List Building and Battle Report!

Darnath Lysander. The Great Eater of guard blobs. Om nom nom.

I had a chance to get a game in this weekend for practice in an upcoming team doubles tournament at my local friendly game store. My usual team mate Thomas, and I were really excited to hear about it because we've been working on and continually refining the team tournament list we used for the first event we went to. Our list has undergone several sweeping changes and thanks to the help of 40k Metrics, we had it down to a well balanced and versatile art. The only problem is that it has yet to be tested in a tournament in it's current form.


Imagine our shock and chagrin when we learned that the rules, force organisation chart, and even the points values would be different for this upcoming tournament. The force org. for each player at this tournament is:
1 HQ (per player, mandatory)
2 Troops (mandatory, 3rd optional)
1 Fast attack
1 Elite
1 Heavy
And 1250 points to fill it out.

We came to the conclusion that this totally screws our balanced list. Over the course of a couple hour's discussion, we decided that it would be entirely necessary to break our codexes in order to have even the slightest chance of success. Playing Imperial fists with the vanilla marine codex, I'm stuck with tactical marines for what is the majority of the force org. Tactical marines are unreliable, and lack the versatility of the troops from many of the newer codexes. Most of my heavy lifting is done with my Elites and Heavy Support slots, but having to pay for the mandatory units first, I'm left with almost nothing to build out my heavy lifters.

Space wolves, on the other hand have a reliable troop, but more expensive and less reliable support choices. Seeing this, we decided to do something we'd never done before and make a super deathstar list just for fun. Here's an approximation of what we came up with.

Space Wolves
HQ Logan Grimnar

Elites x10 Wolf Guard
x9 Tactical Dreadnought Armor
WGT- Power Weapon/Storm Bolter
WGT- Wolf Claw/Storm Bolter
WGT- Frost Blade/Storm Bolter
WGT- Chain Fist/Storm Bolter
WGT- Power Weapon/Combi-Flamer
WGT- Power Weapon/Combi-Melta
WGT- Power Weapon/Combi-plasma
WGT- Power Weapon/Storm Bolter/Cyclone Missile Launcher
WGT- Wolf Claw/Storm Bolter/Cyclone Missile Launcher

WG- Power Fist/Combi-Melta

Troops
x 8 Grey Hunters
GH- Melta Gun
GH- Wolf Standard
GH- Mark of the Wulfen
Dedicated Transport
-Rhino

Fast Attack
x 5 Thunder Wolf Cavalry
TWC- Bolt Gun /Storm Shield
TWC- Bolt Pistol /Storm Shield
TWC- Bolt Gun/Thunder Hammer
TWC- Bolt Pistol/Close Combat Weapon
TWC- Bolt Gun/Close Combat Weapon

Imperial Fists
HQ Darnath Lysander

Elites x7 Assault Terminators
x3 Lightning Claws
x4 Thunder Hammers
Dedicated Transport
Land Raider Crusader with Multi-melta

Troops
x10 Tactical marines
-Flamer/ Multi-melta

x 5 Scouts
-Camo Cloaks
-Sniper Rifles

Heavy Support
x1 Land Raider
Total
2500

With five power house units, our hope is that we can dish enough punishment whilst causing our opponent to have enough difficulties with target priority that only one or two units will be lost through the course of a game.

Sunday, we got a chance to put the theory to the test. We arranged a match with Ben and Chris who were fielding Imperial Guard and Eldar, respectively. We chose a scenario from the big book of tourney scenarios that was kindly made available to us by the TO, and had ourselves a battle.

The scenario stated that it was a kill points mission, but in order to get kill points you had to make it into your opponent's table half (pitched battle) so your units didn't cede their KP to the enemy. There were some tertiary objectives about killing HQ's and a spot on the table to avoid, but primary is what decides the missions.

In a record first, Tom and I won the dice roll to go first. Our first turn got off to a great start with my Land Raider immobilizing itself on some tall grass.... yeah, I know. Followed by Tom's rhino becoming immobilized on the same terrain. I should also note here that the tall grass was the only terrain on the board that wasn't a ruin. But, as you can see, we were off to a great start. Turn one concluded with the Thunderwolves getting bogged down moving through ruins, some worthless shooting, and the Thunderwolves getting shot up by Guardsmen and Dire Avengers.

Turn two had us lay into a few things with shooting, I made a gutsy decision to disembark Lysander and the Assault Terminators and laid into some Fire Dragons and Destroyed their wave serpent. Scouts outflanked onto the board and Thunderwolves got bogged down even worse. Scouts and Thunderwolves were destroyed and a couple Vendetta's flew in off the far board edge.

Turn three was at about the two hour mark. At this point, according to the scenario, we had lost. Rather than restarting with a new scenario, the other players favored finishing out the game. The rest of the game played out with the Wolf Guard Terminators shooting down Vendettas, Land Raider being blown up, and Lysander proceeding to pacman his way up the side of the board and eating both enemy HQ's as well as about 60 guardsmen.

Yes. Please do.

At the end of turn six, we'd massacred our opponents and only lost 2 units. All of our remaining units, with the exception of the rhino (I think) were on the opponents table half for the scenario scoring. So, we did succeed, but not in the way we intended, and not in a time period that would be useful.

So now we have to ask where to go from here. The scouts basically just died, so I'm thinking of investing the camo cloak points elsewhere. Did learn that I NEED to get my terminators out and doing something first turn so as not to waste their usefulness in the shorter game. Really think Wolf Guard Termies should be in a Land Raider. All we did was shoot down a Vendetta with them which Long Fangs could have done cheaper and faster. I understand they have a VERY important intimidation factor to them, but we should be getting them into combat at least once to make them worth their points.... Thoughts?