TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2024, Part 12: Days 1 and 2 of the Dallas Open

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing log of personal, hobby, and competitive progress for Warhammer 40,000. Last time around I talked about going to the Asgard RTT and finally snagging a first-place finish for the first time in my competitive Warhammer career. After a promising warm-up event that weekend, it was time to take my Death Guard to the big stage.

I’m going to go over my list one more time, so if you’re wondering what I ended up on, it’s the same as last week.

The List

Here’s what I ran at the RTT and the Dallas Open GT. It’s more or less the final version of what I’ve been playing with these last few weeks, with a decent amount of mobility and punch.

My US Open Dallas list - click to expand

The strategy is the same as ever – Mortarion supports the three PBCs as I push forward and use their combined might with the plague marines to overwhelm threats. There’s a solid amount of mobility here, and I have the Nurglings for actions and the Deathshroud as a backfield threat while the mortars can clear a space for them as needed. The changes here from the Oxford GT were swapping out a unit of Deathshroud with a Lord of Virulence for a Blight-Hauler and a Fleshmower.

Wednesday: Final Event Prep

I don’t have a ton of work to do to prep for the event but I didn’t have a ton of time, either. I used the time to do a bit more work on my second Biologus Putrifier.

More importantly, I did a small training session with my wife and our son. For the first time, I’m bringing him with me to a GT, along with the missus. She came to KC and Tampa with me last year, but this is the first time I’ll be bringing my boy to a GT. To give him something to do, I’ve enrolled him in the hobby competition for this event, which means he’ll be working on a small model/diorama of his own over those days. That said, he’s seven years old, and not quite in the space where we can trust him with a hobby knife. So I sit him and my wife down on Wednesday after school and walk them through the basic process of clipping, trimming, and assembling a model with a couple of space marines.

The general plan is that my wife will help Bryce do the trimming and assembly for the project – with Bryce’s supervision and guidance – and then after it’s primed he’ll be tasked with painting it. I can bring him to the event with me each morning around 9am, let him hang out at the table with me for a bit, then when she arrives at the venue, she’ll swing by and take him to the hobby station, where he can work on his project.

The hotel prices for the Esports Arena in Arlington were pretty crazy, so we opted to rent a house for the event instead. We found a solid five-bedroom place about a mile down the road from the arena, and we split that with a number of my friends from the Astros Militarum team. Specifically Erik, Andrew, Dan “Swiftblade” Richardson, Klobasnek, and Vinay. Turns out the arena and the house were both right down the road from Six Flags so my initial plan was to leave early Thursday morning (around 7am) to drive up, take Bryce to Six Flags, and then hit the house up around 4pm after a day at the park. It was a lot, but I like roller coasters and so does he. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be – the forecast called for pretty substantial thunderstorms all day Thursday.

Thursday

I live on the north side of Houston but even with that it’s nearly a four-hour drive to the GW venue in Dallas. With our original plans to visit Six Flags scuttled, we instead opted to drive up after lunch, which would put us on pace for a 5pm arrival, give or take. Of course, that plan would shift a bit as we hit those thunderstorms we’d seen on the forecast. Turns out it was a lot of rain, plus some insane tornadoes and wind – the northwest side of Houston got hit pretty hard in particular. We drove right through a bunch of the storm on our way up, spending about two hours driving through thunderstorms and occasionally heavy sheets of rain. It never got dangerous enough for us to pull over, but we cleared the worst of it in the first half of our drive.

We ended up losing about half an hour to traffic and weather, arriving at the house around 5:30 and just after Dan and Andrew. We start staking out rooms and unpack the car, while I order a pizza and some dinner to scarf down. Food options near the Dallas stadium complex (all of their stadiums are in the same four-block radius) aren’t great, but they aren’t terrible, either and I get some pizza that’s pretty damn good. It’s more NYC/Italian-style, with the kind of crispy crust with solid leoparding* that’s damn tasty.

*Leoparding is the term for when black bubbles form on the crust while cooking. These tend to indicate the dough was allowed to properly ferment at cold temperatures.

Dan, Andrew, Bryce, and I hop into Dan’s car and we head over to the venue for some early check-in and to see the big Spearhead exhibition match between Cesaro and Kip Sabian. Check-in goes pretty smoothly – Bryce gets his model (it’s a Fusil-Major on Ogor Warhulk) and the theme: “The One vs. The Many.” Cool. We pick up our badges, and I get the swag. I don’t normally spring for the premium ticket but since we drove I won’t have any problems getting things back home so I snagged one. The models are fine – I don’t play either army so they’ll end up in the Goonhammer Open prize bin – but I was very pleasantly surprised by the new swag this year.

