The 40k Grand Tournament

Against all odds, I have survived yet another GT experience. As might have been deduced from my previous blog entry, I didn't go to sleep the night before, just so I could finish painting my army. Meeting deadlines like this has always been a source of trouble for me. The fact that I've been trying to prepare for the GT while also doing my graduation internship and writing two important papers for school on the side... didn't really help either.

Woes and laments out of the way, I did have an incredibly fun weekend. I don't think I've ever been to a GT where I've played so many cool opponents and had fun even in the games where I was losing. The list I took helped a lot in both of those respects (the 'having fun' as well as the 'losing').

Having failed in fully painting my original competitive list, I was forced to take some more fluffy options to fill up the points I missed by not having a second defiler or a winged sorcerer/raptors. Instead I went with a daemon prince of Tzeentch with warptime and bolt of change and a chaos sorcerer with mark of Tzeentch and doombolt. In the end I did pretty much what I expected with the list, but despite losing 3 out of 5 games, there were still a lot of fun moments and I also learned a lot about how my army works as well.

Below here are some pics I took from the games I played. Some of them are more clear than others, but I only had my iphone handy at the time.

My first opponent had a space wolf list with lots of long fangs, grey hunters, runepriest and thunderwolves. Needless to say this was my first loss, but nonetheless I kinda managed to give him a hard time until turn 3 when I forgot to assault with my daemon prince. D'oh!

My army on display. I didn't get nominated or anything, but I'm still pretty pleased with how it looked.

This ones a bit blurry, but this is Sam's army, one of the guys from the club. It's a really cool space marine army that he did pretty well with.

An eldar army that just blew me away. Those yellow glows in the explosions and blue glows beneath the vehicles are actually LED lights! Really surprised that it wasn't nominated for best army.

Bill's guard army. He apparently also put on a bit of a last minute painting frenzy, but got more sleep than me I guess since he did a bit better in the rankings.

Bob's orange ork army. Bob switched gaming clubs on us (he's now a Fallen Angel), but was still cool enough to drive us to and from the event. He ended up 28th or something. Quite impressive for me, but given bob's record he was a bit dissapointed. He won the great gamer sportsmanship award as well, so I guess he'll be back next year regardless.

Second game against guard. This was the one I actually won. Seize ground has always been one of my prefered missions, but my opponent made it difficult for me and in the end I managed to win with only 2 guys left in a rhino on an objective.

The third battle. I was getting pretty tired at this point (having been awake for about 40 hours) and my opponent was fielding a list with 15 stormshield terminators, backed up by 3 dreadnoughts and 3 minimal troop choices. I tried to punch through, but just made a lot of mistakes and got totally destroyed in the end.

The second day my first battle was against orks. I also lost this one, but it was a fun game and my opponent had a really cool orky army. (see photo below as well).

The final game was against Iron Warrior chaos space marines. We ended up drawing and having a lot of fun. The game was really tense and even though I had some crappy luck (initiative got stolen, defiler blown up first turn, etc) we were quite evenly matched. Picture below is one of my last units facing off against his converted iron warriors lord and plague marines, desperately trying to stop them contesting my barely held objective.

There you have it. My GT experience in a nutshell. I'll definately be going back next year, but obviously with a more competetive list. Next couple of blogs will probably be about regular painting and gaming again. So, see you next time folks and don't forget...

Death to the False Emperor!