1500pt Gimdark Toys for Tots Benefit 40k Tourney Report

Old School here laying down my report from the Toys for Tots Grimdark Xmas Tourney I attended this last weekend at Get Your Game On. As you can see in the photo above, the real treat to this tourney was that a ton of toys and cash was raised to benefit children without toys (including a Mt. Dew bottle it seems, lol). Anyway, here is how I did with the Death Wing.

The tourney was 1500 points, a limit I am not entirely used to, but I figured I would give it a shot with my recently damaged Death Wing. Above is the first army I fought, which also won the tourney, Tony's Inquisitorial Squat army (see also his Squat Guard from Adepticon 2010). The buggies are psyflemen dreads, the slayers are Deathcult Assassins and the miners are Crusaders - everything else is standard)

His list included Coteaz, a couple squads of minimum acolytes in razorbacks, a couple of Deathcult squads in razorbacks joined by a techmarine and another with inquisitor (both with psychotrope grenades), a full squad of Purifiers and three psyflemen dreads.


My List included:

Belial with his command squad (only upgrade was the banner, no cyclone)
in a Land Raider Crusader

3x 5 Terminator Squads with cyclones and TH/SS

2x Land Speeder Typhoons with multi-melta

The first roll I made of the game was me immobilizing my Land Raider on a fence, so I had to hoof it to the objectives. This mission awarded points to any player controlling an objective each player turn, so I knew I had to earn points or lose (this was a win/loss tourney, so no real battle points).

I made a mistake that cost me this game, which was to hop on the objective having forgotten that his razorbacks were chock full of Death cult assasins, along with a techmarine w/ psychotrope grenades. I figured I could handle the Purifiers, but my mistake saw a dog pile of close combat that resulted in the photo below ...

A bunch of dead termies and me being tabled to top it all off. Tony is a good player and would have had me on the ropes the whole game with a ton of scoring units and some deadly CC to match my resilientcy to his shooting and I wish I would have played a better game, but my mistake and his cool headed generalship was the end of this game for me.

My next game was against an amazing Dark Eldar army, which was actually made of Kroot. The list was totally themed, well painted and the player even had a codex he modified to be a Kroot Mercenaries book. The tree above is actually his Webway portal. I wish I held onto his list, but the basics were:

A succubus, a Hemocullus, a minimum squad of wracks, a squad of trueborn with blasters, three Talos, Three big Wych squads and a Beastmaster pack with 15 Chimerae.

This army was a joy to play against and I feel like luck was really against him as he managed to fail almost every leadership test he had to make in this game. Through shooting and close combat resolution, I made his entire army run away at one point or another with the exception of his Talos (Great Knarlocks). The game ended on turn five with his entire army running with the exception of the three talos, which died to terminators in close combat. This was a game where the firepower of the land raider crusader and the potent force of a banner in the command squad decided the fate of many a kroot merc.

Here is a shot of one of the Great Knarlocs. Again, this is an army I have seen on the internet and always wanted to see on the table, so this was a real treat for me, I just wish the dice would have been a little more in his favor.

Like a bonehead, I forgot to take photos during game three, but it was a quick game. My opponent was running a Chaos themed Grey Knights list with lots of conversions. It was Draigo, a Librarian and as many Paladins as could fit into 1500 points (so not too many).

My army is a little hit or miss against Draigowing, with my 3++ having to withstand multiple S5 power weapons, while hoping to deal out Insta-kills with hammers.

He won the role off and set up. It was Dawn of War, so he took a five man squad plus libby and planted it on the objective with another five man behind it. He then made one bad mistake, like my first game and got too aggressive. He ran out from the objective, placing him in range of the land raider's assault if I drove in, which I did.

The command squad made pretty short work of the Libby squad, while my missile launchers killed half of the other paladin squad through massed missile fire and some bad roles on his part. By turn three, he just had a few remaining paladins on the board and managed to roll for Draigo to come in from reserves ... only for him to scatter on top of the paladins, resulting in a mishap, which resulted in a unit destroyed.

We called it a game at that point and he was a very good sport about it. We ended up talking about Necrons, Grey Knights and Daemons while everyone wrapped up.

All in all, the event was a lot of fun, with a great cause. I was stoked to see Tau place as well! The Death Wing certainly had a good showing in their last unpainted tournament game. I also brainstormed a lot between round and came up with a solution to the Patina problem as well as the issue of having to repaint my command squad with them being so close to finished ... but that is a tale for another post ...