Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2024. Last time around I talked going to Armies on Parade, and the continuing hobby progress with my Night Lords. This time around I’m back on that battle/tournament report life, talking about the Dragon’s Lair GT.

With Tampa canceled I immediately started looking around for local events. I’m not a big ITC guy but I do like having six events to my score and without Tampa I was looking at only five – in that regard I do appreciate that the ITC scoring system pushes you to attend more events. So when it turned out that there was a GT at Dragon’s Lair the weekend after Tampa, I jumped on it. I hadn’t been to Dragon’s Lair yet, but it’s a store on the northern side of Houston about 40 minutes from my house and maybe ten minutes from the race track where Warzone Houston is held.

Day 1

The reason I haven’t been over there yet is mostly that I’m spoiled for choice; I have a couple of stores much closer, including Ettin games, where they also run regular events, and many of my friends live downtown and game at Asgard, so I usually go there for my GTs, plus they tend to hold a spot for me. So I was pleasantly surprised by the store itself -it’s a large, welcoming space, with tons of tables and a very nice cafe attached. It was packed to bursting on the weekend, having swelled to 60 players thanks to the Tampa cancellation. Fortunately, Grant Nichols and his team worked late into the night on Friday to get all the terrain assembled for the event, and by Saturday morning we had a full venue of fresh GW terrain, albeit rather plain. That said, I’ll take plain MDF with a good layout over pretty ruins that don’t block line of sight any day.

The event itself was running the old points and rules, and I understand why – with only three days from the release of said rules to the event it was definitely too short a time period to make big changes – but I also was more than ready to play with new rules. Especially the secret mission rules, which would kill me one more time on their way out.

My List

You’ve seen my list many times now. This is basically what I’ve been running since Tacoma, and here it’s really one last ride with the list before I move on to another army. From here it’ll likely be Night Lords for a bit, but I may revisit Death Guard at some point before year’s end as well.

Anyways, here’s the list:

My list - click to expand

This isn’t a great list. In an ideal world I’d have cut the terminators and sorcerer and replaced them with three Mutaliths and a unit of Tzaangor Enlightened. But I haven’t painted all that so this is what I’ve got. It’s decent and can hit hard against hordes, but it’s slow and really vulnerable to armies with a ton of 3-damage attacks like triple Dorn guard or say, Canis Rex. Fortunately I don’t run into Knights often so that hopefully won’t be an issue.

Round 1: vs. Stephen Scott’s Thousand Sons

In a hilarious twist of fate, there are four Thousand Sons players at the event and I get paired into one of them in the first round. And what’s more, I’m paired into the one closest to the mirror match – Stephen is also running a 10-model brick of Scarabs.

Stephen's List - Click to Expand

For day one we’re on Terrain Layout 2, which is just fine by me. Stephen’s list is similar to mine, but running far too light on Rubrics – he’s only got two units, and one of those is a ten-man. I think that’s largely a mistake – his list just doesn’t have enough units to hold objectives and do actions and as soon as he loses a unit or two the game is going to be over. I can generally weather losing Magnus and some Terminators, but I think Stephen is in a much worse place once he loses a unit. He’s also sitting on what I’d consider to be not enough Cabal points, maxing out at 18.

Mission 1: Scorched Earth – Stalwarts – Search and Destroy

We’re both on Tactical missions and Stephen wins the roll-off, meaning he has the dubious honor of going first. And that’s when I get to witness firsthand from the other side of the table what it’s like to watch someone get too aggressive with the Crystal on turn 1 and pay for it. Stephen’s biggest mistake is that he draws Behind Enemy Lines and Storm Hostile Objective on turn one, then discards both of them – spending 1 CP – to pick up Establish Locus and Secure No Man’s Land. Those are better draws, but it means he now has no CP left for any Stratagems. He teleports the Terminators to my half of the table and double moves Magnus over, then fires off a Doombolt and double moves the Terminators to get them within 12″ of Magnus. That costs 17 cabal points. He then fires up his own Magnus and the Terminators and unloads into my Magnus, and I respond with Psychic Dominion to give my Magnus a 4+ Feel No Pain against Psychic attacks. As a result he ends up surviving the affair with four wounds remaining. If Stephen had held 1 CP for Ensorcelled Infusion, he’d have almost certainly taken me down.

