CanHammer Team Tournament : The ATC for Friendlier People

Your favorite frenchie is back from the CanHammer Team Tournament, a 4-man ETC/ATC-like tournament.

Gather ‘round for tales of glory.

CanHammer Team Tournament : The ATC for Friendlier People

The Canhammer team tournament and you

For those unfamiliar with the Team Championship formula, here’s a quick breakdown. Teams of players ( 4 for CHTT, 5 ATC and 8 ETC ) battle it out at 1850 points each.

Each faction can only be played once per team, meaning if your buddy is playing Eldar, you can’t play any.

Players then pair off in a cutthroat draft method (more on this here) and you hope your team outscores the other team battle point wise.

Yours truly at CHTT

I commited to play for team CanHammer who drafted me when one of their member fell through.

Our lineup consisted of :

Chris, playing a Magnus CSM/Daemons list

Jason, playing a Barkstar

Ciaran, playing everyone’s favorite Eldar

And me, playing a laughable army, Rock’em Sock’em Robots.

Rock’em Sock’em Robots

Imperial Knights - Oathsworn Detachment ( ObSec Knights)

Warden, Gatling, Stormspear rockets

Warden, Gatling, Stormspear rockets

Warden, Gatling, Stormspear rockets

Tau Empire – Riptide Wing

Riptide, Burst, Interceptor

Riptide, Ion, Interceptor/Skyfire

Riptide, Ion, Interceptor/Skyfire

1850 pts

Shoutout to Jack and Eric, because none of the models are mine.  Minor props to my favorite retard Kevin, I guess the knights are well painted and stuff.

The Burst-Riptide should have had Skyfire instead of another riptide, but whatever, I never played the list prior and that looked nice on paper. 

My list is fringe and has a couple of horrendous matchups, and was the laughing stock of most of the top teams when it was posted. However, in a format where teams were playing to fight Magnus and Psychic Stars, not a lot of teams brought stuff to deal with 3 Imperial Knights.

Regarding list building, props to team Can’t Hammer, who in my opinion had the strongest combination of lists to annoy the crap out of every team.

Into the games

I posted a picture of every game on instagram, which you can look for here.  And follow while you're at it!

Every mission features a Traditional scenario, a Maelstrom mission and Kill Points.

From this point on, all the strategy and opinions are from my own perspective, as I don’t know how or what the other teams wanted to play versus us.

Our general idea was to have the Barkstar to take on whatever beause it rarely loses hard, but the strong anti-pskyker and mask-featuring lists out there made it a little bit harder, so me and Ciaran (Eldar) would usually end up playing whatever in order for Chris and Jason ( Magnus and Barkstar ) to get favorable matches and get max-point wins.

Game 1 versus Forbes 2nd Legion

Before the game, the TO made it pretty clear that we were in this to win it (hopefully) and that it was our opponent’s 1st taste of tournaments. So we did the sensible team and played friendlier games, mind you, we maxed out, but without dicking them around.

I played Neef, who had a Grey Knights and Deathwing Knight Star. That unit can really hurt Imperial Knights with the good combination of spells, so I made sure to deal with pretty much everything in his army before tackling on the deathstar. Because he had no Gate of Infinity, my plan was to make sure I could score a bunch of Maelstrom points and end-game points, and avoid the star for as long as I could.

20-0 for everybody on our team and the top seed heading into round 2.

Game 2, versus some dudes from Ontario.

I don’t recall our opponent’s team name, but it featured Riley and Ricky Johnson, 2 great players from the Ontario scene.

Once again, we pair off to give Chris and Jason max-points games, with Ciaran having the uneasy task of dealing with Magnus while I have the Tau gunline to deal with.

Riley’s army is a classic Tau list with a Stormsurge, a riptide Wing and a bunch of Skyrays. Skyrays and Stormsurge are nasty on a knight army, because you risk have to deal with 2 D missiles on knights turn one, or the big guy anchoring and shooting 4 D missiles on 3 Knights turn 2.

Riley chose the later, which proved to be a mistake I took advantage of, shooting all my army at it to kill it before it could let go any of the day-ruining D missiles.

The other big mistake Riley made, was shooting across the army rather than focussing a single thing. He failed a couplke shots and/or I got a couple of key saves on Knights and instead of altering his plan and finishing off that one, he went for other targets.

So I started my turn 2 with all my models, but 3 wounded. This allows me to shoot with way more into the riptides and destroy them.

There was no turn 3 in this game, 20-0 for me. Again in this round, all of our games we won, with Ciaran pulling an unexpected win versus Magnus with a lucky D shot from a Wraightknight.

Game 3 versus Can’t Hammer

Now what a bummer, not only are we paired down ( Can’t Hammer having lost their round 2 to Team ‘Murica ) but we are paired down versus one of the better team to counter us, with 3 lists ruining Chris’ day and 2 of those lists Ruining Jason’s.

