[Tournament Report] Molten Crown III | Bottom Table Boogie

 

It may come as a surprise to you, dear Reader, but I didn't return to Whammies K-40 with the intent to play Necrons, or even Chaos Space Marines, although I certainly had some of those on the boil. The vague intent was crystallised into ambition by the Chaos Knights receiving a proper range and my bad self having real disposable income at around the same time in 2022.

I didn't act on this ambition, because I quickly realised my cadre of returning-from-the-day players and first-time ham-slammers would not have a good time fighting an army of nothing but Bigger Dreadnoughts and Even Bigger Dreadnoughts. Whether or not the games could be won wasn't the point: it's about the look on your opponent's face when they hear what you're playing, the depth and weariness of the sigh, the acuteness of the angle at which they tilt before a single model has hit the table. I want people to want to play toymens with me again.

Nevertheless, I have remained Bigger Dreadnought curious throughout my time with the modern game, and have long insisted that if I could run a second army, it would probably be Chaos Knights. In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, curiosity about these heretical matters is a sin: on this day, and in this place, and at this tournament, the wages of that sin were paid.

Round One: Ryman, Chaos Knights (Infernal Lance)

 This one was a "grudge match" from the previous event, where Ryman and I had examined each others' armies in passing and both declared we really wanted to play into that. I had more or less the stuff decided on in the theory session last month, with a couple of last minute substitutions. The crypts had failed to disgorge another clutch of Flayed Ones, so the heinous Deathmarks were grudgingly allowed back in; I also left the Tomb Blades out in favour of my Reanimator, on the grounds that it was something else capable of doing actions and also that maybe, just maybe, with the teleport capacity of Hypercrypt, I might be able to get it into position and actually reanimate something.

He had a Knight Castigator (my personal favourite of the Backward Legged Bigger Dreadnoughts), a Knight Lancer, and a Knight Despoiler with the meta-defining pair of gatling cannons, backed up with a Brigand, two Stalkers, two Karnivores, and the usual brace of Nurgling swarms summoned in to fill points and make a nuisance of themselves.

 The new UKTC layout doesn't allow that many movement possibilities for Bigger Dreadnoughts, or Monoliths for that matter. Ryman had to slam all three of his Cerastus and Questoris chassis into the middle and go wide with the War Dogs; I could only put the Monolith in two places and one of those was right in front of the Lancer, which - no. I felt the Monolith could probably eat some shooting from anything but the Despoiler, but if the Lancer touched it in melee that'd be game over, girlfriend. 

Flayed Ones and Triarch Stalkers headed out to try and stall the big lads in the middle, and I held my Warriors and Plasmancer in reserve to jump out of the Monolith and start picking up War Dogs. (I'd rolled this out a few times during the week, and I was confident that they could either kill a War Dog or put it in such a state that snap fire from another unit would finish it off. The big ones I'd just have to deal with on my own time.) I also kept my Hexmark Destroyer in reserve, per my Fixed Objective plan: drop him into a corner, and score half points on Establish Locus and Behind Enemy Lines from a single model that would be just enough of a faff to remove.

I "won" the roll to go first. I really didn't want to go first, and functionally passed the turn because I didn't want to dangle my doings out in front of Despoiler and Castigator guns; just Terraformed a couple of objectives, cleared out one unit of Nurglings with my Immortals, and left it at that. The cautious approach did pay off to an extent, as the Knights only managed to pick up one Triarch Stalker and the Flayed Ones, Terraforming two objectives of their own, but positional advantage had been given up.

 In the second round my Hexmark arrived and did the thing he was sent here to do. The surviving Stalker fell back, opening a charge lane for the Void Dragon as that drifted out of its corner, and the Monolith took Cosmic Precision and relocated to the very far edge of the board, inside Ryman's deployment zone and able to dump my Warriors into optimal firing range of a Stalker. There was potential here to pick up three Dogs at least with my shooting, and maybe claim the centre objective with my Lychguard if they could manage a short charge into the Nurglings.

 When the dust settled, three War Dogs were heavily damaged but limping along on under four wounds apiece, and neither the Void Dragon nor the Lychguard nor even the Stalker had completed their charges. This failure to seal the deal proved fatal: in the next round my Immortals, Hexmark, second Stalker and crucially the entire Warrior block were picked up by a combination of shooting, Tank Shock, melee, and Dread effects.

