How I Met Your Tervigon, Episode 7: 50 Shades of Celestra Grey

When we last left off, I'd just finished assembling my Necron Destroyers and they were raring to get in some Kill Team action at the Meeple Power league.

First things first, I'd like to apologize to any regular readers for the lack of an entry last week. Some...stuff happened at work (don't worry it's nothing serious, and I'm in no danger of losing my job) so the first half of last week got pretty busy.

Next I'd like to 'announce' that I won't be updating as regularly as before. This is mostly because we're currently in our final week of the Meeple Power League, so I won't be playing as much WH40K as I was over the past couple of months. I also won't be as committed to providing a blow-by-blow of my WH40K experience since...well, it's proving to be somewhat of a hassle to keep track of everything that transpires (that and I have other hobbies too, which the recent major Netunner tourney reminded me of so very eloquently). The main change is that instead of a strict chronological blow-by-blow, I'll try to break up the entries into the stories of my matches followed by the assembly/painting aspect of the hobby; you'll see why at the very end of this article.

That said, let's try to catch up with this update shall we?

But first, obligatory league battle report reposts. It'll take something drastic for Chaos to lose the race, as we can all see.

By the end of my last update I'd finally managed to break my losing streak during the league's fifth week, snatching a win from some Chaos Daemons. For context: I'd gotten a 2-0 on Week 1 and proceeded to get a string of 0-2's from Weeks 2 to 4, and funnily enough that streak was started by Jay -- our undefeated (in his league matches) group vet, the man who got us into WH40K, who jokingly said that he challenged me on Week 2 just to break my winning streak.

Take note of that last detail, that'll be important in a bit.

Week 6 of the league saw me starting my Kill Team matches against Rainier -- the Appraisery's resident airsoft enthusiast, one of our two Imperial Guard players and one of our extended playgroup's "on the radar" Android: Netrunner players (especially after he placed second in that aforementioned major Netrunner tourney). In our little Appraisery-sized slice of the Philippine WH40K pie, his Kill Team was most known for fielding a motherfucking tank. Other vehicles have shown up in the league by now (especially with us being allowed to change army lists every two weeks), but he made an impression by being the first one to field a tank in our little Kill Team scene.

His Kill Team had a total of twenty-six models (including the tank). Mine had nine.
That is not the entire squad in the photo.

I knew that "field a shitload of dudes with a tank behind 'em" was the main strategy that the IG is known for, and resolved myself to simply hope for the best while dealing with those numbers. Time to see if the old "t-shirts and flashlights" joke about Guardsman armor and weaponry really was true.

A couple of hours later, I learned an important lesson that Josh (for the first-time readers: good friend a' mine, not in the country but gives me tons of WH40K advice online, we co-wrote an article on this very blog awhile back) had told me from the get-go when I was starting this Kill Team thing: volume of fire.

See, there's an old saying among enthusiasts of tabletop games: "No matter how hard the roll, keep throwing dice at something and you'll eventually make it." Going up against a squad more than twice my size, I experienced it firsthand: Despite the fact that they needed to roll 6's to wound my Destroyers and 5's for the Warriors, we got whittled down. Their superior numbers pretty much assured control of the objectives on the board; the win wasn't very difficult for him despite my all-around tougher units.

My second match for the league was against Benjo, a stranger who I knew had played a few league matches but I didn't really see among the Appraisery regulars. His Chaos list's highlights were some dudes on bikes.

"Booorn to be wiiiiiild!"

The Warriors pretty much chilled off to the side of the board while the three Destroyers did all the dirty work, taking full advantage of their weapons being at the right AP rating to punch through marine armor. Their numbers were much closer to ours, thus much more manageable -- a win for me, 1-1 for Week 6.

Week 7 saw me deciding to challenge Jay once again. I changed up my army list by only having two Destroyers (Week 5 and 6's list had three) but switching the Warriors out for Immortals, a.k.a. the actually competent Necron troop choice.

Still with that damn missile launcher guy, a.k.a. "I sneeze at you from the entire table away and you die."

The missile launcher marine screwed me over pretty badly in our last match, but my Destroyers were really good at killing marines (or anything whose best saves were armor, really). I'd also be bringing to the table weeks more of experience, as well as a few lessons I'd actually learned from Jay himself, over the course of our 500 and 750-point games on the side.

For example, I learned that Scarabs actually aren't a very good meat shield for a Destroyer Lord.

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of photos because my phone did that weird thing again wherein I take a photo, it shows that it took the photo and then when I view it later it simply shows a blank black image. Our match was pretty much on a tempo: a flamer infiltrated up in my grill and wiped out a chunk of my forces including one Destroyer, only for the remaining Destroyer to successfully take out the missile launcher and give us free movement. We pretty much traded kills from there; his Chaos Spawn were meant to chew us up quickly in melee but some lucky rolls on my part held them at bay and locked his big bruisers in combat for most of the game while the main firefight raged on as my Immortals performed the tried-and-tested Necron strategy of the ages: inch forward while shooting anything not part of the terrain.

The match ended in a draw as we managed to sit on the objectives in the nick of time. I didn't win, but hey, I broke a six-week winning streak.

My second Week 7 match was against Arn; he was familiar from the WH40K-playing regulars of the shop but not among the ones who I really hung out with (in other words, I'd seen him around but had no idea what kind of list I'd be facing). He immediately made an impression by deploying a Black Templars squad with two missile launchers.

I forgot to take photos during our match but there isn't much to tell about it: nothing happened. Both players were taking extra care to avoid getting shot at, and the mission literally ended without a single shot being fired. Yep, two draws for the second to the last week of the Meeple Power Kill Team League.

