Battle Report: pAsphyxious v. Strakhov 35pts

I had an awesome game today at the Toy Soldier against my friend Mitch. He's been playing Warmahordes way longer than I have, so I was a bit intimidated. Among the several armies he plays, Khador is his favorite; and that's what he played today. I played with pAsphyxious and brought a fairly straightforward list with 2 nightwretches, min Bane Thralls with UA and Tartarus, and a reaper/siren/WSC combo. Gorman provided cover and the skarlock ate dick.

Mitch played Strakhov, who I'm not too familiar with despite being the first Khador caster I played against. He brought a spriggan and a devastator...gross. Winterguard Riflemen with Gregorovich, Greylords, and a wardog. He also had some nasty Iron Fang Uhlans. Those are awesome models...

I won the roll to start with a 6 and chose to deploy second. I've been trying this lately thinking I can take advantage of Cryx's speed. I really don't think its worth it. I'm gonna choose first from now on. Deployment was fairly straightforward. My reaper wasn't placed in a very useful spot but it turned out to work in my favor.

The first round was simple advancement. I got Scything Touch up on my Bane Thralls with the Skarlock and put some cloud effects out. Not much happened.

Round 2 started off with a bang, my Bane Thralls got charged by the Uhlans and one of my nightwretches was also hit by an impact attack. All in all, I didn't lose much. 2 Bane Thralls made their tough roll while another died. Commander Borscht sang songs for the Motherland and the Skarlock took 10 boosted shots to the face. Okay that's an exaggeration, he took a few and they also wrecked a Nightwretch. The Greylords moved through some forests and presented a threat next turn with their spray templates. But now I'm getting ahead of myself.

I charge the Uhlans with Bane Lord Tartarus and decide to go shithouse. My thresher hits 2 of the Uhlans and my nightwretch and one of my banes. I kill both Uhlans and the Bane, and leave the Nightwretch severely crippled. I created 2 Banes and placed them 3 inches ahead, in prime chargin' range of the Spriggan. I decided to focus boost the Nightwretch and run him into the Greylords to engage/annoy the leader.

Now, here's where I probably fucked up. Maybe not. I only really had 3 Banes in charge range of the Spriggan and didn't think I could wreck it, so I decided to use them as a front line and countercharge next turn. That's really all that happened that turn.

The Spriggan shot some grenades at my Banes and with some really lucky scatters the blast hit my standard bearer, killing him. In a total moment of noobness I hadn't left another Bane within an inch, so they all lost Tough =[  I took a lot more shots from the Winterguard, but luckily my banes/Gorman were concealed by a cloud and it took quite a few shots to kill anything. Gorman lived with 2 damage and another bane died. Tartarus also took some major beef brisket, leaving him with 2 damage left. Strakhov moved up and took 3 shots with his bullshit cannon, but luck kept tartarus alive. Next turn I would have my revenge.

This turn, and ultimately the game, probably could've ended in 1 activation. But I felt like I had to be sure. The first thing I did was harpoon the Spriggan, boosting my hit and damage rolls. I only did 2 or 3 damage with the Harpoon, but that was enough to reel him in. The Withershadow Combine was quite ready to charge in, but a Bane Thrall stood in my way. I activated the Thralls next and charged 5 at the Devastator, and 1 each at a Greylord. Good times were had on the Devastator, but genenerally mediocre rolls and the fact that I hit separate columns on each roll left him with full systems. This especially sucked because now he was ready to blow up 5 of my Thralls. Sadface. One of the Thralls managed to kill a Greylord while the other whiffed.

Now that the charge lane was cleared, I charged in the Withershadow Combine to hopefully wreck the Spriggan. P+S 13 + 4d6 is pretty nuts, not to mention I had debuffed him down to ARM 17. Admonia delivered the killing blow and I spawned my very own Seether. This left me with some interesting options as to how I could proceed.

I decided to activate Tartarus and go for it. I charged Strakhov but made contact with the dog first. Tensions were high as he took his counter-charge attack, seeing as Tartarus only had 2 damage left. The dog ended up hitting and I shit myself. Luckily for me, he rolled a 1,1,2 on the damage roll. Safe. I took a thresher attack at the dog and Strakhov. The dog took 9 damage, taking him out of the picture. Then it was Strakhov time. Luckily, he had used up all his focus last turn boosting attack and damage rolls. I barely hit him, but the hit was hard. Something like 6,6,5,4. Strakhov was reduced to a puddle of gore and Tartarus earned the name Bane Lord Awesomesauce.


You done good.

Overall the game was awesome. I was fairly intimidated at first but in the end I had a pretty firm victory. Winterguard Riflemen are really quite nuts, and they became a huge concern for me. I think the main thing I learned is not to let people go first. Especially with Cryx. I hate having to be on the defensive, that's what I should be making my opponent deal with. No more of that. Especially considering I have a knack for start of the game rolls, it's almost always my decision and by god I'm going first.

Cryx V. Menoth: A Teaching Game

Tonight has been pretty fun so far! Mike came over for some more mans painting and instead of working on Tartarus I ended up playing a battle box game with my 16 year old sister. She's super annoying and her name is Jaime. The game was really fun though and I feel like she picked it up pretty quickly.

I don't actually own either battlebox...well technically I bought the Menoth one but it didn't have the Repenter so I just got reimbursed for it. A Devout filled the role. I played a Cryx list using Asphyxious instead of Deneghra, mostly since I haven't painted my Deneghra I got for free and am instead waiting for the plastic battlebox version. Enough of these boring details.

