Game 13 was against Stephen, the manager of GW Glasgow!
In this game, Steve was trying out his new Dark Eldar army for the first time. One thing I've definately got to say about Steve, is that he's one of these silent assassin types! He makes you think that he's not that good at 40k, but when the dice are down, he's one of the most fearsome opponents i've ever played!
Steve is also really great at supporting the local GW community. Whenever local events are running, Steve is always very keen to help out by lending terraing and mats. It's thanks to him that so many of our local events are so successful.
Enjoy the report!
It's been a while since my last post - things have been extremely busy with work and real life, so hopefully i'll be able to get back to writing this column regularly. I've not had much time to paint my deathwing, but i'm still working on some of my armies. I recently added some space wolves to my Imperial guard (3 punishers with a rune priest!).
I have a tournament coming up (Chaos of the Warp 8) on the 4th of May. 2000 points - I wasn;t really sure what I wanted to take to it. I decided to roll with something a little bit different. I'm going to trial out an Ork/Imperial Guard allies list to see how it works out. I'll be sure to keep you updated on how that goes as well.
Game 12 was against GW Glasgow Staff Member Stuart!
Stuart was using the previous Witch-Hunter codex for this
game (as at the time of recording, he did not have much experience using
the new White Dwarf Codex). Stuart also has a couple of armies in
common with me - Imperial Guard (though his is less mechanized than
mine) and Eldar.
Stuart and I have had some classic battles in the last (and after this one). One that comes to mind specifically was when my Black Templars took on his sisters again (he was using the WD codex by this point). The game was the scouring, and on the final turn Stuart was winning 7-6. The last action of the game, was when a unit of Repentia (who had spent the majority of the game butchering terminators) charged a land raider, exploded it - and the resultant explosion killed a nearby Seraphim, which literally swung the game in my favour by about 7 points. That story has been lamented many a time between me and Stuart - I can honestly say that was one game I won down to my sheer good luck!
In other hobby news for me this week, I'm still down in London. Work has been busy, so I haven't even started painting my deathwing. I've assembled most of them though. Check out the nifty addition I gave to my librarian:
I really like the new Deathwing model kits. Whoppingly expensive when you consider that you only get 5 terminators in it, but I've got a crap ton of bits left over on most of them, so I'm sure I will be able to put these to good use. It's hard to argue when your guys look like such a badass:
The other cool thing I like about the Dark Angels is that most of them get Preferred Enemy against Chaos Marines. I LIVE to smash Chaos marines, so that rule is awesome in my opinion. The new Daemons book was released yesterday - still haven't managed to get my hands on a copy yet, but I sure hope they toned down Screamers and Flamers a bit.
I shall leave you this time with a random photo I took while in Kings Cross Station in London - see you next time!
For those IG veterans out there, what were your thoughts on Leman Russes (back in 5th edition)? I know that generally Manticores and Hydras were likely considered better, but my Leman russes have always seemed to perform pretty reliably - my Pask Punisher especially! In 6th edition he's even better given that Leman russes always count as stationary, and that AP - weapons don't have -1 on the damage chart anymore!
This game was against Rich's Dark eldar - Rich and I have a bit of an ongoing rivalry. From my Eldar Crushing his Chaos space marines, to his Draigowing walloping my necrons (old necron codex I should state!). I hadn't really fought much Dark Eldar at this point, so he was happy to oblige me by giving me a game. Rich is part of the Chaos of the Warp podcasting and events team. Chaos of the warp (or COTW as i'll call it now) is a gaming group that's primarily based in Dunfermline, and specialises in a variety of wargaming and TCG events. You can check out their website at:
The podcast is great fun, and the events (ran by Geoff, who you will see later in this series) are always good. You might even hear me on a few random shows as well!
The battle commences below!
So i'm off to London on Monday, and my bag is packed full of Deathwing ready to assemble and build. I also treated myself to this beaut....
Got this from Kabuki miniatures. As you can take Belial with a variety of configurations (I do also have the new belial model), I will convert this to have a thunder hammer, and use it as the awakened Lion! I'm not the greatest painter in the world mind you, but I'll certainly give it a good go! I'll warm up on my other Deathwing guys before attempting the main man himself, but I will keep you posted.
