What I learned from a 6-game no hold barred 50+ player GT
This weekend was the Know No Mercy Grand Tournament, run by one of our local Sacramento players. This was the third Know No Mercy, and like the previous two, it was a well run, very fun event. It also deviated significantly from the default mission structure, rules modifications, and FAQ’s that have become the default in most 40k tournaments. It was a lot of fun, but because of the significant deviance from the norm I think there were a lot of important lessons for the community to be had.
The Event:
The tournament itself was 6 games, using a mix of ITC, Nova, and core rulebook missions. There were no erratas used, so Strength D was full power, Invisibility was everywhere, rerollable saves were in full effect, and the whole event in general was straight out of the 40k rulebook (other than the ITC and Nova missions, obviously). We even had to go pick up some tactical cards for a malestorm mission.
Rather than using random swiss parings, players were broken up into brackets for day 1. You only played people in your bracket on the first day, and ITC points were used to seed the brackets. Day 1 basically meant one person from each bracket would advance to the second day undefeated, where they would play each other in their own separate event. Everyone who lost was then shuffled into a loser’s bracket where they played for a second set of prizes using a more normal 3-game swiss pairings.
In attendance was the who’s who of west coast gaming. Steve Sisk, Geoff Robinson, Frankie, Paul Mckelvey, and so on. There were a ton of top-level tournament players, and this definitely was a hyper-competitive event. There were 5 Knight armies, 5 Wraithknight armies, flying circus daemon summoning armies, battle companies, librarius conclaves, space marine thunder wolf ravenwing super-friends, ranged D and invisibility galore, basically any super-nasty list you could think of was represented. Everyone pretty much brought the hardest list they could.
The games:
I’d planned on running my Grey Knights, until the night before I realized I could fit 5 Wraithknights into 1850, and given the nature of the event I just couldn’t say no. I called up a buddy and borrowed the extra WKs I needed, and I was good to go. The list was a minimum Windrider Host, 3 Wraithcannon WKs, and 2 sword and shield WKs. Just barely fits in 1850. I ended up being the only player with 5 Wraithknights, but there was another player with 4, and quite a few other scattered across the tables as well.
Game 1:
My first game was against one of the Left Coast Corsairs, a cool guy who took Sisters, Space Marines, and a Warhound with dual Turbolasers. Mission 1 was straight Kill Points. It turned out to be a very quick game. We deployed across from each other, my opponent won the role to go first. He shot at me, and his turbolasers Str D’d one of my Wraithknights into non-existance, while everything else bounced. I shot back, but failed to roll and 6’s so his Warhound lived. We then repeated this dice-rolling game for several turns, with his Warhound instagibbing one Wraithknight while my return fire whiffed.
Eventually, I chipped his Warhound down (it only has 9 hullpoints). At that point, I had 2 Wraithknights left, but he’d killed off the handful of jetbikes I had, and because he scored so many killpoints and bonus Lord of War points for the wounds he’d done to my Wraithknights, I wasn’t quite able to pull it off. It didn’t help that even after his Warhound died, he kept rolling 6’s on his Adeptus Sororitas Invulnerable saves. I’d shoot my D at his vehicles, St Celestine, remaining 1-sister squads, and every time he’d make his 6++. It really was the game of “who can roll the most 6’s”. When the game finally ended, he pulled out a medium-point victory over me.
Game 2:
This time, I faced up against a Centstar list. 4 Centurions, Draigo, Coteaz, Tigirius, etc. He allied in a Culexus, which he stuck in a fast attack drop pod, and a double-gun Imperial Knight. Everything else was minimum troops.
I deployed my whole army in ruins, and it luckily (for me) was Night Fight turn 1. He Gate of Infinity’d the Centstar close enough to shoot my Wraithknights, but scattered a bit too close towards me. Between 3+ cover and 5+ FNP, the Centstar bounced off one of my Wraithknights. I counterchared with 3 Wraithknights. Unfortunately for my opponent, Invisibility does not stop Stomps. My Wraithknights did a little river-dance, and with so many stomps I eventually rolled a 6. Goodbye Centstar.
In the same turn, I believe I got another lucky 6 shooting at his Imperial Knight, exploding it from across the table. With nothing left but a Culexus and a few min-troops units left, he conceded. The mission had been a Nova mission that ended up not mattering because I won so handily. I’d have had 4 full rounds to grab whatever objectives I wanted, then I’d’ve finished off his last unit for the win. Thanks to Stomp and Str D, this simply wasn’t much of a game.
Game 3:
This time I squared up against a vanilla SM player, with a nothing-too-special bike list in a 4-objective ITC mission. He’d faced a 4 Wraithknight list earlier, and wasn’t looking forward to facing 5. Little did he know that the dice gods were about to bless him like no other.
