TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2025, Part 6: Battling the Ork Hordes

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2025. Last Time Around I took my revised Creations list to league games, scoring wins against GSC (Ryan) and Marines (KC). Good wins, and shortly after I’d scheduled my third game against Chad Stubblefield, who leads team Ettin and runs the “Tabled Talk” podcast. He’s a good player and a tough opponent. I’m glad I scheduled this game early because by the end of last week my son and wife had both come down with the plague and despite my best attempts to stay away, I came down with the same disease shortly after and as I write this I’m a day removed from shivering in my bed wearing full clothes. Being sick: 0/10, would not recommend.

But fortunately I was able to get in a game before all that, helping me stay on track and ensuring I’d have something to write about this week.

Before we dive in, if you don’t remember my list, this is what I’m running:

My League List - Click to Expand

League Game 3: vs. Chad’s Orks

Chad’s playing an Orks army built from models he won in the raffle at the Rise of the Empire teams event back in December, and he’s running them in the War Horde Detachment. He’s got Mozrog with a unit of Squig riders, another unit of the Squig riders, a pair of Trukks, a Battlewagon, two units of burna boyz a trio of stormboyz and a host of nobz. It’s a terrible matchup for me, forcing me to trade into units that are mostly cheaper. I really want +1 Strength and +1 Attack here so I can get over the T5 hump on Chad’s Orks. I also really want to go second, so I can react and pull him off objectives and get easy scoring on the final turn.

The Mission: Burden of Trust / Hidden Supplies / Hammer and Anvil

That’s not great for me. Burden is going to be tough to hold down against Chad, and having two objectives at midtable is better for him because he has a ton of units to work with. Also, this layout is really bad for tanks, boxing me in unless I overcommit to having the first turn.

I’m Going first. 

Not what I wanted. Yeah, easier for Burden but I’d have rather been the one to react and had a turn of Chad moving. As it is, I have to deploy way back to avoid a turn 1 Waaagh! series of advance-and-charge moves, and that just punts the football back a turn as I’ll have to move out to capture objectives and start scoring, but that puts me in prime position to get charged and die. Not great.

Bile Rolls: +1 WS, +2″ Move

I started on +1 BS and re-rolled it into WS, which is better, but not quite what I’m looking for. +2″ Movement is nice – it’ll help me do more with the Obliterators and Plague Marines – but this isn’t the matchup I want or need it in. This kicked off the start of a very bad, no good, horrible game where I got diced pretty bad at every opportunity. Re-roll 1s into 1s? Check. Roll 1s on every D3 for melta shots? Check. 1s on Critical advances? Check. Fail 5″ Charges? Check. This game had every kind of bad rolling.

Among my smarter moves this game was dropping the Nurglings to box in Mozrog’s unit. Going first let me do this even more, and while they were penned in I took the opportunity to take shots at them with the Vindicator, and promptly taking three damage from a failed pact before killing three of them. Any plans I had to hold back on turn 1 to avoid getting charged basically went out the window when I drew Cleanse and Recover Assets, forcing me forward at least a bit to do both. Chad will make me pay for that on his turn, drawing Extend Battle Lines + Bring it Down and calling a Waaagh!

He crashes into my Vindicator with the other unit of Squighog boyz and makes quick work of it (it helped that I failed almost every save and I was starting on 8 wounds). This kept me alive at mid-table with my Rhino but from here things start to play out about how I expect them to – I get out and handle a threat that needs immediate addressing, kill it, then the next wave come in and kill me while stealing an objective. Because there are two mid-table objectives and not 1, Chad has an easy time holding the extra one while I fight over the remaining three. It’s a bad combo and he outpaces me really badly on primary scoring – I only score 10 VP on primary in the first four rounds.

My Nurglings don’t get the luck they need to survive one round against Mozrog and his last hanger-on and they make a break to the south side of the table, causing problems. This is where bad dice come back in – Chad absolutely demolishes me making 5+ saves in my second turn, and my shooting with Obliterators and the Predator amount to basically nothing. Then I rush in with Plague Marines and Obliterators and score… 0 wounds on Mozrog. Great. He promptly obliterates both of them.

I manage to stay mostly ahead on Secondaries during the game but as we wind down, I have a hard stop, forcing us to rush through the final turn. I notice I have destroyed all of Chad’s Battleline units, giving me a chance to go for War of Attrition as a secret mission. I take it, advancing my Plague Marines into a Rhino (naturally, I rolled a 1 for their advance, but I planned for that – it was just that kind of dice game) – then I shot the Rhino across the table and dumped them into Chad’s deployment zone.

Of course, it wasn’t enough. And a big part of this is that I made a huge mistake forgetting that Overwhelming Force checks start of turn, so when I charged my Master of Executions into his Battlewagon and got mulched, it gave Chad 4 VP on my turn and another draw, which after a 1 CP discard would end up becoming a 6 VP Containment, costing me the game. I went from potentially winning by 1 to losing by 9. A devastating swing and it might not have happened if we weren’t rushing but then again I’d have probably forgotten either way and made that bone-headed move. Stupid mistake on my part.

Result: 69-78, Loss

I’m not gonna lose too much sleep over this one, even with the dumb mistake. I was way behind most of the game and didn’t think I even had a chance at the end anyways – I needed a lot of good luck on secondaries to even make it work, and killing all of Chad’s battleline units wasn’t something I expected to do anyways.

That leaves me at 2-1 in League Play with one game to go. Once I get that scheduled, you’ll see the results here.

Hobby Progress

My next event is coming up in another month – the Clutch City GT is at the start of March. And while I still have a little work to do on my Creations of Bile to get them ready for that event – mostly painting up four Night Lords Obliterators to match the rest of the army and a few Cultists – my attention right now is firmly on the upcoming Emperor’s Children release. I don’t know what the army is going to look like yet or what models I’ll be running, but I am reasonably sure I’ll be running Rhinos and probably a Land raider when I bring them to the Grand Narrative – these are just good models for doing freehand on and they’re also just good models to have. Plus, they’ve already shown up in the promotional photos of the army so I’m pretty sure they’ll be available.

So it’s time to dust off the old Forge World legion upgrade kits – I’ve had a set of Emperor’s Children Rhino doors sitting around for a while – and this time I’m going a bit extra. I’ve ordered a couple of the old Forge World Chaos “Extra Armour” kits off Ebay, and I’m working on converting up some Rhinos now. The extra armor kits add a ton of character to the Rhinos, adding the trim that’s normally missing and fitting in very well with the Chaos Aesthetic. The only problem? Bending the resin into place.

Despite that, I’m really happy with how the first one is shaping up. I have another Rhino to assemble up still and I’ve ordered a set of Land Raider doors. My only regret is that I don’t have any of the front panels, but I can live with just having one of those sick icon doors on each transport.

The other major point of hobby progress this past week was helping my son finish assembling his knight. I went ahead and primed the skeleton with Leadbelcher, primed the armor plates gold, and then did some on-the-sprue priming to make things easier from there.

We’ve finished assembly and priming at this point, so next it’s up to the boy to start doing the painting – something he doesn’t really need me for, but I’ll help him out with it anyways. Oh, and the guy in his hand was Bryce’s idea – he wanted to have the fist holding a guy, so I dug into my bits box and found an old berzerker we could use – already primed, and the running position works perfectly for a model that’s flailing about.

Anyways that’s all for this week. I doubt I’ll have my next League game knocked out next week, but I am still planning to get in a game this weekend. So expect to see that and some more hobby progress next Thursday.

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