My tournament cup runneth over!

So many choices of where to play!

So I am use to not having any choices of where to play a tournament. There is a game store (Empire Games in Mesa AZ) that hold an RTT about every other month, and then there are the other game stores in AZ that do not tell you when they are having them because they do not want their regulars to attend anywhere else, and they do not want outsiders to come in. I will say that Empire Games started to recently get a good crowd at their tournaments. It use to be that they only had about 10 players who were all new players and now they are getting around 25 players and some of them are pretty good (where were they for the last 3 years?). 

So I am moving to LA on Feb 29^th (should be easy to remember that date) and I have all kinds of choices and opportunities to play in tournaments. I am not a stranger to LA since I was born and raised there, and played in my share of tournaments. The reason why is because where I was living did not have a local game store (this is pre-Game Empire Pasadena) so to play any games of Warhammer I had to drive a long ways to RTTs (that got me into the habit of driving/traveling far for tournaments). The reason why I started to drive to tournaments is that it guaranteed me a day of gaming, and the side effect was that I started to get really good at tournaments.

So now in LA I am driving up to the Bay Area this weekend to play in the BAO, then next weekend I have to choose between a tournament at Thou Shalt Game in Temecula, or an RTT at Game Empire Pasadena. I do know that I have to be at GE Pasadena the next day on March 11^th to sign up for a league. Then the Ironman in Las Vegas on March 24th and from there are a bunch of other RTTs and tournaments so I certainly will have my dance card full (I hope) whenever I want to game. This is going to be a nice change for me.
  

Something I thought was funny...

Blackmoor goes to the Broadside Bash

Well it is that time of the year again for the Broadside Bash. I did not attend it last year because I hate the comp system. Two years ago another player and I played foot eldar and we got hammered on player judged comp scoring. So I was not going this year, but because of my reporting for 40k UK I try to take in as many events as I can so I signed up for it.

So now I am in the middle of a move back to LA and I am really busy, but I bought my tickets a while ago before I accepted this new job. I did not have any time to work on my army so I just took Chaos that I had no interest in playing. So what happened was that I just had too much stuff going on and I had to drop out after the second game.

Now here is a slightly funny story

I was driving home from LA to Phoenix and my car broke down in Fontana CA. I was about 100 miles away from where I stay in LA, and 250 miles from my home in Phoenix. I have a hybrid and what happens is that my engine shuts off in the middle of the freeway and has a warning on the dashboard that says “please pull over immediately”, as if the engine shutting off did not achieve that result.  It did this a couple of times and I took it to the Ford dealer and I was waiting for 3 hours for them to see what was wrong with it. Well, they told me that it was a water pump that cools the electric engine. I knew that is what it was because the same thing happened to me on the way back from wargames con in July, and it is a known problem with Hybrid Escapes. Well he left me in the waiting room to long because I hatched a plan B if I did not like what he was going to tell me about the repairs. So when he told me that it would be $700 to fix it, and that they would need a day to get the part so I would have to spend the night in a hotel and miss a day of work, it was time to execute plan B! So I went to the closest Toyota dealer and bought a new car. I traded in my Escape and I got a good price for it. The $700 defect cannot be found until you are driving for a while on the freeway (like I always am) so I just saved the money that I would have spent on a car repair, and just got a new car. When I woke up in the morning I had no idea that I was going to end the night driving home in something other than the car I had driven for the last 5 years. The funny thing is that I bought the car late last night and I had no idea was color it even was until I saw it this morning. I thought it was a dark metallic blue and it was a dark metallic grey that is almost black.   

I have a couple of e-mails about Draigowing

I have a couple of e-mails about Draigowing so I will take a moment to answer them.

Dan writes:

Hi there! I thoroughly enjoy your blog, first off. Very well written and with interesting topics. Also it's nice to see someone else who appreciates insanely elite armies. The old chaos chosen Terminators were my favorite unit and now Paladins are the closest I can get to them. How ironic...

