Death Guard at the Grim Dice Tournament

Hello!

Been a little while since I've updated here, and since last time I wrote about my Death Guard toughing it out in tenth edition, I thought I'd continue with a brief overview of the Grim Dice Tournament, and maybe some bonus Death Guard content at the end!

The event itself was a pretty standard 2k one-dayer with about 12 players. I took a list featuring Mortarion running up the middle and a series of small units to try and play the missions, including three Blight-haulers, three units of mostly melee Plague Marines, two lots of Blightlords, a single Plagueburst Crawler (if I had more I would definitely have taken more), Rhino, Bloat Drone, Tallyman and a load of cultitst and poxwalker chaff. At time of writing the balance update has just come out so this list now would have an extra 250 odd points and a powerful new army rule, so I'm well aware I was playing as the underdogs!

First game was against Tim with Chaos Daemons. It was a high scoring win for the Death Guard, 93-89, only a few points in it. The army did what it was supposed to do, spreading out and hoovering up points, while the Daemons slowly murdered everything, but couldn't quite catch up.

Second game was against Robin and his Orks, started fairly even but Mortarion got beaten up badly by Mozrog Skragbad (which I wasn't too sad about too be honest, that guy should be pretty beefy!) and the game went drastically downhill from there. I think the final result was 93-53 to the Orks. My opponent here was a younger member of the community, and I think it's worth saying in case he reads this, I was impressed with both his tactical ability and his Orky spirit!

Last game was against CJ and his Necrons. This one went downhill pretty quickly, Mortation got stuck on the terrain then died fast, while the rest of my army was unable to compete with the 'crons either in their damage or their defences. This game above the others really highlighted the flaws in the index for me - they just can't deal with heavy firepower or really tough targets. Or at least they couldn't - the balance pass might have given them a big boost there. I don't remember the exact score but it was 90-40 ish.

In the end I managed to get roughly in the middle with the highest score of the one-winners. A little disappointing to have the games get progressively more unbalanced as the day went on, but I was ultimately happy to have won a game here. Looking back now on the day of the balance update it does throw it somewhat starkly into focus, the list I would have taken now would have been significantly larger and dramatically more dangerous. Regardless of results, I still had fun, it's always nice to have a day throwing dice!

And as for that Death Guard bonus content - I had a bit of a desire to have a big stupid tank to go with the collection, so I dipped into the Heresy range for this one:

The Typhon Heavy Siege Tank! Kind of like a big Plagueburst Crawler right? In any case, it was a lot of fun to paint up a big dirty rust bucket of a warmachine, using all the weathering techniques I've picked up over the years.

The Lord of Virulence approves! Now I need to play a game with legends allowed. Luckily most of my opponents seem to be pretty cool. Legends let legends use legends! Anyway, thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed, and stay safe out there!

Death Guard in 10th...

Hello!

So Death Guard. They aren't in a great place in 40k right now, and a lot of people have been fairly salty about this. Personally I'm not really one of them, to me Death Guard are not good, but they still kind of do what I feel they should and with GW re-writing rules for the entire game there was always going to be a few winners and losers on the balance front. With that in mind I have decided to plow on regardless with running Death Guard for the first chunk of 10th ed, until the Tyranid codex comes out at least. 

With that in mind I put a minimum investment in to playing the army - I bought the data cards and a few cheap deals off eBay, and got to playing some games and figuring out how to play the new edition. I managed to sign up for a Grim Dice tournament at the end of the month so I think my goal is probably to take Death Guard and win one game, but we shall see how that turns out. In any case, the new additions included a trio of Mephitic Blight-haulers, the most adorable of daemon engines, which I have painted up with lots of help from the sponge. 

Anyway, first game with Mortarion and friends was against Tom's Adepta Sororitas. I took the Primarch of course, with assorted vehicles (all I had at the time) and big blocks of Blightlord Terminators, melee Plague Marines and shooty Plague Marines, all with full character support. Basic plan was to smash into the middle with Morty and the Terminator block, while the vehicles got positioning and objectives.

It wasn't a totally embarrassing defeat, but the Death Guard were fairly comprehensively beaten. I learned that the big blocks just aren't that tough, even with character support, and I also severely lacked in cheap chaff units to score secondary objectives. Finally I learnt the power of overwatch when Vahl's unit took a huge chunk out of Mortarion with their multimeltas after he landed within nine inches of them.

Second game was shortly after with the same list and a rematch from one of my latter games of 9th against Sharpy and his Aeldari. This game featured Servo-skull objectives so it was a fun one to learn how to try and score the secondaries better.

This one ended pretty close, but another loss. The Eldar snuck ahead at the end thanks to swooping hawks pushing the objective around unopposed. Mortarion once again killed the Avatar (though it did take him a long time to do it) but the DG were once again not quite tough enough to get away with big units walking around in the open.

