Welcome back, Dear Reader, to the log of my ongoing Warhammer 40,000 journey through 2022. Last time around I talked about day 2 at the GW US Open event in Kansas City and finishing my first six games 3-3, with a trio of heartbreaking losses to Tyranids. Today I’m going to finish out the story of my adventure, talk about how things ended up, and offer some final thoughts.

Day 3

I sleep even worse after day 2 – heartburn – but manage to get in a few hours before Thomas and I have to get up and do it all over again. Despite his loss to Mani yesterday Thomas has a good shot at the top 8 if he can win another game. I’m just hoping for a winning record after some brutal close losses on days 1 and 2. So far my three losses have been by a combined 10 VP.

We head down to the hotel bar to get breakfast – today we’re crushing some french toast – and then hit up the gaming hall. Neither of us have meaningful games ahead of us, save for saving face, though we basically have to play them – if you drop early from a GW event now you drop a full bracket in the standings, meaning it’s very plausible I could end up way lower. And I wouldn’t mind being higher in those standings than I currently am, anyways.

Round 7: vs. Robert Bolter’s Creations of Bile

Robert’s list is hilarious and noteworth because it includes four Terrax Termite Pattern Assault drills. Absolutely wild.

Robert's list - click to expand

Creations are always a tough matchup because they can be so damn fast but I like my odds against CSM generally and I’ve taken them on before with Dan Richardson’s list. This is another one where I’m back on my Wrath of Magnus bullshit and scoring early and often. Abaddon is a bit of a concern in that he’s a chore for me to kill in a single turn – my experience is that melee wounds are real hard to come by – but he’s also slow and I can avoid him most of the game.

The Mission: Secure Missing Artefacts

The objective wrinkle here isn’t great but I can pull one of his objectives out of cover. I win the roll-off and pick the “wheel” position to move two objectives and use that to keep some further apart.

My Secondaries:

• Psychic Interrogation
• Wrath of Magnus
• Raise the Banners high

Robert’s Secondaries: 

• Specimens for the Spider
• Assassination
• No Prisoners

I’m back on my bullshit after a couple of games away and looking at another opponent who will likely score a lot of points by killing me but fall short thanks to what will (hopefully) be an early lead. The big challenge is going to be that Robert only has two characters to Interrogate, but hopefully I can keep them alive long enough to punish him. He also has almost no denies, so Wrath is a free 15 and I don’t have to actually overdo it casting “dead” spells. Going second would help here, but it isn’t crucial.

I’m going first.

Not ideal, but not terrible either. I press my Tzaangor Shaman forward to get a peek into Abaddon’s brain and sit back and throw up banners and cast some random shit to get my Wrath points up. I open up one of his drills turn 1 and teleport my warpflamers to the far upper corner of the table and use it to try and kill his Legionnaire squad. I roll terribly for the number of shots and only kill 2 models – boo – but the unit accomplishes their goal, which is baiting Robert into committing his Daemon Prince to try and kill them.

There’s no model in the game with a bigger delta between “what you’d expect to happen” and “what actually happens” in melee than the Daemon Prince – they always disappoint, and in this case, Robert’s absolutely does. I only lose two rubrics to the daemon prince in combat, and on the following turn teleport the bunch of them away to harass other units later. This means it’ll take the DP a full turn just to get back to his starting position, and another two turns following that to get into combat while the rest of the army moves up.

I’m able to get rid of one Termite per turn, but I can’t kill the Possessed quite as fast as I’d like and they end up taking out a few of my terminators in the process. The real trouble only starts when Abaddon arrives on turn 5, and I do have to worry a little bit about primary scoring when I’m unable to get head to dislodge the drills from the center objective. Still, I manage to get way ahead on Secondary and force Robert to play catch-up all game.

Abaddon finally falls late in the game after nearly destroying a squad of Terminators, though they’re able to teleport back and light him up for the final wounds in the shooting phase. The Daemon Prince doesn’t ever get to be part of the action but helps Robert capture the middle on the bottom of turn 5, and that 12-4 point turn makes the game look closer than it was. Robert only scores 19 total on secondaries with 4 from Specimens and 3 from Assassination.

Result: 77-67, Win

Alright now I’m 4-3 and hopeful I can finish with a winning record. Thomas and I walk over to the nearby mall for lunch and I end up eating Indian food that’s surprisingly decent and has a larger number of vegetables than many other convention lunches I have eaten. Thomas lost his Round 7 game but a good round 8 showing and he can finish in the top 8 with his Creations of Bile list. We head back to the venue for the final round.