The Swag Bag

Well, most of it – they gave out a lot of Fyreslayer dice and I can only assume that’s because they couldn’t move those at retail. But those two black boxes are worth mentioning.

That big black box had a bunch of cool stuff in it – the Gamer Pack (the small black box in the first photo) was in there, plus a moleskine notebook with a pen for taking notes, a bunch of stickers, a metal GW die, a poker chip/objective marker, and a commemorative coin.

The Gamer Pack was the coolest part of all this, featuring a set of deployment zone markers, 6″ rulers, dial wound counters, and a 3″/2″/1″ measuring tool (slightly magnetic). The bits here all felt pretty high quality and I ended up using several of them over the weekend.

As a collection of stuff, this was very solid, and I liked it a lot more than the stuff Games Workshop normally hands out. I don’t need several of them, but I’m glad I signed up for the deluxe ticket this time around.

The Venue and Streaming Event

The Thursday night preview is going in full swing when we walk in, showing off new models from Age of Sigmar’s 4th edition. It’s a very cool space, with a bigass stage and some great lighting. It’s big enough for he planned events, but not big enough to grow – and that’s also fine. We’re guaranteed to not need any “shadow rounds” to get a true winner in our top 16 for 40k, and that’s ideal. It’s lame as hell when events don’t have enough rounds to accommodate the number of players.

We also meet up with Thomas “Goatboy” Reidy, one of my favorite people and universally beloved in the Texas scene. Hugs are exchanged, kind words tossed back and forth, and reintroductions are made to my son, who doesn’t remember Thomas.

Speaking of which, he’s having a good time – I bought him the Joytoy Invictor at the GW store but at the moment he’s absolutely obsessed with the sniper rifle they have out – a modified Nerf Longstrike. Side note: The Longstrike is one of the best nerf guns ever made. Not because it was particularly good as a nerf gun – it has dogshit range and accuracy – but because it was amazing for making cosplay guns.

About 20 minutes after the preview ends we finally get the wrestlers, when Kip Sabian and Claudio Castagnoli (Cesaro to me) walk out for their streamed game of Spearhead. Claudio flexes pretty hard by posing with the metal warhammer they keep at the events and trust me when I tell you that thing is really fuckin heavy – Andy Talbot is not doing any extra work to sell how much that thing weighs and I was actually mildly surprised Castagnoli could lift it over his head one-handed.

Anyways the game itself is just whatever. I’m not a fan of watching streamed games of Warhammer, and watching from the floor was even worse, so we left about thirty minutes in. For the record, I’ve played Spearhead before and I think it’s a pretty great game, so if you get a chance to try it out, give it a go. GW ran a special Spearhead tournament at the Dallas Open on Friday and Saturday night, and we’ll have write-ups of that event from Swiftblade and Kevin Stillman.

We head back to the house and Bryce enjoys a late bedtime. Everyone else has arrived and we swap accounts of the drive, since everyone had to deal with varying levels of pretty brutal weather on the way up. Klobasnek it turns out won’t be making it – not only did he have a bit of a family health emergency, a tornado going through Houston also downed two trees in the yard next to his. Also, big chunks of Houston are without power. Our house is OK (we have a back-up generator), but some of the Astros Militarum are going to be clearing out their freezers when they return.

Friday: Rounds 1-3

I make some team breakfast – one of the key benefits to renting a house is that we’ve got a kitchen and fridge – and that makes it easy for us to do things like cooked breakfasts and bag lunches. So our plan for the week is to get a bunch of potato rolls and lunch meat, some sliced tomatoes and lettuce and bags of chips, and we can have sandwiches every day. For breakfast I’ve brought about three dozen eggs and some breakfast sausage, so we do scrambled eggs, sausage, toast, and fruit for breakfasts every morning. It’s a solid meal plan, and it’ll save us a ton of money on venue food, not to mention it’s healthier than eating stadium concessions.

While I’m walking around to find my table for round 1, I run into Ryan, who recognizes my username and the Gregbot icon. He’s a fan of the site and an all-around cool guy and we chat for a bit. I told him I’d put this photo online, so Ryan, here ya go.

