So with list submission for the biggest tournament of the calendar year around the corner what better time to share my thoughts on what I'm expecting to see at Cancon, some of my meta predictions and explain some of my concerns coming into an event like this.
My concerns:
As you could probably have guessed Hivefleet Cuck will be making another appearance at this one, though this may be the last time we see the nidlies on the table for a while. Taking Nids into an event like this I feel like is a bit of a risk as now with the much hated Tau back in the meta game and the release of the Ork codex the power from my alien friends is starting to take a slow decline. With an event around the 150 player mark accommodating at least 30 top tier players it is simply too hard to build a list that is so well rounded that you could comfortably say you can handle anything someone throws at me. Now this lead to quite a stressful process of building a list that I think would be able to hold its own, to do this I'm forced to guess/predict what some of these top players are more likely to bring to Cancon and rely on the backbone of my playing ability to hopefully stay on top of some of the possibly weaker players playing lists that are simply just good against tyranids.
My expectations/predictions:
With so many players all being in contention to taking this one out it is probably safe to say many of these lads will be trying to build a list to fight what might be the "norm" what happens here is that it becomes impossible to really know just what some of the heavy hitters will actually turn up with so it's far easier to generalise some of the top tier armies at the moment and be able to stay in the game against them. The common ones include;
Plaguebearer horde
Ynarri spears
Tzangor bomb + smite + daemons
Imperium soup
Knights
Orks (horde + lootas/meganobs)
This becomes a bit of a reoccurring issue as there is just too many drastically different arch types presented in the current meta and now even worse with the influx of Tau. The best way to compete at this event in my opinion is to pick 2 maybe 3 of what you might consider the strongest arch types at the time or maybe even just the most common and try to build a list to accommodate for those armies, some codexes can probably build a list that can actually fight all of that but you just have to be realistic with what you are playing. eg, I've conceived the fact that my nids just cannot handle all of that with minimal concerns so the "top 3" that i have picked out are;
Tzangor bomb + smites + daemons
Orks
Plaguebearer horde
Those three are what I belive to be the most potent In an ITC meta so I have built to hopefully be able to handle those armies quite well and like i said earlier rely on the backbone of my lists durability and my player ability to get me over the line against those other archtypes. Hopefully this all pans out how I am expecting but if not there was nothing else I could do. But with Cancon now looming the suspense of seeing just what the top tier players are bringing is growing.
The next post will be a break down of what I think of the lists from who I think will be the top 5 players at Cancon and who I think might really fly under the radar with a bit of a surprise list.
Wednesday, January 2, 2019
Saturday, December 15, 2018
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
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
Monday, December 10, 2018
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.
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.
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Hivefleet Cuck Strikes Again!
So over the most recent weekend I attended Lords of War,
When prepping for this one the missions are very similar to something you would find in an ETC formatted event, this means there is a huge focus on end game scoring and conserving kill points. When you see a mission format like this it just screams board control and attrition, this is definitely something taken into account when I list build.
A quick breakdown of what I ran at this event was;
old one eye
broodlord
broodlord
neurothrope
150x termgants with spike rifles
15 stealers
4 venomthropes
6 biovores
- primus
20 neophytes
and a handful of points up my sleeve to use spore field every game.
Now this list on paper doesn't look like it packs much of a punch as I decided to sub out a lot of my shooting options to buffer my usual gaunt carpet as well as a few hidden combat characters to fight my way out of any units that might threaten the gaunts at close range. The idea behind this list was 100% to engage in an attrition war with every one of my opponents and back myself to come out on top when we start trading punches over 5 turns which inevitably leaves me on top to hold the end game objectives, along with giving me serious board control to rack up maelstrom points and keep a hold on any sort of early lead I can get.
When it comes to conserving kill points I reinforce the points I covered on the Normal Blokes Podcast, for those of you that didn't have the opportunity to listen to that, using the tendrils or tails of the gaunt units to keep myself under my -1 to hit aura along with being very particular with which models i remove when being shot at, I usually end the game with a handful of gaunts left from most units and still one full squad, this really just piles on how hard it already is to get points off this sort of nid army.
In the next post I'll do a bit of a breakdown of my 5 games and how i felt going into them, in short the nids went 5-0 scoring 100/100 battle so another solid showing, but the lists i played against were;
Rd1: custode alarus terminator star + gulliman
Rd2: Thousand son smite battery + 70 tzangors
Rd3: guard catachan horde + shadowsword and the Saint
Rd4: Plaguebearer horde + bloodletter bomb + plague drones
Rd5: custode bikers + a catachan carpet
Next tournament on the calendar is Hero-con in two weeks time, Something very different might come out for this one so stay tuned!
