Blackout 2018 - Rune's Summary

[RuneBrush]

So, the dust is finally starting to settle following Blackout 2018.  My bags are now unpacked and models back in display cabinets and cupboards.  I was running a Neferata, Grand Host list with a large contingent of the new Nighthaunt models - so I knew it would be a bit of a learning curve as many of the models I'd never used before.

Spoiler

Allegiance: Grand Host of Nagash
Mortal Realm: Shyish
Neferata Mortarch Of Blood (400)
- General
- Lore of the Dead: Vile Transference (Vampires)
Vampire Lord (140)
- Lore of the Vampires: Soulpike
Necromancer (110)
- Artefact: Grave-sand Timeglass 
- Lore of the Deathmages: Overwhelming Dread
Spirit Torment (120)
Guardian of Souls with Nightmare Lantern (140)
Knight of Shrouds (120)
40 x Skeleton Warriors (280)
- Ancient Spears
10 x Skeleton Warriors (80)
- Ancient Blades
10 x Skeleton Warriors (80)
- Ancient Blades
30 x Grimghast Reapers (360)

Total: 1830 / 2000
Extra Command Points: 3
Allies: 0 / 400
Wounds: 126

The basic concept behind my list is that it's fairly heavy on the resurrection element - think Tubthumping by Chumbawamba but with Skeletons and Ghosts (and less whisky & singing).  Now just to explain one thing - on the train around Bristol area, I realised that I'd not packed my unit of 6 Spirit Hosts.  Thankfully for some unexplainable reason had my Knight of Shrouds, but this still meant I would only be running an 1850 points list*...

 

Game 1 - Asqhy - Shifting Objectives - Table 11
Ironjawz (@Wayner)

I count myself as fortunate as to be the first person to play Wayne at his first tournament.  He was running a beautifully painted Ironjawz army and basically steamrollered across the board into my lines.  Certainly the unit of the match was the new unit of Reapers who pretty much did all of the damage to him, luckily managing to kill his Maw Crusha and a few other bits.  There was some blinding play on both sides and the new Smash and Bash is amazing, you seriously need to be careful about what units you put in range.

Wayne got the major win, but the VP total was 8 vs 9, so it was a super close game, with him gaining 780 KP's and me gaining 580.  As per usual I forgot my Grave-sand Timeglass until turn 2.

 

Game 2 - Ulgu - Places of Arcane Power - Table 35
Destruction (Shaun L )

Out of all the games I played, I think this was probably the one I enjoyed the least, for a few reasons.  The heat in Firestorm had got to the point where it was almost unbearable which made it really difficult to focus.  Consequently, I deployed abysmally against a very experienced opponent with a mixed Destruction list.  I deployed first and rather ridiculously gave the turn to Shaun who proceeded to take my army off a piece at a time.  Neferata dying in that first turn to a Thundertusk was the nail in the coffin and I ended up being tabled.

Now, that's the negative part of the game out of the way, I cannot fault Shaun and he was fantastic at pointing out the parts of my army that he was worried about and how he'd have played it.  It certainly has helped a lot on paying attention on how many drops the armies have and who gets to choose who goes first.  As I said, my deployment was awful and rather than place my Reapers in a location to take out his heavy hitters, I instead used them to wipe out large units of grots.  A better solution as Shaun pointed out would have been to have left my Reapers and large unit of Skeletons underground and use the gravesites to catapult them into my opponent and block him off from gaining the objectives.

So that was a major win to Shaun, with 1850 KP's to him and 350 to me.  I didn't forget my Grave-sand Timeglass but despite getting 3 wounds on the off, failed to trigger it on his 4 wound Grot Shaman for the rest of the game...

Annoyingly I forgot to take any pictures...

 

Game 3 - Scorched Earth - Chamon - Table 45
Darkling Covens (Josh R)

There was an irony about playing Scorched Earth as if we'd been in the Mortal Realms I think it may have been cooler.  What I do want to say is that Josh was a great opponent for what is often the most draining game of an event - very cheerful and enthusiastic, which made the game a pleasure.

Josh played a fairly aggressive game, throwing his two dragons into my ranks really quickly and protecting his own objectives.  I made one mistake, in that I moved one unit of skeletons a little too far from my objective allowing him to throw a unit of riders to it and burn it for 2 VP's.  I did what my list does best and spent a few turns basically grinding through his dragons whilst replacing my own ranks.  Josh was also running the Geminoids and Cogs endless spells which are quite simply brilliant.  I really had to work during the game and the decision over going first and keeping my units topped up whilst suffering -1 attacks over going second and moving them out the way was a real challenge.

On turn 3 or 4, one dragon was down and I decided I needed to push for one of his objectives, throwing Neferata up into the corner and her comfortably eating a unit of ten - because we wanted a tense game I decided to roll a 1 for burning that objective too!  The Reapers and Neferata swung round and managed to burn a second objective for 2 VPs (I think) whilst Josh's riders pushed into my other corner, managing to burn that one for 1 VP - giving me my first win (but only with 1 VP difference).  I'd killed quite a bit and managed to get 1320 KP's to Josh's 400.  As with my first game, it was super close.

 

Game 4 - Total Commitment - Ghyran - Table 37 (I think)
Grandhost of Nagash (@ChippyRick)

This game only happened due to "the fates" as Ricky should very much have been up in the top 20 or so with his Nagash & Vohdri list.  The outcome was largely inevitable, with the two big guns comfortably crashing into my Reapers and Skeletons and a unit of Spirit Hosts from the Grave taking one of my objectives on turn 1.  Those two are brutal, but I don't think I did myself down and as with my game 2, picked up a lot of tips on how to play my list better from a significantly more experienced player. 

