TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2024, Part 13: Days 3 and 4 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 my first two days in Dallas, braving the storms to arrive and getting in my first three games, finishing 2-1 after dropping a game on stream to my nemesis, Garrett Moore. Today I’m going to cover the back half of the event, my remaining games, and offer some thoughts on what’s next. Let’s dive in.

Saturday

It’s a new day and a new opportunity to make the top 16. At least three players are going to sneak in with 3-1 records, and I’m hoping to be one of them. Unfortunately, my path to 3-1 has one notable obstacle: I’ve once again been paired into one of the better players in my local group, Christian Rice of the Astros Militarum – and he’s on Bully Boyz.

Round 4: vs. Christian Rice’s Orks

Bully Boyz aren’t Wolf Jail, but they’re not far off, really. The plan is to drop 18 meganobz in your face while grots, boyz, and trukks roll around the table scoring other secondary objectives.

Christian's List - Click to Expand

Those Meganobz are a pain in the ass. Two are in transports and the third is going to teleport in. The biggest problem here is that they have a 4+ feel no pain (insane) while they’re in WAAAGH! and Christian will be in WAAAGH! for two whole battle rounds – 2 and 3, most likely. I’m worried about going through their 2+ saves so I take Rattlejoint Ague (-1 saves), but that was likely a mistake here – dropping their WS would likely have been the better play, though Christian makes this assessment while noting that his opponents who took -1 WS/BS lost their games, so I’m not sure on that front. Death Guard lack for strong AP, but Killsaws are only 2 attacks each base and can often run out of steam.

The Mission: Purge the Foe – Crucible of Battle – Chilling Rain

The one time I’m happy to go second, and I get second turn. Yeah, I’d rather have an extra turn of shooting his units before the deep strikers arrive, but getting easier kill more scoring is a great consolation prize. We’re both on Tactical for this mission and I can expect to be in melee turn 2. There is a bit of a rough moment in this game – I ask Christian pre-game if he has any turn 1 deep strikers and he tells me that he does not, then proceeds to drop Snikrot in the back of my deployment zone. While Snikrot isn’t a deep striker this is still, in my estimation, a dick move, and Christian uses it to score 5 VP for Bring it Down on turn 1. Remember that.

I pull completely dead shit on turn 1 – Capture Enemy Outpost and Homers. I could score homers, but rushing to the middle to get killed by Meganobz seems like a dumb idea, so I pull back, kill Snikrot, and pop open a trukk to score Kill More.

This game became a brutal slog. My big mistakes here were not screening out Snikrot and not taking the -1 WS contagion – in retrospect the extra durability would have been better, I think. I managed to kill most of the Meganobz, but Christian absolutely spiked his 4+ rolls, allowing him to keep a warboss in mega armor alive on 1 wound for two whole fucking turns when I needed him dead. Ultimately I lost this one (well, didn’t win it), when Mortarion failed a turn 4, 6″ charge to get to the middle point on the table, where he’d have scored me Overwhelming Force for 5 VP. I hold on to that one because 5 VP is 5 VP.

We pull up to the final turn and I max Primary and score 10 on Overwhelming Force and Assassination, putting me at 89 points and tying the game. There were numerous chances here for me to edge out a victory but they all mostly just came down to bad dice. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Christian played a hell of a game either way.

Result: 89-89, Tie

Welp, that kills my chances at the top 16. Garrett lost to Erik the round after playing me, but Erik made the top 16, along with Andrew “Hero of the Imperium” Corban. Thanks to five 3-1 players making the top 16 (there was a drop), Christian and I both got bumped to the 3-1 bracket. And so in round 5 I got to play my favorite opponent at the event.

Round 5: vs. Michael Mckibben’s Drukhari

Mike was, hands-down, my favorite opponent at the event. Chill guy, fun to play, and made smart plays. Ours wasn’t the closest game I played, but it was easily in a class with the games I played against Garrett and Christian.

Mike's list - click to expand

Mike’s playing Skysplinter Assault, and I played against them recently at the Oxford GT. The plan here is similar – go with -1 WS/BS, use Nurglings behind my marines to keep him on -2 to hit, and try and wipe out haywire/darklance sources before they can cause problems. I put the Nurglings on the table, but in spots where they can follow my marines rather than go ahead of them.

The Mission: Supply Drop – Search and Destroy – Chilling Rain

If there’s one big wrinkle in this mission, it’s here – this mission sucks. The center objective will be the first to go, followed by the one in the lower right. Mike has more than enough movement to challenge either, so I need to play both, more or less. Mike wins the turn 1 roll-off, but draws into capture outpost and overwhelming force turn 1, and I’ve kept everything off objectives. So he blanks on secondary, which is a big help to me. He’ll generally have shit secondary luck this game.