Thanks Dan, although I must say that if this blog is one thing it is not well written! Chaos Chosen were crazy in the last chaos codex. They were the most customizable unit in the game. I saw some 5-man units running around that cost over 500 points!

Anyway I had two questions for you that I hoped you could answer.

First, I run my Draigowing similarly to yours except that I put in a Vindicare in place of one of the Dreads. Why do you favor more Psyfle Dread saturation over some of the tricky benefits of the Vindicare (not to mention his AT capabilities)?

A Vindicare can be interchangeable with a dreadnaught; it is just a matter of what you are looking for. A Vindicare can be shot down by multiple strength 8 shots (like a dread), but the assassin can also be killed by small arms fire though, so you can make the argument that he is less durable. The Dread is more mobile, can start in reserve come on the board and shoot. Also dreads are better when shooting at squadrons and low armored vehicles compared to the Vindicare which is better at taking out high AV (13+). They can also assault and tie up units that struggle to kill dreads in hand-to-hand. The Dread also can do more damage with 4 shots at strength 8 to infantry. While the Vindicate cannot do that kind of damage to infantry, it can mess up one enemy model pretty good.

I think it is just a matter of play style and preference. I ran my old Demonhunters with 3 dreads, and I just like them.  

Second question, how do you deal with Darklight spam DE? I haven't faced my friend's DE with my Draigowing yet, but his list wastes my JetSeer Council list. I've only beaten his Darklight spam with my hybrid shooty Eldar. Anyway, with the amount of S8/Ap2 he has, it seems like a really uphill battle for me. Any thoughts?

Cheers man!
Dan

Well DE can be a problem. It takes a little bit of practice and know-how. All I can do is give you some pointers.

Hold the center of the board: You have a 24” range (plus a 6” move) so they can’t hide from you.

Combat Squad: You need to shot at as many targets as possible. They will be gunning you down, but you need to be knocking as many targets out of the air at the same time. You need to outlast them.

Hug cover: With Sanctuary this will slow down their damage from darklight weapons.

Take Psybolt ammo with stormbolters: This is devastating to DE. You have a ton of shooting, and strength 5 knocks their sailboats out of the air.

Target priority: You want to get the Ravagers with your Dreadnaughts because they will be in the rear, and they should be able to take out AV11 even with flicker fields and cover saves.

Target Priority #2: Depending on the situation you will either want to shoot at the Venoms with Trueborn or Warriors. If they just have a few Troop units in an objective game, take them out. Otherwise if they have a lot of Trueborn with blasters you will want to kill them.  

Know your ranges: If you stun a venom the guys inside can’t shoot either, also if they move over 6” they can’t shoot. Blasters only have a range of 18” so if they want to move 12” and shoot at you they have to disembark. So you might want to use this to maneuver were they can’t shoot everything at you.  

Know when to hold them and know when to fold them: Depending on their set up, how they deploy, who goes first, the mission, and their army make-up you might want to reserve/deep strike yourself (notice all of the caveats). This gives you first shot, and it lets you react to them. A big factor though is that it also limits the time that they get to shoot you. If you start on the board they are shooting at you for 5-7 turns, if you come in on the bottom of turn 2 they only get around 3-5 turns of shooting. This can be very dangerous with a DE army because they are fast and large. If you deep strike they can blanket the table making it hard to land without a deep strike mishap, or they can block a table edge so your reserves can’t come on. This tactic is very situational and again, be very careful.   

Karios writes:

I have a quick question on your Draigo Wing build. Why do you take a 5man Strike squad and a 10man Interceptor squad instead of Purifiers?

With Draigo, you can make the Purifiers scoring, and that would be my inclination. It also seems like you could be very vulnerable to hordes (especially Orks in vehicles) without
Purifiers, even with 10 Paladins.

I appreciate your thoughts.  