When prepping for this one the missions are very similar to something you would find in an ETC formatted event, this means there is a huge focus on end game scoring and conserving kill points. When you see a mission format like this it just screams board control and attrition, this is definitely something taken into account when I list build.
A quick breakdown of what I ran at this event was;
old one eye
broodlord
broodlord
neurothrope
150x termgants with spike rifles
15 stealers
4 venomthropes
6 biovores
- primus
20 neophytes
and a handful of points up my sleeve to use spore field every game.
Now this list on paper doesn't look like it packs much of a punch as I decided to sub out a lot of my shooting options to buffer my usual gaunt carpet as well as a few hidden combat characters to fight my way out of any units that might threaten the gaunts at close range. The idea behind this list was 100% to engage in an attrition war with every one of my opponents and back myself to come out on top when we start trading punches over 5 turns which inevitably leaves me on top to hold the end game objectives, along with giving me serious board control to rack up maelstrom points and keep a hold on any sort of early lead I can get.
When it comes to conserving kill points I reinforce the points I covered on the Normal Blokes Podcast, for those of you that didn't have the opportunity to listen to that, using the tendrils or tails of the gaunt units to keep myself under my -1 to hit aura along with being very particular with which models i remove when being shot at, I usually end the game with a handful of gaunts left from most units and still one full squad, this really just piles on how hard it already is to get points off this sort of nid army.
In the next post I'll do a bit of a breakdown of my 5 games and how i felt going into them, in short the nids went 5-0 scoring 100/100 battle so another solid showing, but the lists i played against were;
Rd1: custode alarus terminator star + gulliman
Rd2: Thousand son smite battery + 70 tzangors
Rd3: guard catachan horde + shadowsword and the Saint
Rd4: Plaguebearer horde + bloodletter bomb + plague drones
Rd5: custode bikers + a catachan carpet
Next tournament on the calendar is Hero-con in two weeks time, Something very different might come out for this one so stay tuned!
Thursday, November 15, 2018
The Awakening
Welcome to The Hive Mind,
My name is Erik Lathouras and in this weekly blog i will be recording my tournament travels, successes and failures. As part of that I will explain the thought process behind some of the lists i run, how i assess the meta and just what really goes into the behind the scenes prep for a team tournament.
But before we go into all that, a bit about myself;
I started playing this game competitively around 7 years ago now, it has definitely been a long journey to get to the level I currently play at and the support throughout this journey has not gone un-noticed.It took me 3 years of playing competitive events to earn my first podium spot, that sort of achievement most definitely leaves you wanting more, striving to better your ability on the tabletop. Since then I have been a part of the Queensland ATC team for 3 years, the only team to ever win three on the trot, and to have been captain for two of these years.
I'm sure we could all agree the best part of this hobby is the mates we meet along the way and the drunken memories we forge, nothing is better then having the lads around, having a few games of hammers watching the footy and drinking some beer.
With Lords of War only a week away watch this space to see the thought that went in to prepping for this one!
For those of you who haven't heard of Lords of War check out QLD40kTournaments on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/groups/145025342881338/
My name is Erik Lathouras and in this weekly blog i will be recording my tournament travels, successes and failures. As part of that I will explain the thought process behind some of the lists i run, how i assess the meta and just what really goes into the behind the scenes prep for a team tournament.
But before we go into all that, a bit about myself;
I started playing this game competitively around 7 years ago now, it has definitely been a long journey to get to the level I currently play at and the support throughout this journey has not gone un-noticed.It took me 3 years of playing competitive events to earn my first podium spot, that sort of achievement most definitely leaves you wanting more, striving to better your ability on the tabletop. Since then I have been a part of the Queensland ATC team for 3 years, the only team to ever win three on the trot, and to have been captain for two of these years.
I'm sure we could all agree the best part of this hobby is the mates we meet along the way and the drunken memories we forge, nothing is better then having the lads around, having a few games of hammers watching the footy and drinking some beer.
With Lords of War only a week away watch this space to see the thought that went in to prepping for this one!
For those of you who haven't heard of Lords of War check out QLD40kTournaments on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/groups/145025342881338/
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