New England Team Tournament – a tale of pain and sweat
File this one under “how I learned what not to do with epic Asphyxious”.
I actually got a chance to play in the NETT this time so I took two new warcasters for a ride to see what they could do. The first was epic Asphyxious and the second was Venethrax. I ended up just using Asphyxious for all three of my games because I really wanted to learn by trial as I’d never played with him before and only played against him once. Here’s what was in my 35-point army:
Asphyxious
Slayer (have to use those warjack points somewhere)
Withershadow combine
Bane Lord Tartarus
Darragh Wrathe
3 Soul Hunters
6 Bane Knights
10 Bane Thralls
Warwitch Siren
My first game was the only one that I won and I feel bad about it. I played against Craig of the D6 Generation fame. I feel bad about it because my army’s got a reputation as “the beatstick easy button” and Craig hasn’t played WM in a very long time. I won due more to a “gotcha” of him not knowing some detailed interactions of rules and special abilities and the feat than any actual skill on my part or any mistakes on his. Consequently, while I enjoyed our game, I didn’t really learn any great insights about my army or anything.
Game 2 was against a Deneghra list. He brought two full units of Cephalyx drudges, a unit of overlords, a slayer, Canker Worm, and 3 or 4 arc nodes. The scenario was capture the flag, but it didn’t really matter much. I won the roll to start the game and elected to go first. He deployed a unit of drudges on either flank with the slayer to my left, the overlords and Deneghra moving up the middle in a forest, and the arc nodes evenly spread out. I put my Bane Thralls and Slayer on my left, Asphyxious along with the Combine and the Soul Hunters in the center, and the Bane Knights on the right flank.
Turn 1 we both advance, I put up hellbound and I drop out a couple of Caustic Mists at the limit of my control area and right in front of one unit of drudges to mess with his next turn advance. He runs a unit of drudges at me on my right flank and does some random light damage to my Bane Thralls with his Slayer and puts crippling grasp on my Slayer. He also ran the Canker Worm straight up the middle to kill Tartarus. My turn 2 I toss my Soul Hunters right up the middle at him to force the “kill me so I can use my feat or I’ll kill you”. They were also able to tie up the Overlords and a couple of the arc nodes this way. My Bane Thralls trashed his slayer, my Slayer made a mess of the Canker Worm with some help from the Combine’s puppet strings, and my Bane Knights played with the tough drudges – talk about a tarpit unit. I managed to tie up all but one arc node and moved eAsphyxious into position for feat the next turn.
Then, I made the mistake of dropping some caustic mist too far up field to get in the way of his second wave of troops. It probably wouldn’t have mattered in the end because I don’t think I could have covered all the angles and camping focus wouldn’t have helped much. On the top of turn 3, he moved the one free arc node into position, then he moved Deneghrah up just a bit, popped her feat (catching Asphyxious) and spent seven focus giving him a Venom bath. That dropped him to 2 wounds left (would have killed him except for a couple of lucky rolls). That’s when his Defiler I had tied up on the right flank moved, survived the free strike from a Bane Knight, and sprayed my boy down to finish the job. Simple clean kill with basic strategy that I’ve used many times in the past. Lesson learned, don’t get too confident in your own survivability, especially against an army that’s just as good at assassination as you are.
In game 3, I played against epic Caine who’s a counter to eAsphyxious all in himself. This was probably the worst match-up right from the word “go” and I should have seen it coming and chosen to use my Venethrax list here. However, I was trying to teach myself about epic Asphyxious so we went forward with the beating. His list, as best I can remember it, included Caine, a Squire, a minimum unit of Storm Lances, a unit of Stormblades, a unit of Gun Mages, a Hunter, and probably a few other things I’m forgetting. It didn’t really matter. We basically played ‘chicken’ with one another moving into position for the feat turn for the first turn of what became a 2-turn game. I sent my Bane Knights and Tartarus after his cavalry on my left while my Soul Hunters and the Slayer moved to deal with the Stormblades on my right. Asphyxious and his entourage of the Combine stayed in the center opposite Caine.
As it turned out, I mis-judged the distanced by a fraction of an inch and ended up in and uncomfortable position on turn two. I knew he was going to use Caine’s feat this turn and I could either use Caustic mist right in front of Asphyxious to block line of sight to him or put them out further to try to protect some of my army from getting shot to pieces. Because Caine’s feat removes models from play, if I protected my warcaster he’d just blast half my army away and it wouldn’t be available for use during my feat, but the alternative was risking my ‘caster being killed. I have only the heat and the fatigue of several games to use as thin excuses for what happened next. I mis-judged the distance between the two of us and opted to drop the caustic mist clouds in front of his forces instead of right in front of Asphyxious. Unfortunately, Asphyxious and the clouds were too close. Caine took a focus from the squire, stepped forward into one of the clouds (should have put it further from him to prevent that) and popped his feat. He then spent every shot (including the extra shot from Reinholdt’s reload) to fill Asphyxious full of lead. In hindsight, I could have approached this game by using the slayer as a walking shield in front of Asphyxious or better cloud placement, but I don’t think it would have helped me much as this was just an evil match-up and I was facing a very good opponent who obviously knew his army very well.
Overall, what happened to me is what I expected to happen at the tournament. I played three games against three fun opponents and we all seemed to get a good laugh. I made a few mistakes and got punished hard for them by opponents who were more on the ball and I learned a few things in the process. All in all, a good day of gaming.