Canhammer Team Tournament Part 1

Hey hey wargamersblog fans!

Nick here. Sorry we have been light on the posts recently, life happens I guess! I promise we will be better, we can change! Haha anyway, I’m super excited to report back to you on the Canhammer Team Tournament where 1 Plus Armour participated. Let’s get to it!

History of the tournament

This was the second year for the Canhammer team tournament and the format was considerably different from last year, mainly that the game was 40k. The Canhammer team ran the show and, as always, put on a great one. Last year the tournament was Warhammer Fantasy and it was meant to give Canada’s ETC team some practice before heading oversees. It was a tremendous amount of fun. Team 1 Plus Armour made a showing and finished mid pack. Of course we all know what happened to Warhammer Fantasy, so sometime in late summer – early fall 2015 it was decided that the format would switch to 40k to give the 40k team some practice before heading out to the big leagues. Most of us 1 Plus Armour and Canhammer guys had switched focus to 40k anyways so we said why not!

The team: 1 Plus Armour and Canhammer

I’ll focus on 1 Plus Armour, but team Canhammer also made an appearance. When the Canhammer Team Tournament was announced for 40k I was super excited, as was Logan. We got right on to putting a team together. We were lucky to snag a couple of friends early on in the process so we had our team organized and planning early on and weren’t much worried about a last minute drop in the team and having to scramble. It also meant we had time to play games and really think about our lists. This was our team:

1. Logan (Team Captain) playing Tau
2. Josh playing Necrons
3. Ciaran playing Space Marines
4. Nick playing Daemons

Going into this tournament we knew it would be a rough ride, but definitely had our eyes on the prize. We were reasonably confident that we could contend for a podium spot. I’ll go over my games and give some final thoughts. The final lists we brought is at the end of the article but here’s mine so you can follow along in my games:

1850  Chaos Daemons CAD

HQ
Kairos Fateweaver (Warlord)
Tzeentch Herald on disk, ML3, with the grimoire
Nurgle Herald with the -1Ld bell and FNP

Troops
10 Plaguebearers
10 Pink Horrors

Fast Attack
8 Screamers

Heavy Support
Tzeentch Daemon Prince with 3+ invul, ML3, and 2 greater gifts

Chaos Space Marine Allied Detachment

HQ
Belakor

Troops
10 Cultists

Fast Attack
Helldrake with flamer

(The drones in the picture were just for summoning)

Here’s how my games went!

1 Plus Armour vs Loaded Dice

The Tournament Organizer (TO) did a great job leading up the tournament to build anticipation for the event. He posted a couple videos that went over the pairing system and one that was a semi-live pairing draw. This was when we found out which team we were playing round 1. It turns out we had matched against Loaded Dice, the favoured to win the tournament…

We saw this first round as both a blessing and a curse. This match meant that if we beat Loaded Dice and made it to the final round competing for first prize that we wouldn’t have to play them. Of course it also meant that the first round, the round where you may be a little rusty and forgetful would be the most unforgiving one.

I played Mike from Loaded Dice. Mike brought an interesting play on Dark Angels. Here’s his list:

PRIMARY DETACHMENT: RAVENWING STRIKE FORCE – CODEX: DARK ANGELS [850]

HQ 1: Librarian (65) Auspex (5) Bike (20) Force Axe (0) Mastery Level 1 (0) [90] (WARLORD)
Fast Attack 1: 3 Black Knights [120pts]
Fast Attack 2: 3 Black Knights [120pts]
Fast Attack 3: 3 Black Knights [120pts]
Fast Attack 4: 3 Black Knights [120pts]
Fast Attack 5: Darkshroud [80pts]
Elite 1: Ravenwing Command Squad (120) 2 Additional Black Knights (80) [200pts]

IMPERIAL KNIGHT OATHSWORN DETACHMENT- CODEX: IMPERIAL KNIGHTS [830PTS]

Lord of War 1: Knight Paladin (375) Stormspear Rocket (40) [415pts]
Lord of War 2: Knight Warden (375) Stormspear Rocket (40) [415pts]

WHITE SCARS ALLIED DETACHMENT- CODEX: SPACE MARINES [170PTS]

HQ 1: Techmarine (65) Combi-Grav (10) Hunter’s Eye (20) Space Marine Bike (20) [115pts]
Troop 1: Scout Squad (55) 5 Bolters (0) [55]

The game

The ETC format means that teams receive a copy of all the other teams lists a couple of weeks before the event. Our team spent a couple of skype evenings in the week or two leading up to the tournament to discuss potential match ups and who we felt best paired against the players in the other teams. Team Loaded Dice had masterfully crafted lists. Their captain ran an interesting Tau list with a VSG, some skyrays and the standard riptides and stormsurge, while another player ran the standard tournament Eldar list. I was a whole lot of “nope” against the Tau, and wasn’t terribly excited to play the Eldar either. The two lists I thought I could do best against were a thunderwolf/wulfen list or the list above. I was most confident against Mike, running DA/Knights, because with my flying list I wasn’t terribly worried about being shot at, and the DA gimmick of re-rollable jink/cover saves didn’t apply to me because I would just shriek most of them off anyways. I figured this was my best match up and a reasonable one considering the caliber of team they represented. A couple of nights before the tournament I did a little analysis of the potential match ups between us and Loaded dice. We had decided who we were dropping first, and based on how I expected they would judge the match ups I came up with a probability of how the pairings would turn out. I figured this would help the team visualize their likely games and prep before the tournament. I was pretty excited when the match ups were exactly as predicted, and I was playing DA/Knights.

