TLDR My opponent’s list had really strong tools to rip apart the bulk of my army. I took a gamble to destroy those tools and failed, leading to my destruction. My main strategy was fundamentally flawed, a different deployment would have turned that game from a Defeat into a glorious moshpit. Gulliman’s re-rolls meant that almost all of the shooting hit and wounded basically every turn despite my best efforts, and my main hope would have been killing him with a combination of poxwalkers (surround and prevent fall-back) and castings of smite.

My mission: To cross the board into my opponent’s deployment zone with as many units as possible. My opponent’s mission: destroy as many of my units as possible.

Lists: I lost the game of rock-paper-scissors here. I was rocking 111 poxwalkers in my list, supported by 3 bloat drones, a hellbrute, chaos lord, demon prince, typhus, jump pack sorcerer, and a blightbringer.

My opponent brought a gunship, a titan, Gulliman, a land raider crusader, a regular land raider with character upgrade, and a unit of devastators. There is exactly 1 thing that is a strong hard-counter to poxwalkers, and that’s hurricane bolters and my opponent had 2 sources of them.

Deployment (the image is actually middle of turn 1)

Here’s where I goofed big. My whole army is up in that upper left-hand corner. I thought it would be reasonable of me to stack up deep on one side of the board, attempt to destroy the hurricane bolter units (gunship, land raider crusader) so that there just wasn’t enough firepower to kill large units of poxwalkers, and march up the board for the win avoiding most of my opponent’s army.

What I *should* have done was deploy closer to the middle. My opponent didn’t bring anything that could place in reserve, so I had every opportunity to draw the battle lines. I should have deployed as close as possible, allowing myself the chance to advance with all of my drones and actually *use* them like I had in the previous week’s tournament. Heck, I could have potentially hidden my drones during turn 1 if I were clever enough but no. Instead I spent most of the game able to move but basically nothing else.

During turn 1 I had lost two of my bloat drones and most of a blob of zombies, and I managed to put a ton of damage on the Land Raider crusader. Here I decided to take advantage of the fact that the gunship was close enough to charge. My last bloat drone’s shooting all wiffed (4 auto hits, no wounds) and even though my Hellbrute connected with both lascannon shots on the crusader, it saved both. I decided to sacrifice my demon prince here and charged the gunship with my drone and prince both, thinking that perhaps I wouldn’t get spanked too hard. I almost popped the gunship, but a failed cast of Prescience meant my Demon Prince wiffed on too many attacks, and my Bloat Drone managed to wiff on all of his and it was pretty much over.

I proceeded to lose my last drone, my demon prince, my Hellbrute, the last of that blob of walkers, AND my chaos lord all in turn 2. Even though my warlord (typhus) was still alive, at this point all my opponent had to do was destroy 1 more of my units, and he would score more kill points than I could possibly earn via the mission objective.

I decided to make a desperate attempt to mark some damage here, but another misplay made my main hope basically impossible. Even with Warptime, Typhus was too far away to charge the titan. It didn’t occur to me at this time that *it was actually still possible for me to win* because if I were to table my opponent, it would be game over. The problem was to do that, I’d have to finish off one land raider, and kill the other which was supported by a techmarine character that can repair it from the inside. I was doomed, that was that. At this point I conceeded.





The battle was still quite fun, but this was a *very hard list*. I needed at least 1 more source of heavy firepower to drop one of the problem vehicles, and that was the only way my original strategy would have worked here. Between the codex stratagems and the Ultramarine Warlord trait and tactics, there were a ton of advantages here that mad the game a touch lopsided. Against any other opponent I would have lined up my blobs right front-and-center, made sure my bloat drones were close enough to the front to advance either into cover or into shooting range, and pushed in as far and aggressively as possible. I had an excellent stratagem for this mission (at the double-quick) and I managed to put myself in a position where it was only any good exactly twice, where otherwise I’d be using that puppy every turn for the entire game.

Regardless of the outcome, this was a delightful game, and I’m looking forward to seeing the week 2 mission and having another go ideally against some other list with fewer hurricane bolters ;)