As for my 500-point games from the last couple of weeks, I had two against Jay and one against Hessed - the other IG player among the Appraisery regulars. Those are harder to describe in detail so we're gonna bullet-point it from here:

• Jay's Iyanden list, fielding some vehicles and those ever-frustrating Wraithlords. I don't recall much of how this match went, but like the earlier photo showed: I tried to protect the Destroyer Lord with some Scarabs, who one of the Wraithlords pretty much flicked away with its toe.
• A Thousand Sons list that involved a bunch of dudes in transports and as many sorcerers as Jay could field within 500 points. All those spells flung across the board wiped us out pretty quickly.
• The game with Hessed was insanely fun, with him camping several Catachans with heavy weapons on his side of the board, and the rest of his army outflanked (non-players: Outflank lets you deploy on later turns from the sides of the table instead of one of your respective table edge). Absolute mayhem ensued once his superstars Sly Marbo and Stonetooth Harker came in (the Sentinel made a return appearance but got shot down before it did anything) and I managed to win this one by the skin of my teeth thanks to the infantry being fatally allergic to the Annihilation Pards Barge.

Now on to the modeling part of my past two weeks.

Thanks to the aforementioned Stuff that Hindered My Posting, I didn't get much done in the way of assembly. The only stuff I assembled were a couple of Canoptek Wraiths to be fielded as my Destroyer Lord's 'honor guard' in 500-point games, and the conversion of one model from my second Destroyer box into a Heavy Destroyer. My backlog grows!

Destroyer Lord with Wraiths, Heavy Destroyer on the right. Its cannon came from the Triarch Stalker sprue.

The only other huge development with my models' progress is the fact that as of last night, I decided to finally sit my ass down and start painting.

Got the heads of my Immortals in white, and did the base coat of my Kill Team's leader Immortal.
Dave's there too, for comparison with his paint job from the workshop.

I do agree with others who've seen it that it turned out far better than I expected it would, especially for a newbie painter. I'd attribute that to the heaps of painting advice I've received from all over; I'm admittedly into WH40K more for the gaming and conversions, but considering how much the folks around me talk about the painting I do absorb bits every now and then. That, and of course the abundance of advice from the aforementioned workshop.

As the Kill Team League winds down during its final week, I've done some thinking about how my WH40K experience has been so far. One of the most amusing recent developments is that I've actually been designated as a source of advice for newer Necron players. I'm not quite a vet of the game (especially considering others with years of experience before me), but in the Appraisery's little subgroup I'm the 'resident Necron' and after a few months with the game I'm apparently above the 'total newb' tier. Supposedly my elevation from Beginner to Intermediate(?) is because I actively get in a lot of playtest.

That's something to be discussed at length someday, somewhere in the blogosophere: the "gamer to hobbyist" spectrum in this kind of game. On one end are people are in it purely for the tabletop wargaming, focusing more on perfecting tactics and army lists; the sort you'll often find simply paying others to paint their armies for them. On another end are the 'hobbyists' who aren't really out to win games but truly enjoy the creative aspects of miniatures, most often seen agonizing over the details of a model's paint job or assembly.

The thing to remember is that this is a hobby, and neither approach is wrong. It's a hobby, it's meant to be fun and if you're spending your money on it you deserve to enjoy the game the way you want to. From what I've seen of the local WH40K scene so far, I've yet to encounter any of the die-hard "gamey" types who're all fight and no fun -- another plus point for this hobby over the competitive CCG/TCG scene I've abandoned (possibly for good). Then again, what I've seen of the Philippine Warhammer scene consists of the Appraisery (mostly newbies with a few vets among us), a couple of visits to Neutral Grounds Centris (neither of which were during a tourney) and the posts I see on social networking.

Me? I'm not exactly clear on where I stand just yet. For the most part I know I'm into the gaming, but not necessarily in the competitive "in it to win it" sense. Sure I don't mind the proverbial "Crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women" but after what I've seen and heard about ultra-competitive tourney scenes, I'm more for having a good game than outright destroying someone.

In other words, what I want the most out of a hobby --any given hobby I'm in, really-- is to bring out the A-Game in myself and the people I game with. There are people who read it as me being unnecessarily competitive as a gamer (though thankfully not in my current regular playgroup) at the expense of others' enjoyment, but at the end of the day I believe in the power of gaming when it comes to bringing people together and bringing the best out of them. (Though of course that's my personal take on gaming, and there are others who have very different approaches.)

Holy soapbox, Batman. I think I got a bit too into it there. It's just that I've been wanting to say that for awhile now.

But back to the WH40K. While I'm more into gaming than modeling on the surface I did enjoy the three hours or so of painting (yes, that one 'Crowned Immortal' leader model took hours and it's not even done yet) and as far as assembly goes I love thinking up wild ways to make really unique conversions. I'm young as far as the hobby is concerned and my development as a tabletop war gamer could go anywhere from here.

For example, I may have ranted a bit there about how I'm more for enjoying my hobbies now instead of being the tourneyfag douche some people think I am, but there's an upcoming Kill Team tourney in the South soon and I've heard...things about the level of competitiveness there.

If I manage to somehow make it to ATC on that day, how far will my A-Game go, I wonder?




Brian was born in Marikina but swears that Katipunan raised him. On weekdays he's pretty elusive thanks to his night shift job, and on weekends you'll generally find him at the Appraisery. That used to be just on Saturdays but they're open on Sundays now (closed on Mondays)!

_____________________

We're going to cut out the whole "list expenses" thing from hereon. It's impossible to list absolutely everything I spend for this hobby (especially where the line blurs when it comes to 'communal group expenses' and 'stuff for my army'), but I'll definitely be open with any info when asked how much a particular thing cost me.