On my turn I respond by using my Terminators, Magnus, and the units of Rubrics to pick up all of Stephen’s Terminators, his Daemon Prince, and the Mutalith Vortex Beast, while dropping his Magnus to 5 wounds. This is a devastating counter-punch, and it freezes his Magnus in place, since any move will mean he dies to Overwatch from my Infernal Master.

The game is more or less over at this point, but we keep playing it out. Stephen manages to hold on for a bit and burn the center objective after I completely biff a large number of rolls, but I make up for it by taking the War of Attrition secret mission and parlaying that into a cool 40 on Primary at the end of the game. Stephen was a fun opponent but he outkicked his coverage, a mistake I’ve made many times.

Result: 75-58, Win

After lunch I meet up with Dan “Swiftblade” Richardson, Andrew Corban, T Chambliss, and Brendan Muller, all local friends on the Astros team and regular opponents at Asgard (and in this column). I’m introduced to Krystian Maskos, who’s on the Sanctum team and an all-around swell guy. We hit up Taco Cabana for lunch and house some quesadillas.

Round 2: vs. Krystian’s Hypercrypt Legion

Things just work out like that sometimes. Krystian and I play on the table at the front of the cafe, and that’s a damn comfortable area to be.

Krystian's List - Click to Expand

Hypercrypt are good but I’ve played against them before and I have a pretty good idea of both what to expect and how I can take them down. The big problem here is the Tesseract Vault and the fact that it can teleport and drop outside 3″ of my units. I can take down big targets but taking down this many vehicles usually stretches me pretty thin and puts a lot of pressure on me to get average or better dice. Especially with mid-size vehicles like Doomsday Arks.

Mission 2: Take and hold – Raise Banners – Tipping Point

Kyrstian wins the roll-off to go first and that’s great news for me. Hypercrypt are much, much less scary if you’re going second.

Krystian inches up on turn 1 and drops my Rhino but otherwise doesn’t have any targets. All good for me, and I take the opportunity to be much more coy, inching up with Magnus and the Scarabs and playing more aggressively with the Rubrics. I use a unit of double-moving +2″ Rubrics to get around the top corner and kill Krystian’s Flayed Ones, and I use the southern Rubrics to kill his Heavy Destroyer. My goal on this mission is to kill all of the little units early and leave Krystian unable to effectively score or do actions – he’s got a lot of movement, but not a ton of units, so his action economy is shit.

On Krystian’s turn he goes big and teleports the Vault to the middle of the table, and turns it and two doomsday arks toward Magnus. I spike my saves though and he’s only able to get Magnus down to 8 wounds. I follow up by destroying the Vault, killing two Hexmarks, and taking down a Doomsday Ark.

I’ve got three banners down now and I’m pulling 15-point primary turns. Krystian puts the Silent King and another Ark into Magnus, but only gets him down to two wounds, bouncing off a second time. We decide to call it there- Krystian is toast at this point and he knows it. We do a quick run through the rest of the game and submit results.

Result: 97-53, Win

Krystian’s a great guy and a fun opponent and I’m very happy with a 2-0 start. We have a bit of time so we chat for a bit and I check on my friends while I wait for the round to finish.

Round 3: vs. Nick Toomey’s Adepta Sororitas

This game had weird vibes. It started with Nick asking if we were using a WTC ruling for Cabbalistic Rituals that was, in addition to just being kind of insane in that way that WTC rulings tend to be, fairly detrimental to me (it would have forced me to declare all of my rituals at the same time if they had to be used at the start of a phase). I don’t think it would have hurt my game much, given I’m usually not on that level of big-brained shit, but it would have been a major pain in the ass and absolutely an angle for someone to “gotcha” the shit out of me with. Nick wasn’t necessarily out of line asking about a ruling on this rule, but it did immediately put me on high alert that he might not be a fun game. Fortunately, that ended up not being the case.

A judge confirmed that we were not using WTC rulings (I mean, why would we, especially if that wasn’t mentioned in the packet?), and we started the game. It was a pretty quiet affair at the start, but things loosened up after a couple of rounds and we eventually got to a decent place vibes-wise.

