Training games

By TheGraveMind

While everyone has been in a scurry about the possibility of the 6th Ed leak, I've been focusing on perfecting my game in the current edition. With the goal set for a 2k list, it seems everyone is wanting more practice games at that point level. My old Nemesis has been trying out the Dark Eldar, seeing if that is what he will want to build and get ready for the Indy Open. We've played something like 6 games over the past week and a half.

Our first game he tried out the baron and some helions, the Duke, and other such fun things. I had first turn, and managed to blow up both wych raiders with vindicators, killing most of the wyches inside and many of the helions that were behind them. Duke's squad ran, missiles took out some venoms, and Assault cannons tore into raiders and void bomber. By his turn 1, he only had two ravagers and a trueborn squad left and a couple crippled foot squads in the back field. With no decisive shots coming out of his remaining units, we call the game and decided to start anew with him trying a different list.

His next list was something like the following
Lilith
5 trueborn 4 blasters Venom
5 trueborn 4 blasters Venom
9 wyches with agonizer Raider FF
10 wyches with agonizer Raider FF
10 wyches with agonizer Raider FF
10 wyches with agonizer Raider FF
9 Reavers with 3 Heat lances
Ravager FF
Ravager FF
Ravager FF

He had 3 wyches in that raider on the objective in the end. I just couldn't pen the stupid craft.

Both squads had rolled a 1 on their run rolls last turn, so I had to run again this turn to make it to the objective. This prevented me from shooting at the raider with meltas. The raider was immobilized and weaponless, and was at 2.999 Inches and so contested.

 And so our second game that day ended with Him holding one and contesting mine. His first turn shooting was good, and it somewhat trapped me in.

Since then we played a few more games, all the while my Nemesis has slowly fine tuned his list. Each game has been pretty close, with the potential do go either way or end in draws. But most of the time my army seems to run out of steam by Turn 5, and he grabs the objectives or contests and pulls out a win.

After playing almost the same list vs the same list 4 games in a row, I decided to pull out my Tyranids just to have some fun and mix things up. Now I had only played against DE with my tyranids before this week, and those were a horrible slaughter of me getting tabled. So I wasn't expecting a whole lot. We played the GT style, with 5 objectives, then KP, then VPs. 

I started off with horrible shooting and by the bottom of 4th I had only destroyed 3 transports out of 12. But as the smoke cleared and the game ended, I was holding 2 objectives, contesting another, and he had managed to pull a single wych onto a back objective to give him 2 objectives as well. So to KPs for victory, I figured I had lost here, but I still had at least one guy from each squad, and tons of wounds around, while his stuff finally started dying. We counted it up twice to make sure, 8-8 Tied on KPs. We started up the long process of counting up VP. Recounting and checking each others. We had both killed just over 1k of each others stuff.  So the game I thought would end after turn 2, ended up going to tertiary objectives and he only won by about 60 Victory points.

My final verdict? I think DE in the right hands can be a force to be reckoned with. I'm looking forward to seeing how well my Nemesis does in the Indy Open, and I hope I don't get paired against him as well.