Adepticon 2012, Part III: Team Tournament, Game 1 vs. Team Handsome

Team Tournament Time!

For the third year in a row I participated in the Adepticon Warhammer 40,000 Team Tournament, this time with a very different team. I still find it hard to believe that we managed to organize everything with even less preparation and motivation than we did last year, but in the end things turned out to be fine, I suppose. This year we decided to bring four different Imperial Armies. 

I brought my standard Space Wolves list; my friend Vince brought his sexy, all-jump pack Blood Angels; Blake brought a smorgasbord of flyers with 2 Vendetta Squadrons and a Vulture with a Twin-lined Punisher Cannon + a bunch of puny Guardsmen inside, while our Team Captain Justice brought his Ultramarines. Thus, we assembled the..

Justice League

Justice (Superman), Vince (The Flash), Me (Batman) and Blake (The Green Lantern)

With little to no preparation we decided to wing it this year and just roll dice... The idea for this year's team name came to me as soon as the question was popped. I mean, come on. Getting to be Batman was just the tip of the iceberg.... And yes, we had Heroclix miniatures as Objective Markers.

Game #1 from the Warhammer 40,000 Team Tournament had us facing probably one of the more entertaining and original teams at Adepticon. Actually, this year our game encounters were saturated with some pretty er.. famous.. individuals and teams, I suppose.
In what was certainly a mission in which we were doomed from the very beginning, Blake's Imperial Guard and my Space Wolves were put up against the Grey Knights of...

Team Handsome

Team Handsome's beautifully painted Grey Knights awaited us on both tables with tons of scoring Paladins thanks to Kaldor Draigo (which was on the other table, along with Coteaz). Their army was an elite one, with 10 foot-slogging wound-allocated Paladins led by a Tech-Marine, 5 wound-allocated Paladins with a Librarian in a Storm Raven, a Vindicare Assassin and I want to say 2 Razorbacks with Twin-linked Heavy Bolters with Psybolt Ammo, with some Acolytes inside (I think?)

I brought the same list from last years Team Tournament simply because it was versatile, balanced and meant that I didn't have to built or paint anything else. Actually, this year I didn't have to do anything for the Team Tournament, which is the only reason I agreed to be a part of it. There was just no way that I was going to be able to paint a new army and work on a display board while working with "Frozencore" Joe and Brian on the Special Operations: KILLZONE rules and tables.

My list:

HQ#1

Skarvald the Troll-faced - just 235 points

Wolf Lord on a Thunderwolf Mount with a frost axe, runic armor, Belt of Russ (4+ invulnerable) wolftooth necklace and Saga of Beastslayer

HQ#2

Rune Priest (Living Lightning, Murderous Hurricane) - 110 points

- Chooser of the Slain 

Troops#1

9 Grey Hunters - 200 points

- melta gun

- Mark of the Wulfen

- Wolf Standard

- Rhino

Fast Attack#1

Thunderwolf Cavalry - 315 points

- CCW and bolt pistol

- CCW, bolt pistol and melta bomb

- CCW and boltgun

- CCW and Storm Shield

- Thunder Hammer and bolt pistol

Heavy Support#1: 

6 Long Fangs - 140 points

- 5 Missile Launchers

Like a said before, Blake brought tons of Vendettas and a Vulture variant. He had a Company Command Squad with an Officer of the Fleet (woot!) and I'm pretty sure that all his little dudes were bare bones.

Uhhhh....

Unfortunately that's like.. the only picture I took. Some.. foreshadowing I guess.

Mission #1 was the Black Illusion, which had a Pitched Battle deployment, a bunch of Objectives - 1 in each deployment zone and 3 in the middle. The Primary Mission was to accomplish your Secret Objective and the Secondary was to Deny Your Opponent's Secret Objective. Command Tokens could be assigned to units and after a few turns if they were still on the table they could reveal the opponents' secret objective, granting extra points.
Now.. I will keep this one short: Our Secret Objective was to kill every single Scoring Unit!!!
Yes, that meant killing 15 Paladins plus the small Acolyte Squads. Their Secret Objective was to control the majority of the objectives in No Man's Land.. You can see how their objective was easier to accomplish than ours, huh? Now, don't get me wrong - I get the whole hidden objective schtick - they are trying to get their scoring units on our objectives, thus bringing them closer to us for us to slaughter..... But I digress.

Our deployment was simple. We kind of spread around, flyers were in one corner being all intimidating and stuff, Long Fangs had a decent nest, Rhino had some LoS-blocking terrain (the blue pipe thing in the picture) next to the Batman Objective.

Team Handsome reserved everything. Obviously they were afraid of the tons of Lascannons in our list. Oh, they infiltrated the Vindicare Assassin behind our lines. Not sure why.

Turn 1
Basically we had a very uneventful first turn in which our vehicles moved around but not too much. Blake's Vulture shot the Vindicare Assassin with its twin-linked Punisher Cannon but the dude made his saves. A decent Murderous Hurricane from inside my Rune Priest's Rhino finally killed him.
Turn 2
More moving for us.
On their turn they got their Acolytes in play, since they needed 5+ for their Reserve rolls to show up. Not bad.