Nick's List - Click to Expand

Nick’s running Sisters, and I’m pretty familiar with the faction. He’s running Hallowed Martyrs instead of Bringers of Flame and I think that’s generally worse, or at least not as tough for me as a matchup. That said, it has some nasty tricks it can pull. Nick starts the game with a lot of units in reserves – the Arcos, Vahl and her Warsuits, and a Castigator – and I think that was probably a mistake since it really reduced the amount of danger Magnus and my Terminators were facing.

Mission 3: Purge the Foe – Rapid Escalation – Crucible of Battle

I was going first this time, and that’s not generally something you want in Purge, but it was a big help given how much Nick put into reserves this game. I didn’t have much in the way of good moves so I held my Teleport this game and used my Rhino full of Rubrics to take Nick off objectives, killing a Castigator on the first turn and working through some Novitiates. I capitalized on the extra time to take out the second Castigator pretty quickly, meaning that only Vahl was left to really threaten Magnus and by the time she and her Warsuits arrived and were able to take him down Nick had already lost too many units. He sent Celestine over the top into my two units of Rubrics, but ended up losing most of his Seraphim to warpflamers and thanks to the 4+ invulnerable save from the Exalted Sorcerer on Disc I was able to weather the attacks from Celestine and the Gemini for two rounds, then eventually punch her to death twice.

Magnus did me a favor by exploding on death and taking out a Warsuit and a couple of other models, and I’d end up making a big mistake shooting one of the Warsuits to death and getting wiped out in a counter-shoot attack on the bottom objective, but by this point I had a solid lead. Nick played a tight game and managed to hang on in that way that teams players are very good at doing, and I struggled a little bit at game’s end to close out with some key charges but even a 6-point secondary turn on the game’s final round (Recover Assets and Defend Stronghold) weren’t enough to hold me back as all Nick had left at that point was Vahl. I got some extra help from Nick’s dice just not being very good this game but overall I think I made good use of the first turn and stopped it from being a major disadvantage. That said, it Nick managed a 16-point round 4 to help keep things close.

Result: 80-72, Win

Going 3-0 is always a fun time and this time around my first three games included some pretty damn tough opponents. Nick’s absolutely ranked higher than me in the ITC standings and taking one from him feels pretty good.

Andrew, T, Dan, and I grab dinner at a nearby burger place called Hopdoddy, which is also a taphouse of sorts. I snag a Double Bacon Jam burger and a vanilla shake. The burger absolutely rips – it’s super cheesy in the best way – but the shake is only mediocre. It’s not cold enough, and a little too thick. The fries are solid, though. We hang out for another hour or so and then I head back home to watch TV with the missus and sleep in my own bed.

Day 2

I check the standings on Saturday night and see there are four Imperial Knights players in the top 8. That’s not great, because coming into day 2 we’re on Layout 8 all day. That’s a very open layout, and a huge benefit to Knights, who can easily walk all over everything there. It’s a hard one to hide on and I’m not confident I can actually beat a good Knights player in this setup.

Round 4: vs. Zach Meyer’s Imperial Knights

Well, shit.

Zach's List - Click to Expand

Zach breaks out the clock pre-game and I tell him I’m pretty sure we won’t be needing it. His army is a tough one for me, and I immediately make a huge mistake by underestimating how much damage Canis Rex can do.

Mission 4: Linchpin – Fog of War – Tipping Point

I’m going second, which is usually great on Linchpin. Zach opens up by moving his two Armigers toward my zone, leaving a big hole in his backfield for my Terminators. He passes turn 1 with no shooting and I got stupid aggressive, dropping my entire brick of Terminators behind him and killing both Armigers. The plan here is to keep him on 0 primary for a turn and force him to commit a good unit to home objective defense. This isn’t a terrible plan, but as insurance I bring Magnus out to tag one Armiger, and that was a fatal mistake. I should have held him back to keep him safe.

On Zach’s turn he teleports his Crusader right into the middle of the table, and proceeds to absolutely body Magnus, particularly as I just flub all his saves. Then Canis picks up most of the Terminators and that’s practically game right there – I can handle losing one of those units, but typically not both. That said, I’m not completely out of it, and in the following turn I pick up two more Armigers and the Crusader. At this point I could have held on and gotten a win with some good dice, but they just weren’t there. In particular I needed to kill one more Warglaive in Overwatch and I just didn’t roll high enough on the shot counts to make that happen. I’d end up losing the rest of the army to Warglaive melee over the next two turns. I gambled big and lost quickly.

