Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2024. Last time around I got in a practice game with my Thousand Sons against Imperial Knights and finished painting a unit of Raptors. This week I’m back with some hobby progress.
Unfortunately my weekend filled up completely with various children’s birthday parties, including my own, and that more or less obliterated any time I had to play another practice game. Which is a shame, both because I would have liked to get in more reps and because I like having a game to talk about every week. But I still ended up with ample time for hobby progress, and that brings me to two key updates this week. The first is the final Rubric I needed to paint for my Thousand Sons:
I previously had only three Soulreaper Cannons for the army – I was running four Warpflamers in Ahriman’s unit – and while that was fine, it was a bit suboptimal, and in particular I didn’t like having a unit with a different loadout; it was just asking to accidentally mess up the shot counts at some point. The Thousand Sons have quite a few rules like that and remembering when and how to do things like using rituals is super important.
With that Rubric done my army is ready to go. I have a pseudo display board set up for them – it’s not amazing, but it gets the job done. I don’t have a full desert-themed board to use for them and while I could cobble something together before Saturday I’m not that invested in doing so – the army looks great and a half-assed display board isn’t going to improve things.
On the other side of my hobby progress, I’m still plugging along with my Night Lords. This time around I painted Anrac Shan, my Night Lords Chaos Lord with Jump Pack. Shan is a veteran of the long war and the lord of his own warband of renegade raiders, the Crimson Talon. After Kaervek fled the Szarbryne system, he needed to lay low for a bit and regain the Warmaster’s favor. His plan was to do that by joining up with Shan and advising him, leading him to the Kessandras Sector in the hopes of capturing powerful artefacts for the Warmaster. Shan’s no fool and knows Kaervek is only in it for himself, but he’s not going to say no to a powerful psyker with a retinue of his own rubrics.
Shan’s a slightly converted Haarken Worldclaimer – I swapped out his shoulder pads for a pair from the new Nightmare Kill Team box, as well as the head. Then I cut the head off Haarken’s spear and swapped it for a chainsword, turning Shan’s weapon into a more thematic Chainglaive.
My current plan is to run Shan using Haarken rules. This will lock him out of gaining XP during the Narrative but does give him better and more interesting rules to play with. Raptors generally aren’t very good, especially in units of five – so they need all the help they can get. Also Haarken is firmly in that category of “decent, but not good enough that anyone will think I’m going too hard bringing him.” He’s an underrated unit, but not an overpowered one.
So where does that leave me for this weekend? There are currently 78 players signed up for Warzone Houston – a smaller turnout than expected. I suspect that last weekend’s big team event (FLG Champions Cup) in Dallas had a big stifling effect on turnout this weekend, and that’s a bit of a shame. That said, it probably helps my odds a little, though the list of players attending isn’t exactly a bunch of unknowns – many of the regular killers from Asgard are there and they’re always putting up tough games. Also, Goatboy is driving up and staying with me this weekend, and he’ll be at the event, putting up a tough game as well. There are a lot of ways this could end with defeat.
My goal this weekend is to finish 5-1. If I can do that I’ll be pretty happy with the result, especially if that loss happens late. I’ve logged enough games with this army that I’m not super worried about going in without another game, though it would have been good to test another round or so against something like Sisters – they’re the biggest challenge right now for Thousand Sons and have some very strong counterplay into the army.
Next Week: Warzone Houston
Well, it was a short update but that wraps things up for this week. Come back next week when I’ll talk about the results of Warzone Houston, how I fared, and what I’m planning for Tampa. And also what kind of post-event shenanigans the crew got up to. See you next week.
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