Only when I'd put the last Warrior in the dead pile did I realise I could have used Hyperphasic Recall after the first Knight shot at them and hidden them behind the Monolith. I'd been so hung up about using it on the Lychguard for cheap that saving my "guaranteed to finish off these Dogs" squad totally passed me by. They'd have taken their lumps from the Brigand's chaincannon but probably dodged the Despoiler's hail of nonsense that actually finished them off.

I started picking up War Dogs in round three - the Geomancer finished off the most damaged Karnivore, the Void Dragon reached out and touched a Stalker, and the Monolith knocked the Brigand for six and put some hurt on the Lancer as well. I had an opportunity to kill one of the big 'uns and intended to take it...

 Unfortunately, I'd been sleeping on ol' Voidy's datasheet ability to siphon wounds off vehicles, so he'd arrived too late and with too much accumulated injury. He could possibly have held his own against the Lancer, but not the Castigator as well...

 I'd put up some respectable numbers on Secondaries with the Monolith deep in Ryman's deployment zone, but in teleporting stuff around to get my kills in I'd lost a turn of primary scoring. Going first but not doing anything with it, that failure to keep the Warrior brick active and those whiffed charges in the second round essentially had me on the back foot the whole time, and amounted to a rather sad and flabby 95 - 46 defeat.

Good game, though, and at least I knew where things had gone wrong. Now I knew, for the next time I faced Chaos Knights.

Round Two - Ahri, Chaos Knights (Lords of Dread)

Well, that didn't take long. 

Ahri was the ringer, filling in for a last-minute dropout, coasting on a migraine with an army list hammered together the night before. Apparently, she'd been building the War Dogs two hours before kickoff. I think Ahri was also the Thousand Sons player from the doubles tournament back in the summer: it was delightful to discover that any social friction was down to my being tired and crabby in round two, and she's a quiet delight to slam hams with one on one.

She'd also, gulp/sob, brought a Really Really Big Dreadnought, to go with the Even Bigger Dreadnoughts and the merely Big Dreadnoughts.

If you really must know them by their true names, there were two or three War Dog Karnivores, three or two War Dog Stalkers, a single War Dog Executioner, a Cerastus Lancer, and an Acastus Porphyrion, which I didn't even really know was a thing. It's huge, it's made of resin, and it'll kill more or less anything it gets to point its guns at.

Once again, the Monolith deploys in safety, ready to relocate for fun and profit. In fact, everything does. At least I didn't have to go first this time!

Ahri's first turn was pretty quiet, bar picking up the Flayed Ones with a Stalker - but it came first, so I was able to pick up my Void Dragon and Monolith, relocate them into her deployment zone, and... actually, I now think I accidentally brought some reserves on a turn early. No effect on the scores, as the Void Dragon could have Established that Locus, both units were in place for Behind Enemy Lines, and my shooting was the wettest of wet farts.

 Didn't even manage a charge into the Stalker.

The Knight Porphyrion looked over its shoulder, pointed its guns at the Monolith, and I didn't have a Monolith any more. It did take a War Dog Tank Shock to finish off, but that wasn't really comforting. The Lancer started carving up Warriors. It was not shaping up to be a good day, especially with the Void Dragon stuck in corner jail fighting a Karnivore instead of charging out and fighting it somewhere that mattered.

Compounding the issue, a mishearing of declared intent meant that, instead of Heroically Intervening onto the middle objective like I'd wanted them to, my Lychguard were standing exactly where they had been in the centre ruin. Ahri's Karnivore had been aiming to not tag them in combat, and I'd heard that it had been aiming to, and hadn't done the thing, and... 

Not Ahri's fault in the slightest, but it was the emotional low of the day for me and I needed a couple of minutes to sit with my feelings, get off tilt, and not hand over the 100 points right there and then.

Anyway, here are some Immortals charging a Stalker to contest its objective, the Void Dragon escaping corner jail to claim its second War Dog kill, and my Lychguard getting stuck in to grab the centre. Better late than never, I'd have quite liked the 8 VP though. 

Too little, too late, though. The Porphyrion was still taking out everything it saw, polishing off the wounded Void Dragon and dealing 24+6d6 wounds to the 4 wound Geomancer, and now the Lancer and Executioner were able to charge into the Lychguard, double Tank Shock them, and take back control of the centre.