Matchmaking was not only hard, it was confusing as we were not using the same pairing method, because there was confusion with a change from last year to this year which wasn’t quite clear. This made for a sucky begining of the game, but we got pairing we wanted mostly. Jason versus a gladius, Chris versus Eldar, Ciaran versus Tau and I got to play Skylor with a Warcon list I didn’t quite want to face, but we had 3 strong matchups.

Warcon is a decent matchup for my army, except for the Dawn of war deployement and bunker/Escape Hatch for grav-gun totting Kataphrons. This combo of nastiness makes it really hard to deal with, and Belisarus Cawl tanking a milion wound on the un-bunkered unit makes it so you have to charge them to kill them.

The game was a bloody affair, and on turn 4, I was down to a 2-wounds Riptide and Skylor had a half unit of rangers, sisters of silence in a far away corner of the no-one-cares-side of the board and 2 1-wound kataphrons in close combat with said Riptide.

I proceeded to lose that combat and die at the hand of Kataphrons, and get tabled, into what would’ve been a 12-8 loss on regular points, or a draw had I won the combat. All in all a very close game that I was really happy to play and went way better than expected.

We ended up losing the round 32/48 as the Eldar took over our daemons in what we thought was a better matchup for up. Alas, here ends the streak.

Game 4 versus Team Eternal Warriors

This round’s pairings went weird on us, as we don’t expect teams to pair mirror matches, unless you have a pretty sick plan for that.  Maybe they did, they went Eldar vs our Eldar and had me play Tim's Khorne dog star army. 

This is a pairing I am quite indifferent about, because it seems like a draw-type scenario where we both durdle around and nobody gets any decent lead in the game. Mind you, a draw when you plan on your team getting big points is a good outcome.

Turns out that a draw was not to be. 

 Early on, Kairos the Fateweaver grounded himself on a perils, well in range of a Knight’s charge. To make matters worse, in order to save Kairos from a terrible fate, Tim bubbled it with Screamers and Heralds. Not one to pass out on so many points, I proceeded to shoot everything at the screamers which left me a 7 inch charge on the Fateweaver, that I made.

The rest of the game was dealing with a Cabal/Khorne Star, or me waiting to deny a hammerhand to multi charge, or has it happenned, spreading knights around and getting a lot of shooting into the unit.

20-0, back aboard the pain train. We also won this round big, as Ciaran also 20-0’d his match.

Game 5, versus the undefeated Team ‘Murica

At this point, we are in a pickle. Team ‘Murica is 3-0-1 playing us. Team Loaded Dice is 3-0-1 playing Can’t Hammer. For us to take it home, we have to win versus Team ‘Murica, and Can’t hammer has to beat Loaded Dice. Any other outcome, even a draw on their part leaves us with 2nd place.

However, beating Team ‘Murica is no small feat in itself. Their best list is Joshua Dearth’s Wulfen Star that works with electrodisplacement, and we have 2 good lists to go up against it, and 0 way of getting them to play it. Ciaran takes it like a champ, with the easy task : don’t get tabled turn one and we can probably take this, we have 2 good matches, and I’m playing Garner in what looks like another draw scenario.

Garner plays a weird Harlequin army, with a harlequin like seer council. Although he doesn’t have much to deal with knights shooting-wise, as long as I can avoid close combat with harlequins, I will live, we’ll both get some points and durdle around the board for 5 turns. Again, having a draw here is good, as Chris and Jason can get wins in their game.

Once again, a draw wasn’t meant to be. Garner nulls deploy, fails to seize and takes on a whole lot of punishement on his psyker star. A lot of bad luck, but then again, when you have no powers up and get shot at with 1850 points of stuff, bad things tend to happen.

The game snowballs from there as the reserves a coming in in waves and I destroy them immediatly. On turn 3 I have about 13 Maelstrom Points, and Garner is down to 4 models or so, I move in for the close combat, as losing a knight if I’m tabling the unlucky eldar is no big deal.

20-0 for yours truly, and a good thing too, because Chris got severly manhandled by David Kozka’s Warcon. 

Jason is sitting with a big lead versus the Magnus list that struggles to get any Maelstrom points of Kill points. 

Lo and behold, Ciaran manages to get 4 points out of his game and with Jason’s 20 points, we win the round. 

Take that, ‘Murica, we have made the great white north proud in this hard fought round.

Sadly for us, team Can’t Hammer fails to stop the Loaded Dice team, and they proceed to win best overall, while we get 2nd place.

Overall, the tournament was awesome. 

As in most tournaments I play, I’ve had a great time every single game and did way better than I (or anybody, for that matter) expected game-wise. 

The organisation itself was kind of a shitshow, as I went through the whole tournament without having a player pack, and most of my opponents were in the same predicament. Having to wait for 15 minutes to get a rule check because the judge is taking pictures was also quite frustrating.

Jason and Chris supplied the terrain for the event, and just like the Capital City Blood Bath ( which also uses their terrain ) , the tables were the best I’ve seen from any tournament I’ve played.

The event capped out at 20 teams of 4, and the plan for next year is to go full ATC, with 20 teams of 5, as they can keep the same venue but add 20 more players.