Handful of Points Escalation League: Session Six

We’re back (though admittedly later than planned) for the penultimate game in our escalation league. We took a brief hiatus to get some Blood Bowl games in (asrfrsn Skaven), but this then we geared up for both 1750 points and the new General’s Handbook, which brought with it the Andtorian Locus keyword and a heavier emphasis on magic. Knowing this, I decided to go all in, as you shall soon see. Not only that, but we managed to get two games in! On one table we had myself and my Slaves to Darkness vs Arron and his Soulbight Gravelords, which I was looking forward to because we haven’t played each other in a hot minute. The other table hosted Ben and his Hedonites vs Niall (not the editor) and his Nighthaunt. Shoutout to Brighton’s Dice Saloon for making they day possible and with that out of the way, let’s look at the lists for game one.

As you can see, that’s a lot of wizards. The plan was simple: total magical domination. Use the Cabalist dice in conjunction with the primal dice to get off all of my spells whilst denying Arron any of his. I’ve also gone pretty hard on the marks of Nurgle and Slaanesh; the former is tried and tested, and is probably the best one in the book, Slaanesh I hadn’t used before but made sense for my already speedy mounted units to be that much faster. The lord would buff the knights with Hoarfrost and bravely charge after they had mauled whatever they ran into, while the chosen and warriors would move up behind to stand on objectives and keep my claims safe from sprouting undead.

Speaking of undead…

Arron continues to vehemently not use zombies and I am grateful for it. The zombie dragon had me afeared, and it would have to go as soon as possible, and unfortunately for Arron my lack of monsters would neuter the Askurgans from being as effective as they could be. After that the question becomes: does my army have the lethality to beat Arron’s recursion?

Battleplan: The Frigid Zephyr

So about being able to unbind Arron’s spells…

This battleplan has your standard scoring (one, two, more, battle tactic), and the gimmick is that a blizzard is raging and you can’t see things further than 12″ from you at the start of the battle, with the blizzard randomly dissipating at some point from Round 2 onwards. Luckily I brought mostly buffs, so I felt confident about my spells but I didn’t like the idea of not getting to stop Arron’s.

I deployed my Slaanesh units along my left side, with the warriors and Fomoroid in the centre and the Chosen with prince in position to run for the top objective. With my low drops I got the first turn and executed my plan, even getting one whole spell off to score my tactic. The chosen and prince just scraped close enough to clip the objective and claim it, while my warriors firmly sat on the middle one, and the knights had no trouble reaching my far left.

Then I crossed my fingers and got to charging. Fun thing about the chariot: once per game it can run and charge which is exactly what it did, barreling into the blood knights to lift one of them and then hopefully clog them up for a turn. Arron’s turn went as expected, the combined blood knights and Askurgans removed my chariot, while the shear number of skeletons tried to take the centre from me, but were being steadily cut down by warriors and a Fomoroid. Arron scored his tactic, leaving the round one 5-2 to me.

I won the roll off for Round 2 and, after a slight hiccup where my sorceress blew herself up trying to cast blizzard, the slaughter continued. With the chariot dead to the Askurgans in the last fight phase, the lane was freed up for my knights to introduce themselves; on the far side, my chosen moved up to deal with the zombie dragon and Belladamma, backed up by the Daemon Prince. My chosen got their charge off, and proceeded to down the zombie dragon before it could retaliate. I felt a little bad for Arron, because it’s a gorgeous model he’s made, but mostly I was glad to not be dealing with it.

Back on the left, the knights charged after having been bolstered by Hoarfrost to actually give them a good to hit roll. In the centre, the warriors and Fomorian finally downed enough skeletons to retake the objective. The Theridons continued to waddle to somewhere useful to little note.

Arron’s counterattack was valiant, taking down my Daemon Prince, but I had some insane luck with the armour saves and only a single knight was felled. The score now stood at 8-5.

We got past my turn 3 before we called time (we are very slow players). Belladamma was surrounded by chosen, and Arron had failed to bring back the slain unit of skeletons, so we cautiously admitted I had pulled out a win. I’d have loved to have seen where the game could have gone but the clock was ticking and public transport is not merciful.

The other game being played look thusly:

The more observant among you will notice that Ben’s list is illegal, but would have been fine if he had made his Lord of Pain the general, which is what he meant to do. We have forgiven him and moved on.

Battleplan: Every Step is Forward

The gimmick of this battleplan incentivizes charging; models that charge count as one extra, while models that retreat count as zero. Given that both these armies are fast hitters, it’ll be interesting to hear how that went. Since I wasn’t part of this game, take it away Ben and Niall.

Ben: Weirdly, the charging element of this battleplan didn’t come to much, but we did end the game prematurely because we both stumbled over rules. There was also a lot of time pondering depravity dice choices.

I set up carefully, hoping to make a few ranged attacks and maybe a charge or two, just enough to offer all my depravity dice in the first round, without committing too hard.

I didn’t know how tough the bedsheets would be, but I was excited to finally have Sigvald in the list, and expected big things. I set him up on a flank, pointed him at a high value unit of ghosts, made the charge thanks to the start of round movement from the Invaders host, picked him as my euphoric killer. Expectations were high, a devastating swing, depravity galore… he did 4 wounds.

This was where I learnt that Slaanesh units have a lot of rend, which the ghosts completely ignore. I’d also unwittingly charged Sigvald into an aura, which reduced his 2 damage attacks down to just 1 damage. It was a pretty disappointing outing for Slaanesh’s favourite champion.

He served a purpose though, keeping some ghost tied up and off the objectives I was holding. By the time we finished I was slowly losing the combat game, but was ahead in points. My seeker cavalry was lined up along the back of the board though, preventing ghosts floating in and waiting for a late objective retake thanks to their whips (that stop small models holding objective if they charge them). I’m not sure it would have been enough but it would have been interesting to see it play out. I’m excited for next time host meets ghost.

Niall: This was my first venture against Slanesh and boy was it interesting. Prior to our engagement I was aware of Slanesh and their temptation dice and was adamant that I would hold true and reject temptation. It is worth knowing that I am blessed with Will Wheaton dice rolling capabilities, so there was plenty of opportunities to offer me a 6.

Ben made lots of tempting offers throughout and really had me questioning myself and put me in a dilemma more than once. I felt we were well matched for the few rounds we completed but alas a lack of practice and familiarity with rules and my army left me missing key opportunities to push back. All in all a fun game and has left me eager to have a rematch!

Sounds about how I expected. That’s it for now, but join us next month for the 2000 point finale to our Escalation League!

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