Practicon is over!

Well, today I finally got to go to another tournament. My last one I went to was months ago, and I've been missing it quite a bit. The tournament was here in Fort Collins, and there were about 14 (maybe 15) entrants. The entire premise of this tournament was to get us ready for Genghis Con, which is a week from today (13th of Feb).


I've been working seemingly nonstop on my Guard lately, and after a ridiculously late night to finish the basing on the army, the deed was done, and the army was finished.

My friend CJ came down from Laramie to play in the tourney with his new cool Traitor Guard army, which was awesome. Him and me used to go to tournaments all over the place back in the day. I guess we still do, we just took a few months off.

Looking around, there were about 5 total guard armies, 2 ork armies, 2 chaos armies, 2 demons of chaos armies, a dark eldar army, and at least one 'new nid' army. Surprisingly, there wasn't ANY marine players. I wasn't really sure which matchup seemed more deadly, though a few of the guard lists looked like a tough list to play against. Also, I had no real clue as to how I would do against the 10-skimmer dark-lance spam Dark Eldar.

Game 1: My generic Tzeench traitor guard vs. Andy's Guard

Andy and I have had a pretty extensive tournament history. In my very first tournament in Fort Collins (2nd ever for Warhammer) he and Chad ended up trouncing me and my friend Broc in the first game. I got my revenge against him next tournament with my Blood Angels, crushing his Dark Angels. The next team tournament down there though, he ended up winning the first game against me as well (though somehow our team ended up winning the tournament anyways?), and so today was the 4th time we'd been paired against eachother in the first round of a tournament.

His guard list was cool, and looked a whole lot like my first guard lists I made when seriously considering to start them. He had 5 squads of veterans with various melta and heavy flamers, 2 vendettas, 2 Leman Russ Demolishers, Pask w/ punisher and 3 heavy bolters, and a psyker battle squad, w/ a primaris psyker for his HQ.

The scenario was one where we each picked 5 of our own units to be kill points. Whoever got the most killpoints got the primary. I picked units that my opponents don't normally bother to shoot at, thus making it hard for him to choose where to direct shots.

We shot for a few rounds without doing much (both of us getting poor rolls, though his were a little worse) until in the 2nd or 3rd turn my guys ended up turning up the heat, killing a lot of his models. I ended the game with 4/5 of his kill points, and winning by quite a large margin. I was even able to kill all 5 of his veteran squads, for the Tertiary. Full points, despite only playing 4 turns.

Game 2: Me vs. Britton's Slanneshi Demons

The objective for this game was table quarters, where only troops could contest or control the quarters. Britton got his non-preferred wave in, and I was able to kill 3/6 of his demonette squads in the first round. He only got 2 of his 'good' reserves in, and I was able to kill them both, as well as another demonette squad. His other stuff came down, I killed them, and the game was basically over. He was hampered pretty greatly by not getting his selected wave, and my hydras mess up his particular list something fierce.

Game 3: vs. Mike's Dark Eldar

Mike had a really cool Dark Eldar army with 10 skimmers. I was a little nervous coming into this game, as he had a TON of dark lances. I got the roll to go first, and just spread out my on my deployment zone. He did the same, and failed to sieze the initiative. I then proceeded to destroy 7 of his 10 skimmers, including all 3 of his ravagers. Turn 2 I killed the other 3, and a few squads. It was mop-up after that. I felt somewhat bad, since he really didn't have a chance to do much. I got full points on this one as well.

Results: Best overall for the Generic Tzeench Guard!

I was rather happy to win this one, since it was my first time playing this point level with guard in a tournament (I won a 1000-point tournament a few months ago). I'll be taking the exact same list to Genghis, and likely to the 40k championships in Adepticon. We'll see how the matchups for me go at those tournaments. It seemed like I ended up with good matchups and results every game here.

As a side-note, I got a 26 on painting, and the guy who got the best painting result was my friend CJ, with 29. He ended up with 'Best Army' for the tournament. I was happy with my paintning, though, since I used to have pretty miserable results in it. Looks like I'm getting better :)