Saturday, December 20, 2008

2005 Sydney GT - Emperor's Children

Greg Rae and I travelled over to Sydney for the GT, staying at the Travelodge. Dave Millar crashed on the floor of our room and kept all awake with his snoring.

On the Friday afternoon I got to play Troy Forster (the Warmaster from this year’s Liber) in a game for posting on his website diary. After a most enjoyable couple of hours, we had a hard-fought draw. 40k was the winner!

Going into the weekend, I rejigged my Emperor’s Children army list. For a couple of years I kept largely the same list built around Termies and Noise Marines with daemon support. At this year’s NZGT I painted some steeds and with the drop back to 1500 points I had to drop the termies to keep them.

So my list was:

Lord in TA with Dark Blade, Sonic Blaster, Combat Drugs and Strength

2x 6 Man Noise Marines – 5x Sonic, 1x Blastmaster, AC with Power Weapon, strength and Infiltrate

2x 6 Man Noise Havocs – 4x Blastmaster, 2x Sonic, Tankhunter

2x 6 Daemonettes

1x 12 Daemonettes

1x 6 Daemonettes on Steeds

My targets were a podium finish and to win the Best General (I prefer to call it Gameplay) award for highest battle points over the sixth round.

My games were as follows:

v Stuart Johnson (Imperial Guard) – 20-6 win
v Alex Ozanne (Dark Eldar) – 20-6 win
v Julian Millar (Mechanised Tau) – 16-6 win
v Tim Glick (Black Legion) – 13-11 draw
v David Hill (Iron Warriors) – 14-13 draw
v Stefan Barton-Ross (All Deep Striking/Drop Podding Marines) – 18-7 Win

The two draws were very close to wins, in both cases my VP margin was 200+, however GW were using 250 VPs as the hurdle (rather than the rulebook 150 VPs).

This gave me 101 battle points which was 7 or 8 ahead of the next best.

On show were some very nice armies. I particularly liked Scott Grey’s Nids, one of the ork armies (sorry name escapes me but I did give it one of my votes) and my favourite John Travers 13th Company. After voting I had a close look at a Fallen army (Bails?) and realised that it was right up there with John’s.

Yet to see the final results but it my soft scores obviously were enough to preserve a gap as I was called out for First Overall.

Thanks to all my opponents over the weekend plus all the oither competitors. Thanks also to the Daves who ran a very enjoyable event.

And now for my little gloat :cool: . Last year before the Australian GT, Alex Ozane posted the question on WargamerAU “Are the Emperor’s Children Overpowered?”.

The Sydney result gave “Challis Drant” his 5th Grand Tournament win (plus a 2nd at this year’s Brisbane GT). Over those events he picked up three Best Gameplay, three Best Army, two Best Painted and two Players Choice. On top of that he won the other three New Zealand tournaments he played in plus the Conflict doubles.

In six GTs (33 games) he lost four times – Ben Ricketts’ IG (2003 NZGT), Adrian Tchen’s Tau (2004 Australian GT), David Potts’ [Delrogue] LatD (2005 Brisbane GT) and Chris Parkin’s [Systematic] Iron Warriors (2005 Brisbane GT). In the twenty other tournament games in NZ he lost won other – to Jason Holland’s [Kruger] Iron Warriors. The only time in Australasian competition that Drant’s Warband didn’t finish First Overall was when they finished 2nd behind Jason Isaac’s [Wolverine_nz] Nids at this year’s Brisbane GT.

On that basis I guess you’ve got to say that they must be overpowered.

Anyway Drant’s warband is going into a well deserved retirement (on the Pleasure Planet that is the shelf in my basement). As Drant himself would say “Goodbye and thanks for the Flesh”

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