Flashback Pic + a precursor to Space Marines Impressions

Well, well, marines have a new book, and its chock full of goodies per usual.  The whinings of Chaos marine players have been louder on the grimdarks as of late, with a pretty good editorial about what happened and how good things could have been here.

Background on me, I started playing at the age of 16 when 4th edition first hit.  Being wrapped up in PC gaming, I played the excellent Dawn of War, and remembering attending a gamestore with a friend when we were annoying 11-year-olds and seeing this stuff led me to re-investigate.  I picked up the Maccrage box with my brother who grabbed the Nids and within a couple years I had assembled a formidable space marine army.

With how good the vanilla marine book of 4th was, I played them as just marines, but they were painted like Dark Angels - why? Pretty simple really, Dark Angels were by far the easiest color for me to paint that didn't look terrible and I liked the way their heroes looked.  Here's a picture I took before I sold them off for a criminally low price (having been out of the game for about 4 years I had forgotten mini resale value):

It was 4th edition and assault cannons were in vogue - I still have fond memories of leading hidden powerfists against Nidzilla and attempting to assault Tau crisis suits with my chappy-led assault marines.... Sigh, those days are long gone now.  It was a good time.

Fast forward, skip an edition entirely (I got Black Reach, played it once and that was the last time I played) and here we are in 6th with marines finally getting their update that they had been hurting for for a while.

Apart from the "Thunderstorm" (3 Thunderfire Cannons, 3 StormTalons, fill in the rest with shooty stuff) list I had heard about being thrown around on the 11th company podcast around the release of the Demons/Tau books, there weren't really any competitive builds out there that I was aware of for marines.

I'll be posting some thoughts about it over the next couple of days.  Mostly predictions, maybe a few builds or possibly rants, lol who knows.  As of right now, the only thing I can say is from some glancing through, is that White Scars seem good - like really, really good, with Imperial Fists following them.

I'm not familiar at all with the 5th edition marine codex, so I won't be doing any direct comparisons to older stuff, rather I'll look at it from the standpoint of someone who's come in during 6th edition and seeing what it looks like, and how effective stuff seems based on its costs, etc.

NOVA 2013 Top Armies + Brief Meta Analysis

Looking at the final Top Bracket placement for the Nova Open (via Torrent of Fire) probably won't be that eye-opening to anyone who's been following 40k meta.



No lists sadly, I'm hoping that some of them get posted later so as to see what the pre-dominant builds are (especially as I am still personally fuzzy with the Tau-Dar codices). I'm sure that searching the blogdarks would yield up some more results.

So...

NOVA OPEN GT - TOP 16

Position	Name	Primary Army	Allied Army
1	Justin Cook	Tau Empire	Tau Empire
2	Alex Harrison	Tau Empire	Tau Empire
3	Nick Rose	Eldar
4	Neil Gilstrap	Tau Empire	Tau Empire
5	Matt DeFranza	Eldar	Dark Eldar
6	Jeremy Veysseire	Tau Empire	Eldar
7	Aaron Aleong	Eldar	Tau Empire
8	Adam Tricola	Grey Knights	Tau Empire
9	Alan Bajramovic	Tau Empire	Eldar
10	Ben Mohlie	Necrons	Orks
11	Tony Kopach	Imperial Guard	Space Wolves
12	Brad Townsend	Dark Angels	Imperial Guard
13	Matthew Bennett	Tau Empire	Tau Empire
14	Nick Nanavati	Chaos Daemons	Chaos Space Marines
15	Werner Born	Necrons	Tau Empire
16	Bob Roda	Chaos Daemons

As you can see as the results suggest, Tau and Eldar are just on fire, with the top tournament wins now to back them up.  Tau take up 6 out of the top 16 primary armies (37%), grabbing exactly half of the top 10 lists. Eldar come in next with 3 primaries, and Chaos Daemons follow with 2.  The rest is a smattering of different one-ofs bolstered by yet more Tau and Eldar Allies.  Focusing on just the allies, its visible that Tau have been used to bolster most armies firepower as well.

With the recent talk of Daemons being used to counter/combat Tau, being a Daemons player, I am a little disappointed that they didn't fare better.  It makes sense though that Daemons, while sporting very powerful builds are prone to extremely bad cases of luck (in the case of the Grimoir backfiring, monstrous creatures falling down, the Warpstorm going bananas).  Its just the nature of the way their codex is set up.  As the NOVA open was played over the course of 8 games, Daemons were more likely to run into several bad games due to the dice rolls over time. Tau in contrast to this (and Eldar to an extent) when well played, will be consistently more reliable from game to game.

