Try not to get any on you

Here's my first of four completed slag trolls. Slags are light warbeasts with a ROF 2 gun that gives corrosion and gets an extra die of damage against anything that has the construct stat. These guys kill 'jacks dead. The amount of damage they can throw out is just silly as witnessed in the game in my earlier post. They're a must have in Calandra's EE list and really, I'd try to fit one or two into any list I could. It's low RAT can hold it back with those shots, but we have enough stuff in our faction to help that out.

I really liked painting this guy, which is good, since now I need to paint four more of them.

Gotta have some one to lead this crazy attack

Finished up my first caster. Madrak Ironhide. He's the battlebox caster for trolls and, well, that's about all I have for this guy. His stats make him a melee beast, but currently I have no idea how to run him outside the battlebox which is not very good competitively. So I painted him just for shits and grins basically. He'll probably never see much on the field since I'll be using Doomshaper for the Journeyman leagues and Calandra/Gunnbjorn or Doomshaper2/Gunnbjorn since they took Calandra off ADR. Anyway here are the pics. Pretty happy with the way he turned out.

Trolls games 1 and 2

Ok. Got my trolls started and working on getting the bastards painted. Time to get some practice in with them.

First game was a battle box matchup against Retribution. I had:

Madrak
Axer
Impaler
Impaler

He had:
Ravyn
Daemon
Manticore

Seeing as how we weren't playing a scenario and he out gunned me, I lost this one pretty straight out. I did learn a lot about the fury mechanic and using it was a lot easier than I had originally thought. This brings me to one of the problems I have with the game. Some of the battle boxes for the Journeyman leagues are highly unbalanced. The Khador box for instance, is very strong. With Sorscha's feat freezing what little army you have to begin with, it's all downhill from there. Balance that against Madrak's feat, which basically does nothing in those point levels of games. There are alternate lists for the league and I'll be looking into the Doomshaper list as I don't think Madrak can compete at that point level.

Game two was against a Mercs list.

I brought:
Calandra
Runebearer
Slag troll x4
Storm Troll x3
Pyre Troll x3
Winter Troll
Krielstone bearer and Stone scribes
Stone scribe elder

I was up against:
Ashlynn D'Elyse
Anastasia di Bray
Eiryss, Angel of Retribution
Gorman di Wulfe
Doc Killingsworth
Reinholdt, Gobber Speculator
Rhupert Carvolo
Savio Montero Acosta
Ogrun Bokur
Lady Aiyana and Master Holt
Greygore Boomhowler & Co.
Horgenhold Forge Guard
Mule
Rocinante

So basically a shit ton of solos and a couple of units.

Roll for deployment and I chose to go first. I put out my KSB unit, Calandra and rune bearer and that's it. Her tier list allows for advance deploy of all 11 of my beasts which really helped me to line up my beasts better on his line.

Game start and.........I have no clue what the hell I'm doing. I know Boomhowlers are assholes, Eiryss is a bitch and Gorman is a dick. That's about all I knew about his list. I walked up first turn and made my first two mistakes, which was I should have ran everyone forward and I didn't position my runebearer correctly. He has to activate before Calandra if I want anything out of him and I had him positioned behind her instead of in front. So if I wanted his ability, I couldn't move.

This was a very long match and I don't have all the details in my head so I'll skip most of the boring stuff and hit the highlights. My slag troll took out half of the Mules systems with just his shooting, yeah, they rock. My storm trolls arced lightning into his caster taking her to half health, my winter troll took out the Ogrun Bokur and put a hurt on his objective and my pyre trolls ended up taking out all his Forge guard. In the end he had The nearly dead Mule, Rocinante (hurt but still functioning) his caster and like two of his solos left. I had all 3 Pyres (very nearly dead), all 3 storms (relatively unhurt) a fresh Slag, my rune bearer and Calandra but I lost on control points.  My conclusion in all of this? EE is really, really powerful. Playing 11 points up on your opponent is quite an advantage, which sounds like a duh statement until you see just what a massive advantage it is. This list isn't unbeatable by any stretch of the imagination, but it did let someone who's brand new to the game nearly pull out a win even after massive mistakes. That's crazy. I'll be using this in tourneys and saving my fun games for other lists as this was not fun to play against for him.

And My Axe!

Finished up work on my Troll Axer. Looking at his stats he's a pretty decent light warbeast. I'm not sure if he'll fit into any of my lists outside of the battlebox for the journeyman league. That made him a pretty good test bed for how I want my armored guys to look. I'm still not happy with the way the leather turned out and I think I may have over done the rust effect on the armor. All in all though he looks pretty good. I got to shade and work out some more highlights on the skin and I really like where this army is headed. My lord the detail though. Coming from Convergence to these guys is night and day. I can hammer out a heavy Convergence Vector in a couple of hours. This guy took the better part of 6 hours. That's a ton of time for me. Given that I'm going to be doing even larger models and units as well, this is going to be a huge time investment.

