Hi people, we've been back from Blog Wars 9 for a while now and I know I'm late getting a report up...
How did it go? A strange combination of super fun games and awfully... Basically the great Lord of Skulls experiment was a massive failure - but onto that later.
My list is here for you to peruse.
As normal,
Alex did another great job of organising the tournament - everything went smoothly, food was good and there was a really good turnout.
Game 1 I went up against Ryan with a Sisters army - madness who runs Sisters???!! The game was kill points and it was hammer and anvil deployment. I don't think I've ever played them before - so in my mind they were Space Marines with slightly worse stats and flamers. I was wrong. I have literally never played against so much AP1. I think there was something like 16 meltas, a few multi-meltas and 3 D6 shots from Executioners tanks.
Ryan set up as far away as possible, meaning the Lord of Skulls would need a couple of turns to get into combat and lots of melta went into reserve. Needless to say, by Turn 2 the Lord of Skulls was a smoking wreck, the Obliterators were obliterated and the cultists were a fine paste. Abaddon managed to drop in kill a few guys, but there are only so many invun saves you can fail and by Turn 4 I was tabled with an appalling score of around 178 - 1950.
Game 2 and I was bottom table, but at least that's where the fun games normally are. I went up against Andy with his Imperial Guard in an objectives game. Andy had a pretty rounded and fluffy list (although I don't know IG so couldn't say why...) with a few Leman Russ', Hellhounds and Vet squads. Amusingly - no melta.
Andy immediately saw my two squishy Cultist squads and tried to target them, whereas I sent my Lord of Skulls to roll around squishing stuff - which it did with aplomb! It managed to take off a couple of units a turn in a very point and click fashion, but by the end of the game we were both sat on our own objectives and Andy managed to take the win by a couple of secondary VPs.
Game 3 and I managed to move up to second to bottom table (woot), against Daniel with his Grey Knights and Inquisition. This was Maelstrom and despite lots of hard hitting units, Daniel had pretty much nothing to touch my Lord of Skulls. Daniel managed to take an early lead, getting a few decent objectives and having the manpower and armour to grab mid-table objectives - blocking me from accessing them with my more squishy Cultists. By Turn 3 I had managed to blunt his army with the Lord of Skulls, Obliterators and Abaddon, but not in time to catch up and the rest of the game was the Lord of Skulls rolling round smashing stuff again (and ending with the full 9HPs). I ended up losing about 10-6.
These three stellar performances left me 47th out of 48...not my finest hour, but I can confidently blame it on my list looking at normal results. So, why did it go so wrong? Basically because the Lord of Skulls is stupidly overpriced; it was 1013pts, for which I could literally remove any unit I got into combat with (it consistently caused around 20 unsavable wounds/HPs). Shooting-wise it looks good, but the Baleflamer Hellstorm template didn't get used until at least Turn 2 each game, which meant that Skullhurler was being relied on. Both weapons are S9 AP3, which looks good on paper and reliably hurt vehicles, but AP3 meant that I was only ever stripping single HPs and anything with a 2+ save was laughing. Oh and 65pts for instant death with the Baleflamer wasn't used once (I shot some Dreadknights with it, but they passed their saves easily).
So, whilst the Lord of Skulls was rolling around fluffing its shooting and then overkilling in combat, the other 800pts of my army was pretty fragile, unsupported and useless at claiming/holding objectives. So basically - Lord of Skulls is getting shelved until we play more Apoc and in future I will take a sensible list...maybe next time I will take a more sensible list to a tournament.