I decided to split my 10 man units up into smaller ones in order to hide them better and focus on the objectives. Without the big blocks I also dropped a bunch of characters in order to sneak in some Poxwalkers to do the annoying chaff thing.

Third game with the DG was against Mixtapir and a load of mostly Primaris Space Wolves. Like me he had decided MSU was the way to go so there were a lot of small units running around.

This time the list actually worked really well. While I know Space Wolves are also struggling a bit in 10th it felt like I was very rarely blocked out of scoring by a bad card draw or units being tied up with killing stuff. Mortarion flying up the middle as a big distraction kind of worked - the enemy decided to ignore him and focus on the light vehicles to get some easier kills and as such he got stuck into their front lines, and then back lines! For the first time in 10th (and possibly 9th as well?) I scored the full 100 points (I think the SW got 60 in the end, so not a completely one sided game).

The fourth and most recent game was once again against Tom's Sisters, now with Knight Armiger allies. We both had a lot of units to play with and it was the servo skull mission again so it would be all about pushing forward.

This game was really, really close, ending with 10 points in it. My forces did a great job of occupying the middle board and Mortarion took a hilarious amount of firepower from the Imperial forces. MSU worked great with lots of trading on the flanks, but I was once again undone by Vahl and her warsuits, eventually clearing their flank and escorting a servo skull into my deployment zone in turn 5. The various flaws of the Death Guard were pretty apparent in the end game here - struggling to remove enemy armour and their infantry lacking the famed survivability you might think they should have. None the less a well contested game and an encouraging sign for the future!

So, four games in an 1-3 with the DG, but lots of lessons learned and some close games so I'm feeling confident that I can get something out of them, so I think I will persevere to the tournament. On a practical point I have the cards for them and I've now learnt most of their rules, plus it has been a lot of fun painting up more dirty plague dudes!

Anway, thanks for reading, and hope you enjoyed! Stay safe out there!

The Vardenghast Swarm - Tyranid Combat Patrol

Hello!

The first batch of the Leviathan box I got on the painting table was this lot, the Vardenghast Swarm, aka the Tyranid Combat Patrol army. 

I usually paint my Nids in fairly big batches so I thought this would be a reasonable ask, though in hindsight it was a bit of a slog doing all this carapace at once! As you can probably see I go for the 'paint lots of little semi random lines' approach to my bug backs, and this lot have got quite a bit more armour plates than most of the previous Nid models. In fact all round the new stuff here represents a slight departure from the smoother Tyranid aesthetic that was laid down with the 3rd edition revamp, and takes a lot of design cues from the older 2nd edition models, in my opinion at least. Personally I'm ok with this, but it does mean there's a lot more sticky-outy bits to paint! 

Anyway, first up, the new Termagants. I'm hopeful that even with the slightly larger bases they will still look decent alongside their many, many older siblings!

The Barbgaunts are the first of the newer breed here, and there's certainly a lot going on here. Being hybrid organisms I debated painting the guns in a different scheme, but in the end opted to keep them on brand, with a bit of a green glow from the symbiotic brains as a spot colour.

Von Ryan's Leapers - a very cool trio of models, but man that is a lot of plates to highlight! You can see here that I incorporated some rubble into my usual swamp bases for this set, a lot of them are standing on tactical ruins!

The boss of this lot, the winged Prime. Another cool kit but another one that's a fair bit more knobbly than his predecessors. Also pretty hard to get a good angle for him to show off wings, skin, carapace, and face!

Finally from this swarm, the Psychophage. This is the model that most drastically departs from previous Tyranid design conventions (bulging abdomen like a spider, reversed back legs, no hooves), but also I think my favourite model in the whole set. Just awfully glibly and horrible looking, a true alien terror. Also had the most fun of this batch painting this one.

And here they are together - sort of fitting into the light box! And I managed to just about paint them all in time for a game!

This was my third game of 10th ed and my first of the new Combat Patrol, against Orks fighting over their town!

It was a lot of fun, both sides having a nice mix of units and the scenario having a nice mix of skill and luck required to win - making for a close game until the end.

Both sides lost their 'chaff' units quickly, with this one Nob being the last 'regular' Boyz that whittled down the Leapers to a single model on one wound.

The bigger units were a tougher nut to crack however as the Warboss and Deff Dread took several attempts to down the Psychophage, losing the Boss in the process.

This mission had disappearing objectives and it came down to holding the remaining No-man's land one to win. Sadly for me the remaining one was in the Ork half of the board so I could only pile a few Termagants onto it against the surviving Deff Dread and two Deffkoptas. A narrow loss for the Tyranids, but a really fun game all the same. It took us about two hours to play, with a lot of rule checking, so I could easily see getting through a game in 90 mins, and playing something like a 5 game event in a day. I certainly enjoyed myself, and I hope you did too! Thanks for reading and stay safe out there!