Playtest - Thunderdome

Another post that stayed in the draft too long, one of the last game I played before leaving for NOVA.

In another round of playtesting for nova - and most other tournaments as well as this is a popular build - My buddy Arno played a variant of the TWC star.  Turns out, if I win my first round, I am paired vs Aaron Aelong, Thunderdome/TWCStar expert.  Aaron’s NOVA list was nastier than his ETC variant.  Nontheless, testing was in order.

Read on for glory!

One thing I do while playtesting is try some pretty bold strategies to see how they fare.  This makes the playtesting record with the army somewhat odd ( I was 1-7 before NOVA ) but that’s my process and it seems to work so far.

So this was my plan going in this game.  Since the Thunderdome is such a resilient list, I was curious to see what would happen if I went all in and alpha strike the crap out of it.

What I did was keep my pods for turn 2, as I figured I could dodge the star with a gate and shoot for at least 2 turns.  I drop the pods next to  the centurions, trying to mass all of my grav canons on one side of the unit.   

The other units I place as far away from the action as possible.  10 assault marines, 5 scouts and 5 grey knights won’t do much until the star Voltron’s out in the later stage of the game, so I try to have them live long enough to matter.

Without perfect timing on the Centurions, it turns out that you can’t deal much damage to the unit.  With carefully placed Ravenwing bikers that Jink on a 3+ rerollable, you don’t get more than 2-3 wounds through, and usually on some unlucky cyber puppy.

I will spend the rest of the game getting butchered by the unhappy puppy.  

 Lesson learned.