Alright, there’s a lot to cover here and I want to change things up a bit from my usual recap by focusing more on battle plans and key mistakes. I played one really tough game on Friday and two games which were quite a bit more lopsided. That said, while the field at Dallas wasn’t as strong competitively as some of the other GW events I’ve attended (AoW weren’t even there – they were attending a local teams event instead), my usual strategy of “don’t play anyone good until rounds 4+” did not work out and I’d get paired into two of the better players on the Astros Militarum team in my first four rounds.

So let’s jump into Round 1, and my opening game against Thousand Sons.

Round 1: vs. Charles Somerville’s Thousand Sons

Charles is running Thousand Sons with three units of Rubrics, a Winged Daemon Prince, a Mutalith, and a War Dog.

Charles' List - Click to Expand

I’ve played against Thousand Sons recently and they’re a difficult matchup – they can hit really hard, and for my money I think Charles’ list hits harder than Erik’s and has more durability – Erik’s list is better at doing actions and scoring points, however. My primary goal is to avoid taking a shot of double doombolts on turn 1 to Mortarion or a PBC; I can live with Doombolts to a Rhino, especially if they’re placed where the marines inside can get out without being warpflamered off the table. So the plan is to bait that out, then counterpunch from a safe distance. If Magnus isn’t available on turn 1, my priority list is the Mutalith, Daemon Prince, and as many Rubrics as I can kill, in that order. Charles puts his War Dog into reserves, which is about what I expected him to do.

The Mission: Scorched Earth – Chilling Rain – Dawn of War

The Plan: Normally spreading out too much is a bad thing, but the Thousand Sons aren’t great at it either, and Plague Marines can challenge them well on a unit-per-unit basis. The plan is to commit a rhino of marines to each side objective, burn one early, and focus on the other while contesting the middle. The left side Rhino is placed where it can eat some early Doombolts, but everyone inside can get out safely on the other side of the wall. If I can cut 5-6 Cabal Points off Charles’ list early I’ll be in decent shape, and it’ll just be a matter of whittling the Rubrics down from there. If I can’t take Magnus out early, I’ll ignore him. I’m on Rattlejoint Ague (-1 to saves) for this game.

How it Went: I lost the roll-off and went second. Charles played it safe with Magnus, keeping him back, but brought up the Mutalith and the Daemon Prince. They popped the Rhino, forcing the guys inside to get out, but didn’t do much more than that. On my turn, I Advanced one unit of Putrifier lads forward to double grenade the Daemon Prince, but only scored 5 mortal wounds on him total. I threw a lot into the DP and the Mutalith but had a pretty abysmal turn on the dice, and both survived. I did manage to whittle down some Rubrics in the upper left using the Fleshmower, but didn’t score the blow I needed as both monsters survived – the DP on 3 wounds and the Mutalith on 2. That said, I do capture the objective on the right side of the table, and at this point it’s largely uncontested as the Rubrics near it teleport away using the Umbralefic Crystal. I’ll end up burning it on a later turn.

The Daemon Prince punishes me by dropping the Fleshmower, while the Mutalith makes a doomed attempt to take down Mortarion and is killed in the resulting combat. It’s on this turn however in which Charles makes his biggest mistake: He walks his Rubrics with Ahriman off his home objective, pressing them forward to get line of sight on Mortarion. Before he can Temporal Surge back to it, I use Rapid Ingress to drop Typhus and his crew onto the objective, out of charge range from Magnus.

This is a brutal blow for Charles, who now has to decide if he’s going to spend his cabal points to come back and make a rough attempt to take out 1-2 Deathshroud (who will then murder him) or if he’s going to keep with his plan to try and take out Mortarion. He opts to try working Mortarion but only gets another few wounds chipped off. On my turn I’ll end up drawing and scoring Capture Enemy Outpost then using the Deathshroud to sticky the objective, charge the Rubrics from behind, and wipe them out.

I lose a ton of units – Magnus will eventually drop Mortarion – but ultimately I’m way too far ahead on primary (50-15) and secondary scoring (37-24) for it to matter. Charles only has Magnus left at the end of the game, and while I’ve made some attempts to chip him down, that’s only because I was trying to score No Prisoners and Storm Hostile on the final turn.

