[Tournament Report] Molten Crown V | Five Curses and Spite

 ... live in each gnome, this truth can't be ignored... Oh, hello. Didn't see you there. Come in, come in. Sorry about the mess. We're still unpacking, you know how it is. Just step around those, and this, and... is that tenth edition Warhammer 40,000? Oh, just chuck that out. We're not even using it any more.

But as the door closes, there's one last chance to get my fingers crushed and my ass smacked on the way into the sunlit uplands of eleventh edition Warhammer 40,000. Molten Crown V ended up landing on the very day of release and as such became a farewell-to-hams kind of event where one was encouraged to get a bit silly. Which is why I spent June jamming with Cursed Legion. Hack, chop, rip, tear, bzaat where necessary, repeat until the job is done.

Having refined this concept on the battlefields of Rhisga over the last three weeks I was convinced of its potential. It has chunky scoring presence (Wraiths, allegedly Big Skorpekhs), ranged threats (Doomsday Ark, Canoptek Doomstalker, Lokhust Heavy Destroyers) and a bunch of highly mobile murder chod for picking up secondary objectives (Ophydian and Hexmark Destroyers, Deathmarks), to go with distraction pieces (Catacomb Command Barge, Night Scythe, Little Skorpekhs). Would I prefer a second Doomsday Ark to the Deathmarks and Doomstalker? Probably. But needs must when the Deceiver drives, and I was uncomfortably close to the wire with getting the Wraiths done.

For the last time, I came into this with a map-based plan. The new rules offer a far broader matrix of potential objective and layout combinations that even the smoothest brained "all Purge all the time" basis will still generate fifteen possible battlescapes. Furthermore, one doesn't know what mission one will play until one is at the table exchanging force dispositions with one's opponent, which makes it impossible to identify sightlines and staging zones and scoring priorities based on the mission pack. The four pack of highlighters approach has served me well in developing me somewhat as a player over the last year, but from here onwards I shall have to fly low and trust my retros, as it were.

But that's for later. One more time!

Round one was Terraform on Sweeping Engagement, a pairing I've practiced recently and am quietly confident I can manage. Flayed Ones occupy and terraform the central objective on turn one, with the Wraiths, here depicted by Anubis, zigzagging through that open ruin to support them and retain control when the scoring happens. The Ophydians go down in opposite corners, with the unit on the right selected to make the drive for my "natural expansion" objective. They're a bit faster than Skorpekhs and can move through Ruins without penalty, so they get Terraforming duties early on as well. Shooting elements, denoted by the eyes of Horus (not that eye of Horus) are mostly on guard duty here, making sure those fire corridors between the no-mans-land objectives stay live. 

The point of uncertainty here is the Night Scythe, which I've tried a couple of times on this map and... it hasn't quite delivered its cargo to any success. Reinforcing the "natural expansion" push on the right, either from behind as fire support or ahead as a screening piece, and depositing its cargo of additional Skorpekhs onto the divot, seem like the order of the day. There's also an option to use it more aggressively on the top left if things fall apart on the right or I urgently need to Storm Hostile Objective or Engage on All Fronts.

Round two was Hidden Supplies on Search and Destroy. I don't have a great deal of experience with this "six objectives" setup but I have historically done least worst on this map (my first and most recent and also current and last and only tournament win). 

Here I think the play is giving myself options, setting the Flayed Ones up quite conservatively to nuzzle the rightmost divot and bringing on the Scythe and Skorpekhs early to bring it fully under control. The central points are threatened by Wraiths (in the terrain they can fly out of easily) and Skorpekhs (in the terrain they can walk through), and the leftmost has the Doomsday Ark and Command Barge pointed at it ready to sweep up and present threats. 

There are nice spots for the Doomstalker to set up and be an Overwatch bully, and the Lokhusts to bunker up behind until they see something worth shooting at. Most of the points are in no-mans-land so I think making a play for all the divots and having the Deep Strike nonsense ready to relocate and support is the way forward here.

Third and final round was a slightly nudged Search and Destroy layout and a nice simple Take and Hold objective. This one wants more or less the same deployment, but a more cautious set of opening moves with the Command Barge held more centrally to ensure control is maintained. Holding three divots is all it takes to pull this one off so I don't need to make a push onto the top left unless the rest of the board gets away from me or, as ever, the secondary cards demand it.

Such was the plan, any road. Let's see how it turned out on the day.

Round One: "Nothing matters, man. Nothing matters any more."