Hobby wise this week i've not had much build/painting time, but I have been catching up on my Horus Heresy stuff. I've recently read Deliverance Lost, the Outcast Dead, and Know no Fear. I enjoyed Deliverance Lost the most out of these 3, as I knew next to nothing about the Raven Guard, so finding out about them was cool. I've just finished the first short story in the Primarchs, which was cool, so i'll keep going with that.
Anyways thanks for reading, my next update will likely be up next week.
Game 10 was against a very good friend of mine named Paul. The most important thing that you need to know about Paul, is that he is a master converter. I have seen some cool conversions in my time, but some of the stuff that I have seen Paul come up with just blows me away. Some of his previous work includes a looted trygon (yes you read that right!), and an ork Warboss converted from a Daemon Prince. The army that he uses in this video is heavily converted too, which you'll see below.
Paul is also one one of the main people who organises 40k tournaments in the immediate Glasgow area, Including the tournaments Stronghold (2012 and 2013 - more on this below - and the tournament Death Worlds in July of 2012 - which I won!)
So keeping in theme with the special missions every 10 games, Paul suggested that we play one of the missions from the Death World supplement from White Dwarf. We ended up playing a mission called Weather the Storm - and this mission took its name quite literally! Hope you enjoy the report!
So yesterday was Stronghold 2013, and I decided to take an army that was a little comedic - my Gretchin! The points limit was 1250, and there was a caveat of no special characters allowed. Normally with my Gretchin, I take Mad Dok Grotsnik and give all the gretchin a 5+ invulnerable save (an upgrade that costs more points than the gretchin themselves!). This time though, I had to improvise, so my army was this:
Big Mek with KFF
Big Mek with Shokk Attack Gun
15 Gretchin w/Runtherd (x 6)
3 x Killa Kans (x 3)
2 x Dakkajets (converted with grot pilots for the fighta ace upgrade!)
Playing 4 games, I actually won 3 of them! I beat Chaos Space Marines, Space Marines, and Tau, losing to Grey knights (because of a killa kan which exploded, killing the gretchin holding the relic on the final turn!). The cool thing about this tournament is the final mission, titled "Stronghold", in which you score points for holding the solitary objective (in the centre of the table) for 1 full game turn. I managed to beat my Tau opponent in this game, and I ended up 3rd! Which I have to say i'm pretty pleased with!
I'm off to London next week with work, but I will be taking some Deathwing to assemble and paint while i'm away, so i'll keep you posted on that.
Game 9 was agains Daniel (known to his friends as D or "Double D"), and he was wielding the scary new necrons! This is before the hideousness of the night/doom scythe as found in 6th edition, which explains the mass blob of infantry.
The stormlord however managed to troll one of my key units very very massively. It's truly one of those moments where if you don't laugh about it, you cry!
I should add that I used to collect necrons, and the new codex didn't really interest me in comparison to the old one. Monoliths were rubbish now, and destroyers weren't quite as good as they used to be (with the exception of destroyer lords). Wraiths got a nice little boost mind you, but I never had many of those to carry over from 5th edition. I felt that the new necron fluff just wasn't original - it felt very much like "Tomb Kings in Space", as opposed to the cool enslavement story that happened to the original Necrontyr.
Anyways, enough rambling, here is the video!
As for the caledonian uprising tournament that I went to, let me first show you a picture from Rankings HQ:
Those gamers that know me know that I am not a hugely competitive player - I like to win games of course, but I don't think that any of my lists are completely filthy. Caledonian Uprising (or Caley as i'll refer to it from here on in) was extremely competitive. If you are familiar with the ETC (european team championships), they use a 20-0 scoring system. So essentially the margin of victory you have determines your score. The army I took (and you will see a variation of this in the blog series later on) was something like this:
Eldrad
Farseer
10 Wraithguard (3 units)
10 Harlequins w/Shadowseer
Not the most competitive army i'm sure you'll agree, but i've had some success with it in the past so I thought it would be worth a go.
