TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2021, Part 17: The GW Austin Open, Part 3

Welcome, Dear Reader, to the final part of my three-part writeup on my triumphs and travails at the Games Workshop Tournament in Austin. Last time I talked about following up a 3-0 day 1 with a much more draining and contested day 1-2 day 2. Sitting at 4-2 going into day 3 with no chances of prizes on the line, I just wanted a drama-free day of chill games.

I met up with Boon again for breakfast that morning and somewhere along the way we picked up Matt again as well. The hotel has some decent french toast so I have that again for breakfast. Boon’s angling to win both of his games today to finish 4-0 in the 3-1 bracket. I’m definitely more tired of games than I expected to be at this point and I don’t know if that’s because I can’t win anything or if the fatigue from doing events two weekends in a row is setting in.

Game 7: vs. Brad Townsend’s Deathwatch

Brad's list - click to expand

The Mission: Priority Targets

Brad’s got an absolutely gorgeous halved paint scheme army he’s running as Deathwatch using the new Army of Rewnown. That means two kill teams filled with heavy bolters that can autowound me with their hit rolls and shoot on AP-2 in Devastator Doctrine. That’s pretty rough, but the good news for me is that we’re playing on Priority Targets, a mission that caters to my army’s desire to occupy the middle of the table. And while teleporting around is a concern for me, the lack of long-ranged firepower from a Redemptor or Attack Bike group means I don’t have to play quite as defensively around my PBCs.

My Secondaries:

• Priority Target
• Spread the Sickness
• Stranglehold

Brad’s Secondaries

• Priority Target
• Stranglehold
• Oaths of Moment

I think I can score 9 on Spread here so that’s where I’m going over No Prisoners. The other two make sense as I try to hold the middle objective. For Brad Oaths is also a no brainer but a lot of this will depend on his ability to take out my Blightlords early or else he’s not going to be able to win the middle of the board game.

I’m going Second.

Brad puts one of his big Aquila teams in a Teleportarium and spends CP on turn 1 to do the same with his Eradicators, which have been combat squadded into a separate group.

Going second isn’t the end of the world here but it does slow me a bit. I need a more measured approach here to ensure that my Blightspawn can’t be ignored by an opponent trying to play around him. Brad rushes forward and takes shots at my Fleshmower, taking it off the table (I got too aggressive with it again), but spending 3 CP to do so for his autowound strategy. That’s fine by me – it can only be used once per game per unit so baiting it out on the 135-point fleshmower is better than worrying about it on the Blightlords. On my turn 2 I rumble forward out of the ruins and delete all but two models from his large Aquila team while taking out some vanguard veterans with mortars. The Vanvets aren’t a massive threat but they are a concern.

Brad’s second turn is my favorite kind: Where the opponent goes all out on a do-or-die strategy, only to break against my army and face oblivion. No longer in Devastator doctrine, His second Aquila squad arrives on the table and attempts to shoot my Blightlords. They fire up a whopping 4 CP for the Aquila stratagem and the ability to be in all four doctrines, and they have the benefit of a Captain’s Aura. But I have 3 models in cover plus Miasma of Pestilence up. 3 Assault Cannons and 4 Heavy Bolters pour into my squad, delivering 30 shots and scoring 17 wounds. My models in cover here perform admirably and I spike my saves a bit, taking only 5 wounds from the volley, losing one model and taking 2 wounds on another.

That’s essentially the game. Brad’s able to tie my models up for a turn with his vanvets and chaplain when they make enough 4+ saves to stay on the table but I wipe them out in my psychic phase and plow forward while using the plague marines and deathshrouds to clear out the rest of the middle. 5 plague marines with a flail are more than good enough to take on some eradicators. I’ll end up nearly tabling Brad en route to a a 94-60 win. Brad was an excellent opponent with a beautiful army and was very fun to play against.

Result: 94-60, Win

We grab lunch and wait for the results of game 7 to come in. Mostly we’re looking at the Siegler vs. Lennon matchup, which is still going. Mani comfortably won his matchup and we’ve all been kind of rooting for Siegler vs. Cheema in the finals since we learned Mani was coming to the US for this. See, the Brits on our team like to hem and haw about the American meta and talk about how every event is filled with easy matchups and how many good competitors there are in the UK and so on and so forth. And while US events do spread player talent out more, there’s plenty of tough matchups at RTTs and smaller regional GTs in Maryland, Texas, Southern California, Florida, or anywhere in the Midwest, where players like Boon and Chase and Cherwien will drive 8 hours to play 5 rounds. So round 8 here is basically an opportunity for the best player in the US to take on the best player from the UK.

Siegler’s match ends in a 92-92 tie about ten minutes before the new round. He sits at our table as we talk round 6 and houses a pair of pretzel sticks. They’re not bad – I just had the same lunch – but it’s like 15 dollars for two of them, which is kind of insane. He’s dialed in to his next match. We talk for a few minutes about his Drukhari list and I mention to Boon that Siegler told me earlier that playing Drukhari was “like playing on easy mode. I don’t even have to try with this army.” To prove a point, Siegler will go on to completely dumpster Mani in the finals.

Game 8: vs. Bryce Chapman’s Harlequins

Bryce's list - click to expand

Bryce has a beautiful Harlequins army full of great conversions. Every single model has a different pose or face, or something to make them stand out. He’s done a great job painting them. He’s also a wonderful opponent. I walk into the game overconfident, thanks to the last time I played Harlequins at the Lone Star Open. Bryce has already beaten Death Guard twice at this event, and that should have given me more pause. Still, the matchup favors me, so long as the dice don’t go too bad.

The Mission: Sweep and Clear

The mission favors me too – I love being able to hold the middle. The challenge will be holding the rear – the Harlequins can get behind me pretty easily if I’m not careful and wreak havoc on my backlines.