Result: 97-49, Win

I score my first win. It was an ugly game, but I’m pretty proud of spotting Charles’ mistake with his home objective. If he hadn’t left that open I’d have had to wait a turn to get on there, dropping the Deathshroud and using them to wipe the squad from the side, but as-is it gave me a very solid opening.

We eat some sandwiches using the stuff we brought and I check in with the missus, who’s working with Bryce on his diorama. It’s shaping up to be pretty large and I suspect they’ve bitten off more than they can chew, but it looks pretty cool so far. I check standings and I’m up against Garrett Moore, one of the better players on the Astros Militarum. I’ve lost several games to him before, as he has a habit of getting insanely good luck against me in weird situations – he never seems to fail a charge against me, even when I’m putting him on an 11+ out of Deep Strike with Death Guard. He’s got some lovely Space Wolves, and Nick Nanavati swings by to ask if we want to play on stream and I, like a fool, agree.

Round 2: vs. Garrett Moore’s Space Wolves

Why did I agree to this? I have never won a game playing on a GW stream. Anyways, Garret’s running a “Wolf Jail” Space Wolves list. The concept here is to jam a shitload of Thunderwolves and Wulfen down your opponent’s throat, and while they’re trying to dig out you run around the table scoring secondary missions and holding objectives. I really do not want to go second against it, so naturally that’s what will end up happening.

Garret's List - Click to Expand

This list is extremely unfun to play against, basically asking “can you plow through 60 wounds of 4++ save Wulfen and 100 wounds of Thunderwolf Cavalry with 4++ saves in 2 rounds?” And the soft answer is “not really, no” – but I can get through enough if I get some decent opportunities.

The Plan: I can’t do much about the invulnerable saves but I can ignore their toughness and shove a bunch of anti-infantry shooting down their throats, and grenades work well here. I opt for Skullsquirm Blight (-1 to WS/BS) as the saves modifier won’t do me much good. I want to stop the Wulfen and TWC from getting too far turn 1 and put my Nurglings at midtable to prevent them from going more than 9″ away from their DZ turn 1 and in the process I forget about Scrambler Fields, placing a unit on the objective. This doesn’t matter, but when I realize I offer Garrett a concession and he graciously declines. This was a huge mistake on my part anyways. Anyways the plan is to hold them to midtable turn 1, then meet them there and fight over the middle rather than my Deployment Zone.

The Mission: The Ritual – Scrambler Fields – Sweeping Engagement

The mission here is really going to fuck me, however – Garrett has a ton of cheap bullshit action units to make objectives with, making the fact that some of his units have OC 0 basically irrelevant. He can create an objective with a bullshit unit, then sticky it with intercessors and never look back.

You can watch the stream of the game here.

I end up going second, and that’s really, really fuckin bad.

How it Went: Remember when I said Garrett had a streak of getting lucky against me? Well turn 1 he draws No Prisoners and A Tempting Target. There’s literally only one objective in no man’s land right now, so he’s scoring a free 9 VP between my Nurglings and that. Great start, completely fucked. He pushes forward with his whole army, and I respond on my turn by snagging Area Denial and rushing up to meet him. That said, my Nurglings plan wasn’t a total wash – it’s kept him to midtable instead of screaming past that with a big advance, and that puts me in a position to charge the Thunderwolves on the center point and score Area Denial. My 10-man Plague Marine unit wipes out both units of Wulfen on the south side of the table, and I clean up the unit of Thunderwolves in the middle of the table.

Turn 2 is when I realize my biggest mistake: You see that PBC on the left there? He’s too close to the ruin, and thus charge-able through it. Garrett drops Grimnar and his TWCs in the lower left corner, then charges through the ruin – this is controversial as he has two wolves which overhang his base by 3″ so we need to get a judge on the call – but of course the bastard makes his 9″ deep strike charge. This is bad, but not insurmountable – Garrett is barely able to kill the PBC when I fail a string of saves and there’s no one else they can touch this turn.

What absolutely kills me dead is my turn 2 secondary draws. I pick up Investigate Signals (unscorable) and Storm Hostile Objective. Normally Storm Hostile is great, but every unit Garrett currently has on an objective is OC 0, meaning that I can’t actually take an objective he controls. So I spend 1 CP and hock Investigate Signals and instead draw Bring it Down, which is also completely fucking unscorable. So I have to eat a 0-point secondary turn on round 2, and there is no coming back from that against a player as good as Garrett.