The recent change in life circumstances means I am no longer an easy half hour or so's walk from the Molten Crown venue; it's now a two hour two bus job which brought me to the battlefield bang on time. Bang on time effectively means "late" when everyone wants to set up and get started, so I drew the bye round to start me off - that means Matt'TO and his T'au Retaliation Cadre. That means nine Fireknife Crisis Battlesuits, nine Sunforge Crisis Battlesuits, three Coldstar Commanders, three Enforcer Commanders, two Ghostkeel Battlesuits, Commander Farsight and the Twin Lance. A Crisis of Infinite Suits, if you will. Oh, and five Stealth Battlesuits, henceforth referred to as "the Bait," and packing a homing beacon.

I had a game plan. I did not consult the game plan before setting up my units. This is why my Skorpekh Destroyers ended up taking the Bait, instead of my Wraiths - the only unit in my army that might have stood up to the deluge of "perfectly optimised for target type" firepower the Tau unleashed. You see, Wraiths can't move through walls (despite this being their whole shtick in previous editions) due to their Beast unit type, while Skorpekhs can, due to their Infantry unit type. The one had to go around and the other merely through.

The result was a frankly miserable experience in which the Tau had the rock to my scissors and the paper to my rock, and would doubtless have had the scissors to my paper if I'd thought to bring any. This was barely even a game, with Fireknives popping off my Skorpekhs (thank you massed Damage 3 guns) and Sunforges exterminating Wraiths (thank you fusion blasters) while Farsight proceeded to tank my Command Barge's best efforts in melee and then chop/shoot it in half. Burning two command points on Epic Challenge and a re-roll to wound would have paid off if it Assassinated Farsight but it didn't.

At the bottom of round three all I had left were these two vehicles parked at the opposite end of my deployment zone from the Tau, and a grim sense that my mediocre random shot count rolls were not going to dent sufficient Battlesuits to make the third round worth playing out.

That's a concession in the bye round and no Victory Points on the board. I do not care enough to sit through a non-game or make up two rounds of play that never happened for strength of schedule's sake, which is another reason I'll never be a real tournament player. This may be seen as a lack of respect for my opponent's time and strength of schedule. I assure you, the attitude I will cop after three turns of Losing This Game At Deployment is far more disrespectful, and at least this way we have a long lunch break.

Pizza was nice, though.

Round Two: "I feel we've become friends in our time together, and as such you won't take offence when I invite you to tongue my balls."

I told you I get worse when I have to play out a miserable game.

This is nothing against Beastboss Ryanork, who's a really nice bloke and fun to hang with for three hours, and was clearly having a whale of a time playing an army I'd considered running with myself, once upon a time. It's just that this was another foregone conclusion, and Ork close combat phases are tedious to sit through. There's this huge bucket of attacks, and then there's big stuff which has three different close combat profiles with conditional modifiers and gets to use them all, and just when you think it's all over some support character pops up and annihilates your squad, and you have to go through all that four more times before you're allowed to do anything other than roll armour saves. The alternative tagline for this game was "can I do anything about it? don't bother explaining it, then."

Worst of all, there was the slim hope that maybe I'd rack up enough secondary points or break through somewhere and turn the ship around.

Anyway, here's Da Big Hunt. Two massive units of Beast Snaggas with Painbosses and a smaller one with a Beastboss in a Trukk; two units of Squighog riders, one with a named Beastboss on Squigasaur and one with the regular version; a small pack of Grots, a split-up mob of Kommandos, Boss Snikrot and a free-roaming Beastboss on objective duty; and casual Wazdakka Gutzmek racing Morzag or Mozrog or whatever the big fella on the big squig calls himself.

It just about fits in the deployment zone. And here's me with almost all my chaff-clearing stuff sat at home on the shelf.

I've gone and done it again, haven't I? Put the Wraiths in a building, out of which they cannot easily move, thus ensuring they can't get onto that middle objective in good order.

At least this time I had a correction for that mistake, in the form of an empty Night Scythe swooping into the middle of the board to pick them up.

It didn't really help, though. See, while the Wraiths did blop down onto those middle objectives safely (Beast Snagga shooting not being up to destroying a Night Scythe), they were outscored and slowly dragged down by two massive units of Beast Snaggas. I had the tools to deal with this ('lo Scarabs) but they weren't in the right place, so I ended up scoring not one single primary objective point despite there being four entire objects I could touch to score primary objective points.

Secondary objectives kept me in the game for a while, including tickling Wazzdakka to death with Flayed Ones and briefly occupying objectives and quarters with my Ophydians. Ultimately, though, the Squighogs had the speed and the Snaggas had the weight of numbers to bully me back into my deployment zone for something like an 83-34 krumpin' (and that's being generous, giving me a couple of secondaries in the imaginary "talk it out" rounds that I don't think were attainable).

