My opponent this evening was Jim (as if anyone reading this blog is surprised by that anymore) but the game had a slight twist - we swapped armies. I used his Cryx and he used my Magnus list. It was an interesting game, but much longer than I was expecting - we were almost the last people to leave G3 tonight. I used Deneghra and was under the sad delusion that she would swoop down the table and assassinate Magnus in a flurry of spells. Instead the game turned into a brutal slugfest until we only had about 4 miniatures each left.
The luck o' the dice were a bit strange this game, Jim started off very well and my luck wasn't that great at the start. As the game progressed though it got to the stage when Jim couldn't hit the broad side of a whale and my rolls got better and better. I did beseech the Dice Gods on the last dice roll of the game though and they pulled through for me, giving me easily enough damage to take down Magnus.
Though I won I have to say my tactics were a bit poor, I lost the soul hunters almost immediately and could have lost my machine wraith very early if not for some poor dice on Jim's part. If I'm honest though I was using the machine wraith as a board denial piece to stop the Frenzied Mangler from churning through all my mechanithralls. Jim said I didn't use it aggressively enough and that I could have used it to deny him focus, but he didn't use any focus to do anything except launch the Obliterator Rockets to blow up my soul hunters and a bonejack. On most turns Jim probably had enough focus to detonate my machine wraith with no hassle. As a board denial piece it was a pretty useful tool. Definitely something to remember for next time (if ever) I play Cryx.
Fighting against Steelheads with expendable infantry is rather intimidating, their slew of useful abilities meant that getting my McThralls near them was asking for trouble. I foolishly charged a couple of the Steelhead Halberdiers with my McThralls, only to remember that the Halberdiers have Set Defense ('defence' has a C in it you foolish Americans!). Poor McThralls have a hard time hitting things with that high a defence. Forfend didn't help either.
My MVP was Darragh Wrathe and his Hellfire spamming. Even without his soul hunter buddies Darragh did an awful lot of damage. On Deneghra's feat turn he wrecked the Mangler (thus relieving me of one of my major problems). He should have died on the second last turn of the game when Jim charged him with Magnus and had a Renegade ready to kill the dismount but the luck was all stacked on my side of the table by then.
This is my first victory against Jim though I wasn't using my normal army. He did remark afterwards that Magnus seems to run out of juice once all his self-sufficient troops are dead - this is something I've come to to know when I was running a single specialist unit: once it's all gone, you're boned. Of course we've scheduled another game next week, regular armies however. I'll have to come up with some way to counter Vlad...
No comments:
Post a Comment