Mt Gravatt Gameday Tournament Report

After a couple of months of almost exclusively playing 40k, I jumped back into the MESBG saddle for a 600-point Good v Evil tournament last weekend and had an absolute blast!

The tournament itself didn’t have any particular listbuilding restrictions or special rules, it was just a down-the-line, Good v Evil, random scenarios tournament. Being very much out of practice, I decided to go for a pair of armies that were resilient enough to laugh off the inevitable mistakes I made. To that end, I ran my beautiful new Dunharrow that I recently purchased off Pat Mitrega, and the Ugluk’s Scouts I’d speed-painted over the last fortnight. After staying up late the night before the tournament basing some 52 models, I was excited and ready to go!

My two armies locked in mock combat. By the end of the day my back would regret these model counts

Good Army: Dunharrow

Warband 1

King of the Dead

10 Warriors of the Dead with 5 spears, 7 shields, 1 banner

 

Warband 2

9 Warriors of the Dead with 4 spears, 7 shields

Rider of the Dead

 

Warband 3

9 Warriors of the Dead with 4 spears, 7 shields

Rider of the Dead

31 models, 2 fast models, 1 Might

 

Evil Army: Ugluk’s Scouts Legendary Legion

 

Warband 1

Ugluk

8 Marauders with bow

4 Marauders with shield

 

Warband 2

Mauhur

8 Marauders with bow

4 Marauders with shield

 

Warband 3

Grishnakh

12 Orcs with spears, one banner

 

Warband 4

Orc Captain

12 Orcs with spears

 

52 models, 26 fast models, 10 Might, 16 bows

 

Starting with the Evil army, it’s a pretty down-the-line Ugluk’s Scouts Legion that trades off a few upgrades for raw numbers, as well as maximising the bow count to give me an edge in killing scenarios. It’s fast, it hits hard at range and up close, and it’s got the numbers to compensate for my misplays, what’s not to like? The Dunharrow list, on the other hand, is super unconventional, with only a single hero and one (!) point of Might. Instead, it relies on having above-average numbers and army-wide D7/8, alongside Blades of the Dead to chew through the enemy. Not a list with much subtlety, just some really solid numbers and statlines. Against almost all Evil warriors I’m going to be wounding them at least 4 times as easily as they’re wounding me, so they need to be winning about four times as many fights as I am in order to out-attrition my ghosts. My fingers were crossed that it was a simple enough plan that I couldn’t mess it up!

 

Tournament Review

The tournament was held at Warhammer Mt Gravatt, and was generally really well run. The boards were interesting and well-designed, while never being too obtrusive, the entry fee was reasonable and everything ran pretty smoothly throughout. The one difficulty was that the tournament organisers had made the optimistic call to fit in four games in the day, which meant you only had 1.5 hours per 600-point game. That’s probably a little short for most tight games, and meant that almost every game went to time. I gather the next one will be going down to three games in the day, which is probably a lot more achievable, but I can hardly fault them for having tried to give us the maximum number of games possible. Otherwise, everything went pretty smoothly, and it was a great day. Thanks again to everyone involved in running it, including Pat Mitrega for the organising!

 

Game 1 v Dylon’s Angmar in Capture and Control, 4:4

Alas, I forgot to take a picture of of Dylon's army, but imagine Barrow Wights and a Shade like this leading the Orcs

Dylon was running a beautifully painted Angmar list, with a number of AoS models mixed in to give it some real spooky vibes. He had a big Witch King on Fell Beast, plenty of Orcs, two Barrow Wights and a Shade. I wasn’t too scared by the Wights (what are they going to do, Paralyse the King?), but that Shade could really slow my efficiency, and there was basically nothing I could do to stop the WK rampaging.

Because of the board and mission, I was forced to deploy almost everything on the line, ready to try and sweep across the centre and kill his Orcs. That plan went decently, as while the Shade and the difficult terrain slowed me down a lot, I rapidly collapsed his left flank and had begun to wrap around his centre. I also had a pair of ghosts mere centimetres from his back objective, which he had held with a single Orc. The WK had done his thing and cleared my back objective, but a failed Heroic Combat and a couple of Resisted Black Darts meant he wasn’t able to really accomplish much else.