I was being charged and dying without rolling any dice for most of my units, and the ones that did get to roll didn't have the volume of attacks needed to slow the Orks down. The one time I did get to swing was an interruption with Counter-Offensive on my Ophydian Destroyers to scoop up most of a Squighog unit - the titular offer to cleanse my grundular portions was a response to the suggestion of interrupting with Scarabs instead. 

I genuinely don't know what else I could have done with this one. If this had been the Take and Hold round I could have dug in on two divots and made the best of it but Hidden Supplies demands going wide, playing the Orks' game. Who runs the table takes the play and... well. Zero primary score.

Round Three: "And what, exactly, will Lelith be showing off?"

I haven't played against Drukhari since they were still called Dark Eldar, which is funnily enough the last time Archon Ed had really paid attention to Necrons. We'd never met before, but a man with a floofy mohawk who brings Haribo to the table is onto a good start already, and this one was a much needed delight. Ed was entirely on my level, riffing off the dice telling stories with the best of 'em, and the matchup wasn't bad either.

Drukhari bring the pain, you see - they're famous for it, it's their army rule - but they also die when you look at them funny, which meant even cold dice and mediocre placement of heavy weapons could get things done. This was a game with a lot of trading, a good bit of back and forth, and for once I displayed the ability to follow a game plan. 

Also, the photos do not do Ed's army justice. There's an airbrushed slow fade on these perfidious space pixies, blending up from deep pinks and greens to yellow in a glorious cocktail sunrise, nicely contrasted with the brutality of the grey skin and the brutalism of the urban bases. It was a pleasure merely to look at them, never mind kill them.

Kabalite Contract, featuring a swarm of small units! Lady Malys leading half a pack of Kabalites, an Archon leading another, with the split enabled by two Venom transports; a full pack of Kabalites in a Raider; two Ravagers; five Harlequins; two units of five Mandrakes; five Incubi with another Archon; two packs of Hellions; a trio of Reaver jetbikes; five Wyches and Lelith Hesperax; another Raider which I think contained five Wyches; a Talos. Did you get all that? Oh, I missed the Scourges, five of those with heat lances as well. I still feel like someone's missing.

We started the affray with a fairly even trade of secondary points, an easy Secure No Man's Land and a near miss on No Prisoners for me and a confident Recover Assets for him. The difference is, I'd gone first and occupied the middle ground, which meant he had to remove six Wraiths from an objective or run the gauntlet of the Night Scythe, Command Barge and Flayed Ones if he wanted the other.

The fruit salad Kabal did their best, sending a wave of noise forward and taking out the Night Scythe, Flayed Ones, Command Barge and my Ophydians on the northern objective to pick up No Prisoners and Establish a Locus while they were at it. None of that was killing any Wraiths though, and I'd Rapid Ingressed some more Ophydians to keep the aelfs honest around the southern objective.

The Necron big guns coming out of their cage here were able to blow away the Talos, a Venom, a chunk of the Incubi, and a Ravager, grabbing me No Prisoners and allowing my Scarabs to Sabotage that building ahead of the Doomstalker. I was building up a lead at this point, even before my Wraiths popped off and murdered all of Lelith's attending Wyches with their Counter-Offensive. 

Lelith herself proceeded to "swirl, twirl and generally be sexy" for another round, killing two Wraiths by herself before she tripped and fell on the Technomancer's staff. He'd already finished the Talos off, in a display of competence not seen since the early Crusade outings, but was starting to feel a bit tired by the time Lady Malys got involved and finished the squad off. Her Archon pal was eaten by charging Skorpekhs, along with all of his friends.

On the other flank my Hexmark came in to finish off the last Hellion, while the Ophydians charged that Raider and chopped it to bits, not even minding that they lost one of their number to the Deadly Demise. (Well, I was a bit miffed, since it left space for the cargo to jump out and shoot holes in my Lokhusts on the next turn, but these are details.)

At dice-down o'clock Ed had cleared the central objective of Wraiths and had a pile of Harlequins, Kabalites, Lady Malys and light vehicles closing in around it, all concentrating their fire to whittle the Wraiths down. We were sitting at a 52 - 39 in my favour, with genuinely no idea if Ed could bring it back or not. Too much would depend on secondary draws, how my combats and shooting went in taking back the centre and locking him out of primary objectives, and whether he could finally crack the invulnerable saves on the surviving Cron vehicles. 

So we called it where it lay, and I got to see out tenth edition the way I saw it in; an unexpected win against a fine, upstanding opponent who had the Right Vibe. Can't say fairer than that.