After a big 2 days of singles tournament, Cancon followed it all up with a doubles tournament on the public holiday as well. This was an absolute hoot, with a crazy 1400 points per side in two massive games. I’ve been a bit (read: very) slow about writing this up, but it was the perfect way to cap a long weekend of MESBG.
Tournament format
500-900 points per player, 1400 points per side, 2800 points
on the table. Whoof. Rounds would be nice and long (3 hours 25 minutes), and both
players had to pick from the same list. This immediately ruled out quite a lot
of factions, because 1400 points is a lot.
Listbuilding
Pat was staying with me for Cancon, and we were beyond hyped
for the doubles. But honestly, the listbuilding was quite tricky; how many
lists could we actually get 1400 points worth of models together for?
In the end, there was one clear answer, and we were incredibly keen to see how it would do. Behold, The Flock:
Yup, that’s 12 monsters. It’s clearly not an optimal list, with the same diminishing returns that most lists experience above 800 points. But getting to jump on people with thirteen birds and Beorn looked like a hoot, and it also had the benefit of being quite easy to pull together hobby-wise (especially because I already had 7 Eagles and Gwaihir painted up for the singles event).
Round 1: Harad in Destroy the
Supplies, 18:5
14 monsters v 3 Mumaks, what a start to the event. We had
many a laugh with Jack and Liam about having nearly 3.5 hours to use 17 models
between us, which was a bit of a theme of the event: lots of people had seen
the 1400-point limit and brought along a huge pile of monsters.
In any case, the game opened with the Mumaks stomping forward, while our flock maneuvered into position. We soon swooped in, and a huge melee developed in the centre, with all three of our heroes and most of our birds taking on the Warleader and one Mumak.
We were taking some hectic damage
from shooting, however, with the poisoned rocks from the Mumaks killing one
bird outright to open up a path to Radagast as we moved into position. That
wasn’t helped by all 4 players thinking the rocks were S8, which was particularly
devastating against our D8 birds.
In the centre, Beorn was clinging to life after a brutal
charge and bombardment with rocks, but we had managed to deal a lot of damage
to the far Mumak. The critical moment came when the Warleader attempted to
Trampled through Beorn into Radagast, only to bounce off the Bear entirely.
With that survived, we piled a bunch of models into the normal Mumak and called a
Combat, slaughtering it and then doing devastating damage to
the Royal War Mumak as well.
Elsewhere, the third Mumak had
seen off several Eagles as they attempted to burn the right supply, but the
other two had been destroyed by a Fledgling as it flapped its way along their
backfield. The third Mumak did manage to use Rappelling lines to get one Harad
onto our right supply to destroy it, but the other Mumak in the centre had
finally been taken out by our pile of monsters there.
At last, with two Mumaks and many of the crew of the third dead (their critical role as Rappelling Lines fodder had been taking a toll), Jack and Liam were quartered. It was a hilarious game, with a comic up-scaling of everything: our Eagles were effectively the basic warriors running around, with the Mumaks as the monsters striding through their midst. A great palate cleanser after the high-octane competition of the previous two days!
Round 2: Men of the West in To the
Death, 18:7
Matt and Lee were both getting back into the game after a
bit of a gap, and had brought along another crazy list: Men of the West with
all the named (non-Hobbit) heroes, Gwaihir and 5 Great Eagles. Awesome.
Going in, we were very confident. Aside from being more
experienced than our opponents (and much less hungover), our list was excellent into theirs, with the S7
on the charge from our army bonus meaning that we would knock their Eagles
prone and they couldn’t do the same to us. Plus, we outnumbered them again,
which is great with monsters.
And initially, things seemed to be going as we expected. They moved up in an awkward formation that meant we could jump on all their Eagles if we won a Move-off (while we were still in a decent spot if we lost).
We won that move-off and jumped on them, swarming their Eagles and getting
ready to Heroic Combat with Gwaihir, while Beorn went into a trapped Gwaihir
and Struck up.
And then everything went wrong. And continued going wrong,
for turn after turn after turn.
Beorn and an Eagle got a 4-high, and Beorn needed to burn all his Might to beat Gwaihir, who promptly survived the barrage of S7-8 hits after passing all 3 Fate. Gwaihir Combatted into Elessar to peel him off from a Heroic Combat and got badly mauled, going down a couple of turns later having provided limited value. We failed Terror check after Terror check with Eagles, then lost fights with 6 dice to 2 once they made it in. Radagast and an Eagle duelled one of their Eagles for several turns, with a total lack of success culminating in Raddy getting torn to pieces himself. We’d lost every roll-off and basically every Priority after the first, and things were starting to snowball.
By the midpoint of the game, we’d lost 2 heroes and 6 birds, were out of Might entirely, and had done shockingly little damage back. Pat and I were both a bit shellshocked, and so were our opponents: we’d been providing them with heaps of little tips in the first half of the game to help them back into it, and no one involved had expected things to go quite this heinously wrong for us. A classic combo of 'no good deed goes unpunished' and 'pride goes before the fall'!
At this point, I stopped for a moment during their movement
to grab myself some snacks from my bag, joking that I needed them to restore my
morale. And of course, in doing so I realised that I’d left them on the kitchen
counter, and I was devoid of snacks. This may have been my MESBG rock bottom.
But the thing about rock bottom is that there’s nowhere to
go but up, and things gradually began to turn in our favour. Beorn killed an
Eagle, then one of our birds setup a Barge into Legolas and took him out. Then,
in an absolutely critical turn, we were able to Barge another Eagle across the
melee and into Aragorn, who lost the Elven-made roll-off and got one-shotted by our two birds.
One fight over, Gandalf had been charged by Beorn (in man form after being
forced to transform to fit through a gap) and an Eagle and was similarly torn
apart. Suddenly, the game had totally flipped, and we were back in control.
From there, it was somewhat of an anticlimax, as Eomer and
Gimli fell to our monsters. In the end there was just a lone enemy Eagle left,
having fought off multiple birds per turn for the entire game (and done
devastating damage back). We had lost a total of 7 models, which surprisingly
left us unbroken and gave us a big 18:7 win!
This game was hilarious, full of highs and (mostly) lows. We had some great dice towards the end that helped us come back, but it was genuinely comic how badly things went over the first few turns. But I think a teams environment is the perfect time for this sort of game, as a second player gives you someone to commiserate and celebrate with.
After the comeback of the century in that last game, we
actually ended up coming in second overall! The prizes included an extremely
endearing 2-part trophy of the Argonath, half of which is sitting proudly on my shelf.
I’ll skip the usual list retrospective and analysis here,
because frankly 1400 points of monsters is not designed for competitive play.
But this event was a blast, in true teams style. Pat was an excellent teammate,
bringing competitive play and good vibes in equal measure (even when everything
was going wrong in the second game). And Stuckey had put on an excellent event
that followed on perfectly from the excellent singles tournament of the
weekend.
If you haven’t been to a teams event before, I can’t
recommend them enough. And if you’re in the area, I’d heartily recommend the
excitement of Cancon.
Until next time, may your rolls always recover just
in time!
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