In the end, this game was one where I really felt the time pressure, and would have loved a couple more turns to finish it off. I was one turn away from Breaking Dylon, and would almost certainly have taken his back objective as well. The WK would have probably taken a side objective off me in return, but would have had to let me retake my backfield to do so. Alas, no more time was to be had, so we ended up with a hard-fought draw.

 

Game 2 v Seb’s Easterlings in Assassinate, 10:0

That pike block was pretty brutal, but it did eventually crumble

Seb had a beautiful Easterling army I was really excited to face, with both of the new characters, a Dragon Knight, and a brutal pike block. The mission was a little tricky for me, as my King became both my Assassin and Seb’s target, as well as letting Seb turtle up his pike block between terrain.

All those F4, C4 pikes proved a real pain, especially with Fury from the new War Priest and full rerolls from the two banners. Nonetheless, the Dead got to grinding, and had soon started to surround him on all flanks and whittle away his numbers. My King stayed hidden out the back, preserving his one Might to try and take out the Dragon Knight on a turn that he was vulnerable.

A critical combat happened in the second-last turn, in which a Might-less Rutabi managed to beat the King and two friends in combat before getting a critical wound in on him. I then failed three Fate rolls in a row, needing to spend my only Might point to scrape by uninjured on the third roll. Ouch! On the next turn I lost Priority, and Seb was able to get the Dragon Knight into the King and Strike up with his last point of Might. I counterattacked, swamping him with models, but it was all going to come down to the ~50% chance of him scoring a 6 on one of his duel rolls. The dice came down, the highest was a four, and the King effortlessly dispatched the trapped Knight to give me a massive 7 points. Elsewhere the ghosts had successfully Broken his army, leaving me solidly ahead on the final turn for a win that was a lot closer than the final scoreline reflects.

 

Game 3 v Riley’s Easterlings in Domination, 8:4

Alas, I forgot to take a picture this game, but here's one I took from last time I faced Riley

Ironically, the last time I played Riley it had been his Dunharrow against my Isengard, so he probably knew my list better than I did! Still, I was quietly confident after the Game 2, knowing my undead had what it took to wear down the Easterlings. Riley was running a slightly more elite Easterling army, with the Dragon Knight upgraded to Amdur and a handful of bows and cavalry subbed in for a slightly smaller pike block. Domination was a mission that probably favoured me a bit, as I don’t have any hefty pike blocks I don’t want to spread out, but the narrow gap between two buildings in the centre was going to be a hassle for me to break through.

The game started with an absolute howler of an error for me. Riley placed Rutabi first into that gap, anchoring her flanks with most of the pike block. After last game I was not a Rutabi fan, so I placed the King of the Dead on the opposite side of the battle line. This left a nice easy gap for Amdur, who Riley then placed down and, with a Heroic Move on the first turn, slammed straight into the King. Great. Love that from me.

Amdur proceeded to brutalise but not quite kill the King, spending several Might to reduce him to one wound. Over the next several turns he pursued the King, eventually cornering him and hacking him down to go back up to one Might point. Inspired by Amdur and Rutabi, the rest of the pike block managed to grind through my central ghosts, eventually forcing their way through to be a pain in my backfield.

Thankfully, by this point the various chokepoints Riley had set up to prevent me flanking him had been overwhelmed, and the Army of the Dead were spilling out behind his pike block. It was soon broken up and worn down, while everything in his backfield was put to the sword, including Brórgîr (no more Fury, yay!). Amdur and a lone Easterling went haring off to my back-right objective, while another few Easterlings tried to make a break for my back-left but were caught and massacred. In the end I held off Amdur, but the lone Easterling on the back-right objective managed to score the 6-by-4 he needed to kill my Warrior of the Dead and claim that objective! I held the other four though, with only the centre being contested, for a solid 8:4 win that really just came down to the Dead being so incredibly grindy.

 

Game 4 v Sean’s Dale in To the Death, 0:3

Those Dale are beautiful, but this game was a mess. That woodland piece would rotate if you bumped it even a little bit, and moving models in that melee was hell. 

