Introduction

Hola my dudes and dudettes, Scott Horras “Heresy” here with my debut Goonhammer article. Today I’ve got a hot and spicy 2-1 RTT performance recap for you all to be marginally disappointed with. Oh yeah, I make my memes in Paint. Deal with it.

Event Details

This weekend I hit up the monthly RTT (Rogue Trader Tournament for the newbies out there) held at Bel Air Games in Bel Air, Maryland, which had 22 attendees. As the name implies, Bel Air Games hosts a monthly 40k ITC tournament series with a quarterly GT circuit in conjunction with Titan Games and Hobbies. From my perspective these two stores form the nexus of the MD competitive community. The meta ’round these parts tends to be pretty cutthroat with some interesting twists which I think are fairly uncommon across the rest of the US.

First off my team, Peace through Dakka, tends to show up in force at these events. We typically have anywhere between 5 and 8 of our 10 members at any given event. This results in a bit of a ‘PtD Thunderdome’ effect with PtD players body slamming each other every round after the first (thanks, BCP pairing algorithms!). This typically results in some extremely satisfying shit talk and some delicious, salty tears from vanquished teammates. To be honest, friends dunking on each other in 40k tournaments is what gets me through the work week.

The second thing of note is the interesting mix of terrain and missions we tend to use here in the MD meta. We use “NOVA Ls”*, made famous by the NOVA GT, on all of our tables in combination with the ITC Champions Mission Pack for the vast majority of our events, with no ‘enclosed’ ruins.

*Editor’s Note: The NOVA L is a large, L-shaped piece of terrain that blocks line of sight. Usually, two are placed in the middle of the battlefield mirroring each other. For an example of this, see the photo of a battle below.

Finally, we use chess clocks on EVERY. SINGLE. TABLE. While this requires a little on-ramping for newer players to our scene, it means that EVERY. SINGLE. GAME. is played to completion. Admittedly I was very skeptical of chess clocks when our scene first moved to them, but now I have to say it’s perhaps my favorite thing about the MD meta. It takes so much pressure off of you as a player to KNOW that the game will go to completion. Knowing you’re never going to have to try and drag your opponent to turn 6, it takes away the nasty lurking threat of getting scummed (intentionally or not) by a 3-turn game and gets rid of any question whether another player is using a disproportionate amount of time.

My List

I brought my Imperial Guard with a Knight this weekend. I’ve been running a similar tournament list to this for about 15 to 18 months at this point, juggling around about 300 to 400 points between iterations to try and feel out what I prefer. I’ve recently switched back to Cadian after running Catachans Chads for a number of months because I felt the pain of trying to address 3 Flawless Host Discolords one too many times. For the record, I think I only had to play against them twice before I decided I wanted to try and dumpster that match-up in a single turn of shooting address that match-up with Relic of Lost Cadia rather than 90 buff idiots Guardsmen punching them to death with S4 AP0 bayonets (Chads + Straken + Priest).

Anyways. The general game-plan for this list to attempt to shoot down the biggest target each turn through use of the Overlapping Fields of Fire stratagem (which for 2 CP gives all Cadian units in the army +1 to hit against a unit that has already been wounded by another Cadian unit), while protecting the Tank Commanders from the nastiest of my opponent’s shooting. While doing this, I’ve got the Gallant acting as either a counter-charge or a punchy threat. I run him as House Terryn for the Glory in Honour! stratagem (this lets him fight twice for 3 CP). The ability to pretty reliably move + advance + charge 26″-28″ (using the Land Strider Warlord Trait and Full Tilt stratagem) and then fight twice when you get to your target turns this little guy into an absolute bowling ball if you need him to do that. Meanwhile, I have Company Commanders able to order my idiots Guardsmen onto objectives to score my progressive points while the tanks and artillery are doing the heavy lifting.

All in all, it’s meant to be a take all comers list that has some way of engaging with or addressing a wide variety of threats out there.