Ricky's placement of Nagash and Vhordrai with the terrain meant that I couldn't bring my big unit of Reapers into play more than a few at a time and burned through my Command Points really quickly.  With hindsight, I should have let him kill my Reapers and then pull them back up to challenge one of his corner objectives (not that it would have made much difference).  However, I would say that the survivability of large Skeleton units and Reapers with 3 or 4 gravesites nearby is epic and at one point Vohdri had 10 wounds inflicted on him.

The outcome was a major win to Ricky with 1520 KP's and 60 KP's to me (with a cheeky sacrificial Cairn Wraith my Vampire killed on an attempt to grap an objective :D)

One thing I want to point out is that I can't imagine that I particularly challenged Ricky - I've never played this composition of army and don't get loads of games in and it showed.  However, I came away having had a very enjoyable game.  I'm sure if he'd put his mind to it, he could have easily tabled my army with me hardly getting an attack in, so for me it was a perfect example of going "I've comfortably won, let's make sure my opponent has a good game".  At no point did I feel that Ricky was bored or fed up of me and neither did I feel like I was simply having my army decimated one model at a time.

 

Game 5 - Border War - Shyish - Table 44
Sylvaneth (Matt S)

This game was a lovely one as an end to the event.  Matt and I played each other at our first game of our first tournament almost two years ago and it was fantastic to see how Matt's army has developed and his painting has come on leaps and bounds.

This game very much had an ebb and flow and despite being the last game I felt I played my best out of all the games over the weekend (being near the open side-door helped on that front).  Matt elected to go first and pushed a large unit of dryads towards me, using his woods and the terrain to funnel me on my left flank and his Stormcast contingent on the right.  I had placed by Reapers to face his Sylvaneth element and my large unit of Skeletons to basically just hold up the Stormcast on the right.  I chucked my Reapers into his Dryads and slowly cut through them over a few turns, they were joined by one of his treelords and a Branchwraith.

The Skeletons marched up to about 4" away from the objective and stopped as I'd realised that I could capture that without having to get into combat as even that far away I had more skeletons within 6" than there were Stormcast.  That was pretty much what secured me the win in truth.  Matt heroically threw his treelord General into Neferata and put 7 wounds into her in one phase, thankfully despite them having an ignore -1 rend artefact, Neferata had enough -2 rend attacks and I charge my Spirit Torment in combat to just secure that kill.

End result was a major for me with 570 KP's with losing no models in return.  It was a super close game though.

Summary

I was really quite worried about not having my unit of spirit hosts and only running at 1850 rather than the 1950 I had planned.  What I did find though was having 3 command points from the start was huge and added in lots of tactical flexibility in every game.  Knowing that you can pop an inspiring presence on without it leaving you short later on was a massive boon and I'm wondering what changes I could make to the list to keep the number of command points up (none of the Legions of Nagash Battalions are particularly viable).  The Knight of Shrouds didn't really do very much either other than being there to make up the points - a Spirit Torment would actually provide more utility during the game.  The only game where I missed the Sprit Hosts was the second, because I know they could have held up some of my opponent's army whilst I got my act together.

The star of the show was certainly the Grimghast Reapers - quite simply they don't stop.  At one point I lost over half the unit in one turn and promptly brought back all but one of them the following turn.  Being able to bring them back around the unit you're fighting against also helps a lot.  Ideally you want to run the Spirit Torment in the middle and the Guardian of Souls nearby.  I'd also say, don't be afraid to let a unit die.  If you have forced your opponent to concentrate at one end on them, let them die, move Neferata (16" fly after all) and bring them back over the other side.

Neferata is pretty essential to the way I play, but she's a really soft target.  That -1 to hit debuff when sat behind the Reapers means that your opponent just doesn't hit as hard and keeps stuff alive a lot longer.

Having 5 unbinds each turn and 5 spells (when combined with realm spells) is very big and very clever.  With the exception of against Nagash, I had a decent control over magic - but not so much that I dominated or my opponent was frustrated.

Triumphs within games are a waste of time as nearly everybody forgets them.  I think I need a florescent card that I can put in the middle of the table so I remember what I've got.  Personally I'd love to see them change into a permanent buff on one unit or similar.

Having everything on warscroll sized cards and tokens for everything, made playing the game so much less stressful.  It meant that I could put the battleplan and the realm spells to one side and both my opponent and I could refer to them.  Having a Grave-sand Timeglass token also meant I was less likely to forget that!

As I've said in the feedback thread, the event was amazing and @Chris Tomlin runs a stocking event.  I think the only thing (other than the heat) I'd love to see change is there being more granularity in the win conditions in two of the games I played it felt like it should have been a minor loss/win rather than a major due to how tight they were.

* I have just realised the Knight of Shrouds was only 120 points and not 140 as I thought...

[lare2]

Loved reading this - thanks for making the effort! Sounds like you had a great time. 

4 hours ago, RuneBrush said:

Triumphs within games are a waste of time as nearly everybody forgets them.  I think I need a florescent card that I can put in the middle of the table so I remember what I've got.  Personally I'd love to see them change into a permanent buff on one unit or similar.

I use one fluorescent  dice to represent my Triumph (if I have it!) and keep it close to my gaming dice. That way it never leaves my sight and constantly reminds me that I have it up my sleeve. Seems to work a treat. 

I know what you mean though - people are always weirdly shocked that I actually use my Triumph.