Emperor's Legion Day 1

Well this is an enigma of a day. I started coming down with something Thursday and I thought it was due to some fume inhalation but it looks like I've got either tonsillitis or some severe sort of strep throat - awesome. Add in that work screwed up my schedule (again) and I've worked closing shifts until 1am last night and tonight (so both days before tournaments) when I need to get up at 6am and drive for 90 minutes to the event. Yay *waves limp flag*.

So to the actual event...Round 1 - bye *falls over*. Damn what terrible luck considering the lack of sleep + sick - could have stayed home. Wandered around watching the games and I knew exactly what I was going to face round 2 - Draigowing. Why? I get full battle points for the game. The mission was very hard to get full battle points on without fully tabling your opponent. Vince played the Draigowing army terribly (he went towards it rather than capturing table quarters around it) and got tabled. Yay Draigowing with Tyranids.

So mission 2. VP with extra VP for any scoring units in your opponent's deployment zone. Neat mission - good for Draigowing so not great for me. I split deployed to give him one half of my army to chew on and then the rest would move over to support whilst all my Troops (other than whatever Termagants were used to bubblewrap) went to his side of the board. Plan worked brilliantly and I managed to drop one Paladin squad with S8 firepower and get 51 Termagants + Tervigon to my opponent's board. Problem is - 6 MC Relentless Psycannons + S5 stormbolters make mince meat of whatever they shoot and an 800 point Paladin unit in my deployment zone. End up losing by about 400 VP so 8 battle points for me. Ironically, if I had charged my Hive Tyrant + Prime into the squad rather than not, my opponent's dice were piss poor and I would have won by a couple hundred VP as I dragged the squad out of my DZ (we rolled it out for fun after). However, the chances of him rolling a couple 5/6's (even with Paroxysm on) to wound or 2's with his hammers were quite high and with a Bro Banner - that  meant death (which would have made it something like a 16-4 win for him). I took what points I could and was happy that I didn't get smashed by an army that the mission favored and my army was bad against. Great opponent though :).

Game 3 was against another Tyranid (great - we remember how fun that was) who had four Tervigons and DoM. Game was five objectives, pitched battle. Another match-up that favors my opponent as DoM trashes foot lists and whilst he'll only be alive for a turn, that turn can be pretty harsh. He's also going to have more Termagants than me. The issue of course is I can't really focus fire down Tervigons easily - Hive Guard and T-Fexes are going to cause about 2-3 wounds per round and that's what sets my list apart as well as the Hive Tyrant dominating whatever it touches in combat. I tried my best to hold onto the game and was nearly able to drag a win out of it but the dice said no. Of course, full credit to my opponent for capitalising on what unfolded and being able to force me into an ever tighter spiral of doom (i.e. the DoM managed to kill the Tyrant squad with Ld rolls of 6,6,5 and 6,6,4 and thus his MCs became very aggressive as I just couldn't kill them)! I do have to say though, I feel bad for my opponent because at this point I was feeling like shit physically so probably wasn't the best opponent - will make sure to seek him out tomorrow and apologise (assuming I get out of bed :P).

So 0-2 for the day with an automatic win coming as a bye...yuck! Looks like I used all my luck at ATC. Silly Tyranids.

Vince has gone 1-1-1 (but seriously, that tabling to Draigowing was bad - use your mobility Vince!) and Dennis 3-0-0 (making up for his ATC slump). Couple others that come here that are at the tournament but my brain is fried so can't think of their results so far. Hopefully tomorrow goes well but I'm definitely not in the running for Best General - maybe an Overall prize as my painting seems to be appreciated by everyone so far (and only four players were above me before my game 3 failure).