New Year, New Steamrollers, Part 1

So 2013 was a complete bust when it came to Warmachine and Hordes. Starting with a last minute Templecon showing where I played in the first three rounds of the team tournament and then didn't play another game the rest of the weekend, the year in competitive play was fairly disappointing. With a new job with 16 hour work days, random weekend sales calls and major family health issues, play went on the back burner, and my competitive play slipped significantly.

While I made it to Colonial GT, NOVA Open and WarStore Weekend, my play was often uneven and rife with experiments across the factions. Colonial GT went rather well, with a solid showing through the weekend and decent Masters play. By the end of the year however, talent and luck couldn't carry me in spite of the massive lack of practice over the summer. NOVA Open was a massive bust, fielding a variety of Circle casters for a disappointing showing that failed to reach Masters. The following month at WarStore Weekend, a meager showing of East Coast players led to some easy qualification for Masters, followed by a solid first round trouncing of eKaya at the hands of eHaley.

Finally, after a fateful trip to Las Vegas, I ditched the sale job and moved to a more interesting and timely position. With the turning of the new year, I resolved to practice like I did in 2012. The first weekend of the year provided a perfect opportunity to start, with back to back tournaments in NJ, one of the strongest metas in the U.S..

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Privateer Press at TempleCon 2013

The presentation began 10 minutes late. This was better than the 30 minute delay from 2011. They begin with a marketing video for a "MonPoc meets Space Hulk" sequel to their Level 7 board game. The game is completely stand alone from the original Level 7's prison break game play. Next video was a fluff piece for organized play.

No big news, except the inevitable arrival of a global championship called Iron Gauntlet. Iron Gauntlet will happen at Lock and Load 2014, with the first qualifier at Lock and Load 2013. The championship's chief gimmick is mixed faction Divide and Conquer for qualifiers and the Championship itself- bring a Khador list and Trollblood list for same event, etc.. They will have interntional qualifiers in the UK and Britain, and multiple other qualifiers in North America. Following this, my eyes glazed over as they shifted into another marketing video this time for a deck builder.

Blah blah blah deck building in Iron Kingdoms. Copy Dominion, rewrite fluff, drop support like Infernal Contraption et al.. Rather than go with the 15mm grand strategy miniatures route of Games Workshop's old Epic line, Privateer Press is trying to use a deck builder to deliver the feel as a marshal of an army. I suspect this finally means Privateer Press has realized that very few people desire to play 100 point or greater games in their tactical format. It only took them 10 years of failed marketing, but hey, at least they listened to the customers with the next bit...

Finally the real meat of the presentation: Convergence of Cyriss. A new WM faction entirely of clockwork cyborgs. Super jack marshals (drive to assign say, shield guard or arc node powers), passive stat sharing for warcasters and their jacks (think Rapport for all your jacks). Sculpts are Art Deco meets Mortenebra. It should compliment the Art Noveau of Retribution well.

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TempleCon 2013 - Beginning

10 minutes until the Privateer Press keynote begins, and this is the measure of general chaos in the hall outside of the Grand Ballroom. The TempleCon organizers were better this morning than the mess of 2011. There is still a lot of organizing left to be done.

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50 Pt. Tieranny Tournament @ Games N' Stuff

On Sunday I played in the Games N' Stuff 50 Pt. Tieranny tournament. After spending a few hours in the days leading up to the event waffling on lists, I decided that my current faction (Circle Orboros) simply lacked quality tiers that also differentiated themselves from each other. Too many of them relied on a two full units of Druids and a few heavy warbeasts, with the usual assortment of support (e.g. Shifting Stones, Wilder, etc.).

With this lack of diversity, and the realization I might play Circle for the next month for the Journeyman League, I decided to break out one of the other factions for play. Since the driving reason for choosing a different faction was the lack of differentiated tiers to choose from, I decided to pull out my Legion from cold storage. Legion has a number of competitive tier lists with different flavors of play.

After reviewing the tier options, I decided I'd run eLylyth's "Ravens of War" to give me an assassination list not based on spell casting -- a ton of Circle lists rely on spell assassinations to win and the rule today was "not like Circle". For the second list, I wanted to bring a beast driven melee list that could handle a Colossal or two, so I chose pThagrosh. I've been curious to try this list for a while now, and this seemed liked an excellent opportunity to do so. The lists and battle reports are after the break.

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NoVA Open 2012, Part 3 of 3

In this final installment of my NoVA Open 2012 experience, I'm delivering a two-fer on tournaments. The first tournament covered is the Saturday night Team Tournament. The second is the very short report of my disappointing Masters run. Astute readers might note that there is no mention of NoVA Open's Saturday morning Steamroller tournament. Having already qualified in Hardcore (see Part 1), I was now playing for fun until Masters. Therefore I decided to take my wife down to Mt. Vernon for lunch and enjoy wandering around until the start of the Team Tournament. More about the tournaments after the break.

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NoVA Open 2012, Part 2 of 3

This is the second part of my NoVA Open 2012 after action reports. After Hardcore (see Part 1), I had about an hour break to grab dinner and prepare for the Tieranny tournament on Friday. As my wife can attest, I often refuse to settle on lists (or factions) for a tournament until I'm signing up, and even then I will often make small changes to the list composition based on some latest fickle idea. The Tieranny tournament was no different.

While I make my list selection sound fairly rational here, it was by no means as clearly thought out at the time. I didn't finally decide on a caster until a few minutes before tournament start, and ended up handing in my registration sheet as the first wave of player assignments was being called. The lists and battle reports are after the break.

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NoVA Open 2012, Part 1 of 3

This is a write up of my NoVA Open 2012 results. I had a lot of fun this year, playing Trollbloods for the entire weekend. I decided to write up battle reports of the tournaments I participated in, and break up the reports into three parts, one for each tournament. The report for my first tournament of the weekend, Hardcore, is after the break.

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Start of the Games N' Stuff Journeyman League

Wednesday night I signed up for the Journeyman League at GNS. As my wife can atest, I spent the better part of the last week waffling between which of the 11 Iron Kingdoms factions to play. I finally decided on Skorne because I have few models painted for them, unlike my Legion or Trollbloods, and because I've seen relatively few people playing them in the local meta, unlike Cygnar, Circle or Menoth.For my first three weeks, I'll be using Xerxis as my warlock, and my basic battlegroup will be the Archidon and Titan Sentry.

When I got to GNS, there were two new faces I didn't recognize battling out league games in Skorne vs. Cryx. The Skorne player, John Patrick, was running Morghoul with a Bronzeback and Gladiator titans. The Cryx player, Chandler, was running the standard Cryx battlebox with Deneghra, two Deathrippers, a Defiler, and a Slayer. Both John and Chandler were very new to Mk2, so I spent a good portion of the night answering random rules questions for them both, during our games together as well as during their other games. However, they both acquitted themselves well and are well on their way to becoming solid veteran players.

I've provided a summary of the games after the break.

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