TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2021, Part 16: The GW Austin Open, Part 2

Welcome back, Dear Reader! If you’ve been following along, in my last article you read about my master triumph of going 3-0 to start the Austin GW Open Tournament, putting me in rarified air with the likes of Siegler, Lennon, Cheema, Harpster, and others, save James “Boon” Kelling, who stupidly got matched into Harpster in Round 3 like an idiot and then lost a game.

Many people will ask me “Rob, what’s your secret for going 3-0 on day 1 and making the 3-1 bracket at the event?” To which I will say “Get super lucky with your pairings, idiot.” That’s the key: Just don’t get matched into the many, many armies that will end your run or the many players who are much better than you are and you will find it relatively easy to go undefeated.

I mentioned last time that getting easy matchups at an even this size is much more common; you just have many more people you could get paired up against, diluting the talent pool. Of the 190 or so players at the event, I could get paired against any of the other 189 in round 1. Then in round 2, using win paths > random for pairing, I had another 94 players I could go up against. And in round 3, that dropped to 47. By the start of round 4, there were only 23 players in the pool of potential match-ups. And by the time I met up with Boon for breakfast, I had already figured out that there were maybe 4 of them I legitimately wanted to play – one was an Astra Militarum player, another was Nathan Hayot (whose Death Guard I beat the week prior), and the other were the two marine players. Maybe I’d get lucky again and make the top 16 cut?

Game 4: vs. Mani Cheema’s Tyranids

Cool. Cool cool cool.

Mani's List - Click to Expand

So the flipside of my hilarious, deflated hope for four straight softball matchups is that Mani absolutely did get four soft matchups on his way into the top 16, and I was absolutely one of them. Before me, Mani faced down marines and T’au, and we had a good laugh about him mind controlling Guilliman to kill one of his opponent’s units in the game prior.

The Mission: Sweep and Clear

My Secondaries

• Direct Assault
• To the Last
• Stranglehold

Mani’s Secondaries

• Direct Assault
• To the Last
• Stranglehold

Mani’s list is an absolute nightmare for mine. It’s got 18 goddamn Hive Guard, all of whom shoot with insane accuracy from out of line of sight, and have good enough AP to put me on my invuln with terminators. Plus, he can sit comfortably in his ruins while I have to trudge to the middle of the table to get murdered while chasing after Direct Assault points.

I’m going Second.

That’s not ideal. In fact, it’s basically the game. If I’d gone first I could have maybe used my bloat-drones to screen out my blightlords with Cloud of Flies while the PBCs shot a bunch of hive guard off the table while moving into a favorable position for a turn 2 assault, but as-is Mani just gets to unload on me and deplete my forces before I ever get to act. I lose a good third of my army on turn 1 and then spend the rest of the game figuring out how I’m going to score literally any points.

Mani pretty much stepped on my neck early and never let off, playing aggressively to the point that it cost him 5 VP when I’m able to kill his Swarmlord. This is kind of baffling in that denying me points does not help him in any way, but scoring more VP could help him on scoring tiebreakers later and killing my To the Last Targets does literally nothing for him. As-is, it risks dumping me down a bracket if I get matched out of the 3-1 bracket. Fortunately that doesn’t happen.

Result: 23-95, Loss

Well that sucked complete ass. Not because of Mani – he was a gentleman, and very tenderly placed my sorry ass right in the dumpster and tucked me in – but because I had basically no agency in that game whatsoever. At no point did I have any control over my destiny, and that would have been the case even if Mani’s dice weren’t on fire. Basically I lost the game during the army selection process and that was always going to keep me from winning the event. I don’t love that part of the game, but I’m not about to play Drukhari any time soon so it’s something I can live with.

Someone asks me after the game if there was anything I noticed about Mani’s play that was particularly smart or struck me as brilliant. And to be honest, there kind of wasn’t. I thought it was clever how he used his blip markers to screen out aircraft and other units trying to race across into his deployment zone, but I don’t have any of those so using them that way against my army seems like a waste. Mani doesn’t change up his strategy, either – he picks the same secondaries he always planned on after seeing my army, and just sticks to his plan. And to some degree that’s a good plan and the sign of a top player. He also doesn’t really need to go “all out” against my army as he’s already won in the list building phase and first turn just lets him coast all game. So this particular anecdote I have to concede to Scott Horras “Heresy,” who has been arguing for some time that the majority of differential in player skill in 40k is in list building. Then again, I’m not sure what extremely clever play even would have even looked like in our game so maybe it was just a bad example.

I grab lunch with Boon and Matt, another cool Texas guy from Beaumont. Matt’s playing Orks and just played against Boon. we get burgers at a food truck, which rules. Boon won his game 4 but doesn’t have the score to sneak into the top 16. He ends up falling just short.

