The ATC has come and gone.
This was my first year to play in it and it was an interesting
experience. It brought a lot of things
home for me that have been bubbling deep down in the bottom reaches of my
brain. The issues that I am gonna
discuss are varied and I am going to state multiple times how much this is NOT
the fault of the ATC. The ATC just
happen the be the tournament that really opened my eyes to how bad things are
right now in the game for me.
So here we go. Let us
take a little journey together. First is
my list.
Khan,with bike.
Command Squad on Bikes, 4 LC’S, 1 TH, 4 SS’S, 4 Flamers, 1
Apothecary.
10 Man Bike Squad w/ Melta, Plasma, M. Melta.
5 Man Bike Squad w/ Melta, Plasma, M. Melta.
5 Man Shooty Terminators with Cyclone Missile Launcher
1 Storm Raven w/ Lascannons, M. Meltas
1 Rune Priest in TA.
8 Grey Hunters w/ a Melta gun and wolf banner and Drop Pod
1 Space Wolf Land Raider (Godhammer) with Extra Armor.
I designed this list to be fast, to be in your face and to
play maneuver as needed. Its drawbacks
are obvious. Only three scoring units,
heavily reliant on reserves/ outflanking and it can wilt against sustained fire. So getting the Tau paring three times on the
day one was not what I was looking for.
That being said I thought I could give Tau a run for their money. I could get to them, I could deal with
Riptides fairly decently with the Rune Priest and the command squad is just
brutal against the little chicken tasting xenos. All I needed was for reserves to work in my
favor right. WRONG.
I will go on record as this being the worst time I have ever
had playing in a tournament. And it had
nothing to do with tournament. It is 6th
Edition. I really hate this edition and
it is only getting worse for me. Nothing
I enjoy playing is worth a darn and everything I enjoyed about the game does
not work anymore.
Now I had visions of a drop pod list but in my ignorance of
how the reserve rules work I did not think I could get it to work. I would have been a lot better off. So why such a bad time. I came in to this after actually having done
a lot of research. I knew that I could
not play a lot for practice so I watched a ton of battle reports and listened
to a lot of podcasts who did shows talking about their prep work to the ATC. Very enlightening. Then reviewing our lists against some of the
other lists in the tourney, I really thought we would have done a little
better. My dice were not even
horrible. They failed a couple of key
times but overall they were not bad. I
only had to buy one new brick.
The problem was nothing seemed to work in our favor. If we got the match up we wanted it ended up
on a table that was not good and gave the advantage back to our opponent. This happened in both of my first games. I wanted the Tau but with wide open tables I
had nothing to even try to hide behind.
This was something I had not put a lot of thought in and was really hard
to overcome in game.
The death of assault.
I am stubborn and persistent and I just have not excepted that assault
is dead. BBF wrote an article on this very
blog and I could not disagree more with it.
It is especially dead against the Tau.
Their rules for overwatch make assaulting the last thing you want to do
and for me it is the first thing I want to do.
Miserable.
Winning and losing in a tournament is not that
important. I want some good games. If I lose and it is close and fun then do not
care much. I try to make at least the
top half as I think that represents the club.
We have good players and are a respected group around the
southeast. So I want to represent. Chris and Shane cannot put on a bad
event. Anything they do you know it will
be done right. Could they do things to
improve or tweak…yes. Will they? Yes.
So I do not want this to be ATC bashing.
This format in 5th and I am in hog heaven.
So no more tourneys for me.
I cannot justify taking time off and missing games and stuff with the
kids to go to a tournament and not get to play a fun list that is reasonably
competitive. If all you want in a game
is sit back and shoot or build a list that just moves forward and takes shots
then keep on playing in them. I hate
that. I simply refuse to spend money on
tournaments when the edition hates me.
So I gonna settle for my occasional night at the Keep. Gonna try to hit the Boro and play there
some. Gonna work on my marines and add
some of this new coolness that is coming out.
Painting, building and what not needs to be done.
Maybe 7th Edition will love more.
