Speak to me Goose

A defeat and quite a chastising one last night. We assumed that our twin Land Raider with Mephiston list would merrily tear its way through anything put in front of it. However, even with hammer units you have to choose your targets carefully and that's something we didn't do. So, let's have a look what went wrong and see what we can do about it.

Mephiston

We charged him into Michael's Wolf Lord on Thunderwolf an he easily cut him down in one round of combat. However, having done this he left himself open to being shot by pretty much everything on the board. In the end he failed a bucket load of 2+ saves, 4+ cover saves and 4+ Feel No Pain rolls. We clearly suffered from "ooh shiny" here. We'd only taken Mephy once before and he did pretty well but you never really learn how to use a unit until you've used him several times. With Mephiston, since he has such a high Initiative and since he can cast his S10 power in your opponent's Assault Phase, you can almost risk him being charged. If Michael's T-Lord had charged him, he would have cut him down and then been free to charge again on our following turn. We should have gotten him into combat with one of the bigger Troop squads as well. The Lord was never really going to be that much of a threat whereas the Grey Hunter squads could actually win the game.

Overconfidence

Again, we thought our list was amazing and we thought that we could do no wrong with it. Big mistake. We managed to Steal the Initiative on Turn one and off we drove towards the middle of the board. In fact what we really wanted was for Dave and Michael to come to us a bit more. As it was we tried to engage them in very cramped conditions which made it hard for me to get all of my Blood Claws into combat. Speaking of which, we had a choice in our turn 5. Either try and kill half a dozen or so Assault Marines and a Librarian and take a draw or charge across the board and try and steal a win. Again, overconfidence led to us choosing option two. Then, our Land Raider became immobilised on Difficult Terrain and the Blood Claws couldn't really get into combat with the models that they needed to. Of course on their Turn 5, the jump packers joined what was left of this combat so there was no way we could even have won if the game had gone to Turn 6.

Forgetfulness

Not a big one this but worth noting nonetheless. I had a Wolf Tail Talisman on my Wolf Priest. I only took it because I had five points to spare. However, it would have given me a 1 in 3 chance of stopping the Librarian's Might of the Ancients power effect the Blood Claw squad. That could have meant that instead of killing on 2s he would have needed 4s. Okay, not really relevant in this game but it's one of those little things that's easily forgotten in the heat of battle.

Andy's Dice

We were a team so we're not going to apportion any blame. However, Mephiston has a 2+ save and Flamestorm Cannons kill Marines on a 2+. I don't think I've ever seen Andy roll so many 1s. He never rolls like that when he plays against me!


Clearly the last one is a joke but we need to sort out the first two if we're going to stay with this list. Land Raiders are good but they're by no means indestructible and the squads inside need to pick their targets better as does Mephiston. As always, we got a bit caught up in the killing and forgot about the actual mission. Plus ca change.