Looking at the NOVA invitational (which was only played over 5 rounds rather than 8), you can see that Daemons did a bit better taking up the 7th and 10th spots (rather than 14 and 16).  I am interested to see if the CSM allies went beyond running a Helldrake, some cultists and a Black Mace Prince as well here.

Position	Name	Primary Army	Allied Army
1	Aaron Aleong	Eldar	Tau Empire
2	Jesse Newton	Tau Empire	Tau Empire
3	Brett Perkins	Eldar	Tau Empire
4	Adam Tricola	Grey Knights	Tau Empire
5	Matt Schuchman	Eldar	Tau Empire
6	Matt DeFranza	Eldar	Dark Eldar
7	Nick Nanavati	Chaos Daemons	Chaos Space Marines
8	Alex Harrison	Tau Empire	Tau Empire
9	Alan Bajramovic	Tau Empire	Eldar
10	Jeremy Veysseire	Chaos Daemons	Chaos Space Marines

Eldar take the cake for the invitational, with Tau settling in closely at 2nd, 8th and 9th place - Tau allies abound for every Eldar primary (except one),

I'll be extremely interested to listen to Neil Gilstrap's breakdown of differences between his tournament experiences over on the 11th company podcast. He took two armies to play with in the two different tournaments - his Tau scored 4th place overall in the Open, but his Daemon army he brought to play with in the invitational ended up in 32nd (dead last) place.

So, its important to realize this is just a temporary snapshot of the tourney meta scene - as Space Marines drop in I am sure that we will see yet more big shifts as GW unloads their codex updates.  As much as I hope that some new Imperial builds will knock Tau from dominating the top spots, I am more likely anticipating some sort of new Tau/Space Marine power combination will be emerging. 

 

Tyranids at this rate are going to need to be AWESOME if a dedicated assault army is ever going to work reliably in this edition again.  While Daemons can pull some goofy tricks off with the right dice and powers, the nature of their randomness just isn't going to work consistently every game.  That won't stop me from playing with them though as they are an extremely fun list that makes for interesting games for both sides.

Some NOVA Pics

Wow, it's been a while.  I went on an unintended 40k 3-and-a-half month hiatus, which I'm now sad about because it meant that I took a break from playing the game entirely, missing several tournaments, lots of opportunities to game and hobby with friends and also the opportunity to finish up my armies and play in this years' NOVA.  Being only about an hour away from DC, and the fact that I am moving later this year means that its unlikely that I'll ever get the chance to go again to NOVA on the cheap... sadface.

That being said though, me and a couple of pals from my gaming group went over to check out the scene for a day, of which I snapped a few pics.

It was quite the experience to walk through a GT and see all of the fully painted armies, and neat conversions that had been done.  I also saw a few of the "internet celebrities" and players that are known by name for their consistent performance in tournaments.

Entering the tournament hall, seeing around a hundred games going is quite the sight.

Alex Fennel was sporting Pink-dar with Tau allies.  He has a similarly painted Necrons and Grey Knights army that I remember seeing pictures of last year.

I forget his RL name but user HulkSmash was at NOVA sporting a drop pod list with really awesome counts-as drop pods that looked like drills coming out of the ground. Lol his army gave off a Bioshock vibe (probably just the drills/Big Daddys haha) - I found it quite beautiful.

There was a heavy Chaos Demons presence at NOVA and I wish I had snapped more pictures.  This pic, despite being a little blurry was using a couple really cool alternate Tzeentch greater daemon models.

This was a really well done Nurgle Army with Tau Allies that I was a big fan of - I don't remember the fellow who was running this list, but he was using Vortex Beasts as counts as fiends (an idea that I had a while back but didn't follow through on due to lack of $$$), and had used green stuff to make "Doom 3" style growths all over his models.

                                          

The vendor section was also pretty neat, although smaller than I'm used to (I've frequented board game conventions in the past, this was a first for me).  The main attraction seemed to be the Bits Guy who had traveled out from Ohio and set up shop on the bottom floor of the hotel.  He had bins full of "singles" of just about everything you could want including vintage rogue trader stuff.

                                          

The Jawaballs guys were also there selling their painting tutorial DVDs and also displaying Jawaballs' fabulously painted (sadly now in sore need of a codex update) Blood Angel army.

It was a good time, I am planning on posting a light analysis of the tournament results later - sadly no lists yet to look at, but from what I saw, Tau and Eldar were out in abundance, followed by Chaos Daemons, Chaos Marines and Necrons. Apart from Dark Angels, marines and guard armies seemed rather few and far between (being as that Space Marines are about to get their huge update, it made sense).

Overall, it was a nice refresher and recharge to get motivated to painting and playing again.