Everwinter: Winter Assault Day 2

 Welcome to my account of my second day at the Winter Assault 2023 GT! If you haven't seen the post about my first day, you can find it here.

Day 2 of Winter Assault had me harboring hopes of going 3-2, or possibly even 4-1, but I knew I was going to have to work for it. Alas it was not to be, but it wasn't for lack of trying. Maybe I should have worn my unicorn socks for luck, but as I wore them the day before, I made do with my Cookie Monster socks instead.

My first game was against Peter Melendez' Imperial Guard (or Astra Militarum if you prefer), which was an eminently winnable game, but as I was going up against a 2-1 opponent, I knew it wasn't going to be a walkover. It's not often I play against someone taller than me, but I did this game. Perhaps Peter's superior perspective of the battlefield made the difference in the game! The mission was Scorched Earth, with Dawn of War deployment. I've played Scorched Earth enough to be fairly comfortable with it, so that at least was one point I was fairly comfortable on. I also have Imperial Guard myself, albeit an army I haven't played much since 5th edition, but I have at least looked at the Index, so I figured I had some idea what I was getting myself into.

I may have been poorly served by the games I'd had up till that point going into this game, because my Land Raider had thus far proved a robust unit, so I overconfidently placed it where it could be shot first turn. I paid for my overconfidence when Peter rolled first turn, rolled out, and destroyed it before I even got to move it. He got my Dark Shroud that turn too for good measure (he actually took that down first), and worse luck, he'd drawn Bring It Down first turn, so he scored 8 points by doing so.

That was a discouraging start, but I made a game effort of it. In return for wrecking my Land Raider, I made his Rogal Dorn my Oath target and sent all 3 of my Devastator Squads into it. The multimelta Devastators really showed their worth this game, being responsible for picking up Peter's Dorn and Leman Russ Exterminator, but I got units stalled in inconclusive fights that I either shouldn't have picked our really should have swung my way but didn't. Also, Imperial Guard is another of those armies that has a strat allowing them to put a destroyed unit back into Reserves, which Peter did to good effect with his Rough Riders, who are not mere chaff. I never even got particularly close to his Basilisks.

Having paid a heavy cost for my bad deployment, I may have put in my best gameplay of the whole weekend. I remembered to do things like use my strat to out-of-sequence re-embark my Devastators so I could repeat their Razorback Fire Support trick on my next turn, pop Scouts into Reserves so I could have them pop out and help my Inferni against a stubborn Krieg squad that just wouldn't die, and burn one of the No Man's Land objectives to get the Primary Points. I actually outscored Peter on Primary points, but in the end it wasn't enough. Peter took the win 80-73, which makes that 8 points he got for Bring It Down first turn particularly sting. My final game was a painful drubbing that I'm more salty about than this game, but this game was probably the biggest disappointment of the weekend, not because it wasn't a quality game, but because the score suggests it wouldn't have taken doing much different or the dice rolling much differently for this to have been a win.

On the other hand, I think I learned more from this game than I did from any of the others I played this weekend. For starters, I learned to deploy more conservatively vs an army as shooty as Imperial Guard. At the very least, if I'd positioned the Dark Shroud so it was completely out of line of sight, Peter would have had a harder time taking it out, and if I had done so with it within 6" of the Land Raider (which based on the photos was eminently doable), then that might have been enough to protect the Land Raider from destruction 1rst turn. I got aggressive with my Devastators and had them charge some of Peter's infantry units. The las-and-grav Devs actually picked up Ursuala Creed and an Engineseer, which was probably their best performance all weekend, but I would have been better served keeping the other MM Devs out of that fray. In an effort to peel the last 2 wounds off of one of Peter's Sentinels, I charged it with a Rhino, Razorback, and one of my MM Dev Squads, but those wounds remained stubbornly unpeeled, and I was obliged to spend a turn falling back with my MM Devs and Razorback so I could put them to better use next turn. 

The game also prompted me to check out the Guard index again so I could get a better sense for how to face it again. One thing I picked up out of that is that Sentinels do a lot of work for a Guard army, so putting some effort into getting rid of them early will pay dividends later. In general, Guard are an army about overlapping buffs and bonuses, so anything one can do to disrupt that without overly compromising the main effort is worth doing.

After a lunch of chicken fingers and fries at the hotel restaurant, I went into my 5th game, which was against Sam Dayton's Space Wolf Stormlance Task Force. This wound up being my worst showing all weekend. The mission was Vital Ground, on the Crucible of Battle table setup, and whereas last game I went second when it would have suited me better to go first, this game I went first when it would have suited me better to go second. 

Being obliged to go first, I moved out onto the center objectives and hoped for the best. The best did not happen.

That said, I didn't actually lose too much on the first turn. My Land Raider took a beating, but still had a few wounds left, and I did lose my Rhino carrying the las-grav Devs, one Razorback, and my Impulsor, but the squads managed to get out.

Unfortunately, my second turn didn't go so well. I was obliged to make a Desperate Escape attempt with my surrounded Land Raider, which I did successfully, but Sam was able to do an out-of-sequence move with a squad of his Thunderwolves and keep it engaged. That was a major problem, because I'd really wanted to put fire from the Hellblasters into them, but Sam's move prevented that. So, I did what I could do and put fire into his Aggressors. However, I lost 7 of the Hellblasters to Hazardous tests, which pretty much eliminated what little chance I had of pulling the game back. After the end of the second turn, we talked the game out.

Of all the games I played this past weekend, this is the one I'm most salty about. That is not to say I'm throwing any shade at Sam. He is no bandwagon-jumper. All those lovingly converted and painted Thunderwolves did not suddenly pop into existence in the space of a couple months. Seriously, his Thunderwolves are great. He's got Space Wolves fighting alongside Thunderwolves instead of riding them, Space Wolves jumping out of the saddle to dive into the fray, Space Wolves with shields made out of ale barrels - they are no fooling around great. Also, Sam was a delightful person who didn't really enjoy how one-sided the game was either. 

I am throwing a little shade at Games Workshop, however. I think they may have created the rules for the Stormlance to try and make Outriders a unit worth putting on the table and failed to consider how those rules would interact with Thunderwolves.

That said, I'm not excusing myself for culpability for the loss, but I probably had to take the loss to understand how to play into Stormlance Thunderwolves. If I were to play the game again, I'd have moved forward with units I could afford to lose, such as my Inferni, las-grav Devastators, and my Dark Shroud and held back my Hellblasters and MM-Devs behind a screen to counter-punch. I'm not sure that would have been enough, but it definitely would have been better.

So, it wasn't as successful a 2nd day as I would have liked, but I'm not going to complain about being able to play 5 games of 40K in a weekend. Of my 5 opponents; Sam Pope went 5-0 to take 2nd place, just behind Sean Nayden and his Orks, Peter Melendez went 4-1 to get 12th place, Sam Dayton went 3-2 for 18th place, Matt Wallace went 2-3  for 42nd place, and Ford DelVeccio went 0-3 for 72nd place, but he had stated during our game he had only been planning on attending Saturday. As for me, my 2-3 record put me 39th out of 74, which is solidly in the mid-pack.

A funny advantage to a disappointing performance at a tournament is it gives one incentive and opportunity to indulge in the pleasure of scheming how to improve one's performance in the future. Even as I was waiting for the event to wrap, I was going over ideas in my head, and when I got home I hopped on Battlescribe to mess with list variations. I'll be posting an evaluation of the units in my list and variants I want to try in the near future.