Hello everyone here is a surprise Tuesday night fight. Tonight we have a nasty Eldar tournament army vs. Frankie’s Dawn Blade Contingent. Who will come out on top in this battle, tune in and find out 5:30p.m. PST on Twitch.
Ray’s List:
CAD- Eldar
HQ:
2 farseers on jet bikes
Troops:
4 units of 3 scatt bikes
Heavy:
Warp hunter w/ crystal target matrix
loW:
Wraithknight w/ D cannons & 2 scatter lasers
Formation detachment – Tau
Riptide wing
3x tides, burst, SmS , EWO & stim
Fortification:
Void shield w/ 3 shields
This is a super strong list and one that you would likely see at a lot of tournaments. It has fast objective secured units, crazy amounts of firepower and a pretty scary cc presence. The Voidshield does a good job of protecting the units from an alpha strike and the Warp Hunter will keep units from getting to close. This list is going to be hard for Frankie to beat.
Frankie’s List
| Dawn Blade Contingent | ||
| Retaliation Cadre | ||
| HQ | ||
| Commander | Drone Controller, Iridium Battlesuit, Multi-Spectrum Sensor Suite, Command an Control Node, Puretide Engram | 1 |
| Troops | ||
| Crsis Battlesuits | Plasma Rifle x10, Bonding Knife x5, Target Lock x2 | 5 |
| Crsis Battlesuits | Fusion Blaster x8, Bonding Knife x4, Target Lock x2 | 4 |
| Crsis Battlesuits | Missile pod x6, Bonding Knife x3 | 3 |
| Elite | ||
| Riptide Battlesuits | Early Warning Override, Bonding Knife | 1 |
| Heavy Support | ||
| Broadside Battlesuits | High-Yield, Bonding Knife | 1 |
| Drone Network | ||
| Marker Drones | _ | 4 |
| Marker Drones | _ | 4 |
| Marker Drones | _ | 4 |
| Marker Drones | _ | 4 |
| Riptide Wing | ||
| Riptide Battlesuits | Early Warning Override | 1 |
| Riptide Battlesuits | Early Warning Override | 1 |
| Riptide Battlesuits | Early Warning Override | 1 |
This army is using a turn two alpha strike tactic that will hopefully work out. In this match-up Frankie is hoping to go second and nuke down Ray’s reserves. The Riptide Wing’s will be doing a lot of work this game and we will see which one is truly fighting for the greater good. Can the Dawn Blade beat the Eldar? Make sure to find out.
Frankies list is illegal is it not? The FSE detachment makes crisis suits troops but it does not change the requirements for the hunter cadre. You still need to take 3 units of fire warriors / kroot and cant swap them for crisis suits.
Ooops. Read the detachment wrong. Alls good 😉
Yup, time to show peeps to start worrying about the other Tau combi-detachment.
I was like, I hope not haha. Don’t scare me like that man.
The 3 crisis suit minimum is no longer a requirement. Read the codex.
Yup I know. Just like the 3 man unit.
Frankie’s list looks a lot like the one I have been working on. Only difference is instead of 5xplasma I do 3 2x Ion guns for flexibility, 3x Fusion and 3x missiles.
With the extra points I fill out the Broadsides to 3x with 6x Missle drones.
Like to see how it plays out!
I am going to be checking in on this one if I can, seeing as I helped inspire Frankie’s list.
Man, that was really disappointing. Gonna make a note to try to find points for some homing beacons in my list.
Yeah some way to make the scatters less dangerous would be good haha.
I couldn’t hear, did you remember to take advantage of the Dawn Blade Contingent’s rerolls to wound?
Yeah but unfortunately they didn’t have a chance to use it haha. It was a bad dice game. And Ray played really smart so I wasn’t able to Capitalize
Please put this one up on youtube, there are a lot of past Tuesday night fights that are missing still from Youtube. Not all of us can tune in to it live and they are pretty insightful and entertaining.