On My turn I pull Assassination and Cleanse, and cleanse two as I move to the middle of the table. I drop all of my plague marines there, meanwhile I send a PBC around the south side of the table to kill Talos. I drop one with shooting and use the mortars to clear out the Darklance Scourges. I hold on to Assassination as a way to stop Mike from getting too aggressive with characters on his turn 2.

This game is pretty back-and-forth. Mike uses his raider and haywire scourges in the lower right to harass me and keep me off that objective for a lot of the game, and it’s a pretty smart move. He wipes my plague marines off the upper left objective with his incubi.

It’s late in the game (bottom of 3) when I make the game’s biggest mistake and almost lose it all. After cutting Lelith’s squad down to just her, I charge her in the ruin with my big unit of Fights First plague marines. Lelith also has fights first so she swings, and Mike spikes his dice, snagging a trio of 6s in the attacks and dropping 12 AP-4 wounds on my unit. I look on in disbelief and pick them all up. I’m so fuckin upset, I walk away from the table for a moment. I’m about to both lose the game (probably) and write about how big a fuckin idiot I am on Goonhammer (true, but for other reasons), just completely eating shit here.

Then on his turn Mike charges Lelith into one of my PBCs and scores two unsaved wounds. I tick off four damage. Mike corrects me – Lelith only does 1 damage per swing.

WHAT??

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

Granted, none of this is on Mike – it’s my dumbass fault for assuming Lelith had a 2-damage attack. We have a talk about it, and Mike very graciously agrees to roll things back, putting Lelith back in combat with the four surviving marines, who kill her. Then I let him adjust strategy and he charges the marines with his Incubi and kills them easily. I believe this is the correct outcome for the game, but Mike absolutely did not have to do this. Now, looking back at the score, I don’t know if it would have mattered – Even with Lelith’s attacks on the PBC I got super lucky on turn 4 and held him to 4 on Bring it Down, while he’d have been unable to score Storm Hostile on turn 5 once I put Mortarion on that objective. I never drew Capture Enemy Outpost but I did clear Mike’s home objective on round 4 and was able to snag the remaining objective on turn 4 for 15 VP. Mike outscored me on primary, 26-25, but drew Secure No Man’s Land and Storm Hostile on turn 5 and couldn’t score either, being forced to settle for 4 VP on Investigate Signals to get to 57. I was already at 58 by the time I drew secondary objectives that round.

Result: 61-57, Win

I cannot say enough nice things about Mike, who was very gracious about my mistake and working with me on it, and we shared a beer and talked a bit after the game.

I also checked in on the missus, who managed to finally finish her build with Bryce and now they’re working on painting the thing. It’s very large.

They’re mostly working with Contrast paints, though we have a few extras Bryce had stashed in his minis case and those are going to be a real lifesaver when it comes to painting things like metal armor. The Contrast paints are a good set for Bryce to work with, though – he’s very good at covering large areas with a single color. Really the two of them just need direction, so I offer some notes on how to apply them. The wife is more a builder than a painter.

At some point, Zach comes around to tell me I’ve made Showcase. I am a bit surprised by this, since Showcase was supposed to be Friday, though my Death Guard have made showcase multiple times before. That said, one of the judges at this event kind of sucks, and really has it in for some armies – the biggest snub of the weekend is Garrett Moore’s Space Wolves, who looked beautiful, have showcased before, and somehow didn’t get an invite. I truly believe this cost Garrett Best Overall (he finished 7-1), and it’s a black mark on the event. His Space Wolves are great and the stream host spent half the game gushing about them.

Round 6: vs. Cam Hawkins’ Blood Angels

Man I am fucking exhausted. I’ve only played five games but three of them were so draining, and the last two in particular have been end-to-end slogs fighting over every point. I see that I’m up against Blood Angels and realize nearly immediately that I am fucked. I can tell by looking at Cam’s list and the decisions he’s made that he’s a very good player, and he confirms that by telling me that this is the list he’s playing after switching up from running Stormravens after he won a GT with them. Let’s look at this war crime:

Cam's List - Click to Expand

That’s 60 fucking space marine bodies to chew through, of which 50 have jump packs. It’s an insane list – you’re going to be in melee on Round 2, and you’re not going to be out of melee for a while. I have no counterplay to this. I basically need to go first, clear at least one unit off the board, avoid getting charged on turn 2, and then kill 2-3 units before he can crash into my lines. Anything else and he’s just going to run through me, or I’ll be retreating so far into my DZ to avoid getting charged that I’ll never dig out. At 12″ movement, he outranges me by 2″ and so can sit just over 22″ away, then dart in for an 8″ charge – if he wants to be supremely conservative.

