This was my second Hardcore ever. The first one was in the 2011 Templecon, where I also ran Trollbloods. I decided to revisit that disappointing first run by using Borka, my caster of choice for Templecon, in NoVA Open's Hardcore match up. At Templecon my Hardcore games had been grinding slug fests that forced my opponents to waste lots of time attacking warriors for little gain in piece trade while Borka and his battle group maneuvered for position to assassinate. That list relied on Nyss Hunters with Iron Flesh, two Earthborns, Fennblades and Whelps for the core of the list. Unfortunately, the strategy fell short due to the fragility of the Fennblades and poor placement of one Whelp, when Chuck Elsworth's epic Doomshaper list was able to make a hole for a feated Earthborn, who then to goad through a Fennblade and Whelp to reach Borka for an assassination win.
This time, I had a new tier list supporting Borka, the Family Reunion, which gives a significant discount for Trollkin Champions and unlimited field allowance of the same. The dozen Champions worked far better than the Fennblades and Nyss Hunters had at Templecon. The complete list is below:
Borka Kegslayer
Pyre Troll
Dire Troll Mauler
War Wagon
Champion Hero (2)
Champions (3)
Champions (3)
Champions (3) with Skaldi
Stone Scribe Chronicler
Krielstone Bearer (6) with Elder
**In the original post, I listed a Bouncer, but after an eagle eyed reader noted that was illegal in Family Reunion, I reviewed the photos and notes and realized I'd made a mistake in the write up. That is now corrected.
In my first game of the morning, I drew a Skorne player, Gary, who was attending a major tournament for the first time since he had begun playing in January. He was running the Xerxis tier list, which I considered fortunate, in that I had run a similar list for two months in the Games N' Stuff Spring Journeyman League. Gary's list was fielding four Titans and a Cyclops Sentry, and began the game with two minimum units of Karax deployed in his objective, but unable to move the first turn.This game would turn out to be a harbinger of the rest of this tournament. After annihilating Gary's Karax rather quickly, my Champions holed up around Gary's objective and behind the fence separating the two objectives. Gary maxed out three of his five beasts on Xerxis' feat turn attempting to clear Champions before finally opening a potential assassination lane for them. Unfortunately for him, grinding through that many Champions had run down his clock immensely, as well as leaving three of his Titans near death. As the clock wound down, Borka threw Iron Flesh on himself and camped his remaining Fury with the Dire Troll Mauler and Pyre Troll resting near by, barely damaged. The following turn, Xerxis lost control of his Bronzeback, which frenzied on a Champion. Frustrated by this, Gary was down one of the three beasts near Borka, and a nearby Gladiator was unable to free itself to whack Borka. With only one damaged Sentry able to attack, Gary maxed out its fury, and missed several attacks. The hit or two that landed was transfered to Borka's battle group as Gary finally timed out.
It was at this point I learned of a decisive advantage in what would become my main tactic for this tournament - by deathclocking out, my opponent counted as assassinated. I thus received full points for his battlegroup. Having eliminated everything that wasn't a battlegroup member, save two Skorne Paingivers, and with the bonus points in Xerxis' tier, I was now running at roughly 63 VP in a 50 point game.
One of the superstars of this game was one of Dan's two Hunters, which was running under his Journeyman Warcaster. After being boxed in by a 3-block of Champions and his own Stormguard, the Hunter managed to kill all three Champions on Siege's feat turn in melee. The other one, however was not so fortunate, and its death resulted in Siege staring down a unit of Champions about 8" from him across cover. As the photo shows, Siege camped on the hill to the right of Dan's deployment (left side of the picture). The wreck marker is the downed Hunter, with Skaldi and friends nearby. After spending two turns dispatching every last Storm Guard, Skaldi and his remaining Champion were free to charge under Borka's feat up the hill. The Champion swung first, missing the charge hit, and rolling on a few damage on its second. With Rage on Skaldi enhancing his damage, two Rapid Strikes later Siege was dead and I was advancing to the next round.
Game three I was facing a pKrueger player, Paul who was running a fairly standard Warpwolf battlegroup - one Pureblood, Ghetorix and a Gorax. I entered this game fairly happy after looking at the opposing list, as much of Circle's problem in competitive play comes down to a lack of high quality, high damage attacks. This happens to have bad match ups against plentiful, high health, high ARM models like say, Champions. The only model of significant concern was Ghetorix, who could easily maul full units of Champions if put to the test, and pKrueger himself, who could potentially throw enough lightning at Borka to make Windwall irrelevant, as well as wear down his high health and ARM. As with many of the boards (as in all of them I played this tournament on), I would end up with a wall in between the two objectives, where Champions would hold the line, flanked on one side by their brothers and the other by the War Wagon. This was the first game, however, where the War Wagon wouldn't die. It turns out not killing it would cost Paul this game.
