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I have a big game coming up against a buddy of mine. We're both trying to ease into competitive play. He is bringing a War Convocation, and I will play my Tau. We will be playing an ITC mission.

I have never played against Cult Mech, let alone a WarCon. I think his list will be something like:

Bellisarius Cawl

2x5 Grav Devastors (or maytbe 3x3)

3x Kastelan Robots (max phosphor blasters, datasmith with the 2++ thing and god knows what else)

ruststalkers
rangers
vanguard
infiltrators

Sydonian Dragoon

Dunecrawler (not sure loadout)

Knight Crusader: double shot bc, gatling cannon, storm missile thing, meltagun

As for me, I have many options as I own about 3k of Tau, I'm just not sure what direction to go. I also have a Canoptek Harvest I can ally, fyi. I don't mind tailoring against him because he's going to get about 600 points of free upgrades, and I won't. So I need some type of edge. Thanks!

Tau seem to match up pretty well against War Convocation. If nothing else, the vast amount of s6 and 7 you can field will quickly wreck their fragile vehicles and double out the Ruststalkers and Infiltrators. I've had good results with both a Breacher-heavy CAD list and a more tournament-ready list featuring a Hunter Contingent with an OSC.

Whatever you choose to run, make sure you have a clear answer to his Knight(s). If he gets into your lines and starts D'ing your robots, life will get tricky for you in a hurry. The easiest solution is a Stormsurge, a model I'd highly recommend for competitive play, anyway. Whether you go with the pulse blast cannon or the pulse driver, you can go wrong. Your Canoptek Harvest is also a reasonable solution to stall a quickly-closing knight, if you find yourself without a way to kill it outright. The Harvest also has the extremely helpful benefit of providing you with a durable, potent countercharge unit. Many have reported excellent results when pairing Tau with a Harvest, so if that tickles your fancy, go wild.

I will be bringing a Stormsurge, whose D missiles I need to dispatch with the knight. The Harvest is to tie up his kataphron grav destroyers before they kill my Stormsurge, and I'm thinking Crisis solo suits with fusion to take out the robots.

It's easier said than done of course. He has a great alpha strike too. It's gonna be a heavyweight brawl.

That gatling cannon knight can be a total pain for the storm surge. On top of all the 24" grav that war cons bring its gonna be a struggle. If you can keep the storm surge alive for even just a couple turns it will basically wipe out the whole skitarii side of the army.

The optimized stealth cadre is also excellent at dealing with vehicles. I've seen it take out knights before, and it's use of cover saves helps it deal with grav.

If you got the 3 riptides then the riptide wing is pretty terrifying.

Skip fire warriors and just take a couple crisis suits deepstriking for troops.

Use marker drones for marker lights. Have a commander with a drone controller join them.

I don't have a firm grasp on how many points tau stuff is so I don`t know if you can grab all of that.

Focus on killing his grav, and his knight first. The skitarii will melt once you have a moment to actually focus on them. The kastelans are scary for sure but they are so tough I think it is better to kill the other stuff, and then focus on scoring objectives.