SHO 2018 Report

As per usual it seems, I get distracted, busy or unmotivated and suddenly my plans of posting regularly just don't happen. Nonetheless, as the title suggests I'm going to do my best to give an overview of my games across Southern Hemisphere Open. I'll do another post about Skulls 2018 and then give my thoughts on the Tallyband. On to SHO!

SHO 2018
Game 1 vs Yordan
As mentioned previously, SHO 2018 was a one day tournament put on by Objective Secured on 24 September 2018.

My first game was against a well-known player in the local scene called Yordan. Yordan has a reputation as being one of the more competitive players in our scene and, while being a bit nervous going into the game, I was looking forward to it. Unfortunately I can't remember for the life of me what the scenario was, but he was playing a Gore Pilgrims list. He also had the bloodthirster that can do AoE mortal wounds.

This game ended up being close in objectives but ultimately I lost out. The game progressed much as I thought it would - I grabbed the objectives early, and it was then up to Yordan to shift me. To begin with it looked like he might not be able to do it, but towards the end of the game my units were overwhelmed and he was able to catch up.

There were a few things I learnt in this game. To begin with, I forgot that I could cast Glorious Afflictions to halve movement. Given how tight the score was at the end, holding a unit off for a turn could have made the difference.

I otherwise generally learnt about how pile-ins could be used in interesting ways and to watch out for flying units charging into places I didn't expect them to be. His bloodthirster got into my backfield without me expecting it, and if he had some better dice it could have done a world more damage. While I was eventually able to take it out, I was lucky with the limited damage it did. While it was an intense first game, it was highly educational.

Game 2 v Kieren
My second game was against a guy called Kieran who was also new to the scene. He was running a Seraphon list with the follow (probably not everything):

Kroak

Slann

3 units of Skinks (10's I think)

A unit of Ripperdactyls

2 x Bastilidons

1 x Engine of the Gods

1 x Balewind

I have never played against Seraphon, but I listen to podcasts, and knew that Kroak and Bastilidons are bad news for daemons, and I was running a complete daemon army. I knew that I was going to be up against it, but I was up for the challenge; I don't really get into bemoaning how poor of a match-up a game might be, or whether something is fair or not. I enjoy the challenge because I want to get better, and the way to get better is to get smashed up and learn from the mistakes I make.

We were playing Total Conquest, which is the scenario with the weird blocky deployment. There are four objectives, and claiming an objective that belongs to your opponent is worth more than holding your own.

This game ended up coming right down to the wire, but I got pipped at the end and went down. My lack of knowledge of Seraphon definitely worked against me in this game, particularly in relation to how Seraphon can teleport, and how skinks can retreat. Early on in the game, we were fighting over the two objectives near the thin deployment zones on the board. He went after mine with ripperdactyls and skinks, and I sent a large block of plaguebearers after his. One of the big issues for me in this game was how to deal with the bastilidons, and the crazy summoning that Seraphon can do. Early on, I decided that my best option to try and deal with the bastilidons was to send my Great Unclean One after them. I decided this on the basis that he was not going to be effective at holding objectives, and if he managed to get into them then the witherstave would give him some limited protection. I'm not sure if this was the right idea or not; their ability to teleport made it very difficult to truly protect against them, and I couldn't zone out the board in a meaningful way because I needed bodies on objectives to contest against the skinks.

The two big learning points in this one were to be more careful with my position to block out summoning or teleporting. In turn 4 I left a gap for Kroak to teleport outside of 6 of my back objective and he wiped out the plaguebearer unit holding that objective. If I had been a bit more careful I could have mitigated it to a degree and may have got up in the end.

The other big one was in relation to a Beast of Nurgle I summoned. I forgot that it could retreat and charge for two turns in a row. This could have done 2D3 mortal wounds to the skinks I was fighting, and had the potential to allow me to steal the objective back. At the end of the game though, we had both had a fun game that came down to the wire. I'm looking forward to playing Seraphon again to see if I learnt anything from this experience.

Game 3 vs Matthew
My final game for SHO was against a Legions of Nagash player by the name of Matthew. Neither of us had won a game at the stage so I think we were both up for a nice easy game to see out the weekend. We ended up getting Shifting Objectives as the scenario, and I was the only person to outdrop his 2 drop Legion list all day. From memory, Matthew had:

Arkhan

Lord of Bones

2 Morghasts Harbingers

30 Grave Guard

30 Skeletons

10 Skeletons

There was probably some other stuff as well.

This game was the only game where my list worked exactly as I intended it to; I think this was for two reasons. Firstly I had a better idea of what I was doing with the list by this time, and secondly I was up against another army that was more suited to grinding.

In my first turn I ran my guys onto the objectives and basically set myself up to take charges. Matthew obliged and the centre of the board turned turned into a melee. We didn't finish the game, but the main points were discovering how much damage Black Guard can do (quite a bit), and seeing how slow Black Guard could move after learning how much damage they did (2" as it turns out). Shackles were both annoying and very useful in this game; something I hadn't considered is how annoying it could be to move around the endless spells.


At the end of the day I had won 1 game, lost 2, and had played against three people I had never played against. I was feeling a bit down on the list at this point in time; the lack of damage in the list was frustrating, but I also think I didn't get the most out of my Plague Drones - a lot of the time they seemed to be buzzing around somewhere that didn't matter rather than getting stuck in. I was pretty exhausted by the end of the day, but I ended up being voted the second favourite person to play against which was awesome.

