OK, this blog post will be posted after Halloween, but Halloween was close enough for our club for hold a Halloween themed Warmachine tournament on the 30th October. This came at the end of six weeks of Journeyman League, so everyone was keen to crack out of the big guns after the limitations of the league.
The plan was really simple, I organised a straightforward three round Steamroller tournament using casual clock times (because none of us play using clocks normally). Using two lists was optional, but if you did, you had to play both; and the scenarios were Take & Hold, The Pit, and Extraction. The idea being that we had a mix of flags, objectives, single zone and split zone scenarios.
In total we had eight players including myself; which worked very nicely with the number of gaming tables we have. We also had cake, actually two cakes. These were delicious.
Warmachine factions made up most of the fields with Khador, Retribution, Cygnar, Menoth, Mercenaries and Convergence represented. On the Hordes side we had Circle and Minions players. The round draws where done with a highly sophisticated system using playing cards (I had the five of hearts for example), this meant the first round draw, and assigning tables later, was super simple to organise.
For my part, I brought my Convergence of Cyriss Journeyman League army as I had not had the chance to play the 75 point list I wrote several weeks beforehand. Also by switching to a warcaster I have never used before I set quite low expectations for myself, especially in a timed environment because I do not do timed games well.
Anyway, my list looked like this…
Father Lucant, Divinity Architect
Corollary
Monitor
Diffuser
Cipher
Conservator
Optifex Directive
Reciprocators (full unit of five)
Algorithmic Dispersion Optifex (Arc Node Steve)
Steelsoul Protector
Transfinite Emergence Projector (and Permutation Servitors)
This is far from optimised list, but the model count was low and more importantly, ALL of it was painted (and in the last seven weeks no less).
Round One – Forward Kommander Sorscha Kratikoff
So round one, Take & Hold, and I’m drawn against our resident Khador player, Charlie. After a bit of a break from the ‘Reds’ Charlie dived back into Khador with MK3 and has been terrorising everyone with Harkevich since the summer. However for our game, he pulled out Sorscha1, no doubt scheming to freeze Lucant and smash him into lots of little icicles.
I won the roll off and opted to go first, aiming to move up as fast as possible to contest the scenario. This ended up being completely irrelevant as the attrition game kicked in. The star of this game was my battle engine, in the opening volleys it removed half of Charlie’s Kodiak, the turn after, it removed his Field Gun, most of the Winter Guard, and all of the Widowmakers. It was devastating and while I lost my Diffuser to his Juggernaut, that jack was destroyed by my heavies.
With a huge attrition disadvantage, Charlie was left with a decent assassination run using Sorscha’s feat, every gun he could find, and Behemoth’s cannons; but he came up short.
One flying Cipher later, Sorscha was very, very dead.
Round Two – Captain Klara Sloan
With a surprising round one victory under my belt, I walked into one of the few Cygnar warcasters I have never played, or played against, Klara Sloan. This particular Klara list boasted an Avenger, a Defender and four Hunters (plus supporting solos); and in the previous round this list ended our Retribution player in 15 minutes.
So looking at Tobbe’s army, all I could see was lots of armour piercing guns, perfect against my low model count army. The Lucant’s Shield Guard field marshall was going to be super important, as was the scenario, in this case The Pit, which is easy to score defensively.
So I run up, and see my Reciprocators disappear in a hail of Hunter shots and start to get worried, however going second I seized the opportunity to dominate the centrally placed zone. This is obviously my Feat turn so in response, Tobbe gets multiple lines to Lucant and shoots the hell out of the old fella. Five shield guards, and four focus points later, Lucant lost just one hit box, which then got repaired.
The rest of the game goes rapidly downhill for Sloan as Lucant dominates the zone again and scores the final point on his own flag. The final result sort of hid the cat and mouse games between the assassin and her target, and Tobbe, as always was a great opponent.
Round Three – Wurmwood Tree of Fate
With two wins, I got onto the top table for my final game, which came as a HUGE surprise. And I knew exactly which of Big’s warlocks I would be playing into, no Kruger2 for me, oh no, I would be getting Wurmwood and it would be a learning experience.
In fairness to Big, his experience with either Kruger2 or Wurmwood had been exactly one game, but it is probably not unfair to say the man is the best Warmachine player we have at our club. So I was going to have a two to one experience advantage, and I was pretty sure I was playing into a bad matchup.
On the plus side, maybe, the final scenario was Extraction. This is a scenario with two zones and two objectives, so you need to split your army, and Big had a definite mobility advantage. And as Big pointed out many times, I did also manage to put us on the one table with no forests. What were the chances? One in four apparently…
Anyway, I won the roll off and went first. This might have been a mistake however I felt I needed to get up the board before the tree feated and locked my entire army in a forest. My first lesson in this matchup was how devastating Stranglehold is. Vyros has this spell and I always considered it to be ‘meh’, however if you have a teleporting arc node, and you can cast Stranglehold multiple times, it gets a whole lot better.
After my Transfinite Emergence Projector and Monitor got hit with this turn one, I had to feat turn two, otherwise I would achieve nothing and the game would end very quickly. I did this and jammed into Big’s zone with the Reciprocators while dominating my own.
In response, Big cleared his zone, jammed mine, and created an enormous forest. After a communication issue at the end of this turn, I proceeded to hit the tank for five minutes at the start of my turn. This was probably good in hindsight because sometimes these things happen and when playing with clocks you can feel super pressured to just do things, which in my case normally leads to lots of really dumb decisions.
At this point we had a race to five scenario points and that was dependent on me controlling my own zone and contesting the one with a big Tree in it. I knew I probably wasn’t going to manage this, but I did squeeze out three scenario points and cut through three of Big’s heavy warbeasts in the process. Apparently Conservators with Positive Change and Hand of Vengeance are good (“what do you mean that thing is MAT 10?”).
This was a nail-biting game until the last turn against a really good opponent, and even with tanking in the middle of the game, I ended with plenty of time on my clock.
In the end I finished third overall thanks to the lack of control points from my first game, but I’m really happy with how Father Lucant performed against some really hard lists. Big obviously won overall so a huge congratulations to him and for my part I would like to thank everyone for being awesome players and sportsmen throughout the day!
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