Heya Folks,
As I write this report out I am reminded of how tiring a tournament of this scale can be. Especially when you are up super late the night before helping assemble stormboyz for The Judge.
As we arrived in Ann Arbor for our games we were beset by two things, first our round one winner Greg Sparks, was also playing his second round here, and the place was a bit larger than previously told to us by a fellow gamer. However, no terrain had been set up by the organizers! We had to do it ourselves before the first game! Luckily no one got to upset by it, and most terrain seemed quite fair and balanced.
Once The Judge gets back to me with his battle report I will be posting it... if he gets back to me with it. As for me.... here we go.
Round 1:
Round one saw me up against a Nid player, which is really only my 3rd game against their new codex, and took me shockingly by surprise at the amount of bodies he can put on the field. Yes you just heard an Imperial Guard player say that.
With the unique scenario setup of two table quarters being in night fight, it made it quite easy for my opponent to force me to have to night fight check and measure to see him for a majority of the first 3 turns. This made things happily enough for him seem to go his way, and it was quickly looking like this was going to be a round 1 massacre and drop for myself. However I stemmed the tide quickly by assaulting his giant squad of gaunts and locking their poor strrength 3 up with my armor 10 vehicle, and due to how far out his unit was spread, he blocked the squads behind him from being able to move through, saving me for another turn of shooting, though it wouldn't matter much if I did not get down the Trygon down off my flank who would soon be eating through my entire army. My storm troopers took care of this with their 3-3 guns along with 2 meltas inflicting exactly 6 wounds (hurray twin linked thanks to our dear friend Creed!)
The next turn saw the killing blows to his HQ squad, leaving the poor chap with no synapse creatures near either of the two troops that were holding objectives. though genestealer squad was ravaging my backside, i mainly ignored them to shoot off his two squads holding objectives of the three and put my veterans onto one. Thereby tying the game at the very last turn. We were even tied on kill points at 7 a side! With this result I decided to stick around for round two, as two good wins could still place me high.
Round 2:
A rough match for my opponent, who fielded a heavy Monstrous Creature daemon army against me, a total of 5 MCs including the Lord of Change and Ku'gath, 2 Khorne Daemon Princes, and a Tzeentch daemon prince. He also had a plague bearer squad, two pink horror squads (one with a changeling) and two bloodletter squads.
First turn for him saw his main army in, though with bad scatters, sending him far away from me, but close enough for my own bit of shooting to take down one tzeentch demon prince, his changelings squad and most of the plaguebearers, leaving Ku'gath and The Lord of Change untouched in my second turn. However the four remaining plaguebearers got into close combat with one sentinel and would remain fighting until the last round of the game. His second turn did not see all his remaining units come in and from then out its was simple take down what came in and put a wound or two on Ku'gath until he was dead.
At the end of the game he had been tabled, I held all the objectives, and he had only gotten one kill point. My opponent was a great sport about it, and quite friendly, and would love to see him up at our FLGS sometime!
Round 3.
My hopes were up after round 2, i was in the top groupings of tables and knew that a good result here would lead me into the top 3. However as soon as i saw what army i would be facing i quickly knew i was in for a rough, and possibly horrid time. Blood Angels! Normally I would not be toooooo concerned with them, but in a Dawn of War set up when they can outflank on one board edge? Holy crap is their "everything is fast" really become scary! However I held my own mostly for the first turn, as he went first, losing only a few guardsmen, and thinking luck might just be on my side i move my units on the board, only to be horrified by the rolls my dice poured out, either my blast templates from my tanks scattered into nowhere, or failed to pen any of his vehicles, or just glanced, which really did not do much of anything in the long run. Not able to roll anything above immobilized on any pen hits, the BAs kept coming and eventually ran me down, and i conceded after my 5th turn in which i had only claimed 3 kill points to his 10, and he was going to be claiming a bunch more this turn leaving me with maybe only my HQ squad on the field. A horrifying loss, to a great opponent, GT out of Brighton Michigan who is one of the main guys on MI40K.com this game it turned out was for second place, as my opponent took it!
Final results were simple, I didn't place even in the top 6... out of 14 or 15, though i think i was around 7 or 8. The Judge did far better, coming out in 4th, which means that if one of the top 3 drop, he is in!
Until next time, burn some heretics, kill some mutants, and do it as always...
FOR THE EMPEROR!