Round 8: vs. Robert Moreland’s Astra Militarum Connor Mac Cormick’s Ynnari

Coming into the final round I’m paired against Robert Moreland, from the Dallas group, playing Astra Militarum. He’s got a flight to catch however and has to drop before the final round. That leaves me without an opponent and so I walk over to the judge’s table to get a new one. There are three other players over there: Two in the bottom bracket and Connor, who’s in the 3-1 bracket. This is kind of a no-brainer matchup for the judge in the sense that pairing either Connor or I into the 1-win group is a bad idea, but it also means that I’m getting paired up into someone who’s had a much more successful event.

Connor's list - click to expand

I haven’t played against Ynnari yet but I suspect they play like other Craftworlds, just with some Harlequins and a bigass daemon in them. The Yncarne can be proper annoying but I’m more worried about the sheer volume of bullshit two big units of Troupes can put out.

The Mission: Death and Zeal

This is not the ideal mission for me – I’d prefer more distance between us, and the large non-deployment zone area to work with means it’s harder to screen out Rangers who want to do the Scout secondary. I forward deploy early to keep them off the other objective on my side of the table.

My Secondaries:

• Psychic Interrogation
• Raise the Banners High
• Wrath of Magnus

Connor’s Secondaries:

• Scout the Enemy
• Engage on All Fronts
• Warp Ritual

Wrath isn’t great here but it’s the best of a bad set of options. Grind might have been better but ultimately my hope is that if I can kill the Yncarne early it’ll make things easier. Warp Ritual is a real bad pick for Connor but I’m not about to tell him that. Engage is also a mistake and my hope is that i can score enough on Interrogate and Wrath to make up any differences on primary scoring. Going second would be a big help here, since I want to be able to react on a mission that gives you points for doing so.

I’m going first.

Ah, fuck that’s not good here. I make the most of it, pushing forward enough for a turn 1 Interrogate and pushing out as many powers as I can while throwing up two banners. It’s not really profitable to take the middle right now, though I may regret that later. My big error in this game is starting the Rubrics on the north objective – I put them in the ruin to block a turn 1 charge from harlequins if need be and on the objective, and I should have kept them off so they could walk on and score me 2 VP instead.  On Connor’s turn he presses out with some Harlequins and bikes, and jumps his d-cannons forward to shoot me with line of sight. This actually isn’t a legal move, I’d find out – the D-Cannons surprisingly do not have FLY nor are they INFANTRY, so they can’t pass through walls – but I think this is just an error on Connor’s part and it’s not game-breaking and an easy mistake to make – at Warzone Houston I made a similar mistake with Cabbalistic Rituals that ultimately didn’t affect my games. It might have mattered here but nothing was at stake in our game, so I sent him a note afterwards letting him know.

The Yncarne finally shows up on turn 2 and starts causing me problems, picking up most of a unit of Scarab Occult terminators before I can put it down. Likewise, the first unit of Harlequins is an issue and while I’m able to clear both off my half of the table it’s not before they do more damage than they should thanks to some atrocious saves on my part. I manage to make headway on the middle of the table but my turn 3 psychic phase is an utter disaster and I fail half my casts to end up with only 1 point for wrath after Connor’s psychic phase.

Connor gets a lucky shot off at Ahriman with his Vyper on turn 4 when Ahriman fails every save, and that’s a blow that’s hard to recover from on my part. Turn 5 is similarly brutal as I once again biff most of my casts and roll low on my warpflamer shots, failing to completely kill the other unit of harlequins (they live with 3 models). The final insult to injury comes on Connor’s turn 5 when he’s able to get through a single Warp Ritual cast on an 8 – I fail the 3D6 deny attempt twice against him and that’ll end up costing me the game.

In a familiar refrain, I end up losing by only 2 victory points to Connor. I needed any one of several rolls to go my way to close things out – killing the harlequins on the objective nets me 2 bonus points to tie it, denying the final warp ritual wins it, and getting better casts probably nets me another 2 on Wrath.

Result: 77-79, Loss

I lost four games this weekend by a combined 12 VP and that is absolutely fucking brutal. These were incredibly close games where a single die roll often meant the difference between a win and a loss or at least a tie, and doing four of those in my final six games kind of feels like shit, I’m not gonna lie. Connor was a solid opponent overall, if a bit quiet early on but I get that particular vibe since I was there at the end of day 2.

