How to win at Maelstrom

At my club we play a lot of Maelstrom of war missions. It's about a 50/50 split with eternal war and the annual club tournament uses book Maelstrom missions. I've read a lot of commentary complaining about Maelstrom, saying that it comes down to luck of the draw too often. That hasn't been my experience at all. In fact, I don't think I've had a single Maelstrom game come down to luck of the draw. However, you need to build armies that are suitable to Maelstrom. If you bring something that is fundamentally an eternal war army, like Deathwing, Death-stars or a firebase, you are going to lose. Pretty much anything that is designed to kill stuff rather than score is going to have a hard time unless you can reliably table your opponent by turn 5. In this article I've assembled some of the insights I've gained playing around 30 book Maelstrom games. Feel free to disagree with me.

My first display board

I wanted to make a display board for the club tournament because it was my first one with this club. I thought it would ingratiate me with some of the old hands and I also wanted to make some commitment to encourage myself to keep going. I also figured a display board was my best bet for actually walking away with some prize (which turned out to be true). This post is about the making of said board, with pictures!

Tournament write up

So we had the big tournament on two weekends ago. I had a great time but I didn't do very well, scoring 1-1-3. I did, however, win best theme! This was due largely to my display board and some other aspects of my painting/modelling, which I will showcase in a separate post. This article is going to be more about battle reports.

The Emperor's Ghosts in full regalia!

Space Marines - what units are worth taking?

Thought I'd write a post combining all my insights (if you can call them that) on what works and what doesn't for Space Marines. I'll finish with some general list building points. I will only cover units that I think are competitive. Other units that aren't bad, like Vanguard and Legion of the Damned, won't be covered, though there's no reason you can't play them in games and still win. Pretty much everything in the Space Marine Codex is usable. The worst units are Assault Centurions, Devastator Squads (unless you're Imperial fists, in which case they're actually pretty good), Assault Squads and Whirlwinds. Everything else is passable, though I would avoid dreadnoughts, predators, honour guard and most of the HQs, and Vindicators unless your meta is full of Orks/foot hordes. That covers the ugly and the bad, now for the good.

7th edition marines pt. 2

Been a while since I wrote the first part of this series in the wash up of the bay area open. The NOVA open had a drop pod list quite highly placed (13th), so I thought I'd go back and write a bit about pod lists.

Fighting Angron

In my practice game yesterday I played against a CSM 30K list featuring Angron and 4 tactical squads. Each tactical squad has an apothecary - that's something unique to Heresy Era World Eaters. It's kind of cool in that it let's chaos play the way Games Workshop seems to think they should - as a horde of infantry running at the enemy lines. No tanks, no support planes, just bodies. The apothecaries mean all the tactical marines are 3+/5+FNP, which is pretty tough. Angron is a total beast. I7, STR9 on the charge, AP2, fleet, 6 attacks plus rage or something like that, eternal warrior, 5 wounds. His only weakness if that he's 3+/4++, so he needs some ablative wounds about the place.

Not so many lessons

I played a game this week but it was a bit uneventful. It was against a lovely guy who I've played about a half dozen times now and he's just really bad at playing the game. Amazing painter, very poor general. I suppose those things do tend to go together. His list has improved over the months and I even brought a fairly toned down list, but it was a slaughter.