Everwinter: Winter Assault Day 1

On the weekend of 12/10/2023-12/11/2023, I attended the Winter Assault ITC Major at the Everwinter, an annual gaming convention at the Westin Waltham Hotel in Waltham MA. Close to one hundred players participated, including some top players, such as Brad Chester and Sean Nayden. Yours truly is not nearly the player those gentlemen are, but I do appreciate an opportunity to get in a lot of games in a short period of time, and I like to strive to do honor to the First Legion. So, I put on my unicorn socks, brought my Firestorm Assault Force and dove into the fray.

Here's a picture of my army, more nicely staged, and with the multimelta Devastators painted! I'm not losing the Battle Ready points this event!

My first game was against Sam Pope's Endless Swarm Tyranid list. The list is well named, because it just keeps throwing 20-strong units of Gargoyles and Gaunts at you. It's not so much designed to kill your stuff as it is to hem in your army and play board control. I haven't played against a list like that in 10th thus far, so it was interesting to go up  against.

The mission was Supply Drop, which complicated my movement problems because the objectives that were easier to get to went away by the time I could get to them. The Search and Destroy deployment neither helped nor hindered in this one. Sam didn't actually kill much of my stuff, but he did prevent me from scoring points while he scored his. Unsurprisingly, we ran out of time and had to talk out the 5th turn. If we'd been playing on a clock, Sam might have found time management challenging, but if we'd just had more time to play out the game, I don't think actually playing out the turns would have made that big a difference. The final score wound up being 78-49 in Sam's favor. If I'm not going to win, I like to try and at least score 50 points, so I didn't miss that by much.

My takeaway from that game was that I should have used Azrael and the Hellblasters more aggressively to chew up Gaunt bodies. I didn't put them in the list with that use in mind, but they do it pretty well. 20 shots with Lethal and Sustained hits stands a pretty good shot at picking up a brood, and then on the charge a full squad of Hellblasters will throw 30 attacks, plus the 11 coming from Azrael and the Lieutenant, again with Lethal and Sustained Hits. Between the Hellblasters and the Infernus Marines in the Impulsor, I might have been able to pick up 3 big broods in one round, overwhelming Sam's ability to recycle them. It also made me think maybe I want a second squad of Infernus Marines in an Impulsor. It wasn't the last time this weekend I thought that. 

Round 2, my opponent Ford DelVecchio brought a Space Marine Vanguard Spearhead. Ostensibly, he was playing Dark Angels, but he didn't actually use any Dark Angels units. His list was made from an expanded-upon Combat Patrol box set, so it had a lot of Battleline units that sadly aren't the killiest things a player can put on the table

The mission was Purge The Foe with Crucible of Battle deployment. Ford wound up on the back foot on this game, but it wasn't completely one-sided. We only played 4 turns and I won the game 69-50, but it could have tipped to Ford if we'd played that 5th turn. He'd wanted to concede and I had to talk him into taking his last turn, which he scored 20 points on.

I didn't learn as much from this game, but one take-way I had was not to treat the Land Raider like the equivalent of a gun tank and send it up against actual gun tanks, like that Repulsor Executioner you can see in the photo. Even with the multimelta, it's not up to a head-to-head engagement with a tank like that.

My third game was against Matthew Wallace's Grey Knights Teleport Strike Force, and that game was my highest-scoring game. It was a nice, simple Take and Hold on the Search and Destroy map. The Teleport Strike Force certainly lives up to it's name Matt had units bouncing all over the place, especially on our around my backfield objective, which obliged me to keep chasing his units off my lawn. He took Behind Enemy Lines and Deploy Teleport Homers as fixed secondaries, and his extreme mobility let him score max points on those. He seemed to have an endless supply of Grey Knight Terminators too. It seems like every time I  dealt with one squad, then another would pop up. That just speaks to Matt's canny management of his reserves.

Unfortunately for Matt, his army's only real answer to vehicles was to run up and punch them, and that didn't work so well against my Land Raider. At a certain point mid-game, he was obliged to include my Land Raider in a charge against my Hellblasters (who had just finished off the previous Terminator Squad), and I was able to just back them out of the fight and leave the Terminators engaged with the Land Raider which they could scarcely hurt. In the end though, his lack of good options against vehicles gave me an edge he couldn't contend with. It was pretty high scoring for both of us, but I won the game 94-80.

Again, it's harder to take away what one could do better next time after a win. If there was anything to learn from that game, it was that I could screen out my backfield better. 

Thus ended my first day of the Winter Assault GT. I was able to bask in the glow of ending the day 2-1 as I went to the hotel restaurant to fortify myself fancy pizza and Creme Brulé while looking forward to Day 2!