After the third game we took the chance to socialise the the locals at a nearby pub. Highlights included winding up Pete Dunn about comp systems, discussing tournament admin and ranking systems with Pete and the rest of the Dunn family, Sam missing out on a fantastic burger and vowing he would come back tomorrow to make up for it, heading into the city and catching up with the Kiwihammer lads and making sure Lachy (from team Panel Comp FTW) had way too much to drink. Eventually we stumbled to bed about 3am for a short kip before it was go time again the next morning.
Round 4 vs Team Shirts Off Warhammer.
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| James and Mal forgot not to wear shirts. But James did have a very cool captains hat... |
The next obstacle in our path involved 4 disgusting nerds without their shirts on. To be fair they're lovely gents, but there is only so much warhammer player nipple I can handle. They were rocking a filthy Orc & Goblin gunline that had absolutely nothing interesting in it, a very nice mixed High Elf list that had good potential both offensively and defensively, a cloud Lizardmen list with a metal Slann and finally a Slaanesh DP choir bomb WoC list with most of the usual suspects; bloodcrushers, exalteds with ridiculous ward saves and a bunch of chariots.
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| A somewhat understated but very nice unit of Skullcrushers. |
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| With an army like this it was no surprise that Sam Whitt took out he best painted award. |
Last round they had beaten our aussie brothers, their WoC scoring a huge win against the Dark Elves and the Lizards grinding out a score against the Empire. The lizards were pretty threatening for my high elves, what would normally be a good matchup is altered significantly by the presence of searing doom, and I didn't really want to go near the Orcs. Other than that there were no match ups we desperately needed to avoid, so we were fairly confident going into the match up process. Honestly I can't remember how the match ups played out, I remember thinking that they might have outmanoeuvred us at one stage, but I was pretty happy with the final matches. They were:
Me vs James Milner (High Elves)
Greg vs Ben Wadsworth (Orcs & Goblins)
James vs Mal Patel (Lizardmen)
Sam vs Sam Whitt (Warriors of Chaos)
The way I saw it I had a game somewhat in my favour, as did Greg against the Orcs. James was once again tasked with taking a draw from his game to give us something to build on and Sam had a match up that could go either way.
James' list, which I am a big fan of, contained:
Prince: Barded Steed, Giant Blade, Dragon Armour, Enchanted Shield, Dawn Stone
Archmage: Elven Steed, Level 4 (Death), Book of Hoeth, Khaine's Ring of Fury
Noble: Barded Steed, Starlance, Halberd, Other Tricketer's Shard, Charmed Shield, BSB, Dragon Armour
Mage: Elven Steed, Level 2 (Fire), Dispel Scroll, Ironcurse Icon
14 Silver Helms: Full Command, Shields,
3*5 Ellyrion Reavers: Bows
9 Dragon Princes: Full Command, Banner of the World Dragon
1 Frost Pheonix
3 Repeater Bolt Throwers
5 Sisters of Avelorn
Very flexible, dangerous in all phases and very manoeuvrable. A great list for teams events.
I deployed fairly evenly across the board, James had more drops than I did because of the reavers so I had to spread out. On the left I had a reaver unit, then my Silver Helms, my Dragon and a pheonix in the middle and the dragon princes, reavers and the second pheonix on the right. James focused his forces on my left, deploying the prince on his own far left, the silver helms and dragon prince bus middling left while his shooting was spread around the board. His pheonix remained relatively central, eyeing off its two brethren on the other side of the battlefield.
James won the first turn and moved up a bit, his magic was ineffective, I let a Doom and Darkness through on my dragon as he was unlikely to take a panic test, and with shooting I think James killed 1 dragon prince. In my turn I measured a few things and noticed his dragon prince bus 21 inches from my Star Dragon.
So this happened:
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| Shit gets real! |
Boom, charges were declared, skippies were rolled and suddenly things looked *very* bad for James. The dragon princes also succeeded in a 20 inch charge onto a reaver unit, which meant I was crossing the table extraordinarily quickly.
Things got a bit worrying in the magic phase though when I rolled a pair of ones and couldn't dispel doom and darkness. Thankfully I passed the ld7 test on the dragon thanks to the stubbornness afforded to me by James' banner of the world dragon. For the record I did not have a re roll.
James tried to do the only thing he could think of to kill my dragon that was about to start shredding his characters. He 6 diced a purple sun, thankfully I still had a dispel scroll so managed to keep the sun at bay for a turn. The rest of James' turn was unexciting, he was in no way prepared to be in combat so quickly and had to spend the turn re-adjusting his lines.
In my turn the silver helms went into his dragon princes, while my dragon princes faffed around in the forest trying to chase down reaver units. Over the course of the game they managed to kill two reaver units and a bolt thrower, but got utterly shot to bits in the process and ended up full of holes. The silver helms broke through the dragon princes, and the green pheonix in the centre of the board tied up the silver helms.
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| Came from behind! |
Unfortunately for said pheonix the dragon failed to pursue into the combat, which meant he (or she) was all alone when James' pheonix turned up in a sexual frenzy of pheonix lust. Unprepared for these attentions my noble beast tried to gracefully flee, but could not prevent the white pheonix from having its way with her. The silver helms could but watch this disgusting display of mystic avian eroticism and slowly bumped slack jawed into the dragon.
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| The green pheonix tried to run, but there would be no escape! |
Blue pheonix felt a stirring within him watching the savage brutality of the white pheonix's display. He surged forward eagerly just as the white pheonix finished with it's mate. The white pheonix frantically flapped around in an attempt to avoid the predations of the blue.
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| Not meeeeeee! |
Deciding that it did actually prefer doing things face to face the white rallied itself and turned to face the blue. They gazed longingly at one another for a brief moment before proceeding to but into each other ineffectually until it was the blue pheonix's bed time and he had to go home. The silver helms continued to watch this bizarre pheonix love display as they were torn asunder by the dragon, at which point the game was done.
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| The remaining pheonixes bump uglies. |
End Result: 16-4 win. That first turn charge kinda sealed it. James managed to fight back mainly with his shooting and the Pheonix, but it was too little too late. The dice weren't particularly nice to James throughout the game, but we agreed that there really was no valid reason for his DP bus to be within any charge distance at all of my dragon in the first turn. It was a minor error that was punished massively, but things like that will happen. From my perspective I didn't feel I was going to lose out much by failing the charge, and so having a crack at it was a no brainer.
On the table next to me things looked bad for Greg early on. The green gunline was taking his models off at an alarming rate, but he managed to steadily work his way back into the game. Taking out the warmachines massively reduced the damage output of the orc army, and Greg could then chip away at it for a 15-5.
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| The Dark Elves run the gauntlet as the green gunline. |
James did his job and got a 10-10, potentially he could have pushed for more but that would have opened him up to potentially losing big, and we were happy to take the safe points given the way the other games were going. Sam looked like he was going down to the WoC but picked up some strong points in the last few turns and managed to battle back to a draw.
Team Result: 51-29.
Another strong result against probably our strongest opponents yet. We were still in the 50 club (the only team remaining in fact) and knew that next up we had the noisy neighbours, team Panel Comp FTW.
Yeah, I'm not sure I knew what my Phoenixes were signing up for when they agreed to go on that trip with you....
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