Outside of a few home games, I hadn't yet tested any of my lists in a true 7th edition tournament setting. Then the opportunity came up to play in Huzzah Hobbies' monthly 40k RTT a couple weeks back. It was my first time visiting this store so I was excited to check it out and get my first larger point games of 7th under my belt.
I knew the competition would be intense as this was the last RTT before the NOVA Open and everyone was out tuning their tournament lists. Nonetheless, this was a good opportunity to practice some of the basics of 7th while hopefully learning a trick or two from some of the top 40k players in the region.
Since it was kind of a last minute decision to go (ok it was more like 10 hours before round one) I didn't have a lot of time to prepare a new list so I basically went with my NOVA list from last year with a few tweaks; I dropped the Baron, a large wych unit in raider, changed the 5 man warrior squads into wychs, and left the farseer on the shelf in lieu of the avatar and a wraithknight (I wanted to try my new toys).
As expected, there were some tough lists in attendance. My first round opponent's army is pictured above -- 5 serpents, 6 war walkers, Eldrad, another seer plus warlocks which amounted to a sizable pool of warp charge dice used mostly for summoning daemons.
He summoned plague drones, some heralds, and a couple units of horrors. I nearly lost the wraithknight on the first turn, but he held on to take out a couple serpents. I did the best I could to play for objectives and was up going into the last turn, but my archon failed his shadow field on the first wound and I fell behind at the very end.
I had a chance to pull this one out, my dice just weren't with me. It was a close, fun match to start the day off with.
My next round was on the same table against Tau with Farsight allies.
I lost the roll to go first and ate a ton of shooting, easily giving up first blood and several kill points (which was the primary this round).
I managed to take out a devilfish and was in good position for turn 2 assaults which barely kept me in the game.
By turn 3 I felt like my army was on the verge of getting tabled, but then I ended up having a really solid turn and closed the killpoint gap. My wraithknight and avatar performed really well this match. My archon had another poor showing by dying very early in the game. I lost this one by a larger margin than my first round, but it was a lot of fun fighting my way back and giving it a go.
Round 3 I was up against another Daemon summoning Eldar army with Grey Knight allies.
I think I chose the wrong primary objective to go for this game. And my dice were at it again, utterly failing me on critical rolls. I lost the archon yet again on the first wound, then failed several key charges early on. It just wasn't happening for me in this one. A greater daemon was manifested from a warlock, which then tied up my back line for the better part of the game. On top of the dice, I definitely made some tactical errors on this one and things went south real quick.
At the end of the day I took a pretty good beating from 2 Eldar summoning lists and a superior shooting Tau/Tau list. All three opponents were really cool dudes and a pleasure to play against. I definitely need to change some things with my list, but at this point want to see if DE get a new book in coming months (or weeks!).
I've been watching the NOVA live stream and looking forward to catching more matches this weekend. Next year I'm definitely going again :) Good luck to those who are there, and take lots of pictures!