The Mission: Vital Ground – Crucible of Battle – Chilling Rain

The mission is no help here – there are only two no man’s land objectives, meaning Cam doesn’t have to split his forces at all and even if he did, he’d just be washing through the middle of the table anyways.

I lose the roll-off to go first, and that’s pretty much the game. Cam and I both know how this is going to go. He pushes forward into the staging ruins with his marines. I get a little luck on my turn with A Tempting Target and Extend Battle Lines, scoring 10 VP while killing one DC Dreadnought and most of an Assault Intercessor Squad – though in melee I completely fuckin whiff with my power fists and the sergeant survives, killing three plague marines with his power fist in the process. A terrible portent of what was to come.

Not a lot to say after that. Mortarion gets Oaths’d and despite me dropping Disgustingly Resilient on him for -1 damage, the attacks go Cam’s way and the saves don’t go mine and he dies before he can do any damage. I spend a few turns retreating with my PBCs and trying to thin out Cam’s marines, but I don’t get the luck I need and Cam sweeps through my deployment zone. I use Typhus and co to clear out his backfield and steal his objective, but that’s an easy loss for Cam to eat.

I think my biggest mistakes here were not advancing the Rhino onto the objective down below – that gave Cam a pile-in into my plague marines, albeit one he could only get three guys fighting for – and not taking -1 WS/BS. I tend to focus on -1 to saves against marines but in this matchup I suspect buying some survivability could have been a better play. That said, even if Mortarion survives he’s only going to kill at most five marines in combat. This was a really bad matchup for me and one where I needed to go first.

Result: 50-88, Loss

Welp, I’m beat and also at two losses. That means it’s time to drop. I could play another round or two but it’s just not what I’m into at this point and it means potentially going home early and being able to do a normal evening routine with the boy. I check in on him and the wife, who are hard at work painting when I head to dinner with the Astros Militarum.

Sunday

Sunday is much more lowkey and chill than either Friday or Saturday. I show up, pack up my models left out from Showcase, help Bryce finish off his diorama, and then we wait for the final judging. Erik’s made the final four, where he loses to Colin McDade’s Orks and then beat’s Justin Moore’s Grey Knights to finish uh, third? It’s hard to say – GW rankings are completely fucked and the BCP results are all over the place. Either way, there doesn’t appear to be a third-place trophy, despite there being bronze awards. I dunno man, prizes are the one thing GW events can’t seem to figure out.

Bryce asks me if he’ll get a trophy for his entry. I tell him there aren’t any, but even if there were trophies for this event, I don’t think he’s going to beat Blake Law with his paint job. The diorama he’s got is good but it’s hardly best painted material. That said, it (rightfully) wins Best Story:

They’ve done a hell of a job on this and it’s packed with wonderful little details. Those tentacles are ones Bryce made out of play-doh last year, and while he didn’t do all the assembly, he came up with a lot of great ideas, like having the tree eating a rat and having the little Blaster Master guy being down in the swamp.

He’s very proud of it and I’m very proud of him. As an added bonus, the missus also enjoyed working on it, although she things it was way too much for him to do solo. I suggest that next time she do something much, much smaller.

We’re able to leave around 2 pm and as a result are home by 6:30. We made a couple of pit stops for food and bathroom breaks but otherwise made decent time. I’m completely worn out from the event and it’ll take at least another day for me to get back up to full speed. I feel like I ate better this time around – we did sandwiches all three days and the dinners weren’t too bad – and the house definitely saved us some money while giving us a better sleeping situation with Bryce. It was a good experience overall and I’m excited to go back next year.

Final Thoughts

Whew, what a week of highs and lows. It’s definitely a bit disappointing to finish 3-2-1 after winning my first RTT, but it’s also not exactly shameful – I played four extremely difficult matchups this time around and that’s pretty rare at larger events.

What’s becoming clear to me is that Mortarion no longer really has a place in a competitive Death Guard army. Yeah, there are matchups he helps in but ultimately I’d be much better off with more units and firepower, and the answer in this wolf jail/blood angels/bully boyz meta is probably “Predator Destructors.” I don’t really want to buy those, so I’m likely going to start my shift into Night Lords. I need time to assemble and paint that army, but in the meantime I’ve got older models I can test with. Stay tuned – I’ll see you next Thursday.

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