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.