I played Mike last year at the CHTT and he leveled me with a 4 Treeman Wood Elf list. So I figured this year I could redeem myself. Mike and the rest of Loaded Dice are great players so, though I thought the match up was in my favour, it definitely wasn’t a guaranteed win. The bikes part of his army would be easy to deal with but the knights a little harder. I figured Fateweaver and Belakor could get the job done.

Mike rolled for deployment first and choosing to go first or second. We played emperors will, meaning that the two primary objectives were in each others deployment. This played in his favour since he could park his knights on both objectives and they would be difficult to remove. The maelstrom mission was contact lost meaning we were only drawing objectives if we were holding objectives. He deployed most of his army aside from a unit of scouts, as I recall. The bikes lined the front of his dawn of war deployment. Knowing they would scout I deployed my Tzeentch daemon prince in a far corner to limit the shooting he would get turn 1 and deployed the plaguebearers in cover along with the horrors to ensure I wouldn’t lose everything turn 1. I reserved the rest of my army.

Mike started and pushed everything up the middle. He focused fire on the horrors and plaguebearers. I lost a couple of models on the plaguebearers but nothing too significant, even with his ignores cover unit the FNP on them helped them survive. The horrors took a bigger beating but they were there for that. Most of the other shooting focused on the daemon prince. The daemon prince is pretty mean, but if he suffers a wound there is a chance he dies outright, so you definitely have to be careful. He took a wound and failed the Ld test, but luckily the Fatey re roll saved his life. My turn came around and the daemon prince took to the skies. He tried to stay out of range of most of his shooting but still wanted to shriek the bike squad with characters. Psychic phase rolled around and he managed to pull off a couple of models.

The game for the next several turns was looking in my favour. My reserves were coming in and Belakor, Fateweaver, the Daemon Prince, and the Helldrake were removing most of the bikes units. Shriek combined with the -1Ld item and terrify was a very good combo. Fateweaver was also able to pull off 4 hull points from one of the knights. At this point in the game Mike had 2 individual bikes left, the Darkshroud and the two Knights. One of the Knights was soon to be knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door so I was pretty confident with how things were going. Mike even mentioned to me after the game that at that point he took a moment to go tell his Captain things for him were looking grim.

I would say close to turn 4-5 the fact that 40k is a dice game came back to haunt me. My preceding turn Fateweaver had just pulled 4 hull points off a knight that was on Mikes Emperors Will objective. I tried to Fly him a decent distance away from the knight but not so far as to not be able to finish off the knight in the next turn. Come mikes turn he starts shooting. Now what I’ll describe next may be a be a  slightly crafted memory, but either way it makes for a better story. Mike’s shooting phase is largely ineffective. However, at some point he decided “why not, I’ll shoot the heavy stubber at Fateweaver”. Now I can’t remember if it was the heavy stubber or some other, more menacing gun, but he manages to score a hit, then a wound, and I fail my 4+ invul re-rolling 1’s.  Grounding test comes around and I fail, no problem, Fateweaver has a free re-roll that I can apply to grounding so I should be fine. I fail the grounding… Knight promptly walks over, and makes chicken for dinner. This was frustrating because he was on knight killing duty. It’s ok though, this is why you put redundancy in a list.

My turn comes around and Belakor steps up for Knight cleanup duty. He drops to the ground and looks at the Warden straight in the eye and says “Let’s dance”. Mike’s psykers are dead so I basically have free reign on casting. To avoid getting shot to death and minimize the chance of belakor getting smoked in combat I cast invisibility on 5 dice. There’s a 16% chance of a perils. I wanted to maximize my chance of successfully manifesting the power, but also minimize the perils. Lo and behold I perils. Still no a problem because Belakor is on full wounds. I roll a 1. No problem I’m leadership 9. I roll an 11. Belakor decides he had better things to do back home in the warp.

At this point in the game things are going from bad to worse. I need to enact plan desperation. I still had the herald and screamers left and they have armourbane attacks. So I figured if I grimoire the screamers they should make it to the Knight that’s almost dead and finish him off. This would mean I could contest the primary, tie the secondary, but come ahead in Kill points. It would turn my commanding lead into a tie, but what you going to do… Grimoire fails, and the screamers have nowhere to hide. The knights promptly focus their attention to them and my precious space sharks were reduced to space shark fin soup. Luckily the game ends turn 5 to stop the beat down I’m receiving and I leave the game with 2 points, Mike having been able to recoup his early game losses.

This was a fun game, but a classic example of how a string of bad luck can turn things around pretty quick. I don’t think I would have changed too much but maybe have been slightly more aggressive with Belakor going into the Knights earlier. He could have invis’d himself and stayed in cover until he was ready to pounce on a weak one to finish it off. This would have meant that a knight was dead and the ensuing string of bad luck would have been less painful. Oh well, that happens!

The rest of the team didn’t do so well besides Ciaran who walked away with 10 points. Logan got a spiritual victory by pulling off the only points from Dan, Loaded Dice Captain, suffered all tournament. He essentially would have went for a perfect score throughout the tournament if it weren’t for Logan. With our first game as a loss at the tournament, morale was a little low, but we picked it up and we ready for our next match against the Atomic Death Squad.

To be continued.