As a side note, would love to see more special guests like InControl and Cooper, they are super entertaining to watch when they play Frankie or Reece.
Looking forward to this one!
It definitely will! We had a very big graphic design project that took up all of our video editing resources. We’re way behind on videos at present, but should be caught up within a week or so.
7 Riptides!? Have I died and gone to heaven!?
Yeah, I have a similar list to to the one Frankie brought, but I’ve been doubting how good it can actually be when facing a top tier tournament list like Ray’s, especially when a very good player like Ray is piloting it. Great game, though. The scatters can only be avoided if you can fit tetras into a CAD that goes with it. The DS mishaps and the 4 D flail cupcakes, every turn, really played a factor. For Frankie to have a chance at surviving he needed to go first to give his riptide wing the 3++, for durability, until the rest of his forces arrived.
Pretty sure he had 3+ cover vs most of the firepower and wanted to go second due to deep striking.
Yeah I chose to go second since Nightfight was in play I had a 3+ save but that didn’t help since I was failing more than I was making.
Might it be worth taking Farsight for the no-scatter and then find a way to get a homing beacon into his unit? I don’t play Tau so I don’t know how difficult or bad that would be, though.
It could be done. He can take Farsight as part of the command section of the Dawn Blade detachment. If he cuts down the other crisis suit teams to 1 and invests heavily in just 1 group of Crisis suits, he can guarantee they arrive where they need to. He’d just need to make some cuts in other places.
Personally, I’d have taken an Optimized Stealth Cadre instead of the Riptide wing. Not only is it cheaper, but your Ghostkeels can get 2+ cover at the start to weather any incoming fire while you wait for your Beta Strike.
On top of that you can infiltrate your Stealth Teams and start getting some Maelstrom points turn 1 onwards, so you are not helpless early on. AND (if you so desire) you can give your Stealth Teams homing beacons so Deepstrikes within 6″ don’t scatter, for those big footprint units like Broadsides and Riptides that are forced to deepstrike with Retaliation Cadre.
3 Ghostkeels in the Optimized Stealth Cadre are also more independent and dont need markerlights since they’re BS 5 and Ignores cover due to Fire Team and Wall of Mirrors. It’s like OSC was MADE to be used with Retaliation Cadre.
After seeing that game, Frankie would have been better off with a pseudo farsight bomb + OSC instead of Riptide Wing when using the Dawn Blade Detachment, in my opinion.
Forgot to add, hindsight 20/20, of course.
Going up against a brutal, top-tier list with a list you’ve never played before is never going to turn out well for anyone. He did the best he could, but I hope he doesn’t get discouraged and tries a few more iterations before giving up on it.
I like your suggestion for the optimized stealth cadre. I might give that a go. Homing beacons would help a ton haha.
That’s the main reason I included a ghostkeel wing in mine.
I love frontline battles reports.
I would love it if there were more short format battles reports. It is much easier to dedicate 20-30 minutes than 2-3 hours
We will be producing one a week going forward, we just had a massive graphic design project we’ve been working on that took up all our time.
This game finished before I could even tune in after doing my podcast! Wow! I was expecting that this one would at least go over an hour 😛
I find it odd that Tau suck overall at deepstriking (made worse by larger crisis suit bases) despite being highly advanced space communists. This is likely do to balance concerns since Tau are already pretty strong.
Homing beacons are difficult to set up properly and costly. Costly in reference to actually getting them on suits and risky since they have to deploy in forward positions to make use.
This limits what the suits can do to some degree and keeps Tau as a backline shooting army.
The Tau list could use some tweaks, of course. Getting Farsight in there may help, but if you’re going for Farsight, you might as well just make a Farsight bomb while you’re at it. Or maybe a smaller bomb (minus shadowsun of course. RIP infiltrators being unable to join units in deepstrike).
Anyway this will lend to you a stronger more reliable first drop, that gives your opponent two major threats to worry about: the riptides and then the bomb, wherever it shows up at.