Anyways, now I’m in the 3-1 bracket.

Game 5: vs. Brandon Fox’s Death Guard

Brandon's List - Click to expand

Brandon’s playing Death Guard but he’s playing the Terminus Est variant, which means lots of poxwalkers, little in the way of ranged attacks, and lots to clear through. He’s also got 3 units of 5 Deathshroud, which are going to be a real pain.

The Mission: Vital Intelligence

My Secondaries:

• No Prisoners
• Stranglehold
• Spread the Sickness

Brandon’s Secondaries:

• Despoiled Ground
• To the Last – Each unit of Deathshrouds
• Data Intercept

Brandon’s taking Despoiled Ground, which seems like a big mistake. He says that when he wins it’s 15 points for him, which seems correct because it’s very much a win-more secondary. He’ll end up only scoring 4 for it this game.

I’m going Second.

Game 5 starts with a judge call. On turn 1 he tries to Advance his Tallyman and then perform the Data Intercept action, which just straight up is not allowed thanks to the FAQ for abilities that allow a model to count as Remaining Stationary. His logic is that the rule refers to the prior Movement phase, so on turn 1 as there’s no prior movement phase, they still count as stationary. This is, of course, specious at best. We call the judges over, who take some time to figure it out, before I just suggest he do the action with one of the other three units he has on that objective so he can still get his Tallyman into range of the Possessed to buff them with +1 to hit on turn 2.

The rest of the game is a grind. Not because Brandon is a jerk – he’s plenty agreeable – but because chewing through Poxwalkers sucks and because my dice are ass. I manage to clear out one unit per turn, starting with one unit of 20 on an objective near me on turn 1, but things get dicey when Brandon charges his Possessed into me and is able to force me to fight last while avoiding coming within 3″ of my own Blightspawn. He lands 36 wounds on my Blightlords, which should end up killing 5-6 of them but instead I fail 28 saves and lose all but 2 of them. Just amazing. And by “amazing,” I mean “terrible.” The game stays pretty close with lots of back-and-forth thanks to my Fleshmower sticking around an extra turn. The big moment comes on turn 5, when Brandon charges my remaining character – a Tallyman – and fails the charge roll, needing a 6+ and scoring a 5. He declines to re-roll it, thinking he has the game in the bag.

On my turn 5 I step back and re-evaluate the board state, doing a tally of points. I’m at 11 for No Prisoners, 6 on Spread the Sickness (bleh), and only 5 on primary objectives. But if I can kill a single Deathshroud with 1 wound left on one of my objectives (and I have two PBCs, a Deathshroud of my own, and the Plaguecaster nearby to do it), then I’ll drop him 5 more points for To the Last and I’ll hold 3 objectives this turn. That’s when I notice that my Tallyman can make a 4″ advance to reach the bottom right corner objective just outside Typhus’ 3″ Intervention range. I go for it, tell Brandon, and roll a 4, moving him onto the objective. Typhus moved onto the objective the prior turn in the movement phase, so control of it isn’t “locked in”, which means I can contest it. That means I’m now holding 3 objectives to Brandon’s 2, giving me 15 for primary. With the other points I score, I’ll have a 67-62 win.

Brandon immediately says he wouldn’t have skipped re-rolling the charge if he’d known and asks if he can do it, and rolls a pair of dice to charge. But at this point I’ve already made my Advance and well, this is a tactical mistake and not a rules error. I tell him no, this is how it’s going to be. He’s very much not happy with the result but he begrudgingly accepts it. We do another accounting of points and submit results.

Result: 67-62, Win

I hit the restrooms and talk to some friends. I check on Boon. Pairings go up for Round 6. That’s when Brandon comes back to the table. He’s telling me we messed up scoring – he thinks he should have scored 15 for primary on turns 2 and 3. He says he had more units on objectives on turn 2 and 3, and should have scored hold 3 and hold more on both turns. I break out my phone – I have a picture of turn 1 that shows he only had 2 poxwalkers from his squad on one of my objectives that he’s claiming to have had models on, and I wiped that squad out while moving onto the other two objectives with a long advance. So his account of holding more/four objectives is wrong, and we both scored him 10 for primary on turn 2 and 5 points for primary on turn 3. But he does have a good point that we scored him 3 for Data Intercept on turn 3, which means at some point we did think he had 3 objectives, which means that either our accounting on that secondary is wrong, or our accounting on the primary objectives is wrong. I suspect that primary accounting is wrong to the tune of 5 points, but I can’t be sure, in part because my recollection of the prior game states is not that good and I took a lot of poxwalkers off the table on turns 1 and 2 to clear off objectives. The game could be a 67-67 tie, or it could be a win for Brandon. But pairings are already up and I’m not certain enough to go try and get the score changed (and I very much do not believe they’d change it at this point for this reason). I tell Brandon I’m sorry but that’s the result.