We did not in fact, need the clock.

Result: 42-85, Loss

That one hurts but I wasn’t shocked by the outcome – my army doesn’t match up particularly well against knights even when I’m not fucking up badly by going too aggressive on turn 1. I wildly underestimated how much damage Canis could do, and even if I wasn’t in his deployment zone he’d have still been picking up terminators left and right. My notion that Layout 8 is good for Knights held, and there are three Knights players in the top four at this point, plus Kevin McCormick running a weird melee Hypercrypt build.

We grab Taco Cabana a second time and then head back to the venue for round 5. I’d like to go 5-1 at this thing but I’m also not averse to going home early and eating dinner with the family, so if I lose in round 5, that’s most likely how I’m going to do things.

Round 5: vs. Eric Tadt’s Genestealer Cults

Eric was a lovely opponent – a real pleasure to play – and this was an absolutely brutal game. An incredibly close affair that I felt I could have won in multiple spots, but some bad breaks sent it his way.

Eric's List - Click to Expand

There’s a lot of bullshit there and it’s basically Innes’ list. It can do a lot of very annoying things, and if Eric rolls hot on his regen rolls I’ll run out of time and energy shooting him. There’s also a ton of brutal overlapping effects here, and that Ridgerunner mortar is one of the game’s most dangerous (and bullshit) weapons.

Mission 5: The Ritual – Swift Action – Crucible of Battle

This is a fucking nightmare scenario to play against GSC on. There’s almost no way to stop him from just making whatever objectives he wants, and there’s very little cover in the middle of the table for me to use. On top of that, I win the roll-off to go first, which I absolutely, positively did not want. And on turn 1 I draw Secure No Man’s Land and Marked for Death. Fuck it, I have to go very big here or I’m going to get bled out and lose. I teleport the Terminators, I double move Magnus, and shoot the Rhino across the table. My goal is to score both secondaries and stop Eric from making an objective early, and if he does, I’ll kill him off it and keep him from scoring it. This is more or less the only way I can stand a chance in this game.

Turn 1 goes pretty well – I clear out some squads, destroy a Marked target, and put him off creating an objective. Then I lose half my Terminators but Magnus sticks around. Not a terrible result. Where it goes wrong is in the following turn, when Eric spikes his return rolls and saves, and I completely whiff on an important roll to kill his Saboteur, rolling only a 1 on my Doombolt at her, and only scoring 2 wounds instead of the three I needed, forcing me to shoot her and preventing me from killing a third unit with Magnus.

From there it goes downhill pretty quick; Eric continually spikes his dice when it comes to rolling 5+ to wound with his S3 flamers, and as a result gradually whittles me down. That said, he doesn’t score any primary until round 3, and I hold him to 20 through round 4. That of course doesn’t matter because he’s going second using the old rules and he goes Secret Mission, picking Unbroken Wall to score a 40-point turn 5 to just drop 40 on Primary. While comparatively I only manage 10/10/5/5. I cannot wait for the current Secret Mission rules to be gone.

This one was super close, and if I had a tiny bit more luck in round 4 – I missed a trio of 7″ charges I needed to score 5 for Assassination – I’d have won the game. I kept Eric off Primary and Secondary for the first two rounds of the game, but that just wasn’t enough. Again, fuck Secret Missions.

Result: 72-76, Loss

Oof, this one hurt. Eric was a great guy and a total sweetheart to play, but I felt I should have won that one. That said, I’m not too broken up by it. As much as I’d have liked 3-2, I am very happy to just go home early and spend time with the family rather than put in a full 9 to 5 at the Warhammer Factory. I drop from the event, wish T and Dan luck (Andrew and Krystian had already dropped), and I headed home.

Next Time: Night Lords Hobby Progress

That does it for this Road Through, but stay tuned next week for more hobby progress and likely a practice game. I want to test out Death Guard with the new points, and I’m heavy into painting my Night Lords for Atlanta. Finishing with a 3-2 record at Dragon’s Lair isn’t ideal, but I’m not real mad about it given the layout, opponents, and the fact that my army isn’t exactly the top of the meta. My opponents were all at least fine and the store was a real treat. I expect I’ll be back soon.

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