First 6e Tournament

I've been trying to finish several posts about painting and modelling over the last two weeks and failing miserably and have just ended up scrapping them.  Family life has been crazy between one sick kid and another teething (no one gets more than 2 hours of straight sleep with the screaming).

This doesn't mean I haven't been painting, modelling or list building.  I just haven't had the mental capacity to do those and keep up with this.  But regardless I got in a great practice game last Thursday before going to my first 6e tournament on Saturday. 

Practice game on Thursday was fantastic.  I played Frosty and his Chaos marines and got tabled...It was great because I enjoy hanging out with Frosty and it was nice to see that the list I was planning on bringing with me that weekend was total garbage and I would at least have a few days to clean it up.  I had been running Deathwing with a detachment of Blood Angels.  I thought scoring terminators, a Stormraven and a few Ravenwing squads would work well.  It didn't.  I'm still building 5e lists.

So instead here is a run down of what I ended up bringing with me on Saturday.

Librarian Divination

x2 Assault squad (10) with power fist and 2 meltaguns
x2 Assault suad (5) plasma pistol x2 and plasmagun
Death Co. (5) jump packs and 2 power swords
Scout Squad with power weapon, sniper rifles and camo cloaks

x2 Priest with jump packs
Sternguard (10) in drop pod

Bike Squad (3) plasma pistol and x2 plasmagun

Stormraven

Notice anything about this list, it's pretty 5e as well.  Couple things to point out, first is that the scouts are there because the store typically does a single model best painted judging and the scout sergeant is my best so far.  I took the power weapon because it was the look I was going for.  They decided not to do any painting awards.

First game was against Templars. This game was great fun and hard fought, tie for kill points and tie for table quarters.  There were a bunch of minor points to get, we tied these as well.  Really what happened was two good players missed the boat.  One brought an army horribly out of date for cost and the other built a list to compete against other 5e lists.  Still a good time.

Second game was to control different sections of the board and 4 objectives. I played against Vanilla Marines.  Vulcan, Tigerius, lots of scouts, flamers and melta.  His list really worked out well for him.  With 30 scouts on his side I ended up losing sergeants and priests to the precise shots on my way across the board.  I also lost 3 bikes and a librarian to Overwatch in a series of improbable rolling.

The main problem ended up being that I was using too many small units attempting too many assaults.  I was too spread out for the plasma guns to effectively soften up the units I needed to assault.  When I did assault, I didn't have the numbers to overcome some great Overwatch rolls.  Where I played back in the first game, I over extended in the second game trying to compensate.  I was nearly tabled. The one really good moment came on the first turn when I placed the Sternguard drop pod right behind the Aegis line w/ Quad gun.  Hellfire rounds lit up the gun easily and the Ignore cover rounds killed most of the Scouts that were manning the gun.  It was clear sailing for me Stormraven for the rest of the game.

By game 3 there was no chance of placing at all.  With a gentleman's agreement we would forgo the objectives and just mass kill points to determine the winner.  Not usually something I would do in a tournament, but since there was 0 chance of the way either of scored effecting the awards...golden rule.  Another wonderful moment for the Sternguard as they come in and wipe out a max squad of Lootas behind the Aegis line. After that the mega noz and warboss just tear me open.  I was again too spread out and killed 3 of my own guys with Gets Hot.

The day was great fun. I'm waiting for Gundam John to post his bat reps so I can throw a link in here somewhere since his Tau did exceptionally well.

Lessons learned.  MSU assaulting is no longer the way to go.  There are so many death stars out there I need to have either an effective counter or equally effective deathstar...again thanks to Gundam John I now have something in mind.  More on this as the list rounds out around the the deathstar.  The only consistently effective units were the Sternguard and the Librarian with Divination.  I'm still not quite sure why there are things that are not divination.  The stormraven wasn't bad.  No one was quite able to bring it down, but I brought it to take on other flyers...and didn't face any.  There weren't more than 4 or 5 in the whole tournament.

Everyone squealed about how awesome the defense line is with the quad gun.  I found it extremely easy to neutralize the gun, and the wall is the same as deploy in ruins.  Weapons that ignore cover, or just flanking take care of anything hiding behind it with ease.  I think I can find a much better way to spend 100 points thank you.  At least until other people actually start fielding flyers on a regular basis.

So I'm still going with Blood Angels for the forseeable future.  I may toy with Chaos if I can swap in enough of my DIY guys as chaos and not buy anything.  Still waiting on the Dark Angels Codex, before dropping any real money though.

I'll have some pictures up this week on the Avengers Project, a new Jump Pack Librarian, WIP of the scouts and 30 other models....

Stormraven: WIP

The Stormraven has been assembled, primed and based grey (original chapter color scheme) for about 6 months.  It has also been sitting on the shelf after trying it in three games and failing miserably in 5e.  So with 6e out and flyers being the rage, I decided to revisit the paint scheme again.  Going with the chapter emblem of the sunburst, I decided to go with that for the Stormraven.  Here's what it looks like so far.

The base coat here wasn't difficult. I started off with blue for the entire top. Next I taped off where I wanted the sunbeams to come out from and added the yellow.  Last I went back and added the half circle to the tail.

The next steps are to add some significant blending to both colors.  Then getting some shading in the recesses.  After that I need to decide what I want to do with the sides and bottom.  I want it to have a completely different look based on the angle.