Phase 2

Finally ready to begin my intro to Hordes and the winning army is:

I ended up picking them because of a couple of their models. That and I had a really cool paint scheme in my head for them. I already have a slag troll painted and I'm working on getting the battle box painted up. 

I enjoyed painting him up, and yes, I realize he looks kinda like an eggplant. Don't care. Got to try out the Ryza Rust effect from GW and it looks awesome. I still have no clue on what to base them with though. I'm thinking snow, but those are kinda messy and a pain. 

Axer WiP. Definitely not use to this level of detail after painting up Convergence. Gonna take a while to get them done, but they're gonna look really nice.  

Hoping to learn a lot with them as they seem to be fairly competitive with a couple of lists

Can't Touch This

Stop. Hammer Time!

Ok, now that's stuck in your head, here's my Axis: the Harmonic Enforcer for my Convergence. Going to be honest, I picked him up mainly to complete my collection of the faction casters. I don't really have any idea how to use him in game, though he seems to be gaining in popularity with all the recursion he can do. His tier list allows you to bring 4 Enigma foundries instead of the usual two and they are one point less. You also can only use small base infantry in tier, so that means he can bring back 12 bodies a turn. I'm going to be looking into his lists in the future, but right now I'm focusing on Lucant. I just won another game with him last Wednesday and he seems to be a really solid caster.

Very happy with the way he turned out. One of my favorite models in the faction so far and he was a blast to paint.

I'm now out of models (and money) so until that changes I'll just be updating on how the new league is going at the Gopher. 

Flat Con wrap up

Finished up my first Warmahordes tourney and feel pretty good about it. It showed me some tricks that I need to work on and showed me some of where the strengths of this army lie. It also showed me that there are just some lists out there that are bitches to beat and I'm gonna have to figure out how to get around them since I'll probably see them again. I ended up going 1-2 but could have gone 2-1 if it hadn't been for a couple of mistakes by me and some cheating by my opponent.

Group shot before the battle.

Game one:

Doom Reavers everywhere!!

I had no idea what to do against this. My Lucant list didn't have the bodies to hold him off and my Syntherion list didn't really have the firepower to deal with all those spread out models. I dropped Synth anyway and ended up losing on scenario. I would have lost by assassination as well, but he chose to win on scenario. This is one list I'm going to have to figure out a drop against as I'm sure I'll see it again. Maybe an Aurora list can do it.

Game two:

You can't shoot Cygnar, we shoot you!

My missed drop of the evening, but also my only win. I saw he was playing infantry heavy Cygnar and chose Synth due to the massive amounts of removal I can do. Wrong. My Lucant list would have been much better suited to this game. He was playing Stryker2 and just about everything I could shoot at him was negated or his armor was so high that I couldn't do anything. So, how did I win this one? Well, my opponent was an honest and straight up guy. He placed a template a good 6 inches further out than it should have been, completely screwing over my movement and changing the game significantly. The next turn he noticed what he did and what that caused and gave me the game by concession. Didn't want to win that way, but I'll take it. Also, thanks for being a up and up player.

Game three:

If I bring a colossal I win right?

Closest game of the night. If we hadn't decided to extend the round times to 90 minutes from 70 I would have timed him out. He brought a very nicely painted Mercs list that featured a Galleon as the centerpiece. I decided to drop my Lucant list as there were three flags to grab and my Synth list just couldn't do that. The game was pretty fun. I blew putting positive charge on my Inverter and that kept me from removing that one last Nyss hunter that was contesting the objective. In the end he killed my caster. There was a couple of moments of rampant cheating going on here though. I didn't have enough to call him on it, but he didn't take away his focus when he trampled with the Galleon and that cost me my TEP. Then later I swear he used too much focus to boost when he shouldn't have been able to. He was determined he was going to beat my list no matter what because he didn't like the way I was playing. Instead of asking what a unit did, or asking to see my cards, he just expected me to fully lay out what my army did. I have no problem asking what someones unit does how what effects it has, and if I don't know, I'll ask before I do anything to it. I also have no problem when people ask me those same questions, I'll gladly tell you. But don't get mad at me when you try to knock down a jack that is immune, but not ask before hand. That's not my job at the table. I'm not going to with hold info, but if you don't ask, I'm not telling.

So, there ya have it. Tourney one in the books. Overall it was a positive. I did walk away with the best in faction award for Convergence, so the night wasn't a total loss. I gotta learn to trust Lucant more since seeing wave after wave of models break over my guys was oddly satisfying. I'll for sure be looking at different angles in the game now too.