The game was pretty straightforward. I first introduced the different types of models and explained the importance of the Warcasters. We played a basic assassination scenario. There were some both exhilarating and depressing rolls throughout the game. Jaime arced an Immolation through her revenger and crippled both movement and arcing on my nightwretch. Ouch =[. She then charged my other nightwretch with her revenger(loaded with 3 focus) and nearly wiped out my Nightwretch. I think he had 2 health boxes left.

I didn't think much of it because I had a slayer ready to charge when my turn came around. Wellp. My turn came around and I did a total of 5 damage. Revengers are OP. I should've combo strike'd.

I was going easy on my sister in general so I charged her Crusader with pAsphyxious to show her how crazy feats can be. My plan was to introduce feats to her on my turn and then let her kill me with Kreoss' feat on hers. I wrecked the crusader with the help of Consuming Blight and left him there with 4 focus camped, instead of teleporting to safety as I probably would've done.

Shit hit the fan for Jaime on her turn. I told her I wasn't going to help her out this turn, but ended up explaining again that killing the warcaster ends the game, and told her that Kreoss is more than capable of fighting. She charged and popped her feat, knocking down all my models. I was glad and fully expecting a focus hogging Kreoss to kill Asphyxious. In the end, after letting her reroll tons of rolls, Asphyxious was 4 damage short of dying. I should've wasted those last 4 focus last turn, but Asphyxious with ARM 20 was too much apparently. She did light him on fire, but it only ended up doing another 2 damage.

The next turn I killed Kreoss because I didn't know what to do. She still had a lot of fun though and is talking about getting her own army, but she's poor and probably won't. But who cares. Good ol fashioned family fun.

And no, I'm not spelling her name wrong. My parents really did name her Jaime.

In other news, my wonderful amazing girlfriend is going to give me her digital camera so I can take tons of pictures! She's the best. She's also trying to figure out what to cosplay as at PAX East this spring. As cool as it'd be to see her dressed up as a warcaster or something, I don't think it's very likely. I never fully appreciated how abstract Warmachine/Hordes character design is until I suggested my girlfriend dress up in it.

Mans Painting I: Part 1

This will be a bit of a preview post and a reflection on my night, as well as the introduction to a recurring post. Every Monday night my friends come over with some stuff and we all paint and talk and be merry. We call it Mans Painting, because we paint tiny mans. I plan on recording my work each night and posting it here for future reference and inspiration.

Tonight I worked mostly on the Skarlock I mentioned earlier. The model doesn't really feel finished to me yet and I'm not quite sure I'm happy with it. I loved painting the green soul that wraps around him and I think I put more effort into painting it's face than the Skarlock's face. I experimented some more with glow effects and reflections after having a good time on pAsphyxious. I decided to paint the Skarlocks exposed bone in more of a bleached bone color as opposed to white because Sarah said the bone on my bonejacks was her favorite part. I also feel like if living skeletons were real they would be offended by all the things that portray them as clean and glistening white. Overall, it's pretty good.

I really wish I had a camera, but unfortunately my Motorola Q is packin' a legendary 1 MP camera. It's pictures look kind of like what happens when you squint after yawning and your eyes are all teared up. Only blurrier. Anyway, I'm going to try to find a camera to use tomorrow so I can get some picures up and record a step by step of a one Bane Lord Tartarus.  I have some ideas for him...I was never a fan of the swirly water base type thing, whatever it is. To me it looks like water. Anyway, seeing as Tartarus himself is a tortured and demented soul, I think I'm going to paint that swirly base as a swirling storm of souls. I'm excited for how it will come out, but that's for tomorrow.

Here we go

Hello dear readers. I'm starting this blog after being inspired by my lovely girlfriend Sarah, who just started a blog of her own.

I'll be using this space for multiple purposes. Mostly, I'm going to use it to chronicle my progress in painting models for Warmachine/Hordes. Warmachine is a tabletop game that I started playing a few months ago with a couple of friends. If you weren't aware, I'm a huge nerd. Anyway, arguably my favorite part of the game is painting the awesome little models, so you can expect lots of pictures of my progress, and maybe even a few tutorials. There also may be some posts on my endeavor to get my girlfriend to play Warmachine with me. That should be a real treat.

I started off playing Menoth(praise fire) and have collected quite a large force. Unfortunately, Menoth's shiny gleam has worn off for me, and the Dragonfather calls. Cryx has always been my favorite army, and I'm kind of confused as to why I never started with them in the first place. Ohhh yeah, thats right; I figured they would be the most common faction and I didn't want to be a copycat. Sucks for me, since after I bought a ton of Menoth stuff some people at the Toy Soldier(LGS) yelled at me for being "another" Menoth player. Oh well.

I've started up on Cryx with the stuff I already had after a short hiatus from war gaming in general. I recently painted some bone chickens and pAsphyxious, along with a reaper. My Skarlock is up next, and you can expect pictures shortly.

I'm also interested in Legion of Everblight. I have yet to play Hordes aside from dicking around with the MK.II playtest rules a while back, where I proxied a few games as Skorne and Trollbloods. Legion has some really cool looking models, but I'm really only interested in a select few of them. Actually...I say that now, but if i were to look through all of them right now I'd probably want at least 2/3 of them. Either way, a few months from now I may consider starting a nice small army of Carniveans and eThagrosh and Scythean's galore. One of those nifty all-beast armies appeals to me.

Now, aside from Warmachine and me being a huge flaming nerd in general, I may occasionally blog about other random crap. My interests include my girlfriend Sarah(#1), cooking, and teaching myself Japanese. Who knows where I'll go with this.

Thanks for reading
またね