My First ATC...Ouch!!

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 6^th 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 5^th 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 7^th Edition will love more.