First, he killed one Wraithknight with Hammer of Wrath. He preemptively charged with a unit of bikes, and with Str 5 Hammer of Wrath, he killed a freakin’ Wraithknight. Then, he Psychic Shrieked an Invisibile Wraithknight, managed to roll a 6 to hit, rolled up 6 wounds, and I failed all but one FNP roll. He then promptly chucked a Krak grenade at me and killed that Wraithknight.
Another psychic shriek killed a third Wraithknight. Grav killed a fourth. He was on a freakin’ roll. With so many bonus points from killing Wraithknights, he was able to win out on objectives. The game was honestly hilarious, the dice rolling was so absurd. Plus, you can’t be mad about losing to a cool guy who looks like Chris Pratt ;).
Day 2:
With 2 losses, I was definitely headed into the loser’s bracket. Because this counted as a separate event, the losers were allowed to play a different army day 2 (the undefeated players who continued on had to stick to the same list). Since two of my 3 games basically game down to stupid dice-rolling exercises devoid of much tactical thought, and my third game was a hilarious underdog story that should have been a stupid dice-rolling exercise devoid of tactical though, I ditched the 5 Wraithknights. I’d had 3 fun games, and it’d been amusing to pull out 5 Wraithknights, but the list itself hadn’t been any fun for my opponents, and it wasn’t much fun for me either.
Instead, I pulled out the list I’d originally planned to play. Grey Knights with Draigo, a Librarian, a Strike Squad, and two Dreadknights, allied to Tigirius with Centurion, plus an Eldar CAD with an Autarch, two small scatterbike squads, and a Wraithknight. Not the friendliest of lists either, but far nicer than 5 Wraithknights. I’d played exactly one prior game with this army, as I’ve avoided playing the Centstar in the past since it was the same thing every other GK player I’ve ever seen does. For today, though, I thought I’d try it out.
Game 4:
I initially got paired up with a particularly notorious member of a particular game club who has in the past cause some severe sportsmanship issues in the past, including getting extremely aggressive to both myself and several friends of mine to the point of us getting ready for him to start throwing punches. As soon as I saw him across from me, I told him that I wouldn’t play him, then found a TO to tell them I conceded my game. One of the other players saw this and knew the history behind the event, and offered to swap opponents with me. Once we got that worked out, I faced up against a Daemon player who turned out to be a very cool guy and we started playing.
My new opponent had essentially ‘the’ competitive Daemons list. Fateweaver, Belakor, a Tzeentch Daemon Prince, a D-axe Bloodthirster, a Heldrake, a bunker with comms array to hid cultists in, and some horrors to hold objectives. While I do get preferred enemy Daemons on my Grey Knights, this was a bad matchup for me since I didn’t have much anti-flyer and Grav is terrible vs Daemons. We were playing pure maelstrom with 6 objectives, pretty much straight from the book (with a couple of very minor tweaks).
My opponent won the roll for turn 1, and went first. He flew his guys all up in the air, Grim’d the Bloodthirster, then cast Invisibility and promptly Perils’d. Belakor failed his grounding check, and dropped out of the sky within range of my Wraithknight.
I pretty much had to take advantage of the opportunity to kill his Invisibility, so the Wraithknight ran forward. The Dreadknights Shunted to get closer to his home objectives while still being able to back up the Wraithknight vs the D Thirster, and my Centstar shot at said Thirster. He made all his invulnerable saves on the Bloodthirster, but the Wraithknight punted Belakor on the charge.
On his turn, he ran his Bloodthirster at my Wraithknight to try and charge it (I took the D guns, not the close combat D Wraithknight). He also summoned an absurd number of heralds that jumped on objectives. He drew several good malestorm cards and jumped up to about 12 to my 3 points. His Bloodthirster failed the 7” charge, though. I counter-charged with my Wraithknight and both Dreadknights.
His Bloodthirster and my guys sat stuck in combat for a couple turns, with me bouncing off his invulnerable save (yay for absurd invulnerable save abuse from Daemons…) while he did a few random wounds to me. I broke Draigo off from my Centstar to join in the fun. Unfortunately for me, my opponent kept making all his invulnerable saves, even after I used Banishment to drop his save and negate the Grimnoire. He then allocated one attack to each of my models, and rolled a bunch of 6’s. Draigo, one Dreadknight, and my Wraithknight disappeared in one go.
With him up by more than 10pts on tactical objectives, my jetbikes dead from the Heldrake, my footslogging Centurions hanging out on their own, and only one Dreadknight left, I called it. His summoning had hit critical mass, and he had like six heralds running around the board and even more coming. I couldn’t kill enough of his stuff, his Thirster was still kicking, and he was drawing all the good tactical cards. We called it at that. Fun game, a cool guy, and another loss for me.
