Adepticon 40k GT 2013

Greets,

As promised earlier, here is a recap of my 40k GT experience.

First let me say that overall the experience at the GT was positive for me. The only hiccup was the super late start without any "real" updates from the Adepticon staff. I understand the delay was to let people who were delayed by the storm to arrive, but they could have announced this in advance so we could have wandered off or slept longer.

My real negative for the event came from the interaction I had with my paint judge for the GT, it really made me mad.

I like to think I have a good looking army, I spent a lot of time painting, basing and making it look nice. Some may disagree but I tend to think its above average to well above average. That said, everyone has pride in their work and I understand this colors it a bit from my perspective.

 But I really can't stand it when I am out and about getting a coffee, and I come back and find a slip on my board notifying me I had been paint judged, when there is ZERO identification of whose army this is, or its theme. I had to ask a variety of people who were sitting around my display board to identify the paint judge who had come through our section, and after finding him, he told me, "some guy" had told him it was my army. That's a super awful way to do things. Sloppy as hell.

I asked him if he didn't mind coming back to look at my army to make sure he had recorded the correct person/army. He came over, shuffled some papers, told me it was correct and started moving on. I asked him if he had noticed the custom objectives, specifically the nurgling doing a keg-stand. He said no, glanced again at my board, told me I had an "average" army, and walked off.

That really really really made me mad. How could judges not even be bothered to examine the army nor notice details in it,  give scores based on the need to do those things. Part of judging should also include talking to the participant to understand their theme or what they were going for. I understand that there is a need to "rush rush" as it were for a one day GT to judge peoples armies, but wtf? seriously? They were keeping us there until midnight, somehow I think there is enough time to examine everyones army for 3-4 minutes in detail, considering there were multiple paint judges and oh I don't know, the over 14 hour event window.

My Army, in all its blurry / bad granularity glory

My army was

Juggy Lord w/ axe, sigil, meltabomb
Bike Nurgle Lord w/ black mace, aura, blight grenades, meltabomb

3x 10 Cultists

1x5 Spawn
1x5 Nurgle spawn
1x1 flamer-dragon

2x1 maulerfiend

Nurgle Herald w/ palequin, lesser gift, greater gift, FnP
5 Plague drones w/ sarg upgrade w/ lesser gift, venom stings( those instant death weapons)
1x1 skull cannon
1x10 plague bearers


Game 1 vs. Hulksmash of They Shall Know Fear
Hulksmash was playing Dark Angels / IG blob. He had two large blob squads w/ autocannon teams, power axes and the like, two dark angels libbies, a lemon russ with lots of plasma, and a bunch of guys in drop pods w/ melta and/or flamers. Also included were two company command squads w/ flamers in two vendettas.

I had first go in this game I think. Either way, I moved all my stuff forward as illustrated to the left. Shot my cannon and killed a few guardsmen.

Hulksmash used his turn 1 round of fire to kill off a bunch of my spawn, a plague drone or two, and my maulerfiend. Turn 2 I assaulted the plague drones w/ juggy lord into the right squad and the maulerfiend + nurgle spawn w/ nurgle lord into the left blob squad. The maulerfiend absorbed overwatch and ended up getting immobilized on the charge.... so he stood there the rest of the game like a dunce. The picture to the left is turn 2 or 3ish I think. The blob squads are being chewed through at a nice pace, the vendettas came in and whiffed vs. my dragon. The back fielding dark angels units are working towards killing my cultists.

 
 This is Turn 4 or 5. We ran out of time and were unable to play any further turns. As the game stands at this point, Hulksmash and I have traded sides. I've destroyed all the blobs + dark angels guys on his side of the board, and he has removed the cultists from mine with his platoon command squads w/ flamers to capture my objectives for the win.







Game 2 vs. Dark Eldar
Game - The scouring / Emperors will combo.

 This game was vs. a very 5th edish type of dark eldar list. Venoms, lots of boats with poisoned guns, and ravagers with lances. I opted to go first to reduce the turns of firepower coming at me.

 
 Basically how this game went is my opponents dice failed him utterly. It was really really bad. Couldnt hit, when he hit, he couldn't wound. I'll just leave it there.











Game 3 vs. Tyler
The Relic
Tyler was/is the good buddy / constant sparing partner of Hulksmash apparently. His list was Space Wolves w/ IG allies. Two blob squads w/ autocannons, two rune priests, 5 drop pods with grey hunters w/ banners, meltaguns. A vendetta with a platoon command squad inside, a chimera, and another platoon command squad in reserves.

 I spent a lot of time on deployment worrying about drop pods coming in and wrecking my maulerfiends / skull cannons turn 1 with meltaguns. Apparently I need not to have been worried as I promptly seized the initiative and ran full speed at Tyler. Pictured to the left is the middle of turn 1. Tyler was deciding where to drop his pods off to best stop me.

 This is actually the end of the game to the left. I forgot to take pictures in between. You can see the drop pods in the middle of the table, Tyler dropped a third off in the middle (which exploded, the other two are wrecks in the picture). So Tyler dropped off 40 of his 50 grey hunters into the board middle to nuke me. I killed them all and then killed his two blob squads. The remaining 10 grey hunters landed on my back objective, and the juggy lord turned around to go deal with them (you can see him with some cultists holding my bottom left objective).

 

So as far as this game goes, much like my game vs. hulksmash, I essentially cleared almost all of my opponents army off the table in this game. Tyler had left two platoon command squads and a vendetta. Unfortunately for me, as you can note, my plaguebearers were much to slow to get to the relic, so Tyler parked his vendetta on top of it so I could not take it, then on the following turn, switched to hover mode and moved a few inches, dropping his PCS out the back to claim the relic. I didn't even foresee this happening, otherwise I would have moved spawn/juggy lord / nurgle lord on bike onto the relic to prevent the vendetta from landing next to it... Stupid me. We didn't have time to start another round or else the plaguebeares + nurgle biker would have assaulted said squad wiping it out.. shame on me!

 Game 3 vs. Thomas
Objectives / KP

So at this point, I was suitably depressed by my game win/loss arc. So I decided I'd go full into my booze and just try silly fun. I played vs. Thomas who has a really epic/cool display board and army.  I set up directly across from him intending to just rampage forward and see how it went. Its worth noting Thomas is part of the crew that I associate with the 11th company area. (Curtis and several others whose names I forget are also part of it) They were around all weekend and boozing it up quite a bit. I appreciated their company a lot!

Apparently Khorne favored me, because the rampaging was good. I moved forward as illustrated...

 Rampage!! Juggy lord does what he does best. Nurgle lord went into coteaz and company for some win. The Juggy lord had such a good time, he just had to turn into a Daemon prince, then get shot in the face and die. At least he's immortal now or whatever right?

 Some deep striking strike squads needed to be dealt with. Skull cannon + cultists + the dragon were up to the task.

This is Thomas's army and display board.

This army won best painted

Andrew Gonyos Display board / army