All in all, I played 8 games against opponents who were all fun to play and easy to get along with and that’s a big win regardless – this was probably the first GT in a while where I can say that, even. At no point did I wish I was playing someone else (though I may have wished to not be playing Tyranids), and there’s no one in the group I wouldn’t play again. Nick and Ben were particularly fun opponents despite playing Tyranids and I had a good time playing against them.

Thomas and I walk over to the hotel bar and get dinner there. The food isn’t bad at the hotel and neither of us feels like walking anywhere, plus Thomas has to leave to catch his flight in two hours. I’m not so lucky – United didn’t have many flights to and from MCI, so I have to fly back Monday morning, though my 8am flight isn’t too bad an option. I grab a hotel bar burger, which is pretty solid. I check on the status of the day’s NFL games. I’ve been following the games all day but now I really get to dig in and see how bad the Cowboys trounced the Bears and check my fantasy scores – I am in a close game against Fowler’s team despite starting an inactive player this week (oops), mostly thanks to Christian McCaffery having a monster week and throwing a TD pass. I’ll end up winning that one after Dawson Knox, my backup tight end filling in for Kelce this week, catches a TD. Then I’ll taunt Fowler merciless about it since he tried to warn me to set my roster before the games, but I missed the message due to being in my round 7 game.

Goatboy’s List

Thomas ended up finishing 7th with his Creations of Bile list, and just generally had a fantastic weekend competitively with a few close calls. We talked about his list a little bit on this week’s Competitive Innovations, but I wanted to include more about it here since I’m a Chaos guy and also since Thomas offered.

Goatboy's list - click to expand

I asked Thomas to write a bit about the list and his experience:

I think the joke from the weekend was there was no way I had this many 3-wound models in an army full of characters and other fun things.  Still it all fit per the army building programs out there and fulfilled my goal of being a very aggressive army.  Thankfully I didn’t hit my “problem” match up until after I got to the top 16 with Mani and his massive amount of flamers mixed with Mortal wounds.  I think he killed almost 19 models in one turn of the game due to very high psychic rolls, damage from bolters, and just his armies desire to murder all my gross friends.

 

I went with this build as it gives me a lot of board control and going 10 man strong units of Possessed meant that if I hit any other assault heavy stuff I could easily control my model pulls to ensure I always kept someone touching the enemy model and let as many “dirty bros” fight on death as I could.  It also meant I covered a ton of the table and gave other armies issues trying to stop me from scoring Grind them Down. Most of the time I took Grind Them Down, Banners, and Specimens of the Spider for my Secondary’s because I am always pushing forward to get into the opponents business and hopefully stealing all their candy.  The Possessed couldn’t advance and charge so most of the time their 10 inch move was used to get on an objective and drop my flag in hopes the enemy would move away due to the nature of dealing with 10 Possessed.  The Terminators would move with the Possessed to create a really nasty little middle murder box full of creepy Marines and Chunky Terminators getting in the way.

 

The Master of Executions was one of the more fun models in the list with his ability to Heroically Intervening 6”, his wounds causing Mortals, and just randomly popping back up after dying.  Most games he earned more than his 65 points whether he punched out a Carnifex or just started chewing thru Admech guys.  I wasn’t a fan of the Bikes as I didn’t feel I could just throw them into the enemy like I wanted too.  They either planned for it or were set up in a way that they had to stay back as a weak 3^rd assault wave.

 

I like to play aggressive armies where the plan is to force opponents into unfortunate decisions – move up to try and get rid of the monsters in the way or get pushed back.  This is why I liked the Bile list as it plays to my style with the ability to be forgiven for getting to close to an army or units that might be too tough for other armies to chew thru.  Plus it let me roll a ton of dice and cackle as I count all the chaos symbols that showed up. It is a simple army and not getting a ton of time to play during the week means I can just shut off my brain and push my plastic toys forward.

 

I already have another version of the list I plan on working on for an upcoming Warzone Atlanta event where I fit in some Chosen and even a beloved Rhino.  Let’s hope I have better luck into Chaos Demons the next time I play them instead of just watching as I fall apart versus a Wound Capped Bloodthirster.

-Goatboy

The Awards Ceremony

We wander back over for the awards ceremony, which I’m not usually big on attending but I have nowhere else to be. I’m not winning anything with a 4-4 record but it’s fun to cheer on the winners and again, I have nowhere to be.

