Gaming Blog: The Virtues of Camping Focus

Jim couldn't make it tonight, it being Carrie's (I may have spelt her name wrong - she's his wife) birthday and all (Happy Birthday Carrie) so instead I played a 350 'practice' game against Dermot and his Trollbloods. Dermot will be playing in the fully-painted 350 tournament in Glasgow at the end of the month. Details to be found here. I won't be playing in that one since I'm going to a wedding the day before. I hope to achieve new heights of revelry mixed with ceilidh dancing.

Dermot's List:
Grim Angus
Bouncer
Impaler
Champions

My List:
Magnus the Traitor
Mangler
Renegade x2
Gorman di Wulfe
Reinholt

The Mangler appears to be suffering some sort of malaise. It dies so damn often and early it's stupid. It didn't help that I have instructed Dermot in the ways of using Mantarp (yes, ManTARP). So anyway, the Mangler died... again... The renegades performed somewhat sub-par, I just didn't have a way to drop the troll armour down to a level where I could reliably do horrible amounts of damage with the shredders. With the death of the Mangler however Magnus had the opportunity to sit on lots and lots of focus. I took the opportunity to use black oil on Dermot's champions every turn that Gorman was alive (so twice) and killed a champion pretty much every turn once Magnus got stuck in. Dermot managed to kill everything in my army except Magnus with his 20+ armour. I managed to kill... 4 champions before the opportunity for a caster kill arrived.

As wins go, this one was very cheesey, and I'll admit that if the game had a time limit of any sort, Dermot would have probably won. Instead, I sat on lots of focus every turn, killed a champion and then laughed off all but two of the damage done to Magnus. This did serve to point out a critical weakness in Dermot's list - he has no way to deal with high armour targets (except the Mangler, but that thing's cursed by Satan or something). Eventually Dermot forgot to move Angus out of Magnus' charge range, so I ate two free strikes (laughing one off and taking a lot of damage from the second, though it was too late by then) and beat Angus to death with Foecleaver. Magnus pretty much won this one himself. Go Traitor go!