Imperial Vox Caster Tournament Recap

Panda says: support your local tournaments or it’s about to get real!

Yooooooooooooooooooo! Prepare to get funky all you Turkey lovers, Reecius here from Frontline Gaming to discuss the recent Imperial Vox Caster Tournament held in San Diego, CA.

First off, who are Imperial Vox Caster? They’re a group of guys with a very cool 40K podcast, give them a listen!

The event was held at At Ease Games, in Poway, which is a very cool shop run by a longtime gaming associate of mine, Ron. Give them a look if you are in the area. Their terrain is really pretty damn awesome and they have a huge selection of miniatures and other gaming goodies.

So, that aside, let’s talk about the event. It was a 1 day event, and a little shy of 30 players, so not the biggest but well run and a lot of fun. It’s always nice to actually get to play in a tournament as opposed to being the TO like usual!

The Imperial Vox Caster gang ran pretty much book missions with only slight modifications. Every mission was a book mission with Kill Points as a secondary victory condition. I would have preferred some of the other missions as secondary as always using KP can be detrimental to a lot of lists (and we didn’t know the missions in advance) and the scoring was a bit more complex than it needed to be (two scores were tallied in every game when really, 1 would have been fine) but those are very minor critiques in what was a great tournament. It was well run, beautiful terrain, the TO’s were on the ball with the schedule, rules questions and the prize support was crazy good for an event that size. $500 for first place! Cash too, not credit. Wowzers, that’s better than a lot of GTs!

So what I wanted to discuss though, was the armies and lists that the players were using as I found it very interesting.

There were some very good players there. 4 of the top 10 ranked players in the USA according to RankingsHQ were there, and San Deigo in general has a very high caliber of player, more so than pretty much anywhere else I have been (and I have lived in and gamed in a lot of communities on the West Coast). So, there were no easy games to be had at this event. Another important fact to note was that 40K Approved Forgeworld units were allowed. That is a trend we have noticed really catching on and one that I find bother very refreshing and positive. Once again, the world did not stop turning, no one “bought” victory (in fact, only 1 of the individuals that won a prize had ANY Forgeworld units at all) and no one there had any issues with not knowing a certain unit’s rules, etc. It went on largely in the background as it does.

Quite a few of the players were using Forgeworld units and the increased variety was really fun, plus it meant that flyers were teeming over the tables like a plague of locusts! Saber Platforms, Contemptor Dreads, etc. in combination with Quad Guns had the Airforce armies grounded in favor of lists with fewer flyers and more balanced lists, which I prefer, personally.

Josh Dearth won best General with his Sisters/Grey Knights. He got max battle points, walking through the comp with little trouble. Exorcists, St. Celestine, a Bastion, and Coteaz combined with Grey Knight choppy units and sisters shooty power proved to be really effective. Just don’t let the Sisters and the Purifiers cross paths in the showers, might not go so well for the Sisters! Josh also did really well at Duelcon with Tyranids last month, showing his versatility as a general.