In considering whether SHO was a run well, I don't think I really have the experience to say whether it was good or bad. In the end only 10 people ended up attending which was a shame, and there was some discussion about how to get more people to come out to events. I think our local scene is building at the moment, and I hope it continues to do so, but we seem to be split into a number of smaller communities. I'm hoping that somehow we can connect these scenes are start to build to local tournament scene.

That's it from me for the moment folks, but I (hopefully) will be back soon with another post.

SHO 2018 & Skulls 2018

Southern Hemisphere Open has been and gone, and while I didn't place particularly well, it was an enjoyable event to participate in! It was run smoothly by Mike and Emma over at Objective Secured at Perth's Ascot Racecourse. I've never been to Ascot, so it was a good excuse to check it out; mind you I went to the wrong venue on the way and each of my games ran the full round length so I didn't have a great amount of time to explore, but the view overlooking the racecourse while we played was pretty great. I'll go through each of my games in a future post, but I thought I ought to set out why I took certain options in my list. I have another tournament this coming weekend, Skulls at Outpost 6030, that I'm going to take the same list to so I'll give a review of it after that.

My List

As mentioned in my previous post, my list is as follows:

Allegiance: Nurgle
Realm: Shyish

LEADERS

Great Unclean One
  - General
  - Plague Flail & Doomsday Bell
  - Command Trait: Pestilent Breath
  - Artefact: The Witherstave
  - Lore of Virulence: Glorious Afflictions

Poxbringer
  - Artefact: Wraithbow
  - Lore of Virulence: Favoured Poxes

Poxbringer
  - Lore of Virulence: Favoured Poxes

UNITS

Plaguebearers (30)

Plaguebearers (20)

Plaguebearers (10)

Plague Drones (3)

Plague Drones (3)

BATTALIONS

Tallyband of Nurgle

ENDLESS SPELLS

Chronomantic Cogs

Geminids of Uhl-gysh

Soulsnare Shackles

List Choices

In building the list (the theory of which I discussed here) there were a few places in the list where I could play around. The core of the list (to meet the tallyband battalion) had to be a Great Unclean One, a Poxbringer, 3 units of Plaguebearers (for battleline) and a unit of Plague Drones. From there, my choices were primarily:

1. What load out did I was on the Great Unclean One?
2. What did I want my second artefact to be?
3. Did I want my Plague Drones in a unit of 1 or 2?

There is also room in the list to drop a poxbringer, the cogs and the shackles to bump the unit of 10 plaguebearers to 30, which I think I like the idea of, but I don't own enough plaguebearers to make it an option.

Great Unclean Load-out
This was probably the most straight-forward choice. I knew I wanted the Doomsday Bell for the 3" movement buff, so that was automatically in. Choosing between the flail and the bileblade was more difficult, and I'm not entirely sold on the choice, but I decided I wanted the GUO to have the ability to do some damage in combat. The trade off of his Massive Bileblade (3 attacks / -2 Rend / 3 damage) for the Bell (4 attacks / -1 Rend / 1 damage) is already a fairly significant hit to his damage, and I didn't want him to be a complete potato in combat so I kept the flail. An interesting side note is that the bell doesn't get any worse the more injured the GUO is, whereas the Massive Bileblade drops attacks, so the difference didn't end up being as extreme as I feared.

The Witherstave is an amazing item, and has such a large area of effect that it fits really well into my overall gameplan, so that was an easy choice.

Pestilent Breath for the command trait is primarily to give me flexibility. At it's heart it is a horde killer; 1/3 of a unit taking mortal wounds is excellent. That being said, it is highly situational and is short ranged. I'm not sure whether the ability to manipulate the dial with Grandfather's Blessing is a better choice - it's something I'll keep an eye on and will mix it up at some point.

Second Artefact
I had a really good time going through the Malign Sorcery book and thinking about what artefacts were open to me and what I wanted. After a fair bit of consideration I came down to deciding between the Tome of a Thousand Poxes from the Maggotkin book and the Wraithbow from the Realm of Shyish.

The tome gives spells cast from the Lore of Nurgle +1 to cast. The uses for this in my army are limited but significant. There are only two spells that would be affected; Foul Regenesis and Favoured Poxes. Foul Regenesis is important because it allows wheel manipulation, and Favoured Poxes is an incredibly potent debuff; -1 to hit, wound and save. Both spells are cast on a 7+, which means they had a 20/36 chance of being cast (or 55% chance). By taking the Tome, this increases to a 26/36 chance, or a 72% chance, as well as providing some assistance against dispels.

The Wraithbow is an artefact that is used in the shooting phase. You pick an enemy unit within 18", roll 6 dice, and they take a mortal wound for each 6 rolled. What attracted me to this item was that:

1. It has a good range;
2. It can be used after running; and
3. It isn't affected by negatives to hit.

One of my concerns is my ability to pick off characters. I have a few ways in which to deal D3 mortal wounds (spells primarily) but it isn't significant. This bow is quite variable, but the ability to ping a wound off here an there was very tempting. I also thought the item seemed fun, so I am going to give the bow a run for a while to see how it goes.

Plague Drones in a unit of 3 or 6?
The decision here was whether the have one unit that would benefit from the GUO command ability, or whether it was better to have two separate units acting independently. I'm not sure which way I prefer as yet, but I'm going to try having two units; I think it will give me more options and more roadblocks if necessary.


It will be interesting to compare how this list performs in an event that uses full realm rules (Skulls 2018) vs one that didn't (SHO). My initial thoughts are that I have a good number of casters to take advantage of the realm spells, but I have too many endless spells which are points that could be spent elsewhere. I'm looking forward to forming testing some hypotheses, forming some opinions, and seeing how they compare with internet wisdom.