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Hey guys, well I played in the Battlefoam Wild West Shootout in Mesa this last weekend and want to make sure and send kudoes to Romeo from Battlefoam and Kyle from the Mesa Battle Bunker Game Empire for picking up the slack left by GW when they decided not to do a Vegas GT this year. The store was absolutely amazing - I am only hyperbolizing a little bit when I say that I would kill to have a game store like this in driving distance.

Sadly, I picked up a bug that started kicking in Friday and carried through til Wednesday or so this week. As a result I didn't take many pics and completely forgot to take notes. Plus my memory is a bit shakier than normal, so caveat lector. Also, I would like to make a very public apology to my opponents if I was a bit crankier than I should have been. I tried hard not to be, but I know my patience was a bit shorter than usual.

I brought my Crimson Fists bike list which has had many transformations. The current list skews a bit heavy on the anti-IG/anti-Ork tech (which is most of what I play against) but I figured both would be pretty well represented. Turns out there were only 3 IG players, 2 of whom I drove with. Oh yeah, they did a great job of ensuring that none of us played against each other for the entire tourney - so that was pretty awesome.

My list:
Crimson Fists Ambush Force
Captain Vaqaero on Bike with Relic Blade

4 Bikes with MM Attack Bike, Power Fist, 2x Melta
4 Bikes with MM Attack Bike, Power Fist, 2x Melta
4 Bikes with MM Attack Bike, Power Fist, 2x Plasma
4 Bikes with MM Attack Bike, Power Fist, 2x Plasma

Land Speeder Typhoon
Land Speeder Typhoon
Land Speeder Typhoon

Thunderfire Cannon
Thunderfire Cannon
Thunderfire Cannon



GAME 1

Game 1 was against Cody Voorhees (who went on to win 3rd) and his Vulkan Marines. This was the mission where everything was worth 2kp except for dedicated transports which were worth 1kp.

Vulkan List
Vulkan He'stan
Librarian (avenger, null zone)

3 Rhino squads with MM, flamer or melta

6 Thunderhammer Termies

Vindicator with power of the machine spirit.
Land Raider Crusader

2 MM attack bikes



Cody castled everything up in a corner. I considered just basically staying out of range of everything for the whole game and force a draw, but then decided that I paid and traveled for 5 games, so may as well try and win even if it means a loss. My early game shooting was fairly crappy - most of my army shot at the vindicator - including the dreadnought at rear armor and just managed to shake it which power of the machine spirit negated. One of the Tunderfire cannons stuns a rhino. One of my units of bikes sweeps wide.

POTMS vindi shoots and kills a couple of bikes, everything else moves toward me. The passengers in the stunned vehicle shoot at the dreadnought and destroy it.

The following turn the Thunderfire Cannons switch to tremor rounds which results in an immobilized rhino (yay!).

The LRC cruises forward the max distance and unloads a whole lot of pain which charges and crushes the Techmarine arming one of the thunderfire cannons (the other two are in the opposite corner).

My shooting manages to wipe out the two attack bikes. At this point the game kind of slows down and we have some rules issues that eventually result in a judge coming over. Basically, near as I can tell, Cody's group uses the "magic cylinder" to play the games and he was having problems with me using TLOS. Since TLOS is the rule, it goes my way, but it did greatly reduce my enjoyment of the game with him bickering over every single long range shot I tried to take. To his credit, after the judges ruling he didn't really challenge any beyond that even saying that he needed to remember he wasn't playing Codyhammer, so full marks for that. He was a nice enough guy, I was just starting to feel really lousy as my medicine was wearing off and so I was just ready for the game to be over.

This game ends in a loss in VPs for me - I lost 3 bike units, the thunderfire cannon, the dreadnought and his drop pod for a total of 11 KPs, in return I killed all three of his rhinos, the bikes, and one of the squads for 7 KPs. The game was fairly tight until the end.

GAME 2
I popped a couple of dayquil and was starting to feel a bit better. Game 2 lined me up against an awesome looking ork army generaled by the youngest player at the tourney - Dante - the battlewagon came apart and was apparently used as a stompa head in the bigger army. Also was a road warrior looking car with metal plates and chainlink fence welded to it as a trukk for the nobs.

Dante's list was basically:

Warboss
Big Mek with shokk attack gun

18 Boyz x2
10 Nobs in trukk with zogwart
15 Grots

6 burnas in battlewagon
Snikrot with 10 Vulchas



This was the infamous football mission which has been spoken of elsewhere. I have to admit being a bit worried about playing against Dante, but those fears were absolutely unfounded. This ended up being far and away the most fun game I played at the tourney. He was a great opponent who was having fun playing the game and was laser sharp in his sticking to the mission objective. He even came up with a good idea of moving the objective 6 inches with one unit and then 6 further inches with another unit. Unfortunately, this was shot down by the judges who said that it couldn't move more than 6" per player turn, period.

Dante's basic strategy was just to scrum up around the objective and my basic strategy was just to kill handfuls of orks to try and get to the darn thing.

The thunderfire cannons were absolutely brutal to this affect. Basically, str 5 ap6 ignore cover is just made for killing orks and it just became a contest of could I kill them off before they got off the table.

The lootas focused their fire on the thunderfires in range, destroying one machine (the techmarine then joined the crew of the other to provide a bit more help when it came to wound allocation). Snikrot had a bad drift and his vulchas ended up less than an inch from my bikers so I put them in the far corner. If he had fewer vulchas he could have just stacked them on the other side and been okay - something I am going to remember for my own Vanguard Veterans. They did get their vengeance though by killing the captain.

Speaking of the captain, he was very nearly squigged. I think my exact words were "he does what?"

Luckily for me I got a 4 to his 3. Whew.

All in all it was just an absolute meat grinder with me literally killing his last model 1" from my table edge. I had tabled him but had 47" to go to get the objective off the table.

At the end of the game, rather than rolling for the custom objective I just gave it to Dante - he was such a great sport and so much fun to play, I felt he deserved it. Not to mention the fact that I hadn't been able to pry the damn thing out of his greedy little green hands.

So, that is two games down. Look for games 3-5 coming a bit later.

Cody is still new to 5th ed and forgets staple things constantly, to his defense.. He is used to 4th ed with the los blocking forests, and somehow always manages to forget its not like that anymore.

Thanks for the bat rep's.

Yeah, like I said, he was a nice guy, I would definitely play him again and had I not been sick I would have been a bit more patient. He played a good tight game, as did Josh - seems like you guys have a good group there in AZ.

Josh can count all his 5th ed games on two hands, and was using my Tyranids.. An army he isn't super familiar with. He's starting to come around more after a long break

How did he have the Machine Spirit on a Vindicator?

Embarked squads can't shoot from inside shaken or stunned vehicles.

G

There were a lot of weird rules things it seems.....It's not snikrot who deepstrikes it's Zagstruk...but whatev, it seems like he played that right, he got Zag's name wrong but his unit and rules were right.

I probably messed some stuff up during the batrep - like I said, I was pretty out of it.

Druggy boy!

Fetterkey wrote:How did he have the Machine Spirit on a Vindicator?

I second this, my vindicators can have POTMS but i am 99% positive 'nilla marines cannot.

Haha, these batreps are as scatter-brained as you were that weekend.

Yeah, if he was playing Salamanders, power of the machine spirit is now 70 points and its called Antaro Chronus.

Can't shoot out of a stunned vehicle as GBF pointed out.

yeah these reports are ridiculously bad. Please check my sig for actual good reports (I am somewhat ashamed by these - but posted them cause I said I would).