Miracle of miracles, I won today. Not a huge win, and against an opponent almost as bad as I am, but I won none the less.

First off was some statistically better-than-average rolling on my wards.

I played a 1000 point game, with two 9-man squads, 20 archers in a huge block, and 3 heroes--a paladin, a BSB, and a Damsel (found a model I liked, thank God).

Just having the damsel helped immensely, as I was no longer terrified of his magic (enemy was high elves with archers, spearmen, scout archers, a Wizard, and two bolt throwers). In the shooting phase, the archers proved to be a tasty target, and too large to kill in one fell swoop from long range. By deploying my knights behind cover, I took the Blessing and let the archers flee off the board after wasting his opening salvos.

I began my march forward in a giant pincher, with my uber-squad on one side and my other moving up to draw off the bolt thrower fire. The uber squad hit his scout archers, then locked on their flank with his spearmen. Irrefutable challenges forced his nobleman into a fight with my Paladin, preventing lots of S4 attacks against my 2+ save nkights. The "damsel" shut down his magic phase by preventing the only worthy target unit from being selected. I meat grinded him on this end of the table, and on the other side charged in my knights against the large block of archers on it's narrow flank. When they broke, I ran them all down and pushed forward into the rear of the spearmen. On the next turn, they turned back around and then moved back toward his bolt throwers (not in the same turn) so that he did not have easy LOS on the large squad over the smaller one. The game ended here, with two squads of knights about to bear down on his last heavy weapon choices.

Wish more of my games went this way.