so...where were we. Ah yes, I'd just been destroyed in the most comprehensive way it is possible to be destroyed in a game of 40k. The only way I could have lost more badly would have been for my opponent to actually steal my girlfriend during turn 5.
So, the tournament being tabbed, I dropped waaaay down to the bottom table. Down there, swimming around in the juice at the bottom of the bin, I expected to find someone fairly rubbish - hopefully someone with no intent to win - a "fluff gamer", or someone who had qualified by painting alone, who didn't actually know the rules. But sadly, this being the UKGT final, I encountered an army made entirely of cheese.
No, not actually made out of cheese (Sadly). But it might as well have been. I've written on my loathing of dual-lash armies before, at the GT heats:-
I was slightly horrified in this game. The other player put his army on the table, and it was...well, it was pretty ridiculous. He had two giant horrible Lovecraftian winged tentacle monsters with mind control powers, 30 or so immortal superhuman killing machines in powered armour, and several giant Terminator 2 style things that could turn into practically any gun they wanted, and a couple of tanks firing nuclear demolition shells.
This army, is to say the least, ridiculously badass. Also, it's totally lacking in any kind of coherent theme, just a collection of models that have one thing in common - they are really mean.
It was this army, again. Oh, it was slightly different - it was nicely painted, and he had Predators instead of Vindicators. But still the mainstays - 2 lash princes, 6 Obliterators, marines in rhinos to score.
But...the player using it had a lot of class. He'd bothered with linking it all together into a coherent theme, even painting all the Obliterators to match the general scheme. I didn't take pics of them (for fear of the techno virus destroying my camera), but they were nicely modelled - he'd unified the weapons on them, so for example, one was turning into 15 assault cannons, one was turning into all flamers...
It looked really nice. As we chatted, he explained to me that he really liked Chaos marines, and wanted to bring a competitive army of them - he felt you couldn't really do a competitive Slaanesh list without lash.
I do have a certain sympathy with him - by this point, for the first time ever, the bar grumbles were about Guard rather than anything else. Almost every game I played started with the question "Sigh. How many Vendettas?" - hardly a good sign for the ongoing popularity of Guard. In particular, one chap with an eight Valkyrie list was being excoriated for having "won" the first game by preventing his opponent from deploying on the board by blocking the table edge off with Valkyries.
The way this works is his opponent put everything in reserve, anticipating getting the first shots on the Valkyries. He countered this by deploying as far forward as he could, then scouting 24", then turning his flyers end on to block the entire board edge. Effective, but hardly sporting.
There were 20 or so guard lists there, and mine was the only one relying on a mix of Chimeras and Russes - which I felt was very odd indeed, as it's generally agreed to be one of the stronger builds going.
I didn't have a great feeling going into this game - it was pitched battle (the dullest setup type) with annilation (a perennial weakness of my 17 KP army) as the victory condition. I think he looked at my army and expected it to be a hideous death-fest for him. As it was, we both had a fun game, where my essential plan was to castle the tanks, AV14 hulls out front, and his essential plan was to melt everything I had with sound cannons firing pure hero metal, turned all the way up to 11.
It shook out to a draw; I killed his 5 tanks, and both of the demon princes, but his infantry stayed alive. Shooting from Obliterators in cover gradually wore down my tanks, and I lost a couple of Russes, a trio of chimeras, and a couple of squads who were mind controlled into running into the Demon's dribbling sticky maws.
Wait, they were very firmly Slaanesh demon princes. Correct that last sentence to "Orifices". Ewww.
I'm going to skip ahead now, to game 5. By this point, I was on a high, having totally stamped on my opponents in rounds 3 & 4 (Apologies to fans of suspense - I'll deal with them next week, before unveiling my mighty work on the new army). What did I come up against?
Well, it was an army entirely made out of cheese.
Well, not quite. It was another dual-lash chaos army, but this one was played by a man with a considerably lower reserve of class than the previous gentleman. The gentleman lurked in the centre of this awful ven diagram:
The army was hideous. Hideous. And not in the game. It was just ugly.
He had two demon princes - one painted Khorne, one painted nurgle. By two different people. He then added to this an iron warriors landraider (painted by a third person), six of the horrid old obliterators (the 3rd ed ones) and three squads of "Plague marines with meltaguns".
Well, AOBR marines sprayed/drybrushed/dipped in dulux masonry paint. Green masonry paint. Their meltaguns were crudely stuck on tau fusion guns. They were painted by a fourth individual - maybe our man himself.
He was the worst sort of tournament player. The sort you read about on the interweb as the typical attendee. In fact, he represents a tiny minority of players - tournaments are fun, and attempts to "fluff them up" (as represented by the current GT ruleset I dislike) aren't going to stop him.
Anyway, we played the game, and disaster struck early for him. He ran his plaguemarines out in the open to get close to an objective. He knew it was safe to move them out of cover because he was out of all of my guns 48" range.
It rolls round to my turn, and I fire two battlecannons at them. He points out, somewhat smugly, that his marines are out of range. I point out battlecannons have a 72" range. Rulebooks are consulted. I am correct. Ha.
The plaguemarines go up in a burst of filthy masonry paint, leaving one alive. He begins to loudly complain about my "cheesy army". Brilliant. The game - Spearhead (quarters) with capture & control (2 objectives) is often thought of as the "draw" mission. It worked out that way for us, with his immobilised Land Raider cover his objective, with one plaguemarine inside it.
He wasn't even that good a player; frequently making tactical mistakes and so on. The only reason I didn't win was because a couple of my chimeras immobilised themselves on the way to his objective. Ah well, it happens.
That's the real problem with netlists like nobz bikers or dual lash - they provide a crutch for WAAC types to think they're good at the game. Of course, it all comes crumbling down when you play against someone who know's what he's doing. The other problem is that 3 out of my 12 GT games in this season were against slightly dull samey armies - armies I probably wouldn't have chosen to play 3 times, if I'm honest.
Anyway - what did I learn?
1.) Don't judge a book by its cover. A guy with a netlist that looks awesome can be a great player and a great hobbyist. Equally, he can be a tool.
2.) Battlecannons having a 72" range is still awesome.
3.) Guard are a "totally broken army" according to some netlist players...
No comments:
Post a Comment