SoCal Open 2021 Coverage

It has been too long, but we are back with covering events! So lets start with this the almost 200 person 40k Tournament the SoCal Open 2021, brought to you by the venerable Frontline Gaming folks. This is very wide open event with the Art of War Team not in attendance, meaning that someone you don’t expect might make it to the top.

This doesn’t mean we don’t have some competitive 40k top player power. Number 3rd Ranked Sean Nayden and  7th Ranked Colin McDade are in the house, as well as defending champion Brian Pullen and previous SoCal & ITC champion Brandon Grant. The West Coast has certainly been lagging in the ITC points overall, but that is mostly thanks to the tougher Covid restrictions in this part of the USA, leading to fewer events.

As for the coverage, we will be doing the usual, Facebook live feeds along with pictures and hot takes from the various games as they happen, along with recaps for each day. As usual, Day 1 is really the feeling things out day, with hard coverage starting on Day 2.

 Check back parodically October 22th to 24th for Continuous Coverage

Round 1

As is typical, the event got started 20 minutes late, but the only real controversy / annoyance was player placed terrain, now while this is basically how the 9th is intended to be played, it is just an added step that for most games is really unnecessary especially for players that won’t be competing for podiums.

As for the games themselves no surprises as Sean, Colin, Brian, and Brandon all won their games, Junior Aflleje ranked 23rd in the ITC though did lose with a high loss, more surprisingly the loss comes with him switching from his typical Blood Angels to Drukhari.

I did find one amazing conversion I just had to share

Round 2

Round two say Sean and Colin win, but reigning champion Brian Pullen lost his game. Still with the amount of players at the event currently, it is possible for a person with one loss to still make it into the Final 8 Championship rounds.

Also here is another cool pic from Round 2.

Round 4

Looks like we had some minor drama on with two Texians duking it out on Top Table 4, and we had some chair throwing tantrums and strategic reserves shenanigans with judges all around. Other than that though it has been a pretty chill round for with Brandon Grant still looking like he will his game on table 8, Brandon eventually lost a low scoring point game against surprised Hive Mind army. As for the top 3 tables have to go to the frontline twitch streams to find out! I did though run a video for start of the round below.

Round 5

No new Drama to report, but we have a super interesting undefeated list of Dark Angels, Drukhari, Ad-Mech, Orks, Slannesh Daemons, and Genestealer Cults + Tyranids. Going to take some more pictures and post them when I have them. There is a lot to unsettled as we will most likely get 5 players with 1 loss going into the top 8!

Round 6

This was the round where the meta took over and the usual suspect army cleared out the remaining chaff. The Top 8 going into the single elimination finals is what we all expected. We have 3 Drukhari, 2 Ad-Mech, 1 Orks. This left us with the great meta hope of Dark Angels and Chaos Daemons to try and break into the heavy favorites. As or coverage I am going to leave it to the big boys at Frontline gaming and their Twitch Stream.
https://www.twitch.tv/frontlinegaming_tv

But before I go I will leave you with this pictures I took at the event as well as a bit of rant on the current state of 9th edition.