Hello my friends, fans, Irish haters and other random bystanders. Last week I started my report on the recent ETC and today I’ll dive right into 2nd round and see how far the wordlimit will allow me to continue.

Second round saw us paired against the slightly less flaily of the 2 Epic Flail teams. The pairing process paired players with the best personal results together, so I got to play a certain Martin… with Skorne (yay, I’m becoming a trendsetter!) also, our Adam played against an Adam too!

Martin presented me with a Mak3da list and Zaal. Since I know since the Irish Masters finals that Zaal works against Rasheth (Hello Ciaran /kisses) and I think Mak3da could have enough hitting power to power through his feat I reached for Mordikaar again to jam things up and win on time in worst case. Martin chose Zaal so we got the geriatric party started. His list was quite infantry heavy, but still included Tibby, I heard somewhere he fits in well with Zaal.

Supreme Aptimus Zaal & Kovaas (*5pts)

* Basilisk Krea (4pts)

* Tiberion (11pts)

Farrow Bone Grinders (Leader and 3 Grunts) (2pts)

Immortals (Leader and 9 Grunts) (8pts)

Nihilators (Leader and 9 Grunts) (8pts)

Paingiver Beast Handlers (Leader and 3 Grunts) (2pts)

Praetorian Karax (Leader and 9 Grunts) (6pts)

Swamp Gobber Bellows Crew (Leader and 1 Grunt) (1pts)

Tyrant Commander & Standard Bearer (3pts)

Ancestral Guardian (3pts)

Ancestral Guardian (3pts)

Hakaar the Destroyer (4pts)

Scenario was Incursion and Martin went first. His infantry units were deployed centrally with Tiberion and Hakaar, with a Guardian on each side, the Tyrant commander to his left and the Bone Grinders with the Krea on his right. My Cetrati brick went opposite his lighter right side and the reste more or less centrally as well. Martin ran everything forward, but since he had so many models the units got somewhat intermingled, but the Immortals lead the pack. I ran as well but not as much to get charged just engaged mostly. I still didn’t have a solid plan for my Drake and jammed him up a bit with my Nihilators. Oddly enough, the middle flag did not disappear but the one on my right side, which left the left flag in a contest between my Cetrati brick and Martin’s Ancestral Guardian, Krea and Bone Grinders 😀

The main fun started in the middle. Some 2 maybe 3 of my models died or toughed, but I had something to revive, gave Ghostly to my Nihilators and feated. The Drake managed to open a charge lane deep into Martin’s lines for my Ghostly Nihilators and the bloodbath began. I managed to kill the majority of the Immortals, several of Martin’s Nihilators and Karax and the Bloodrunners Shadowplayed themselves into the midst of Martin’s army. My Cetrati advanced in shieldwall towards the flag and did some damage on the Guardian guarding it.

Martin had to counterfeat to kill at least something and with Last Stand on Nihilators I think killed some stuff, but also gave me several soul tokens. Since he activated Hakaar for his Righteous Vengeance move, he unfortunately forgot about his regular activation, so overall my losses were not too big and easily replacable. Tiberion was quite stuck in the back of Martin’s army.

In my next turn I proceeded to kill the Guardian at the left flag with regular Cetrati and then Vorkesh finished off the Kovaas. I revived some stuff, killed the Tyrant Commander, Paralyzed Tiberion with my Krea and then the Bloodrunners did their stuff on Martin’s remaining Karax.

Martin fought back valiantly with what was left of his army, but the attrition swing was allready heavily in my favour. Tiberion was unable to approach the middle flag, so then in my turn I was able to get into contact with it even with Mordikaar and the left flag was taken over by my Agonizer while the Cetrati started to press into the middle of the table killing Hakaar in the process while the Kovaas got shot by the Drake.

The Zaal list didn’t work that well due to being overcrowded and Tiberion really needs Rush to have a more dominating threat presence on the table.

We got pretty good matchups this round, fortune even gifted our Retribution with a PoM opponent who had Harby and Sevvy so Ravyn had a field day and it was even the hot table! Eventually we managed to win all our games and were happily off into the third round.

Now we got paired with zee eevil Germanzz and a Belgian collaborator who eventually went on to win the entire tournament. I got paired against Robin, their Legion player, while our Circle faced Cygnar and our two remaining members had to deal with Cryx both. Surprisingly our opponents allready used their team feat, so I decided to take advantage of it and feat on them making my table again sizzlingly hot. The scenario was stupid Destruction and Robin was running both Vayls, who love to shoot those objectives to create easy arcnodes. Robin opted for his pVayl list which looked like this:

Vayl, Disciple of Everblight (*6pts)

* Ravagore (10pts)

* Ravagore (10pts)

* Scythean (9pts)

* Seraph (8pts)

Blighted Nyss Striders (Leader and 5 Grunts) (6pts)

* Blighted Nyss Striders Officer & Musician (3pts)

Farrow Bone Grinders (Leader and 3 Grunts) (2pts)

Spawning Vessel (Leader and 3 Grunts) (2pts)

Blighted Nyss Shepherd (1pts)

Blighted Nyss Shepherd (1pts)

Feralgeist (1pts)

There might have been a Shredder or Harrier as well and maybe a Spell Martyr.

I went first and concentrated most of my army in the middle, mainly the Titans formed their defensive anit-Rampager trianlge with the Sentry in the back Lockering the other two up. The Gators came from the right and my Slingers and Drake were on the left. Robin started taking potshots with his beasts at my Gators, one died and I toughed another, so then he killed off his Bone Grinders to spawn a Stinger to try and finish it off . The Stinger charged in but got promptly smashed by the Bronzeback’s countercharge. Leash was on the Scythean who just ran a bit to the right side of the scenario and objectives. On the same side the Striders started decimating my poor Slingers.

With my Bronzeback repositioned I was looking for ways to capitalize on it, but it would require my sentry to destroy one of the objectives to clear a charge lane and leave him not Lockering anyone and maybe there was some other problem as well so I ultimately decided against it and just moved up to practically deny entry into the zone for Robin and I feated. Rasheth moved up a bit as well, behind a wall, which however put him directly across from the Scythean.

I must admit to not have counted the Scythean’s threat range with Leash and Slipstream only once Robin started eyeballing a possible assassination. Luckily there was the wall, which would put Rasheth and DEF 12, which can be missed allready, I had 2 transfers and the Scythean would be at dice -1 on damage rolls due to my Feat and Agonizer. Since it was the hot table Robin eventually decided against the attempt and tried to go for attrition instead. He jammed my Bronzeback up with a Strider to deny me countercharges, went for my Drake with the Scythean, who in a display of poor rolling (Robin tried just to buy attacks and hitting on 7s, which failed) did maybe some 5 damage to my cheeky little bugger and feated positioning the Scythean very dangerously in my backfield.

I ran Rasheth away, put some stuff in the Scythean’s way, destroyed one objective and kept my Agonizers screaming at full lungs. My remaining Gators went for a Ravagore.

Robin finally killed the Drake I think, the Gators and also tried to kill the Bronzeback with Incite up, but some below average dice prevented him from dying, so then I charged the Krea in to get the Seraph and Ravagore in her Paralytic Aura and the Bronzeback with Carnivore easily hit and dispatched both of them. I think he had a bit of help from the Sentry.

Things were now really looking grim for Robin, I even killed the Feralgeist with a nuke from Rasheth and I was in the Zone waiting to destroy the second objective and start dominating like a proper Dominar. Vayl managed to crit freeze the Bronzeback and due to damage he couldn’t shake it. My Gladiator was ready to smash the objective but first I tried to tickle Vayl a bit, since she didn’t have any transfers, the Krea tried to paralyze her but missed. The Sentry however trampled over, bought an attack, boosted, HIT and boosted again and that was it.

Admittedly Robin had some bad dice throughout the game, I rolled well but on another table Janos had some good dice against Martin’s Legion, hitting some important Bane attacks on 8’s and won a close game, so the overall dice luck balanced itself out. I was the only one with a win from our team and thus we lost the round. Zee eevil Germans turned out to be realy great guys, even the Belgian was OKish and we went for a great dinner just around the corner in a very nice Indian restaurant.

This leaves us with 2 more games to go for the event, which will include the spanking of a good old friend of mine and one very shamefull experience concerning a big fat man and a littel blond girl. If all stars align well, I’d like to finish this report in an earlier special edition article so that next friday I can tackle a new topic – some musings regarding the published WTC lists. After that I’d like to share my games from the European Masters with you and a possible tournament caster lineup change for me resulting from the tournament.

Martin over and out.