In the decisive turn of the game, shown in the photo, pKrueger's feat was in play, denoted by the white rings. A single champion stands just outside some Smoke Gobbers smoke cloud, denoted by the pink ring, single handedly holding off a Gorax and the remaining Druid of Orboros. The War Wagon is just behind my hand, and the Champion I'm picking up is about to move up to the fenceline, but I decide at the last moment to try and pull Ghetorix across the fence to bait him into an attack so I can finish him with the Dire Troll Mauler. Paul, in the subsequent turn, decided not to accept the bait and instead defended pKrueger, who was hiding just behind Ghetorix.Consequently, once Krueger's feat expired, I moved Borka and the Dire Troll Mauler to my left to attempt to line up a charge around the side of the fence line and threaten Krueger and his objective directly. I moved my Chronicler and Champion Heros strongly up the same flank and finished off the Wold Stalker unit. At this point, it was clear the War Wagon was as safe as I could make it, so it simply aimed and lobbed shots at Paul's support (two units of sentry stones and some farrow bone grinders), while spraying the final Druid to death. However, this would lead to the first close call of the Tournament, as Paul still had about 5 minutes remaining on his clock, and as you can see from the photo, a moderately damaged Pureblood now has a charge lane to Borka. Paul saw this angle too, and turned the Pureblood Ghostly before charging in. However with Iron Flesh up, and sitting at 21 ARM, Borka only took a few points of damage, didn't transfer, and stumbled out of the Pureblood's melee range.
Paul's only hope now lay in figuring out a way to move Ghetorix up the line to attack Borka directly. It turns out that not advancing across the fence had now prevented Ghetorix from charging for extra distance, and left him trying to walk in between the Champion I had decided not to move, and the War Wagon which Paul had previously retreated from while trying to defend pKrueger. It turns out that having some tokens to attempt to place in between the Wagon and Champion was a fantastic move, as Ghetorix was unable to fit between the gap, and without the extra distance or a place to position himself, Paul had no angles to Borka. Paul would continue to ponder this frustration until his clock ran out, giving me victory in the third round.Of all the games of the day, the fourth game was easily my closest call. I was playing against Andrew Watts, a guy I had been introduced to at Dream Wizards by one of our Press Gangers. Andrew was one of my team tournament partners for the following night. We had already practiced some games against each other, so we were prepared for each other's lists. He plays a fast and highly aggressive game, running eVayl's tier 4 theme list. I would end up escaping this one solely by camping Borka on a hill, under a varying combination of Wind Wall, Iron Flesh and Pyre Troll animus. The latter two of those spells were frequently purged by eVayl's purification, which would fortunately cause Andrew to waste precious seconds and fury to accomplish.
At the beginning of this game, Andrew and I both made the mistake early on of being very friendly and jokey about our play. I popped Borka's feat on the first round to send 3 champions up the field after an Angelius. While dealing significant damage, they failed to come close to killing it, and I had ended up popping my feat and wasting a third of my infantry for no gain. Fortunately Andrew was in a similarly silly mood and spent a great deal of time talking with me about how great his previous games had gone and how funny it would be if I had managed to do more with the Champions on the feat turn. The wasted time ended up being his undoing.
The end of the game came as Borka's forces were swiftly dwindling. My Champions had failed to signficantly harm any of the Legionnaires, as I had ignored them for most of the game and chosen to attack and kill a Ravagore, while threatening to come around a wall and go for Typhon and eVayl. Andrew eventually ate through my Champions, leaving Skaldi and a couple friends alive, then my solos, and lastly my battle group and most of my Krielstone unit with his Legionnaires and Angelii. The entire time, the casualties on the field were refilling the Legion sacrificial pot, resulting in a steady stream of Stingers that ate up my dwindling number of attacks. At last, I was faced with a decision to end one of the Angelii with Borka, or attempt to retreat to the extreme edge of my objective zone and hope for the best, open and exposed. I decided that placement on the hill, combined with eliminating one of my major threats was the better move, and charged Borka up to the Angelius, ending the warbeast. Unfortunately the attempt left Borka with no fury for transfers and Wind Wall up.
