Old School's Deff Race Batrep; Taking Nids to Second Place

 Old School here with my Batrep from Deff Race; an event put together by our own CVinton, which took place at Evolution Games. The event was a standard 40k event with a twist; you had 2250 to build an army with the standard FOC and the addition of one spearhead formation. Getting to the nitty gritty, here is my Nid list:
HQ

Tyranid Prime, Bone swords, toxin sacs, scything talons (these guys join the fexes and cause trouble with shooting, they only get into melee if my back lines are threatened.)

Tyranid Prime, Bone swords, toxin sacs, scything talons


Elites

3x Hive Guard (obvious choice)
3x Hive Guard
Doom in a Spore Pod (I don't mind taking him with no Hive Commander as I would rather have him later to snack on disembarked enemy troops and to help absorb life from units in comat with guant squads and such)

Troops

12 Termagaunts
14 Termagaunts (don't ask why I didn't go 13 and 13, I can't explain)
Tervigon, Cluster Spines, Catalyst, Toxin Sacs, Adrenal Glands
Tervigon, Cluster Spines, Catalyst, Toxin Sacs, Adrenal Glands


Fast

15 Gargoyles with toxin sacs and adrenal glands (I was sure to face tanks, or so I thought, and was looking for Tervigon screening bugs)

Heavy

Carnifex w/ 2x devourers, brainleech worms
Carnifex w/ 2x devourers, brainleech worms


Spearhead: Mass Attack (pref enemy MC, S7 grenades, may test to regroup even when normally not allowed)

15 Genestealers with toxin sacs
15 Genestealers with toxin sacs

 Alright, so game one was scenario 1, primary objective was to secure objectives (6 of them all in all), secondary was victory points and third was to destroy all non-spearhead troop choices). My set up can be seen above. I deployed to screen my army with gaunts and gargoyles.

 Then, came the stealers infiltrating ...

 My opponent's deployment - he also had three battlewagons in his spearhead which recieved an automatic 1st turn outflank. They contained two nob squads and a squad of Flash Gitz.

 My first turn sees my army spread out, encompassing all but one objective within it's enourmity. You can see the battle wagons are about to make their entry on the one board edge that isn't occupied with a wall. The odd thing is that all three battlewagons came on and nobody disembarked, leaving me with just three threats still.

 My genestealers over the next couple of turns will kill all of his boyz squads. The white ones will take the 20 man shootaz across the way eventually through combat resolution, while the other squad kills two squads of trukk boyz and the unit of killa kanz before the game ends.

 and here is doom throwing in his assist.  Oddly, this only causes my opponent to disembark one squad of nobz. Doom dies the following turn to the Nob assault, but I think my opponent missed an opportunity to break out a devestating assault and drive six scoring units into my gut (in spearhead, all components of the spearhead and all tanks are scoring).

 My answer is to run the fex into a wagon (destroying it) and destroying the other two wagons with hive guard fire.

 This is the last shot before the game ended. Jesse made a solid drive to contest objectives after being dissembarked, but I held three objectives and contested three, had taken the majority of victory points and had killed all of his troops. When the smaoke cleared, I advanced with 29 points to his 1. I think that his mechanized assault should have disembarked and made me make bad choices. The deff rollers really would have helped him clear the hordes out from the objectives.

 My second game was against Pusbelly, our resident Nurgle enthusiast. He brought a Mass Attack Spearhead similar to mine, but made of plague bearers, in fact, his army had 84 plague bearers in it. I took inventory of the situation as he dropped in the masses. Scenario 2 was scored by KPs, Table Quarters and units in deployment zones. I knew I ouldn't be able to take KPs from plaguebearers as their poison was going to work just as well if not better than mine + their FnP and High T meant I was boned in combat against them. So, I redployed and played keep away until easy targets presented themselves.

The first easy target was the Great unclean one. I attacked him in cover, took my lumps and killed him with a squad of stealers. The gargoyles went an pinned down the far squad of plague bearers in combat. The rest of my army continued to shuffle away from the masses of Plaguebearers, forcing them to attemp to get 6's on their Slow and Purposefull moves, which they didn't at the time.

Then, Pusbelly managed to get some gaunts in combat, slaughtering them. I answered back by taking his Nurgle herald and a squad of plague bearers down the next turn with the two Prime/fex stars, while I dampened his ability to collect kill points by flooding his other squad with poison gaunts and hive guard.

As the tickle fights broke out across the board, I dropped doom in an attempt to take some wounds from his vulnerable parts (the Khorne Herald and the Bloodcrusher squad). If I could pull some wounds here, I could also stop his nurglings (the plague bears, which are hilarious) from advancing across into another combat. I don't have any more photos of this game, so I will break it down.

The blue stealers advanced and killed the herald and the remaining bloodcrusher. Doom stuck it out for the next turn with the nurglings and the gargoyles held out to the end of the game, where they finally died. The end result was a Victory for me in KPs (cherry picking), a tie in table quarters (which meant 0 points) and a victory in the deployment zones by one unit. I then picked up the bonus points for a total of 24 points. I thought this match had knocked me out of placement, but I kept my head up, as taking max points in the third round could pull it out.

Round 3:

Our remembrancer managed to pick up a game, so we have no photos of game three, so I will dave the long explanation. I played against Vulkan Marines, who were set up mostly to fight tanks. I brought a horde. Scenario 3 was all about getting the most scoring units into the enemy's deployment zone, which is pretty easy for Nids to do. I managed to kill or disable my opponent's scoring units and kill his spearhead commander and managed to pull out 31 out of a possible 32 points. 

I placed second overall to one of the nastiest Daemon armies I have seen in a while and while I wish I could have played them, I think it would have knocked one of us (likely me) out of placement, so maybe next time.  I am sorry for the lack of pics toward the end, but I don't take pics during tourneys when I play; I prefer to concentrate. I did tweet throughout all three games, though, so next time, check out the twitter feed for progress during my games. Spearhead is an under rated game, though it doesn't help that GW doesn't support their expansion games very well.

Hopefully, I didn't bore you to death!