My Secondaries: 

• Direct Assault
• Stranglehold
• Grind Them Down

Bryce’s Secondaries: 

• Retrieve Octarius Data
• Engage on All Fronts
• Assassination

Grind is the one I’m not sure on and in retrospect I should have taken Assassination. Otherwise this is very doable for me but it all hinges on removing the bikes as quickly as possible. If I can do that I’ll be in good shape.

I’m going first.

I need this extra movement to get out, and the Poxwalkers oblige with a long advance that puts them on the middle objective without my having to advance the Blightlords. Unfortunately nothing else goes right from here – I get 0 wounds on the bikes with my PBCs, and they’ll proceed to fuck up my whole day from there. They charge my upper left along with a couple of Troupes and destroy the Rhino, which I pay 2 CP to force to explode, killing a few harlequins, and the Fleshmower, which also explodes and gets a couple more. My plague marines acquit themselves well here though and survive the initial drubbing to wipe most of his models off the objective, though 6 bikes survive and they’ll spend all game tagging up my PBCs with no consequence.

And this is where everything goes horribly wrong. None of my dice roll well after this. I fail all my saves, whiff most of my shots. Fail every morale test (and there are multiple). I manage to, through sheer volume of dice, clean out and keep the middle clean but wave after wave of fusion pistols constantly rolling 6 damage (Bryce’s dice were also hot, to boot) take their toll. The backbreaker moment game-wise is when I charge a lone Solitaire with 5 plague marines for supremacy of the upper left corner. I clear 3 troope members off in shooting, then charge the Solitaire with all five, popping the Trench Fighters stratagem for extra attacks. Yes, he’s got a 3+ invulnerable save but I’m wounding on 2s re-rolling 1s so I’m hoping to make this work with sheer volume. It doesn’t I end up whiffing most of my attacks and only get a single 2-damage wound through. Then the Solitaire fights, spikes his wounds and I fail my saves to lose 4 plague marines, and then I roll a 6 on morale and the last model flees. This costs me Stranglehold, Grind, and 10 points on primary, swinging the game to the tune of 21 points I’ll never recover from.

This is incredibly demoralizing and nothing goes well afterward. The Harlequins clean out my backfield – my Poxwalkers make an attempt to clear out his last two bikes before it’s too late, only to score a single mortal woundfrom Mutant Strain while losing 4 models, and my center-objective terminators are too far to take back the objective which, thanks to the “lock-in” – something I remind Bryce about when he contemplates leaving his models on the objectives (people either forget that rule all the time or just never know it exists) – he can just leave unattended for the rest of the game. At this point I’m not having a good time. Nothing’s going right and I’m out of options and it’s game 8 with nothing on the line.

Turn 5 rolls around and I do the accounting. Bryce is up 84-70 and there’s nothing I can do here to adjust that. Still, I start the turn hoping to claw out any more points for Grind and promptly perils on my first roll of the psychic phase. Fuck it, that’s it. I’m out. I give Bryce full points for Assassination (I have 2 unprotected wounded characters left) and call it. I’m so absolutely fucking done with this game. Bryce wants to talk about what could have been different but honestly I’m not interested. I tell him I need five minutes to just cool off. This game was miserable on my end and while there were a couple of tactical errors there wasn’t much I felt like mattered on my end after I whiffed on the bikes and that Solitaire survived.

Result: 70-93, Loss

And that’s it. I take my five minutes, shake Bryce’s hand and wish him a safe trip home, apologize for being a bit of a downer, and start packing up. I finish 36th at the event, which is a marked improvement from New Orleans, but it feels like a wash since on the balance I won fewer games and lost the last one. Mostly I’m exhausted and very glad my wife is driving on the trip home. It was a good weekend of warhammer and I played and met some cool people – I finally got to meet Russell Tassin in person and he’s absolutely wonderful – and I improved, standings-wise, on my performance in New Orleans. But days 2 and 3 really took it out of me and I feel like I only got to where I am playing weaker armies on day 1.

Looking back I probably shouldn’t blame my loss on the dice – I definitely needed to play the northern objective more aggressively – but I also needed to get more out of my PBCs in order to have any chance of keeping my bloat-drones on the table. Thinking about my win against Harlequins at the Lone Star Open, a lot of that came from, ironically, playing a mission where there was less room to move laterally, and from being lucky enough to keep a bloat-drone on the table through haywire shooting. But splitting this army’s resources is a constant struggle and one that characterizes a lot of my losses – it’s a structural issue with the army as much as it’s about play decisions.

So What’s Next?

That’s a really good question. I’m pretty sick of my Death Guard now. They’ve been great, and I enjoyed playing them as a faction, but it’s time to move on to something else. Mostly I think my army in particular just Doesn’t Work Well. I’ve noticed that when it does win games, it tends to do so by scoring in the mid-80s, where successful armies are pulling down 90-100. Often I start games not even expecting to score that many points, giving up 3-6 on Spread, 5 on To the Last, etc. This means that when I do win games they tend to be lower-scoring and that’s both bad for me when it comes to tournaments and just also means my army isn’t good enough at scoring Secondary Objectives.

There’s potentially some play to be had here in adjusting the army and adding more Deathshrouds or Blight-Haulers or what have you but honestly I’m just not that invested in continuing. I’m not going to get best-in-faction with them, especially now that the army is above-average at best from a tier standpoint. But I still have an event or two to go before this series is done, one of which will be LVO. So right now I’m looking at picking up Thousand Sons or maybe going back to Chaos Space Marines. Night Lords seem like they’ve got some real play now. But I know the former is competitive and the latter will still be an uphill climb so I’m on the fence. In the meantime, I’ve been painting Rubrics.

Next time I’ll be testing one of these two armies in preparation for a local RTT. Until then, if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.