I'm fully recovered from NOVA and figured I should do this recap sooner than later before I forget everything. I didn't really take notes and didn't take a lot of pictures during each game but I remember enough to at least give a brief rundown of my matches. Before I get into all of that, here's my army list so you know what I'm working with:
Dark Eldar w/ Eldar allies - 1847
Baron
Archon w/ venom blade, shadow field, combat drugs, haywire grenades, phantasm grenade launcher
Court w/ 3x Sslyths, 1 of everything else in Raider w/ NS
4x Incubi in Venom w/ dual SC, NS
10x Warriors w/ SC in Raider w/ NS, Splinter Racks
5x Warriors in Venom w/ dual SC
5x Warriors in Venom w/ dual SC
10x Wyches w/ haywire grenades in Raider w/ NS, Shock Prow
3x Beastmasters w/ Clawed Fiend, 5x Khymerae, 2x Razorwing flock
Ravager w/ lances, NS
Farseer w/ Jetbike, Shard of Anaris
3x Windrider Jetbikes
3x Windrider Jetbikes
6x Swooping Hawks
A little bit of everything (except anti-flyer) all crammed on this board. My thought process behind this list... I was expecting less flyers in general now that there are more things in 6th to deal with air force lists, plus my army is so fast I can fly behind them and seriously mitigate their damage output (which actually worked out pretty well for the most part). The Farseer & Baron joined the beasts making a semi-star and a nice anchor unit from which to cast powers on the rest of the army. The Archon was typically my warlord and joined the Incubi in their Venom, staying close to the pack and behind the Court's Raider, which was a majority Toughness 5 distraction/suicide unit meant to charge in first and eat overwatch. 6 troops is pretty much mandatory at a GT. The army is pretty much 50 / 50 focused on shooting & assault elements. Pleanty of poisoned dakka and at first glance may seem low on dark lances, but with 3 units packing haywire and 2 more units with high enough Strength close combat attacks to crack armor, the list did alright against high T and AV targets. Psychic buffs also helped a great deal. The weaknesses of this will become apparent as I get into each of my games.
Game 1
Kill points mission against Iyanden Eldar -- 2 Wraithknights, 5 Wave Serpents, Farseer & Jetbikes, Vaul's Support Battery. And my list has 20 possible KPs. This was a tough matchup & mission to start the Open with.
I did what I could, but there was far less LOS blocking terrain than previous years, so there wasn't much hiding from those crazy ignores cover 60" serpent shields of doom. I dealt with the Wraithknights in no time and went straight for the throat against the support batteries & Farseer.
But I couldn't deal with those serpents at range. When I got close, they would just back away and continue to unleash deadly torrent after deadly torrent. By turn 4, I ran some quick math and realized there was no way for me to win and no way my opponent wouldn't win by at least a 4 KP margin, enough to earn max battle points, so we called it there to give ourselves some extra time for lunch. Despite the tough matchup, I was really glad to start the GT off against such a nice opponent; really fun guy to play against, and he definitely knew what he was doing with that list.
Game 2
Pure Daemons list: 2 big packs of hounds, 2 grinders, 2 flying DPs, 2 squads of blue & pink horrors. Mission was objectives, big guns never tire.
I haven't played against many Daemon armies but I was feeling a little better about this match up than the previous one. I deployed further back to soften things up with some shooting as I was pretty sure his army was better than mine in assault.
First turn he powers up and moves flat out on the far flank for the objective on my side of the board. He had his scoring grinders pretty much camping the 2 on his side from the get go.
He covered a lot of ground with those hounds and swooping DP. I move out guns blazing and ground the DP, then focus the majority of my poison on him while setting up a long potential charge with the beasts, but end up taking him out with shooting. My Wyches however pulled off a pretty long charge into the hounds which didn't end well for me; I didn't really land a lot of wounds and couldn't roll that critical 4++ (I really haven't had much luck with Wyches at all in any of my games with them which is sad... I really like their models but I just can't seem to make them work on the board).
Anyway, next turn we get several more of our squads locked into assaults, which took a LONG time to work through each. I'm not sure where the time went for this match, cause before we knew it, time was being called and we were barely to the bottom of 2... Neither of us could believe that much time had passed and it didn't really feel like 2 hours had gone by. I felt bad at this point because he had moved his grinders off his objectives to get range on some of my transports, and I dropped the hawks on another to contest, and I was in a pretty good position to steal one and win on the primary. I don't like when games end prematurely and someone wins by circumstance of the round clock. But things didn't end up going that way. I just had to shoot one dog to get his hounds out of the 3" radius of the objective my warriors had jumped out to claim, but my opponent wisely went to ground in area terrain and rolled 3 ups like a champ. I only managed to take 1 wound off thus narrowly missing the primary. Then we had to pull out the calculators to figure out who was winning on secondary, then tertiary, then tiebreaker points. It came all the way down to points destroyed where my opponent had me by a narrow margin and wins 13 battle points to my 7. Another really nice guy to play against and I wished we had more time to get in more turns, but what can you do. There was no intentional slow play going on, just long protracted assaults and daemons have a lot of rolling and bookkeeping to do before the game starts.
Game 3
Orks! 3 battle wagons, 2 big squads of lootas, dakka jet, and a bunch sluggas & shootas of course. I never did well against Orks with my other armies, but DE brings a much different toolset against them. I knew my shooting would be extremely deadly to the green skins and that my beast pack could take them in assault. My opponent was extremely nice and laid back. It was a really fun game but I felt bad because it was a really bad matchup for them, and they had only played against DE once before (earlier that day against Venom spam, so they really weren't expecting anything choppy like a beast pack). They set up aggressively like all Orks do. I think my snakes tricked them into thinking the Court was scarier than it actually is, so they took the majority of the shooting this game (which is exactly what I hope for with that T5 unit!). My shooting cripples the lootas and their warlord's wagon where the beasts were ready to eat them up after they poured out. On top of that, my rolling was pretty hot and everything just seemed to go my way this round. I end up with max battle points this game.
I was 1-2 for day one but at least scored some BPs from my last 2 games and the 1st game my points destroyed was huge so I felt pretty good about things. All my opponents were awesome and really fun to play against, as was the case with all my games throughout the weekend, but I'll get to those later!