Game 5:
This time I was paired up with the same Centstar player I’d faced round 2 yesterday. A minor snafu, since normally you don’t face the same opponent twice at tournaments, but neither of us minded (since I wasn’t playing the same 5 Wraithknight list). The mission was another Nova mission, where you to either score all your points at the end of the game, or accumulate points by holding objective mid-game, with the ability to pick three secondary objectives off a list of 10 depending on your opponent. Since I had more scoring board presence than my opponent, I chose to accumulate points, and since he had two single-model detachments (his Imperial Knight and his Culexus), I picked the secondary objectives for killing the Culexus, killing a full detachment, and killing all of his min-troops choices.
Since this was a cent-star mirror match, he won the roll-off and chose to go first. He powered up his Centstar, teleported across the board, and shot my Centstar. I’d deployed such that this put him in charge range of my Wraithknight and both Dreadknights, though. His Tigirius also Perils’d and forgot Invisibility the first time he cast it. His shooting killed everything but two Centurions out of the Centstar, but I then prepared to gang up my whole army on him. My centurions and the rest of my shooting killed a few of his models, and then I charged in. Between all my Str 10 attacks, I killed all but one Centurion and Coteaz on the charge, and then stayed locked in to combat.
He’d also ran up his Imperial Knight (which he’d initially cast Invisibility on), with the hope he’d bait out my Wraithknight. Since I’d ignored it, he took the opportunity to try and kill some troops, which its guns did quite adequately. However, in his combat phase, I kicked the rest of his Centstar to death, then my Wraithknight turned around an rolled a 6 on his Str D to explode the Imperial Knight. With only a few min-troops choices left, my opponent conceded. Poor guy, getting a loss off of Str D/Stomp 6’s repeatedly. He was a cool guy, we chatted about lists for a while. I told him I though his list centered too many points on just the Centstar and the Imperial Knight, and that he just didn’t have enough threats in his list
Game 6:
In my last game I faced up against another local player, a solid grav spam SM bike player with a Librarius conclave with 3 Centurion in a drop pod. The mission was 4-objective ITC. He won the roll to go first, lined up his army, and rushed at me.
I’d lucked out and gotten the Stealth Ruins warlord trait, and the whole board was covered in ruins. His Centurions dropped in and did some damage to my Centstar, but Draigo, Tigirius and two Centurions lived, and none of my ‘Knights were hurt. His invisible Librarius Conclave mini-deathstar ran up in my face. I retaliated by assaulting with Draigo and the Wraithknight, while my Dreadknights went after his bike units.
After several rounds of messy combat against a full-powered invisible unit, I managed to chip the conclave down to a few models, and kill most of his bikes, but he killed my secondary units and finished off my Centstar in exchange. My Wraithknight and Dreadknights ran towards his objectives, where his last bike squad and pair of Librarians joined up. I just managed to kick them to death with my Wraithknight, but after the whole game of chasing around impossible to kill grav units he plinked my Wraithknight to death, and brought both Dreadknights down to one wound. A pair of Storm Talons managed to kill off both Dreadknights turns 6 and 7, until the game ended with almost nothing on the table. I had a unit of Scouts on an objective, he had a drop pod and one Storm Talon. He claimed two objectives to my one, and on turn 7 he was able to pull ahead on maelstrom. A super-close game against a cool guy, and a narrow loss.
Some conclusions:
1. With the notable exception of the aforementioned TFG (who is fortunately banned from a lot of the major tournaments and is pretty notoriously known within the local community), everyone was a cool guy. We had fun, talked about lists, joked about crazy dice rolls, and even when someone 6’d something to death with a Stomp or Str D everyone was still joking and having fun. This is, by far, the most uber-hyper-ultra-hardcore event I’ve ever been to, end everyone was having fun kicking the crap out of each other, even if they were losing. If anyone genuinely thinks that competitive players are a bunch of dicks who try and cheat or abuse each other and are all poor sports and it’s no fun to play against them, then you probably haven’t attended many tournaments. Thanks to the ITC/Frontline and a lot of solid clubs and local communities, the west coast has build up a large, solid gaming community where competitive play and fun are not at all mutually exclusive.
