out very nice with his display board. Bryce was absolutely over the moon about winning gold, and my parents stopped by to cheer him on when winners were announced.
It was a sweet moment and it was great to see his hard work rewarded. I had a good time getting him to this point and hopefully he’ll use this as motivation to work on more stuff in the future. We’re currently reading through Attack of the Necron at bedtime to get him the next reward on his Battle Honours path, but we’ll be going back to painting soon – Max informed me that Tanksgiving is around the corner and Bryce really wants a Stormhawk Interceptor…
Next Time: Dragon’s Lair
That does it for this week’s update but check back next Thursday when I recap the Dragon’s Lair event I’m attending this weekend. I’m hoping for 5-1 or better but I can live with 4-2 again if I have to. That said, there’s some really good players attending and they’re not going to make it easy, plus if I’m sitting at 3-2 after round 5 I’m likely just going to go home. Either way, it’ll be a fun time.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
