The ND Open 2015 part 3

Catch part2 here

4-0 at the end of the first day means tha no matter what happens, the W/L ratio I wanted is achieved.  But don’t let this fool you. There were more butts to be kicked.

Game 5 was versus Bruno, winner of Best Overall last year and currently at 119 out of 120 points. Is army is everything nasty packed in an army, 2 Wave Serpents, 2 WraithKnights, 1 Imperial Knight, 3 Hornets and a Landing Pad.  I really like that list, it propably can make grown men cry.   The scenario is 6 objectives at 3 points each, and Killing the priciest HQ, so his farseer and my FateWeaver.  My plan was quite straightforward, get a spawn farm in my half of the borad and avoid playing with all of bruno’s nasty units for as long as possible.  I rolled one spell on malefic on each DP, because spawing crap on bruno’s side gives him something to deal with rather than bust my own side farm.  I also planned to focus on getting the secondary objectives and draw it out/ contest heavily the objectives.  I got quite lucky, as a lucky roll on the warpstorm table blew up Bruno’s farseer on my 1^st turn.  7 points in the bag and one pissed off opponent later, my luck is catching up with me, as despite not failing many saves, I fail an insane amount of summoning and all my units scatter everywhere.  Losing his warlord early made bruno misplay for a turn or 2, misplacing models and attacking the wrong targets, but he shook it off and laid the asswhooping on my army, scoring 16,5 to my 13,5.  I made a few misplays in the last turn, placing wise, but Bruno had so much stuff left on his side and mobility that I don’t think I could’ve salvaged more objectives. 4-0-1

Game 6, and I was determined to make whoever I would face pay for that last game.  Turns out I would play my buddy Eric, winner of the ND Qualifier, and star of the META your Maker articles.  Eric’s list is a blob, a Pask Punisher Star, 2 NDK and Thudd Guns, I’ve played Eric a bunch of times  with variations of this list over the past year. I knew if I was not making any dumb move, I was winning the game.  Scenario is Kps, with one objective in the middle of the board.  I reserved the Fateweaver and horrors, and figured the 3 Princes and GUO could take a beating for a turn or two.  The game was quite uneventful, with eric winning 1 KP to 0 for 4 turns. I was attacking Eric’s weak units – a PCS and a 5 man strike squad to get easy kill points.  I should have put more hurt on the thudd guns to keep my horrors safe, I think.  In the end, 2 tricky manoevers helped me pull the win, one was a GUO with fleet charging the blob from a side and taking it off the middle of the board, and re-rolling a Ground check with my fateweaver reroll to crash a daemon prince and charge his Leman Russes on my last turn.  I misplayed a unit of horrors pretty bad, allowing a NDK to tie them off the same way I tied the blob.  28-2 for me.

I figured if Bruno had another draw, I could have a shot at best overall, but he crushed a Farsight bomb and defended his title of Overall Champion. Speaking of title defence, despite not winning 30-0 like last year, my 18-12 win over Remi in game 1 allowed me to claim the prestigious title of Back-to-back Princess Maker.

Also, despite me claiming I never play and/or don’t know how, I scored my 1^st ever Best General trophy, with pretty decent stats, 2^nd Overall and top 5 Painting.  I’m quite happy with all this.  The best part of my tournament was walking to get the Best General trophy, where I heard a Fantasy player, in an incredulous tone, say:  “Hey, that’s the guy who spent the whole weekend drinking straight from his pitchers of beer “.

The only part of the tournament that I did not really like was the painting competition, that was held in a different room than the tournament, and that had 5 judges, with 4 of them competing in the event and 3 of them claiming all but 3 prizes.  They were all deserving of the prizes, with entries better than mine by far, still it’s hard not to find this sketchy.  As I said previously, competition painting is not really for me, so it’s no wonder I wasn’t that impressed with how it went down.

I can’t wait until next year’s event, where I now have 2 titles to defend!