It's all a bit of a blur, to be honest. Six team games in two days tends to do that to a man.
Ciaran put out the call for team-mates shortly after Adepticon tickets went on sale. He's good people, so I jumped at the chance immediately. Then, Matt joined us a bit after. What followed was a series of "4th Players" who stepped up and had to step down again for whatever (important) reason. We began to consider the 4th Player slot cursed. Then, not too long before the event, Adán stepped up to the challenge. We were very grateful to him for doing this especially considering he dropped some events of his own in order to play with us.
The concept for our army was, simply put, a Heavy Metal show. Half of the players used Orks (Adán and me) while the other half used Chaos Space Marines (Ciaran and Matt). The idea was that the two bands (Noise Marines for Ciaran and Flash Gits for me) were traveling from planet to planet rocking out and inspiring blood sacrifices in the guise of Metal-fueled rampages. On the Ork side of things, the WAAGH! was being influenced by a disguised daemon (in the image of a red-skinned Gretchin) who had designs of summoning the long-lost Ork, Tuska, from the Warp... presumably for next year's tournament.
Our first game was really tough. All of the players had Eldar with Wraithknights and both of our teams lost pretty handily. The guys were okay enough, though, and the result was rather expected. We gave it the ol' college try, however... retreat wasn't even in our vocabulary!
I did get to fulfill a promise to myself: that I would, at least once, fly around in the kopta with the Shokk Attack Gun (attached to the Slow and Purposeful Meganobz) and shoot the gun from the sky. It was great fun until the kopta was blown up. I didn't do that again.
These armies were quite nicely painted, especially the Contemptors which were standing in for the Ironclads. I'm sorry I didn't get a nice picture of them.
We faced an AV 13 wall Necron list in the third (and last) scenario for Saturday. Matt and I were teamed up. This was the Marked for Death mission where only one team member counted for kill points and, much to his chagrin, Matt was the one Marked for Death. This, of course, didn't stop us from being tabled! On the other table, Adán and Ciaran won their game. Of course, this solidified my position on the team as the millstone around everyone's neck!
The second day dawned exciting and new. Ciaran decided he'd like to have the Orks play together one last time and also wanted the band back together for the last game. He also expressed a desire to have a win with each of his team-mates. This made good sense to me. In the first game, Adán and I played against a horde Marine army with a small air cavalry detachment. These were some pretty armies for sure, especially the Sons of Medusa which are always so striking with their almost neon green spot color. The player actually mentioned that he'd built this army just for the tournament, but was considering a full collection since so many people had complimented him on it. I'm not surprised.
This battle proved that there just aren't enough bodies in an Ork list. Sure, our lists were rather elite, but even if we'd gone horde, there just wouldn't have been enough left to score. This game was rather close, though. We really gave it our all, but in the end it just wasn't enough to push them off.
This game also had the distinction of being the first double 1s of the convention for the Shokk Attack Gun. Poor Warp Mek Sizzlegrub sucked both himself and his Battlewagon into the Warp.
I don't recall how Ciaran and Matt's game went.
Ciaran and I did put our game faces on for this one. Though we still kept it friendly (and were quite permissive about a few odds and ends rules-wise), I think we made a good showing against a difficult opponent -- Tau and Eldar. Our opponents' lists were not nasty cookie-cutters of all the other Taudar out there. They were very reasonable, in fact, but still quite difficult to deal with.
This shot looks quite ominous, but we were able to push at their flanks and keep them from pushing up the center with the huge amounts of low AP Ignores Cover we were packing. Noise Marines are very good with their AP3 Ignores cover shots with Fearless and Power Armor. They're very, very good. My army was mainly a harrying force threatening the flanks and taking opportunity fire.
This game also had the distinction of featuring the only double 6 rolled for the Shokk Attack Gun during the convention, destroying a few of the Piranhas. I was so excited that I jumped up and down, losing several items out of my Battlepouch.
Both of our teams won our games. While we had a great game and did boast a tactical victory, Adán and Matt on the other table controlled their board with prejudice.
Results
The results of the tournament can be found on the Adepticon website.I was pleased to find out our team scored a 45/55 for theme which is very good, placing us at around 15/120 for that metric. I like to think that the music-playing and light-flashing stage and the sound card Adan bought for the Battlewagon had something to do with our good score! We scored 36/60 for appearance, 13/17 for the quiz, and 19/20 for sportsmanship.
I had a wonderful time with these guys. I love the team tournament and I can understand why it is considered Adepticon's flagship event. It really draws together all the great things about the hobby into a single event, awarding creativity, sportsmaship, and skill. Best of all, you aren't doing it alone; you're hanging out with good people the entire time rather than going it alone against strangers.
Also, as long as the Chaos Gods are cool with us spilling our own blood as the sacrifice, we should see a WAAGH! Tuska army on my workbench before too long.
That's enough for this post. Since I'll be on the train for another hour this morning and then again for three hours tonight, I'll probably get Part 4 posted before the day's through.
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