2. With everything allowed, the game was not balanced. Every army/matchup/game I saw revolved around abusing a handful of specific mechanics. Space Marine allies could stack rules on rules while hiding behind invisibility. Everyone could spam and abuse invisibility and/or Str D and/or Stomp. Grav was everywhere. Welfare armies with free upgrades/units were everywhere. If you were an army that couldn’t abuse Invisibility, grav, Str D/Stomp, or spam free stuff, you weren’t winning any games. And of those games, matches were frequently determined by who got first turn and was able to alpha-strike their opponent’s Str D/Invisibility first. Lords of War vs Lords of War came down to who could roll the most 6’s. The game was laughably imbalanced, with a very, very limited number of specific mechanics completely dominating the meta.
3. Within the armies that adequately abused the right game mechanics, there was plenty of skill involved. The players who made mistakes (see deepstriking a Centstar right next to 5 Wraithknights) lost, while the top tournament players mostly were still able to play their way to the top tables. The final game was Steve Sisk vs Geoff Robinson in a very tight game, with Steve pulling it out in the last couple of turns. So, while a large part of the game is certainly down to listbuilding, and a lot of game mechanics come down to plenty of luck (what if your Tigirus fails to roll up Invisbility, or your opponent rolls a bunch of 6’s on his Str D/Stomp?), so long as both players take similarly tough lists and the dice rolls aren’t skewed too much in favor of one player or another, skill will win out.
4. There isn’t as much mission variety as there should be. While the pure-rulebook maelstrom mission kind of fell flat on its face (everyone I talked to pretty much agreed that, yeah, it was too super-random and it mostly came down to drawing the right cards), playing core rulebook, ITC missions, and Nova missions at one even highlighted how stale a lot of the standard mission packs are. All of the ITC missions have modified malestorm, and other than the killpoints one is also a multiple-objective mission (and with increased importance of secondary, killpoints is only half of one of six missions). While it’s a great format with fun missions, all the ITC missions pretty much play exactly the same, and it’s heavily skewed in favor of certain armies (battle companies, for example, while elite armies often can’t win without tabling opponents). Similarly, the Nova missions were fun, but seemed like a complete repeat of each other. These standard tournament packets (ITC, Nova) should mix up their games a little bit and come up with some new missions to spice up the tournament scene. I feel like if you go to a Nova event, you’ll just place a bunch of mostly-identical Nova-style missions, and if you go to an ITC event you’ll just place a bunch of mostly-identical ITC style missions. Both are fun, but it would be much more fun to mix it up. Play a Nova mission, play an ITC mission, play something new and fun and exciting instead of very minor variations of the exact same mission over and over again.
5. The ITC nerfs work. I’m sure you can quibble over the details, but virtually everyone had Invisibility. It got freakin’ old. It wouldn’t have been nearly the problem with the ITC nerf, where it’s a useful but not overpowering ability. Same thing with ranged D, though frankly close combat D and Stomp is far more absurd in a completely unfiltered format than Frontline has claimed in the past. This, however, is probably due to the format allowing LOW spam, along with full-powered Invisibility to deliver said assault LOW into combat. Grav was also a notable problem, as bog-standard grav units, Skyhammer, and Centurions were all able to wreck face even in such a hardcore event right alongside full powered Str D (though again, Centurions greatly benefit from Invisibility).
6. A lot of lesser armies were nowhere to be seen. There were one or two Sisters players, but they only did well when allied to a more powerful force. No one was playing Grey Knights, only Draigo allied to Centurions (there were quite a few Draigos out there, I was the only GK player with so much as a Dreadknight that I saw. And on that note, if you think Dreadknights are OP, you’re probably not a competitive player. They did some decent work for me, but they were nothing compared to the far, far, far, far nastier things out there). CSM was only taken for Belakor and the Heldrake. Etc. The wide spread of armies that has been notable of late at Frontline’s ITC events was nowhere to be seen here. There were a lot of very similar repeat lists, and they pretty much boiled down to who could abuse certain specific mechanics most efficiently.
7. Space Marine Super-friends is crazy. A giant deathstar of a bunch of Ravenwing bikes with rerollabel 2+ jink saves, Librarius Conclave for Invisibility and psychic shenanigans, Thunderwolf Iron Priests for assault punch, and so on makes for a giant, neigh invulnerable steamroller that laughs in the face of the fact that technically, Blood Angels/Dark Angels/Space Wolves don’t have “Chapter Tactics” chapter tactics, and thus you can stack basically every USR out there into one big unit.
8. At the end of the day, everyone still had fun. This whole venture was one grand, ambitions experiment and a giant departure from the tournament norm. Even if it, in my opinion, validates a lot of things like the ITC nerfs to Str D, Invis, and rerollable saves, it brought valuable lessons and highlighted some areas for improvement in the tournament norm (in particular, more variety in missions). (Also, standard maelstrom still sucks for competitive play.) But, again, the event as a whole was a blast, and I saw people there having a ton of fun.