It’s all pretty much downhill from here, and there aren’t any plays I have left to dig out. I could potentially throw my Rhino over to Grimnar – Nanavati thinks this is the play, but I’m not so sure as I’d rather Grimnar and co come to me to die than commit units back over to my home objective. That’s what happens, and I use the opportunity to score No Prisoners for 5 wiping the squad with Mortarion and Typhus and his lads. But on Turn 3 I also drew A Tempting Target, which is also fuckin impossible to score on this mission.

I nearly table Garrett and still have a chance heading into the final round… until Garrett does what he always does. He has a single Scout in deep strike waiting to Battle-shock and on the final turn draws Behind Enemy Lines and Area Denial. I don’t have a unit already wholly within 6″ of the middle, so he scores 3 free VP for that, and then scores 3 for Engage when his Scout comes down and passes the battle-shock test. 6 free VP to put the game out of reach. I need a 13-point turn to catch up, meaning I need Capture Enemy Outpost and a 5-point secondary and instead I draw fuckin Engage (5) and Defend Stronghold (3), the worst secondary to get in this case. I’ll lose 98-88 in a game I really think I could have won.

Result: 88-98, Loss

That was a hard one to swallow. There were a couple of mistakes I made – the Nurglings at midtable was not the right call and the PBC was too close to the wall – but at the end of the day I don’t think either can make up for four completely dead secondary draws. Late in the game I needed to find ways to deny Garrett points but there just weren’t many of those to be had – when he drew Defend Stronghold I couldn’t stop it, as moving my MBH onto his home objective would let him fire off a reactive move to keep holding it. I think best-case, I hold the Nurglings and trade 4 points of No Prisoners from Garrett for 4 points of Signals but then I don’t clear Bring it Down out of the pool.

We finished a bit late so we quickly head into round 3 where I get a bit of a breather against Chaos Knights.

Round 3: vs. Joshua Mobley’s Chaos Knights

Chaos Knights can be a pain but ultimately I’m not worried about them – I need to prevent them from getting turn 1 charges off but otherwise if they can’t I can delete 3-4 per turn and a single one isn’t really a match for Mortarion.

Joshua's List - Click to Expand

The Mission: Priority Targets – Hidden Supplies – Search and Destroy

The Plan: We’ve got Hidden Supplies this mission (6 objective markers), so I opt for Fixed secondaries with Bring it Down and Cleanse. Cleanse is a bit rougher than I’d like here since Josh can kill Nurglings with Havoc launchers and I’ll admit I should have just deep struck the Nurglings on later turns for Cleanse. Anyways the plan is to set up too far away for a turn 1 charge, kill 3-4 War Dogs turn 1 and another 3-5 on turn 2, and by that point Josh will run out of steam. I think I need the AP here so I took Rattlejoint Ague but in retrospect Skullsquirm Blight was probably a better play. Likely a wash.

How it Went: I won the first turn roll-off and used that to reposition along the south edge of the table and line up some Cleanses while chipping away a bit at the War Dogs, taking one down. Josh charged across the board and took some shots and was able to clear off my Rhinos and the Fleshmower for an 8-point Bring it Down turn (ouch), but gave up any Cleanse points to do that. I retaliated on my turn by killing a five more war dogs with a mix of PBCs, Grenades, and Mortarion. I can afford to go blow-for-blow here as my units just don’t cost nearly as much, and losing half his army by turn 2 really slows Josh’s clapback.

Josh will eventually snag a PBC kill with a Karnivore but I’ll keep chipping away and by the end of the game he’s sitting on only a couple of War Dogs. I maxed Bring it Down early but got sloppy and only scored 10 on Cleanse, though that’s more than enough. This was a game where Josh needed to play a bit more cagey – he went all out on turns 1 and 2 hoping to swing big, and ended up eating five dead War Dogs as a result – and right in the middle of his army, meaning what was left was divided and split across the table.

Result: 85-58, Win

I finish Day 1 at 2-1. Disappointing, but with only 28 players on 3-0 going into day 2 we’re going to have three spots open for 3-1 players to make the cut, so with a bit of luck that can be me.

Next Time: Days 2 and 3

That’s it for the first part of my write-up but check back tomorrow for the next article, when I’ll wrap up my experiences, talk about my finish, and show off the hobby project my wife and son worked on. Until then, if you have any questions or feedback, drop me a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.