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.

Lessons from 1500 point Maelstrom games

This weekend it was raining so my usual Sunday afternoon tennis sessions were cancelled, which meant I could play twice as much Warhammer! So I had two games at 1500 point Maelstrom. The first was against Chaos Space Marines, where I won in a slaughterfest. The second was against Eldar, where I lost in a slaughterfest. The Eldar guy is probably the best player in our club, and he uses some unusual stuff (e.g. shadoweavers and vipers). I learnt some things

Lessons from 1500 vs. Astra Militarum

Got in a 1500 point Maelstrom game over the weekend against what I imagine is a fairy conventional Astra Militarum Army. I won fairly convincingly, but it may have been because my army is cheese and Astra Militarum is one of the weaker codexes. I also thought marines was not a great match up because you get armour saves against just about everything and his guardsman need 4s to hit and 6s to wound against bikes.

Anyway, on to the analysis: