Game two was against Dark Angels, an enemy I have a fair bit of experience going against now. There are a lot of Ravenwing fans where I come from! This army was a mix of raven and regular, with the seemingly obligatory Sammael leading them to unlock some bike troops choices. The army consisted of a big Ravenwing squad, an attack bike, a couple of speeders, some Black Knights and then, rather incongruously, a squad of scouts, an Aegis Defence line with a quad gun and a Vindicator. Fortunately for me, the mission rules were against my opponent slightly. The main objectives were kill points, with Fast Attacks being worth two points apiece and if the opponent’s entire Heavy Support was destroyed, you got a bonus three. As I was only packing one Fast Attack choice and three Heavies, and my opponent was the other way round, I definitely had the rules in my favour. He started off with a very defensive setup. You know that you can do things in the game that make tactical sense as far as the rules go, but don’t really fit in a narrative or cinematic sense? This was one of those examples. He used his defence line to form a rough corral and stuck his Vindicator in it. It makes sense rules-wise, but who goes around fencing in their own tanks?
Anyway, he took first turn and tried for a cheeky first blood, with a scouting multi-melta Attack Bike and one of my Soul Grinders. It’s always a risky proposition that. When the melta failed to do anything noteworthy, the bike was swiftly annihilated, giving me the first blood instead. He was just in range of too much of my stuff to last the turn. There were a couple of interesting things that happened in that game, but they centred on the additional special rules. The big special rule for this round was ‘Stuck in the Cocoon’, where one unit of your opponent’s choice would be unable to do anything, or be attacked by anything until they freed themselves. 6+ on turn 1, 5+ on turn 2, 4+ on turn 3 and auto-free on turn 4 (thankfully). I chose Sammael (forcing the bike squad to soldier on without him and separating him out for the rest of the game) and my opponent chose the Bloodthirster. Can’t say I’m surprised at the choice! I’d most likely have done the same thing in his place. But the rules bit me a little hard as Sammael freed himself on turn 2 and my poor Bloodthirster had to wait until turn 4. Arse. To make matters worse, we only got to turn 4 before time was called, so I only had one turn to have him accomplish anything. He jumped out in front of a lone Black Knight, ready to grab a nice juicy kill point for himself, and the Slaanesh butts his/her androgynous head into the game and decides: No, I’ll kill that biker. And I’ll fling two wounds on the Bloodthirster for giggles. I get the feeling it won’t be the last time I call out a god for kill-stealing…
The other big thing that happened in that game was that my Warpsmith challenged a Black Knight Champion, beat him raw and bloodily into the ground and then spawned himself. Surprisingly, that’s the first time that’s actually happened for me. It puts my Warpsmith at one ascension and one spawnhood, so he’s batting average. On the plus side, he didn’t actually die. He spent the rest of the game rambling up the board and ended it tearing some scouts apart. Who could ask for more, eh? Anyway, with the game ending the way it did, it was a pretty big win for my army. There was not enough anti-tank in my opponent’s list to deal with the armour I was bringing and the victory conditions themselves put the situation in my favour regardless. Sometimes you just get good matchups. You just have to play well enough not to botch them!
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