My worst loss in Warhammer ever :-)

Hi everyone,

So the title really says it all. I played a game of 40k today and I've never lost as badly as I lost today.

I lost Belial and 25 terminators in 5 turns. 

I dealt one wound to one model on the other side. That's it!

Here are the culprits. My opponent brought a Draigowing army list which was just a massive rock to my scissors. 

I brought (after new codex points shuffling)
 -Belial with sword and storm bolter
 - 5 command terminators with TH/SS, Cyclone and apothecary
 - 2x 10 terminators with 3 TH/SS,  Cyclone, Assault Cannon, storm bolters.

My opponent had.
 - Draigo
 - Coteaz
 - 10? Paladins with 4 psycannons, apothecary, banner, a few halberds, a force stave, two daemon hammers, psybolt ammo.
 - Dreadknight with incinerator, psycannon, sword and jump pack.

Essentially what killed me was rock paper and scissors. 

Through stacking psychic powers and Draigo's abilities my opponent had:


 - Rerolls to hit.
 - Rerolls on wound rolls of 1. Since a number of weapons were wounding on 2+, that was nice.
 - Ignoring cover saves (for the rending psycannon shots).
 - Rerolls to hit in combat.
 - Automatic force weapon activation in combat (from the banner) making the apothecary useless.
 - Instant kill on Belial in a challenge for the above reason.
 - Selective look out sir rolls to make it very hard to kill anything.
 - The magic warding stave wand of success. I delivered six Instant Death thunder hammer attacks and all of them were placed on the warding stave model, who made his 2+ invulnerable saves. 

I know that the game rules are an abstraction and can be used in different ways to fluff any semblance of reality but it was annoying as hell to have Draigo able to effectively jump in front of any bullet from side to side to protect his unit, unless he didn't want to, when another guy would step in to be the bullet shield. Then the Deathwing terminators ran foul of a ninja Grey Knight who danced along the front of the melee and intercepted every single hammer blow heading toward his comrades. 

It may be a cinematic game in this edition, but this time I felt like I was the Agent Smiths going up against Neo in the matrix with support from Harry Potter and his wand ;-)

It was a frustrating game because it felt like every advantage was with my opponent. Every failed dice roll was re-rolled. Every attack of mine was shunted to a model who it wouldn't take.


Rant over ;-)

Now I have to admit that my opponent played well, played to his strengths and did nothing that could be construed as bad in any aspect of play. What we had here was simply a case of a Deathwing army lacking the tools to take on a Draigowing Deathstar army and consequently suffering to this mismatch. 

My problem at the moment is that I do not have the models necessary to change up the list and play with something new so playing against Draigowing just isn't a good game for me now. I'm getting a couple of boxes of the new Deathwing models and with a few bodies etc from a bits website I should be able to field something a bit different. I'm also thinking of getting a proxy for one of the fliers, just to bring something new to the field. More about that in the next post.

All the best folks and avoid those rock and scissor matchups ;-)

Pete