Some of these are expected – Gavin Grigar won the Age of Sigmar event again, wrapping up his Siegler-like run of the year’s events, while some were more surprising – Zaak Karstetter edged out Mani Cheema in the finals by 1 point with his Blood Angels to claim the championship. On an extremely cool note, my round 6 opponent, Ben Frederiksen, went on to win the 2-2 bracket with his Tyranids, taking home the Lieutenant Bracket’s trophy.

On the more hobby-focused side of things, Andrew Gonyo won best overall with his gorgeous T’au army. As he’d already won a golden ticket to the GW Finale at NOVA, that meant his golden ticket went to Kasra Houshidar instead. Kasra did surprisingly well with his extremely beautiful Ultramarines, led by Guilliman, starting 3-1 before finishing with a 5-3 record.

Oh, and some asshole won best painted with his Thousand Sons.

I was absolutely floored by this announcement, but it made my day. Hell, it made my entire week. After walking away from Warzone Houston completely demoralized, it was incredibly validating to get recognition at the GW Open. Was my army the best painted? Actually no – Gonyo’s Tau scored higher, but he won Best Overall and they only do one award per player – but knowing that particular bit actually makes me feel better about the outcome, as I felt that I was competitive on a model-per-model basis with the other top armies but I just didn’t think I could compete without a display board. What put me over the top? Solid OSL effects with an attention to secondary lighting on the bases and other parts of the models, and the fact that every single model in the army had at least one freehand shoulder insignia.

Ironically, while Lennon’s advice didn’t get me to the top 16 or a positive W-L record, it did likely help me win Best Painted, since my Rhino is painted much better than my trio of Chaos Spawn. So thanks for that, John.

I walked around with a big goofy grin for the rest of the event. I won a Sylvaneth Battletom from the prize bin as well, but immediately gave it to Joseph “JoeK” Krier, as I had no use for it. The random prize bin you get 5 seconds to pull something from is probably my least favorite “innovation” from the GW Open events.

The Aftermath

Then it was over. I’m not usually around for this part – most of the time I’m booking it out of there to get home the same evening, so it was interesting to see the GW crew break everything down. Zach and I talk for a bit about the narrative and the event. His team did a fantastic job with his event, working well as a solid team and handling issues as they came up. Nayden vs. Cheema on the stream table threatened to be a disaster at times but the judges managed to defuse it well and overall the whole thing ran smoothly.

I meet up with John Lennon again and we watch the first half of the Sunday Night Football game (he’s a Packers fan) and talk about our games. John lost in round 5 to Brent Simon in the 4-0 bracket, though he already won a GW event this year – Seattle – so he’s punched his Golden Ticket. I’ll end up catching an Uber to the airport with him and Nanavati and Paul in the morning, since my flight leaves only about half an hour after theirs. Getting packed to go home is always the hardest part; I have a bunch of extra stuff to get back, like a t-shirt, two models, some LEGO kits I bought for my son, plus this trophy. Sadly, something has to stay behind and well, the MDF carrying tray is starting to look pretty rough around the edges. Thank you for your service, tray.

It’s been a hell of a weekend, with good games, good opponents, great bonding opportunities, and highs and lows. It was rewarding and humbling to win Best Painted at the event and it feels like a perfect cap to a year of work spent building, painting, reconfiguring, and retouching my Thousand Sons to get them to this point. Did I want to finish with a better record? Sure. But sometimes those are the breaks, and my losses were close enough that I can legitimately say that one bad decision or roll was the determining factor in each of them, while my wins never felt particularly close.

The flight back is uneventful and the important thing is I’m home for Halloween. It’s my son’s favorite day of the year and this year he’s decided to go as “Jack Skellyton.” The hardest part of taking him trick-or-treating is that he runs full speed between houses and ends up exhausted after like two blocks. Even after three days of standing and walking, I’ve got more than enough energy to follow him around.

What’s Next

I cannot tell you how excited I am for the GW Finale Narrative event in Albuquerque. Everything about it seems so incredibly cool and I am hype as fuck for it. I’m bringing Black Legion and I’m very much aiming to win best painted with them – they’re painted better than my Thousand Sons and I know some of my biggest competition personally – MasterSlowPoke, SRM, ArmorOfContempt, and Jack “BenBooley” Hunter are all incredible painters, so I’ve got my work cut out for me. Watch this space for my next update on paint progress.

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