Blob's Park Army List

There were some really awesome armies at Blob's last weekend, and as you'll soon see, all my opponents had some great looking armies. So much so, that it made me not want to enter another tournament again with only the minimum painting requirement met. On one hand, events like Nova and Blob's park really pushed me to get things assembled and painted, but there was certainly some last minute heroics involved that I'd rather not repeat for future events. I'd like to do the biker army justice and bring each up to a higher standard. I still fully intend to continue with my Dark Eldar, but as a lot of assembly is still required with them it should be easy to pick up my halfway completed bikes when I'm in the mood just for painting. Raven Guard is still an army that I wish to have on hand ready to play. DE will definitely require more in the way of tactics, and as I've learned from the last 2 tournaments, I still make too many crucial mistakes...either misjudging distance or forgetting to use a key ability until I'm unable to utilize it that turn. The DE will be much more unforgiving with their average toughness of 3.

At any rate, I should probably start off with discussing my Blob's list to give a little more context to each game. To start with, I thought this list played much better overall compared to my list for Nova (although my record would lead you to believe otherwise). The fact of the matter is I played much tougher lists at Blob's than I did at Nova, but overall I felt like this new list had more options which resulted in closer games. Here's what I had:

The big change was more bike squads which allowed for more special weapons and redundancy. I also retooled the command squad to be more close combat oriented since they were riding with Khan and would benefit from his Furious Charge and Hit & Run abilities, along with the Chaplain's re-rolls and fearless buffs. I'll be frank, the HQ section of my list kicked ass; among their casualties were Nob Bikers, an Ork Warboss on bike, Terminators, Abaddon, Kharn the Betrayer. But lets be real, for the amount of points my HQ section costs they should be taking big stuff down. The truth of the matter is, even with this type of "rock" unit it's still just as easy to make some really big mistakes. With so many eggs in one basket and such a large portion of my overall points invested in this one unit, when I did mess up with them it hurt big time; to the point where a mistake with them felt like it was costing me games. And that's really not surprising... when I don't make effective use of 665 pts, I leave myself in a situation with less than 3/4's of my army to take on opponents or to make up for my most powerful unit that didn't deliver with weaker portions of my army. It was cool to run a unit that was truly feared and when everything went according to plan could unleash some serious devastation, but not even halfway through my games was I wishing for more of those balanced bike squads.

Khan's outflanking ability was a nice tactic to have and at least 2 of my units took advantage of this in every game. There's certainly more chance involved with this route, but oddly enough I found myself wanting these squads to show up later in the game than they actually did. In all of my games, everything held in reserves came in by turn 3, and as chance would have it, sometimes it all came in on turn 2. But this randomness is something that Outflanking armies need to account for in every game and have a plan in mind for units showing up early and/or late -- you can't expect for them to arrive exactly when you need them to.

I'll start getting into my match ups in the next entry along with more lessons learned.