This, frankly, sucks. I don’t want to win this way – especially if I’m in the wrong – and it ruins my whole day. While neither of us is on track to win the event, this particular win still matters and it’s probably the case that our primary accounting is off in my favor but I don’t have any other photos of the board after Brandon’s first turn save the one I took of the objective at the end. Brandon’s absolutely not happy about it and I get it. I offer to buy him a drink but he declines. Hopefully there aren’t any hard feelings in the future if we ever rematch. Brandon was a fine person to play and I wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to play him again and settle the score. He’ll go on to clean up his opponents in the one-loss group and finish with a higher overall rank/score than me, so good on him for that.

This all goes down two minutes before round 6 starts and the only thing that saves me from wanting to just drop is that I’m up against my friend Garrett Moore, who’s been tearing things up with his Grey Knights. Those of you who have been following along may remember that the last time I played against Garrett we did a practice game on my worst mission, Battle Lines, and I got shithoused. Well, as fate would have it that’s the exact scenario I get to try and squeeze out a win in a third time.

Game 6: vs. Garrett Moore’s Grey Knights

Garrett's list - Click to expand

I chose Battle Lines to practice on against Garrett because it’s by far my worst mission and Grey Knights are my worst matchup. Battle Lines is Hammer-and-Anvil deployment and this layout has really bad sight lines for my PBCs, plus there are only four objectives so Spread isn’t doing much for me and banners isn’t good, either.

The Mission: Battle Lines

My Secondaries:

• To the Last – PBC / PBC / Blightlords
• Stranglehold
• Assassination

Garrett’s Secondaries:

• Retrieve Octarius Data
• Engage on All Fronts
• Purifying Ritual

My hope here is to use To the Last to force Garrett to put more attention on my Blightlords; he knows better than to try and handle them otherwise. Stranglehold seems like something I can claw out on 3-4 turns if I can churn Garrett off objectives, and Assassination can be worth 13 if I kill enough Dreadknights, which I kind of have to do if I want to win the game anyways.

I’m going First.

That’s decent news – it allows me to get forward and score Stranglehold Turn 1 and move onto both midfield objectives with an advance from my Blightlords. Unfortunately my PBCs can’t do as much as I’d like and are unable to wipe out a Strike squad. They’ll be pretty much off this game, which hurts like hell going up against Grey Knights. I have pretty bad dice on days 2 and 3, likely as cosmic payback for how lucky I got with my Day 1 matchups. Ah well.

Garrett plays a tough game – he’s a good player – and we grind out a hard battle, mostly fighting over the midtable objective the Blightlords aren’t sitting on. I don’t commit enough to it – I needed more than just my deathshrouds walking over – and when I can’t take out a second Dreadknight, that’s enough to tip the game in Garrett’s favor. Working in my favor is that Garrett has some real bad psychic tests and I manage to deny 2 casts of Purifying Ritual for him to deny 2 VP during the game, but fall short on the third one (I roll a 6 when I need a 7). We grind it out until turn 5 when Garrett is able to get off all the casts he needs to put himself over on Engage with 3 points. With smarter play I could have completely blocked him out of my deployment zone but he can probably still kill my wounded PBC even if I block him out. As-is, that gives him a 73-72 win and it would have been 72-67 even if I’d done that better since I’d have only prevented 1 point and forced him to kill the PBC. A very close game and a tough loss for me but Garrett’s a great guy and a pleasure to play. After round 5 I was very, very glad to be playing a friend in a game where we could both just relax.

Result: 72-73, Loss

Day 2 is in the books and I’m not officially out of contention for anything meaningful prize-wise. I’m still well ahead of my New Orleans result though, since I know that the 2-2 bracket winners are capped at rankings/ITC scores below the 3-1 bracket players, even if they go 0-4. My goal at this point is to try and win both games tomorrow to finish 6-2 again, but I’ll be happy with 5-3.  At least, that’s what I tell myself at this point.

For dinner we meet up with the Houston crew again and walk over to a place called Russian House. It’s a Russian bar, with Russian food. I get the Chicken Kiev and a #5 Balthika beer. The food is pretty solid. James and Bill swing by again to meet up with us and drink more. It’s a fun time and we hang out for a few hours before heading back to the hotel to crash again. I’m absolutely exhausted.

Next Time: The Amazing Conclusion

Come back tomorrow for the conclusion of my epic saga, wherein I talk about Games 7 and 8, getting mad as hell at dice, and what’s next for my stupid Death Guard army. In the meantime if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.