The Final Showdown

Welcome back guys, this week's post is all about my round 5 game against fellow ATC teammate Liam Hackett. Everyone at this event was anticipating Liam to do quite well with this all new and powerful force which is Orks, he was running a list that was considerably different to what would first come to mind when you think of the Ork horde which has been their standard throughout the editions.

 Just to quickly outline what Liam was running so you all have an idea what I'm talking about when we go into detail;
Your standard pick of Ork characters, war bosses/weird boys
big unit of lootas
big unit of tank bustas
a tide of gretchin
and a 20 man mega-nob death star.. 7th ed is that you?

Now, going into this game i was feeling pretty uneasy about this match up after being exposed to what the Orks could do in round 1 against Luke Pearce. I think I could comfortably say if i hadn't played Orks round 1 I would have lost this game. Looking across the table to this match up is quite daunting, this Ork list has all the tools it needs to be able to get on top of the Nid carpet while having the damage output to really scare the Hive Tyrants and any of my other backfield shooting.

With the mega-nob unit dishing out a whopping 80/100 power claw attacks I knew the only chance i had here was to do everything I could to mitigate the damage coming out of this unit, that on it's own would not have been so hard if I didn't also have to find a way to shut down the other key units like tank bustas and lootas.

I was pretty confident I would be able to achieve this if i was to have first turn, this would mean he has less time to screen out the Hive Tyrant drop along with giving me an extra turn to really start minimising just where this mega unit could go, stopping Da Jump was never really an issue as i had the spore field, but funnelling this units movement with spore mines from biovores or just with gaunts keeping the mega unit away from my backfield was key here. Sadly this plan got turned on it's head when i lost the roll for first turn ( I had the +1)

So Ork turn 1 meant this "star" could get to where it really needed to be at the end of turn 1 just by moving and advancing as Evil Suns, Liam was also able to get a few shots off into the biovores and killing a couple which wasn't huge but i was happy i didn't lose any full units. I now had one turn to set up everything perfectly to take the charge from the mega unit. I don't think I've ever spent longer thinking before actually moving a model to set this up but i knew if i could do it in a way where all the models in his unit are splitting attacks amongst various gaunt squads I would be able to sustain this damage. Knowing the megaz were making this charge next turn i pushed forward as much as i could to start laying out some hurt on the gretchin to make sure i had some room to drop my flyrants in key spots, this even meant shooting all my biovores into them.. feels bad bro.

So with all gaunt squads interlocked as much as i possibly could, The Horror up on the mega unit i handed it back over to Liam. The megaz made combat this turn tagging all but one of the gaunt squads, this is where Liam really gave me some breathing space without knowing it, when the unit charged he stretched them out as far as possible to keep everything in my deployment zone, though in doing this during my next turn it meant the middle units that were all in combat cold fall back, i made sure all these models were outside of 4" now this means the models filling the gap in the middle of his unit could only pile in forwards leaving only 4 or 5 of the megaz in this 20 man unit to attack, after that it was essentially rinse and repeat and i would alternate which units were in combat as much as I could to just filter out his attacks.  Because of the space that was created for the Tyrants this meant they could easily clean up his back field and Liam couldn't get the mega unit out of combat to handle this. Doing this meant i had taken away the 80+ shots coming out of the megaz every turn along with in combat with the horror they were only hitting on 5's so when I've made it so 3 megaz are hitting one unit and 2 maybe 3 hitting another he really isn't achieving anything which drastically impacts the KP differential. Game ended turn 5, 14-6 win to the Tyranids. A great game to end a tournament with and it's amazing to see this kind of talent coming through our scene.

Next on the cards is the build up to Cancon!
What will I be running? At the moment I have no idea, a lot of thought will be going into this one, but rest assured, Hivefleet Cuck will be making an appearance.
You'll be able to follow along with the tournament with who some of Australia's big names are picking as the favourites for this event and what they expect to show up from our good mates @Down Under Network. Check them out for some quality banter and of course the streams!
https://www.facebook.com/DownUnderNetwork/?epa=SEARCH_BOX 

The Reign of Terror Continues

Welcome back to The Hive Mind, in this post ill quickly touch on the most recent even which was Hero-con and my initial reaction on whats to come from chapter approved, some concerns i have moving forward with Nids along with some possible benefits.

So Hero-con was a two day tournament running ETC styled missions run by the infamous Josh McGowan, hats off for running a really organised event. For this event I went completely against what i have been saying about a particular unit in the nid dex for a long time, here's what i ran;

Leviathan Battalion:
Dakka Flyrant
Dakka Flyrant
Dakka Flyrant

3 rippers
30 gaunts
30 gaunts
5 venomthropes
3 biovores
3 biovores
2 biovores

Leviathan Battalion:
Nurothrope
Nurothrope

30 gaunts
30 gaunts
30 gaunts
and some left over points for spore field goodness.

Just quickly on how this list went, I played against;
rd1: orks (12-8)
rd2: Deathguard (18-2)
rd3: Guard (19-1)
rd4: Tau (20-0)
rd5: orks (14-6)

There you have it guys, Hivefleet Cuck continues its undefeated run.
This was a pretty neat spread of armies to play against, all of these lists were drastically different to each other even the two ork lists so that was all pretty refreshing. I'm still not sold on the flyrants as a unit in a tyranid army, i love the weight of fire they bring to the table for me but not for the sacrifice of 600 odd points that's so easily taken away from me. 

Prior to this event I was genuinely concerned with how my list would fair against the new guys on the block being orks and I was 100% right in placing my concerns with them, that book is off its head. Despite the score being closer in game 1 I played one of the toughest games I've had in a long time against a good mate Liam Hackett, he was playing a meganob star ork list and it was honestly such a well constructed list, i take my hat off to him for this one. This game deserves its own little write up so I'll be making it the topic of the next post, stay tuned to hear about just how I manoeuvred to get the upper hand on this brutal ork list.