Adepticon Team Tournament - Circle + Skorne

This is my last article before Adepticon! in fact, when this posts, we will be on our way to Adepticon already! After the event, I hope to write at least a brief report for each game and take a picture of each army I face. Hopefully that will go better than last year, where I took one picture the whole first day because I was so into my rounds...

I have also decided on some personal goals for this year's Adepticon. Since I am a pretty new player (less than a year in warmachine!), I know I have no hope of winning my events. so instead I need some more donw-to-earth goals for my tournament experience. read on for my goals and the lists my wife and I will be running for the team event





Last year I made several goals, and managed to hit all of them. I'm hoping for a similar success this year. So here are the goals I am looking at:

1. win one game of Hardcore
2. win half of my games in the Masters
3. win one team tournament round
4. Not play Caldera in any events
5. record each of my rounds, at least a summary and pic

all pretty straight forward, and hopefully achievable. for those who are wondering about goal #4, Caldera is one of the writers for BOLS, and my most common opponent in Warmachine. A few years ago, we got paired up in every tournament we played in for 40k, pulling a draw every single time. this was like 5 events in a row. Last year at Adepticon, I had to play him after coming all the way up from Austin with him and the rest of the Austin crew. So this year I am hoping to not play the guy who I play every Tuesday night...

Anyways, back on track. the Team event. each team has 2 players, who each bring a 25 point list. the two lists can be from separate factions, but if they are the same faction they share FA. The event will use any scenarios from the SR 2012 rules, but will not be using any reinforcements.

I am very excited this year that I will be playing this event with my wife! she finally caved and gave my mini-gaming habit a try. I got her hooked, and now she has a fully painted (by her) Circle army. she will be competing in the Masters and team event.

Together, we decided our team should be called "Baby Elephants". kind of like baby seals, but with an agonizer. don't club us too hard ;-)

We went through several iterations of our lists before coming up with one we liked. At first I had some grand plan about using Krueger's board control mixed with some Skorne melee buffs to do some funky tricks like TK'ing something into place for a Titan slam in the rear arc, etc. On our first attempt, we played Caldera and his girlfriend, and the game was a total flop. You think order of activation with your army is bad? try two armies with totally different styles and goals... it was terrible.

The entire game lasted about 4 hours, and finally ended with a turn 8 caster kill... it was awful.

Next we tried fast lists. I went with eMakeda, swordsmen, a gladiator and an archidon. She went with Krueger again with lots of infantry. let me tell you, a bunch of swordsmen with vengeance plus a bunch of circle infantry takes way too long to activate. so we scrapped that idea.

My wife recently started playing eKaya, and has been loving her. so we tried her next. I brought eMorghoul on a whim, with a ton of support solos. this time was better, and we finished a game without deathclocking ourselves. I just felt like eMorghoul wasn't pulling his weight.

We did enjoy Kaya in this environment, though, and decided to keep her. I switched eMorghoul for my old standby pMorghoul, and we finally ended up with the following lists:

pMorghoul
 * Bronzeback
 * Gladiator
 * Rhinodon
Agonizer
Orin Midwinter
max paingivers

eKaya
 * Laris
 * Stalker
 * Pureblood
 * Shadowhorn
shifting stones

This is a fun list to play. 6 heavies at 50 points is so much fun! we stopped trying to get our armies to work together to make something too complex, and started running side by side. there isn't much overlap, since most Circle abilities are Friendly Faction only. Luckily, Skorne has a few abilities that are any friendly model, and a few of these will make for some fun surprises. Which I won't be spoiling here. Let's just say we are going to shock at least one person with a massive Stalker charge. it should be awesome.

My half of the list was very straight-forward. I am going to feel the lack of a Brute to protect Morghoul, so he will need to be careful. But instead, I have my favorite Bronzeback, the gladiator to help him out, and some infantry smashing with the rhinodon. the Agonizer was a must as our mascot, and Orin is a jerk.

My wife went with her standard low-point Kaya list. very simple, lots of living beasts to get the most from her feat and abilities, and stones to help manage fury, heal, and sometimes do some teleporting.

It won't take people totally off-guard, but I'm hoping we will run into lists that aren't prepared for that much beef, especially with Kaya's feat for an alpha-strike, followed by morghouls feat for another turn of protecting our important models.

I'm looking forward to trying this team event out, and hope to have some reports later on! If you see us at the 'con come say hi!