Turn 3
Some more shooting on our part managed to wreck one of the vehicles, but the guys inside were fine.

On their turn they actually managed to get everything from Reserves on a 4+. That was lucky. Big blob of Paladin got inside a forest, thus mitigating any potential Lascannon shots, their Stormraven with even more Paladins moved, getting a 4+ save and then Shrouding gave it a 3+ save from shooting. They put up some shots into the Thunderwolves and the Vendettas, getting or stunning one.

Turn 4
Blake moved and disembarked some of his troops behind a building and near the objectives and I simply pulled back my Thunderwolves. A problem that I personally ran into this game was that I just didn't know what to do with them. I didn't want them to stay in the open and get shot by tons of Storm Bolters, and I definitely didn't want them to charge or get charged by the big blob of Paladins. Then why did I keep them in the middle...? I guess their initial Null Deployment did not leave me a chance to react. The Thunderwolves should have moved towards my lonely Rhino behind the pipes as soon as it was obvious that the Storm Raven was going for it. Instead they just stood in the middle, protecting the Guardsmen.
Our shooting was.. uneventful. The priority for us was the Storm Raven with the Paladins and Librarian but no lascannons or missiles managed to go through the 3+ cover save. Bleh. At this point we could have avoided the 10 Paladins - they were only going to be shooting at us, needing at least 2 more turns to get into close combat.

On their turn their Paladins moved and actually ran, but didn't get too far because of the forest. Their vehicles started to dance around, eager to get in position to move-park-and-grab the objectives on Turn 5, Eldar style. The Storm Raven moved at full speed again, the Librarian cast Shrouding... and I failed to stop it on a 4+. Sigh.
Some more shooting shook and damaged some of the Vendettas..

Turn 5
At this point I was hoping for the game to end on Turn 5. Blake's troops did some shuffling and my Thunderwolves moved as well, but in the chaos I was simply too far away from one of the objectives. In hindsight, Blake should have moved his Vendettas and disembarked his guys more aggressively. I think that definitely cost us the Secondary - we tried to prepare for a Turn 5 finale, but we just couldn't do it properly.
Again we shot at the Raven and if we managed to get any penetrating or glancing hits on it didn't really matter. I disembarked my Grey Hunters and my Rune Priest hoping to blow up the Storm Raven and get the charge on the Paladins... I know, right? Crazy. Otherwise they were going to manage to blow it up with shooting and just assault me. This is where my Thunderwolves should have been, not just chilling the middle.

Team Handsome's turn. 10 Paladins moved forward but not far enough to be near Objectives or to charge anything. Razorbacks moved flat out, pretty much and were on one of the objectives which we weren't contesting. All of a sudden a Turn 5 finale didn't seem like a good idea.. D;
Paladins disembarked. Paladins charged my Grey Hunter squad, completely annihilating them and causing my Rune Priest to run off the table.

We rolled to see if the game was going to continue to Turn 6..... and I rolled a "1".
Game Over.

Team Handsome managed to get the Primary and the Secondary by controlling 2 out of 3 Objectives and denying our hidden objective. By the way we both managed to use our Command Tokens to "spy" on the opponents as well. A small consolation prize was that Skarvald the Troll-faced was in the middle of the board, thus getting us a few extra points. I guess that's what distracted me from the est of the game - I really wanted to get that mini-Objective and thinking that controlling the middle is what Space Wolves do best I thought that it was simply the smart thing to do. Well, guess what? Space Wolves are not the best at mid-zone controlling anymore...

LOSS

Well, losing our first game certainly was kind of discouraging, but we were kind of expecting that. Like I said, we didn't go hoping to win the tournament, haha. 

Team Handsome were a blast, though. Whatever issues we had during the game, whatever rules questions were unclear we managed to resolve them like gentlemen. There were a bunch of shenanigans concerning Blake's Vendettas that definitely required us to open the books, but I stayed out of them, simply because none of my armies have "Flyers". Yet. It was actually frustrating that the Vendetta only managed to kill one Razorback the entire game.

This was my first game against Grey Knights, actually, though I had read quite a lot about them. The other table had done better, actually with some lucky Terminators escorting Draigo off the board and killing Coteaz, so I guess that wasn't so bad. Our game, though was pretty uneventful. Only 4 KP scored for both teams! That's crazy.

Our Primary mission was too hard for us to accomplish and I actually have a rant about "Scoring Units" and the way Adepticon allows Special Characters to affect everyone's FOC, even across tables. It's actually very easy for Grey Knights to have a very elite army in which every unit is a Scoring Unit. In our situation we were facing scoring Paladins and scoring Henchmen without even having Draigo or Coteaz on the table. This isn't even the worst combination, to be fair, but you'll see what I mean next game in which we had to face yet another team of Grey Knights. Yay!