I was initially matched up against Liam’s Khazad-dûm, and was honestly super keen on the matchup. A scenario that heavily favours shooting, in with I have triple his bows and almost double his movement? On average dice I’d have dropped at least 5-7 of his Dwarves before he hit combat, at which point things are massively in my favour.

Unfortunately, it was as we were deploying that the TO came over and told us that there’d been a mistake in the ordering, and I was actually meant to be playing Sean. Although I was keen for another game with Sean, who I seem to play at every tournament, I was absolutely not keen about the matchup. 15 Dale bows and Girion, backed by 39 models, is absolutely not what I wanted to see, and was one of only two armies at the tournament that out-shot me. Damn. Can I go back to the Dwarves actually?

We played fairly carelessly in the first two turns, with my Uruks remaining just outside 24” of his bows while he slowly moved forward to box me into a corner. I waited till a turn where he had Priority and had moved up before surging forward, taking a couple of casualties but then Marching again on the next turn to almost totally close the gap. Our lines crashed together and the game got incredibly messy, with around 80 models clashing in a pretty crazy melee. I played quite well with my archers, using a pair of ‘hit squads’ to continue shooting while the rest of my troops clashed in combat. One squad hit Girion three times but failed to get a wound, while the other moved around his flank to pepper him with arrows.

Unfortunately, it was at this point that Sean’s dice decided that sixes were a good number, and they liked rolling them. In one particularly brutal turn I lost all bar a single combat across the entire front, picking up about a dozen models. Grishakh also failed to Strike up above a 1 and got massacred, while Mauhur got ambushed by Girion and shanked. The next turn was almost as bad, and it left me in a hole I couldn’t climb out of. That’s not taking anything away from Sean (who made some clever moves and leveraged the advantage of his shooting well) nor my own mistakes (I was too aggressive in the final turn, and Mauhur and Grishnakh were both probably too exposed). There were definitely things I could have done better, but ultimately it felt like the decisive factor was ending up in a bad matchup and my opponent rolling like a god. Another turn and Dale would likely have been Broken too to return us to a draw, but with this many models on the field running out of time was always on the cards. Bad matchups and dice are always going to come up eventually, and credit to Sean for being charming as ever as he brutally massacred my Orcs.

That left me on 2 wins, a draw and a loss, which exceeded my goal of equal wins and losses! I believe it put me at 5^th overall, which I’d be pretty happy with in any context. Given that these were my first MESBG games since January, I couldn’t have been happier!

 

List Reviews

My two armies clashing in formations about as careful as any I used on the day

I thought my two armies performed pretty well. The Dead were surprisingly fun to play, I really liked the grindy, inexorable playstyle. That simple calculus of wounding the enemy on 3’s while they wound you on 6’s is pretty awesome with this many models, and I loved the simplicity of not having to worry about Heroic resources or magic. It was a simple list, but I honestly don’t think I’d change a single thing about it at this points level. Aragorn is great and all, but I think he would have weakened the list in the first and third games, and maybe in the second as well.

I didn’t really get a proper run with Ugluk’s Scouts, only using them in a single game that was pretty messy and didn’t give them a chance to shine. I really liked the massive numbers, that capacity to absorb losses is awesome, and the speed was also great. I only had to endure one proper Dale Shooting Phase, which is a much better outcome than I would have gotten with any other army. My own shooting was also sneakily good, consistently killing off at least one Dale model every turn, and meaning I actually out-shot Sean overall. In future I might try and fit a few shields onto my Orcs, maybe in exchange for some spears, as they did seem to end up in combat a lot. One the other hand, this was also the kind of messy game where I didn’t have much chance to set up my frontline as I would have liked it before we made it into combat. Definitely a learning experience, but I’ll need more games to be sure.

 

Overall

A couple more pretty armies from the event. Sauron has blue robes, very swish

I had a blast at this tournament, playing 4 great games against 4 excellent opponents, and having good chats with plenty of others besides. It was really encouraging to see such a large turnout of new and returning players alike, it spoke highly of the state of the game. Thanks again to Pat and the staff at Warhammer Mt Gravatt for a smoothly-run event, and I look forward to the next one!

Until next time, may your heroes always win their key duels!