The reason for the strike squad is that I have to have a second troop choice to fill out the force organization slot before I can use Grand Strategy to make other units scoring. I have seen people take solodins (a single paladin model) but I like the strikes better. It adds a warp quake, it has 5 wounds for durability, and it adds some ranged shooting. 

The Interceptors are a fast moving unit in a slow army. They make up for a lot of weaknesses that being a slow army presents. They can get to where I need them to be to do things like getting side shots, claim/contest objectives etc.

As far as Orks goes I have never lost to them, and in fact one of the easiest armies for me to beat. Orks have one move and that is to get into assault. A block of paladins can do so many wounds to them that every unit they have in assault with explode to "No Retreat" wounds (30+ attacks hitting on 3s and wounding on 2s will kill a shed load of orks). In return they will do a couple of wounds, and kill a model or 2 with a Klaw, and then it is over. 

Return of the Foot Eldar for a 1750 RTT

So as you can tell by the post below, I was thinking about taking my foot Eldar for a spin again, and that is what I did at an RTT last Saturday. A lot of people don’t know this because they only know me as a Draigowing player, but back in the day, I did well at GTs using foot Eldar. I have not played them in over a year since Da Boyz in Nov. 2010.

So I drove the 40 minutes to the game store called Crusaders Retreat in Phoenix. It was a new store with just a few tables so there were like 9 players.

My 1750 point list was:

The state of foot eldar and an e-mail question

E-mail in!

Hey, I heard from people that you are a foot eldar expert and I am just starting to play 40k but running foot eldar because it looked more fun.

I have 1500-2k points or so of the following

Eldrad + Avatar

Harlies x11 (inc. shadow seer/Jester)

Scorpions x9 (inc Exarch)

Gaurdians x40 ish

2x Warlocks

2x Wraithlords

3x War Walkers

I was going with the eml/lance on lords and SLs on the walkers and the 4 gaurdian squads with 2 spiritseer conceals.

Two things, because I notice you are in the LA area, What would you recommend I change up/get and second would you be up for a game ever?

-Michael

Well, I was a foot eldar expert, and I hope that my eldar are going to be making a return soon.

So let’s break down what you have:

4th Edition Codexes in a 5th Edition World

So the question is (all things being equal) can the 4^th edition codexes beat the heavy hitters of 5^th edition? And if they can, do they have more than one build that can do it?

Now before my recent run with the Draigowing I always played the old codexes. A lot of my friends were always busting my balls about always using 3^rd edition codexes. I took Demonhunters to Adepticon last year (and won a lot of RTTs with them for the prior 6 months), and at the last GW GT I played in was the 2009 Baltimore GT where I placed 12th (out of 130?) with my Witchhunters.

I also played a lot of games with my Chaos Space Marines (and I am taking them in a couple of weeks to the Broadside Bash) and my reputation was first made by playing foot eldar.

So what 4^th edition armies can stand up these days to Mech IG, Space Wolves and Grey Knights?

My thoughts on the matter is that most of the old codexes are still able to compete with some of the newer builds, but some of them of course are better at it than others. I think that we would see more people have success with these armies but they are just never brought. I think the reasons for this is that a lot of the armies from 4^th edition are pretty much single builds these days and it gets boring to play the same army over and over again with no room to change. The other reason why you never see some armies played is that certain armies just have a stigma to them. You hear all the time about how bad Tau are, but are they really? When was the last time you have played them or played against them? I have played against them twice with my Draigowing and I was barely able to beat them and they have given me a much harder game then most of the 5^th edition codexes have. Another reason why you never see the older armies is people like to build the latest and greatest army and they often have an easier learning curve to them. Also stores and GW always like to hype the newest releases, and forget about the older books. I went into a GW store the other day and they do not even carry any metal models, so if what you want is not out in finecast (and most of the older stuff isn’t) you are out of luck.

Here are my thoughts on the 4^th edition codexes from the worst codex to the best: