Leadership 2

Friday night

Roll into Sac with Colonel about 9:30 to find the LD2 crew well into their cups and Cameron having some kind of alcohol induced emo fit.  Ed slaps me in the face and I throw my water bottle at him.  We head back to one of the rooms and listen to the crowd get louder and louder (and by crowd, I mean Ed).  Ed is slapping anyone within arms reach and telling stories about ethnic butt holes (apparently they called Casey for his medical opinion on racial sphincters.  He must have been drunk too as he sent off an email that he doesn’t remember composing.  Also Ed and Cameron seemed to have forgotten that as a dentist rather than a proctologist Casey is more knowledgeable regarding the front end of the digestive tracts rather than the back end).  Somehow we hooked up with the Barbarians and the Low Comp guys.  In a surprising intuitive self preservation move the group collectively decided to move to the Barbies move where Ed continued his slapping thing.  About 1 min after we left the security guard showed up at the other room and Derek to shut the hell up.  We tried to keep a lid on the noise at the Barbarians room but with Ed there it was like trying to plug a 6 foot hold in the dike with a finger.  We ducked out and ended up in someone else’s room, where Sanders, either fed up with Ed’s slapping antics or just feeling unfocused male aggression, picked up Ed and literally body slammed him to the ground.  The party more or less broke up at this point, although it seems that the party in Ed’s gullet went on all night. 

Saturday

Everyone in our room, even Cameron, seemed more or less recovered from the previous night’s debauchery.  Free breakfast and head to the venue, where we find out Ed has been doing the Technicolor yawn dance all night long and will not be joining us for round one.  Seems like if he wanted to spend all night drinking and vomiting he could have stayed in the apartment with Mike and saved himself the trip to Sac, but who knows where the motivation comes from.

Round 1            Kyle LaRue       Dark Elves

• Dreadlord on Dragon
• 2 scroll caddies
• 20 corsairs
• 2 RBT’s
• A freaking huge 10 man unit of cold one riders
• Hydra
• Assorted shades, harpy, and crossbow units

An obvious failure of the SAWS comp system, there is no way this kid should have been matched against my 12 comp list (yes, the judges boned me for an extra 2 points) round one.  Nice kid, and a great sport with horrible luck.  Round one sees his cold one unit take 3 casualties from flamers, roll and 11 on their panic, and run off the table.  I offered to let him keep the unit on the table as if they passed, but he was a good sport about it.  Corsairs with both scroll caddies break, causing both RBT crews to panic.  Hydra eats flaming death from one herald while another one cuts the dragon out from under the Dreadlord.  Conceded turn 4 with one RBT crew still on the table. 

Round 2            Darrel Grigsby   Lizardman

• Slann with War Banner
• Flying skink priest
• EOTG
• 20 temple guard
• 20 suarus warriors
• Mixed krox/skink unit
• Ranked skink unit
• Terradons
• Chameleon skinks

Another nice guy, this guy is the one with the goatee who normally plays O&G.  He started right, getting his chameleons to march block my left flank and trying to do the same on my right with the terradons.  He chose death as his lore, which I don’t feel is really the best lore, but I think he wanted to give his sauras warriors fear so they wouldn’t autobreak.  Flamers shot down the terradon’s.  he dropped a comet on me but it didn’t do much.  By then I was close enough to get dog/herald units into both units.  Magic flux saw him roll 4 out of 4 ones for his slann, giving me 6 dispell dice one turn and him with almost nothing.  After a couple of rounds of getting EOTG AOE damage the flamers finally manage to shoot the skink off the steg.  After that it was just a matter of grinding the temple guard down until the mage priest died in a challenge.  Another win for me.

Round 3            Bill Edwards      Red Steamroller
Most of you should recall I beat Bill last year with my vanilla steamroller verses his Bretonians and in a really annoying move rather than try to develop a list that can beat it he just copied it.  In an even duechier move (some of you may disagree, but Derek and I both agree this is nothing more than a shitty ego gratification move) Bill was only running 1999 points.  He made sure to mention the fact to everyone he talked to at the tournament.  This move is designed to make anyone who loses to him feel even worse and take away from any satisfaction from a win.  Also of all the lists out there the steamroller scales down below 2000 points better than any other, so it doesn’t really hurt him as much as it would anyone else.  Effectively it’s like if one of my heralds caught a cannon ball round one.  I’ve had that happen and still beaten people.  Anyway, here is the list.

• 2 heralds on juggs
• 1 herald on chariot (only 1+ save, but impact hits)
• 3x18 bloodletters with extra charge banner
• 2x5 and 1x6 dog units
• Furies

The advantage was mine, but really it was going to boil down to who got the charge first, and with the extra charge range banner on his bloodletter units that was very likely to be him, so I made the mistake that I make whenever I lose and tried to dance around rather than move forward and suck up the charges.  I used bloodletter units to redirect him and it worked great on the right, where I destroyed one unit of bloodletter.  However on the left he stacked his heralds.  I got the charges I wanted but couldn’t break the unit and his counter charges hurt me badly.  The flamers did not do much for the same reason shooting doesn’t really affect me much in that we were in combat turn 2.  At that point my luck went to hell (an entire unit of flamers shoots at dogs and sticks 2 wounds, etc) and my ward saves went to hell as he killing blow’d 3 of my 4 heralds.  He also pulled some typical Bill Edwards bullshit, trying to claim that his bloodletters got hatred without a herald in them (a very basic rule for anyone who plays a steamroller).  We danced around with my last herald and at that point I knew I had to get in to do some damage and made a less than optimum charge and lost my last herald.  Loss for me, and in retrospect I think I let the weirdness of the game and Bill’s reputation screw me up and not play to my best ability.  Oh well.

Saturday night

Eat an ungodly amount of pasta at Bucca Di Beppo followed by District 9 and watching Johnny play Guitar Hero.  Excellent movie, you should all go see it.

Sunday morning

No hangovers.  Breakfast and venue

Round 4            Cameron Shearer           The Green Meatgrinder
You are all familiar with this abortion list.  His big bragging point was 11 dispell dice and 4 scrolls, which put paid to some VC guys but does nothing against me.  His 18 casting dice were more of a concern.  He chose death also for his slann but with three skink priests, all 3 of whom rolled comet, I chose to direct my banner against heavans.  Cameron got screwed in the scenario, which allowed me to line up 15 inches up.  He tried to layer cake his army, with engine’s behind temple guard behind ranked skinks behind skirmishing skinks.  Unfortunately this meant he was still a good distance in from his table edge, allowing me to charge turn 2.  He was AOEing my ass and it hurt, but one of his skink units failed a panic check when I broke the unit in front of them, allowing me to get into his temple guard one turn early, which made a big difference.  Once more shooting did next to nothing except stick a single wound on one EOTG skink priest.  The weirdest thing was Cameron failing a stubborn temple guard check with BSB.  Mage run down.  That same round saw Cameron get all three comets off and stack them one on top of another right on top of three of my units, only to lose 2 of them as skink priest were killed by heralds in combat.  Win for me, but a really fun game.  Cameron get my number 1 best game vote. 

Round 5            Josh Gurin         Tzeentch Daemons
This was a rematch I really wanted.  This is the guy who beat me at QCR after we found he had been playing his flamers incorrectly. 

• Daemon prince with Etherblade (no armor saves) and Immortal fury (reroll all misses)
• Herald on chariotx2
• Herald on disc
• 26 horrors full command, plus 1 to cast banner
• 10 horrors x2
• 3 screamersx2
• 6 flamersx2

I knew from our last game that his general would kick the crap out of any of my heralds (higher WS, I, no armors save, reroll all misses) so I wanted to avoid the hell out of him.  Personally I think as he only had the general as a combat unit I think he should have committed all the way to all magic.  He chose tzeench lore on two heralds and beasts on the third, which was a big mistake.  I put my heralds in bloodletter units to spare them beast cowers, leaving him trying to cast it on dog units with only 2 dice.  His heralds couldn’t really start in a unit, and while he sent his flamers after my dogs and so on I sent my after his flying heralds.  Round one I shot one down.  His flamers wound turn out to be a huge pain in my ass, slashing 2-3 units per turn but my flamers always had something more important to shoot.  His general got into a unit of bloodletters and gutted them.  Meanwhile my dogs took out his smaller horror units and a herald/dog unit took out one of his flamer unit.  I shot the chariot out from under another herald and got a bloodletter unit onto the flank of his general.  My plan was to challenge with the unit champion and hopefully CR him to death, but it didn’t work.  My herald was actually out of combat from him.  He gutted my champ and passed his check.  At that point he decided to charge the rear of one of my dog units with his beast lore herald chariot.  His plan was to cast Bears Anger on himself.  Unfortunately it is US1 models only.  I offered to let him retract the charge but he decided to see what the impact hits would do.  not much, and the dogs cut the herald off the chariot.  At that point things were looking very shaky.  Round two of his combat with his general saw him win by a good three.  I rolled a 7, which would eliminate my unit but leave the herald in combat unscathed, which would seem to be a good situation.  However, I knew he would gut my herald in my turn and be free to run all over the place so I made a ballsy move and used my BSB to reroll.  I rolled an 11, totally eliminating the unit and sacrificing 190 points of herald for the greater good.  The good part was at that point his T5 naked general could now be shot at by my flamers.  I also lined up a single flamer in charge range, giving him something to charge and hopefully keeping him in shooting range.  I stuck 2 wound from shooting.  He took the bait and charge the lone flamer, killing him but the general was still in shooting range.  I shot him down for a 400 point swing.  Meanwhile a herald and dog unit devastated is big horror unit.  At the end of the game I had a win by 48 points, and we both agreed it had been a great game.  I gave him my second best game and I think he gave me one too.  Very good game, with a lot of thinking and planning.  My opinion on Josh has turned around completely.

Awards ceremony sees a now sober Ed (I will never drink the night before a tournament again) win best overall, Pajama Pants get best gen, and I tied for 3rd for best paint (the certificate I promptly lost.  If anyone picked it up please let me know).  Overall I think it was my favorite SAWS, with only the half assed sportsmanship scoring being my only complaint.  Overall a fun, good weekend.