So the next tournament is coming up swiftly for my local scene. This time, it's one called Southern Impact, and tradionally it is the larger warhammer fantasy tournament the club runs. This year will be no exception, while Gobbocon was a smaller 1200 points, this time we'll be going full sized matched play armies at 2000 points.

This does bring some interesting challenges though. It's a one day tournament, so at 2000 points we can only fit 3 games into the schedule for the day, this may make finding an overall winner on the day a bit of a challenge. Different to Gobbocon, to hopefully split the pack up a bit more I've introduced a difference between a loss and minor loss, as well as adding in secondary objectives. The hope is, that some of this stuff will create more of a spread even if we only get 3 games in.

Looking towards the armies. If I need to play to fill in the odd man, I will once again be taking my Chaos Undivided, the Shadowborn. At some point I'd definitely like to take my Free Peoples out for a spin, but I just haven't had the time to work on them recently. It's also been a bit of a slog trying finishing off the command for the Freeguild Guard unit.

The most probable list I'm going to take is as follows:

Be'Lakor

Chaos Lord on Daemonic Mount

Chaos Sorcerer Lord

Chaos Lord

Warlock Engineer

10 Marauders with Hand Weapon and Shield

10 Chaos Warriors with Hand Weapon and Shield

10 Chaos Warriors with Additional Hand Weapons

10 Chaos Chosen

5 Chaos Knights

6 Jezzails

Godsworn Champions of Ruin

The only thing I'm considering at this stage is I could swap the Chaos Lord or Warlock Engineer for 5 Marauder Horsemen. I think a stronger choice would be to swap one and the Battalion for a Daemon Prince, but I don't think I'll have the time to paint up the Prince.

I recently got the opportunity to try out the above list. We played this game at my local GW, as I was hoping to get a few more people interested (But alas, the store was not busy at the time we were playing). I played against another competitors Nurgle force. Was really cool to see two pretty much fully painted armies (Unfortunately, my Warlock Engineer was letting the party down!) on a table full of GW terrain.

The game went pretty well for me, was pretty much in my favour. He took the first turn, but I got the double which was pretty important. My Jezzails almost finished the Great Unclean one off in one turn, but the double turn secured it. Also because I got the double turn, I was able to move my forces to get full control over one of the side objectives, while snatching the 2nd one away for a turn giving me the edge in objective points.

From that point on for him, unfortunately the game was a bit lost. His forces were slowly being whittled down, and never was in a position to really contest my home objective to try and snatch back some points. We called it at the end of the third or fourth battle round.

As a result of the game, I think it's kind've proven a feeling I've had for a while about the game. Strong shooting can be a really oppressive part of the game. This game really showed how I got to dictate the pace and having a strong shooting element in my Jezzails gave me control. That was only 280 points invested into it as well. I find it's really important to have ranged units in your toolkit, as I know I've felt frustrated being on the receiving end of shooting when my Slaves to Darkness didn't have any. And that was before all the hardcore shooting came out.

It'll also be interesting to see how the scene takes some of the more 'filthy' lists. Gobbocon was a bit of fun at 1200 points, with a surprise Death list winning it. But at 2000 points, I know at least one Aetherstrike list is going to be showing up. That's a whole other level of shooting. It'll be interesting to see what other people are taking, and whether or not the scene as a whole are going a bit more competitive, or if perhaps we'll see only a few people taking 'top tier' style lists.