Brief Tournament Recap

Last weekend I played in a local tournament organized by the Inner Circle Gaming Club using the same army list from a couple weeks back. I was going to make some changes to the army but then decided that I really need to play several games with the same list before I go making changes to units that I'm inexperienced with. And what better way to learn a list than to play 3 back to back games.

I had a really good time at the tournament and although I made several key mistakes, especially during the first couple rounds, I definitely learned a thing or two. There's been a few recent articles on the net about "rock" lists and having just added one to my army I thought I'd briefly state my two cents. The rock unit I'm referring to of course is the 5 Assault Terminators in a Land Raider Crusader. Compared to some rock units, mine is still relatively reasonable on points but it still clocks in just shy of a quarter of my entire army. Then when you factor in my plan of running Khan in a bike unit hidden behind the LRC to break off and join the termies for charging into close combat, that's quite a sizable chunk of my forces all tied up together on the board. While the strength output of a rock unit is generally amplified over the rest of the army, the same is true of any mistakes made with said unit. There are no small mistakes when you mess up with a unit that makes up so many of your army's total points. Over the course of the day, I made some deployment blunders, confused the setup and mission during the second round, and also made a couple target priority mistakes that overall had some significant impacts on how my games played out.

What's important is that I learn from these things, reflect on the circumstances that led up to these situations / decisions and use them to better my game. There were some really tough army lists in attendance and sometimes you'll draw a tough matchup against your list, but the losses I incurred were not a result of having a weaker army list than my opponents. It was because I didn't use my army to its full potential, and honestly only having played one game prior with the list, I didn't expect that I could. You can't just add something like a Land Raider to a list and expect it to take care of itself or carry the weight of the rest of the army. For the most part I enjoyed playing this list -- it seemed to generate a decent amount of threat and huge board control. It could deliver a formidable amount of ranged shots, presented a decent amount of target saturation, and still had a close combat / counter assault unit that was no joke. In the hands of a better general than myself, I think this list would have performed better than my 1 - 2 record for the day. None of my games were blow outs and I at least felt like I had a good chance to make something happen in each round. Certainly more durable than some older biker based lists I've used.

My pictures from the day didn't really turn out and I didn't have the time to take a ton of notes to bat rep each round, but one thing I'm really happy about is the motivation to finish more of my marines as I continue to work on my Necrons and Dark Eldar. It's fun adding new units to the army and having more available choices when building a list for an event like this. I've got one more list to try out with my Raven Guard which I'm hoping will bring me to the end of my marine backlog of unfinished units. But I'll get into that more some other time. This weekend my goal is to finish magnetizing a few things and getting the next large batch of models ready for some paint.