The photo shows the end state of the game. The second Angelius was freed from combat by the Legionnaires, and eVayl managed to land Icy Grip and an Obliteration on Borka, but Andrew rolled poorly on damage. The Angelius charged, and took Borka down to zero life, but I passed my Tough roll, and Stumbled Drunk away, but not out of reach of the Angelius. At this point, the Angelius only had one fury left, and Andrew rolled to hit. The hit connected, and I took my die in hand, ready to make my last tough check. Andrew couldn't boost the damage though, and between the Krielstone and Unyielding, Borka was at 21 ARM versus the Angelius' POW 14 tail. At dice minus 7 on two dice, Andrew rolled a 7 and proceeded to curse his foul luck. At this point, with no other assassination avenues left, and his flag about to tip, he dropped into his seat and began smoking his electric cigarette, continuing to grumble about Stumbling Drunk, Tough and Deathclocks. I, on the other hand, knew I had dodged a very narrow loss, but proceeded to steel myself for the next, final game that would decide if I'd win my second ever Hardcore attempt.
In game five I came up against Jake from NJ, the only other undefeated player left in the Hardcore. Jake was running my longest standing problem caster, Epic Haley. He had chosen to run a gimmick list however, taking advantage of eHaley's tier to field 2 Storm Striders and a bonded Stormwall with Thorn, a few units of mechanics, the Black 13th, Storm Tower and Storm Caller. I surveyed his list, and realized that only eHaley had magical attacks, and without Aiyanna and Holt, Borka's Windwall was going to be a major defensive edge. After winning the roll off, I deployed second.I made the conscious decision to adopt eHaley's own strategy against Jake - I was going to run Borka away from the opponent to deny assassination attempts. As you can see from the photo, Borka is deployed to the right of the War Wagon at the bottom of the picture, with a forest immediately in front of him to provide a refuge from the fire power facing me on the other side of the field. The game proceed much as the previous four had, with the War Wagon advancing rapidly forward, sniping various infantry and making a nuisance of itself. One flank was anchored by Champions and the other by Borka's battle group. Although the Champions rapidly reached the fence sitting between my objective and Jake's, that is where they would spend the rest of the game until their deaths.
The highlight of this game for me was taking down Stormwall in the fourth turn. I believe Jake decided to threaten Borka in the woods in an attempt to either draw me out or force me to abandon the scenario objective. I answered Stormwall's advance with a Rage'd Dire Troll Mauler who put the colossal down to 4 boxes remaining before running out of fury. One of the remaining Champions then finished the job with a lateral charge.
With Stormwall down, the Dire Troll Mauler was sitting in base to base with a 5" cover marker, and had a Storm Strider within walking distance. This forced Jake to retreat into his deployment zone, and throw several mechanics to the Dire Troll in an attempt to stop it. I made a an attempt at this point to chase eHaley with my battle group, but with a couple of mechanics and a 120mm of rough terrain in the way, it was going to be slow progress.
Realizing that he probably couldn't assassinate Borka (who spent most of the game with Windwall up), Jake decided to throw Thorn into the scenario zone and begin sniping the remnants of the Krielstone Bearer unit to score some control points. Forced to decide between racing against the scenario and overextending Borka for a half effective assassination run on Haley, I retreated into the center of my control point, wrecked Thorn, and threw up Windwall. Jake rode out his remaining minute or two looking for some assassination angle, and decided that he couldn't get eHaley up fast enough to threaten Borka. Thus I ended Hardcore with my fourth Deathclocked assassination.So ends part one of my NoVA Open experience. By the end of Hardcore, I had managed to earn 259 Army Points from four Deathclock wins and one Assassination, earning me not just the Hardcore champion medal, but the Eliminator medal as well. Later in the weekend, I learned that the PGs running the event had overheard Andrew and I joking, and were concerned he would throw the game as my teammate to give me the Mage Hunter award for fastest assassination (which ended up going to someone for an 8 minute plus kill in Round 2 of his game).
I'd like to give a special thanks to my wife, who took most of these photos through the day and of the other tournaments this weekend, as well as for Chris Ordonez, for making funny faces as I showed off my Hardcore medal awards. Finally, I'd like to thank Ryan, a local at Games N' Stuff, who showed me how to effectively Deathclock even experienced players by running away with high DEF warcasters while marginally challenging the scenario. Just goes to show there's always new tricks to learn in Warmachines and Hordes.
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