At the time of the tournament (it's changed slightly), the first 2 games I had was against the 4th ranked player (Chris Dickinson) and 9th Ranked player (James Ramsey). Chris was using a pretty nasty Tyranid list - 2 flyrants, 2 tervigons, 2 trygons and a couple of units of Ymargl genestealers. As is so often the case with my army, I was outnumbered pretty heavily as the Tervigons did their thing. I lost (as expected) but I managed to keep the score down to 13-7, which I thought was respectable considering how highly ranked my opponent is.
The second game was against an alliance of Sisters and Imperial Guard. Jacobus in a 50 man blob squad (giving them Feel no pain and stubborn Ld10) is not fun. My harlequins managed to kill them though! 3 Exorcists and a manticore kept pounding my guys - and it really didnt help that the mission was the relic, and that he gt a scoring saint as his warlord trait :(. I lost 12-8 , which I thought wasn't too bad.
My weekend didn't really get much better after that, i won my 3rd game 13-7 against a blood angels list with 3 storm ravens, lost 12-8 to horde ork boys (who were using these crazy forge world one shot battlecannon things - 9 of them!), and got trashed 20-0 in the last game by Grey knights - who I do have to say used a really good move on me to get rid of my harlequins. He essentially shunted a dreadnight behind me, and using Kamarazov's ability to place a blast template on his own guy, forced a perils of the warp on my shadowseer, meaning my harlequins lost their nifty cover save.
So lesson learned - if I do go to such a competitive event in the future, I need to take a serious army. My Eldar, while probably my favourite army, just were in another league altogether here. I have another Tournament Next saturday in Glasgow, called stronghold. This one we have been deliberately asked to bring fun armies, so that's that im planning to do. I will be using... my GRETCHIN of win! 90 gretchin - for the win! I will post my results and army list on my next post.
Another Dave up next (a different Dave!). Dave had seen a few recordings and had asked to give my Imperial Guard a game with his space wolves. I was up for the challenge, but was a bit wary about how my army would do - Space Wolves were a pretty good counter for IG in 5th edition, so I was eager to see how it went!
Dave also has a large Ork army (battlewagon and nob spam), and more recently a grey knight henchmen list.
Caledonian Uprising was at the weekend, so in my next post i'll detail how I did and give a summary of my thoughts.
So as you may have observed so far, most of the games that had been played up until this point were against some sort of flavour of space marines. Ultimately, my goal was to ensure that I got at least one battle against each codex. My good friend Dave was happy to oblige me by bringing his Tyranids.
Dave is a huge Xenos fan, and also has a Tau Empire army and more recently a Necron army, primarily featuring Zandrek and Obyron. His partner bought him a titan for his christmas recently, so we will see if he switches to the (dark?) side of the imperium!
I'm blogging from London on this occasion, and i'm trying to prepare for Caledonian Uprising - an ETC qualifying event held at eye of the storm in Mansfield. The tournament starts on Saturday, and I think i've played maybe 1 game since December in preparation? I'm consoling myself by reading the dark angels codex, and contemplating doing a small deathwing army - i'm a fanboy for small elite armies, but you'll learn that as the series goes on!
Anyway hope you enjoy the video! There are some fun moments!
Back to the standard missions with game 6, and this time I was up against my friend Franco. Franco used to be based in the Glasgow area as well before relocating to England. Franco has historically used a Tau army and has had great sucess with this at prior tournaments.
The Grey Knight army featured in this video was I believe 5-6 months old (at the time of writing). At this point in 5th edition, Grey Knight armies like this were pretty fearsome, and they didn't go down easy. As with most lists, practise makes perfect, but a you'll see in this report, Franco wasn't shy about inflicting some painful lessons!
Franco also contributes to the 40k uk podcast, so if you're interested, please check out their facebook page as well:
When I last caught up with Franco, he was working on a horde warrior Necron list, which he has had some success with, qualifying for the UK 40k GT finals. I'm hoping to catch up with him at an upcoming event, Caldeonian Uprising, coming up on the weekend of the 19th/20th of January.
Anyways i've rambled on enough - enjoy the report!