Ye gods, was I glad we'd played on, though, because this was an 87-84 defeat. I haven't put up scoring numbers like that since ninth edition. My Hexmark had been ticking away six VP a turn like I'd planned, the Void Dragon was finishing off Behind Enemy Lines, and I'd played around the damn points for a change. If everything else had transpired as it did, except that Heroic Intervention? I'd have taken this 91-80. So close.

Absolute scene of a game. Never give up. Take five, sit with your feelings, eat your salt, drink your flask of weak lemon drink, and get back in the fight.

Round Three - Mirror Man J, Necrons (Starshatter Arsenal)

Chaos Knights twice and now the Necron mirror match. I am being punished.

 My majestic phalanx deploys for the last time, with the Reanimator front and centre: I was going to have least one d3 of extra wounds restored out of that thing if it killed me. With some actual infantry models on the board, albeit not many, my Plasmancer could return to the Immortals, and the Warriors were left as leaderless chaff.

J's Starshatter list was exactly what one would expect from a team tournament veteran: Silent King, Nightbringer, two Doomsday Arks, Hexmark lurking in the lines, Overlord and Lychguard, two free-roaming Destroyers, and the full fat Wraith brick - six of them with a Technomancer and Cryptothralls.

A good deployment photo proved impossible, as J knew exactly what I could do with Deep Strike, and spread out to leave no space in his deployment zone big enough to drop the Monolith in. Also, I had to go first again. Boo.

 As if disheartened by this, my Monolith's firepower amounted to almost nothing throughout the game - I think one Wraith, at one point, ate enough Death Rays to die. Neither of us wanted to commit our tanky tech to the other - the Lychguard and Wraiths simply traded control of an objective back and forth as odd models were sniped off or reanimated back.

The game was defined by these grinding back and forth engagements. In the centre, my Immortals phased in and out of reality, strafing down the Silent King with support from the Warriors, and eventually bracketing him to the point where the central objective was contestable. 

Up top, a Triarch Stalker planted its claws on another objective while two broken and enraged star gods went at it like bare-knuckle boxers. The Void Dragon was throwing out more attacks, but the Nightbringer was pulling wounds off everything nearby and healing itself up faster...

 The deadlock finally broke at the bottom of round three, when the slain Nighbringer detonated. Its Deadly Demise killed my Void Dragon, the Void Dragon's Deadly Demise killed my Stalker, and the Stalker's Deadly Demise... scratched the paint on the oncoming Doomsday Ark.

The complete loss of my forces on that side of the table led to a collapse in primary scoring for me. I wasn't in the mood to teleport my Monolith into the Doomsday Ark's optimal range, I needed the Lychguard where they were to hold the southern point, and the Silent King had cleaned out my Warriors the turn before. 

With my secondaries locked for three out of five turns, and perfect Tactical draws for J in the last two rounds, this one came out to a 46-77 defeat. 

 

Genuinely, sincerely, I think I could have had this if the tempo of the top left had been different, maybe if I'd thrown the Immortals up there instead of trying for a kill on the King - but then, keeping his wound count down was what allowed me to contest the centre as long as I did.

This was the only game where I regretted my choice of Fixed secondary objectives. With an opponent who knew exactly how to manage the teleporting nonsense and had resources to spare for that purpose, my extremely reliable scoring plan was never going to work for more than two turns, and it didn't. 

My fallback of Engage On All Fronts wouldn't have improved matters, not without reliably having something in J's deployment zone, and cold dice kept me from reliable kills. 

Cleanse might have worked out for the Lychguard and Deathmarks for a couple of turns, while they were standing on points and denying space? Ultimately, I think the greater range of opportunities from Tactical were the only way I was going to close the gap once that northern front collapsed. 

Destined for Spoons 

I didn't think I'd done that badly, but when the scores hit the doors it turned out I'd taken home my second wooden spoon of the season - dead last, 16th out of 16. No scores below 40 though, so still performing better than my personal worst, and I'm pleased with the high score in round two. Goes to show that I can do the thing, if I try. I also finally managed to make the Reanimator Reanimate something, and it helped me stay in the game in that last round. We are, as they say, always learning.