So I played another tournament this past weekend a few weeks ago (I took a long break between starting and finishing this post) with the High Elves and I thought I’d jot down how things went! The tournament was small; very small. There were only 12 spots available due to space constraints in the store. It was a 1,500 point tournament with no composition restrictions and few rules modifications.
We’ll start of with my list and some thoughts.
Alarielle The Radiant 350; 4 spells from the Lore of High Magic; General
Noble: Enchanted Shield; Luckstone; Khaine’s Ring of Fury; heavy armour; Battle Standard. 134
18 Archers: Musician. 190
18 Archers: Musician. 190
21 Swordmasters of Hoeth: Bladelord; Musician; Standard Bearer (Banner of the World Dragon). 353
Eagle Claw Bolt Thrower 70
Eagle Claw Bolt Thrower 70
5 Sisters of Averlorn 70
5 Sisters of Averlorn 70
As you can see right of the bat, there is a lot of shooting and some reasonably strong magic in this list! I thought I’d give Alarielle a run out primarily due to her Shield Stone of Isha which grants Alarielle the Radiant and her unit a 5+ ward save against any non–magical attacks. This combined pretty well the Banner of the World Dragon on the Swordmasters meaning that they had a 5+ ward against non-magical attacks and a 2+ ward against magical attacks. I also tried out High Magic because the lore attribute could raise that non-magical ward save to a 3+.
Again, the Swordmasters are a sub-optimal choice and primarily there because I have them and they’re painted. As for the rest of the shooting, I was expecting a couple of lightly armoured horde armies and this list should have been able to pepper them down before we reached combat. The bolt throwers added a reasonable answer to more heavily armoured troops or monsters and the Sisters of Averlorn could, in theory, deal with Chaos Warriors and the like.
As it turned out, a few players never showed up so we only had 9 people and a bye-buster. The first round, I was randomly paired against Cameron Bennett and his Vampire Counts. Cameron’s list was a couple of units of hounds, a couple of units of 20 zombies, a unit of 40 zombies with a level 2 necromancer on Death Magic, a unit of 10 Black Knights with his Vampire Lord and BSB in there and a terrorgheist. Having played against Vampire Counts a few times and seen the list, I knew that I should be able to destroy him in the magic phase if I got the Fiery Convaction spell. Being a level 4, there was only a 4% chance that happened so I was good, right? Nope. I started to worry a bit about how I was going to deal with so many models. Early on I managed some magic missiles and shooting to get rid of the hounds, despite making a mistake where I measured where I would need my noble to be to cast his bound spell, then moving it so the unit was in range but left my noble on the wrong side.
Cameron charged his Vampire Lord and Black Knights straight into my Swordmasters expecting to deal enough wounds to break me while he sent his Terrorgheist up the flank to scream at my archers. Unfortunately the charge had taken the General out of range of the terrorgheist so he couldn’t march it to reach the archers and it sort of sat in the middle of the field. On my next turn, the archers did enough wounds to the gheist that it was no longer scary. The vampires all managed to fluff their attacks too and my Swordmasters got stuck in winning the combat by enough that his General died to combat resolution and then his army crumbled. We rolled 4 turns worth of crumbling and called it a 20-0. A good start to be sure! Unfortunate for Cameron that it wasn’t really a game but Vampires do have that as something to be aware of! At some point during this game I cast Walk between Worlds on my bolt thrower to move it to get a better angle on the Terrorgheist and fired it. This isn’t allowed as the bolt thrower still counts as moving. I’m not sure I hit it anyway so it was of no consequence, even if I had, the game was all but over by then anyway.
Secondly I played Chris Paine’s empire. I’ve played Chris in all three tournaments of Warhammer I’ve played now and I must admit that while I’m improving against Empire, I don’t enjoy playing against them very much. Chris was the bye-buster for this tournament and had stepped out for a smoke and was at least 10 minutes late to the game. Chris deployed his Inner Circle Knight bus, his halberdier bunker with engineer (and perhaps a wizard), cannon, volley gun and steam tank on a hill and didn’t move them all game basically. He won the roll for first and cannoned off both of my bolt throwers and I was forced to bring the fight to him. I trundled my troops up towards him and eventually baited the Knights to charge. The fight was a bit intricate with Challenges and what not and we came across a rules dispute. Now it’s worth mentioning here that in my first game I challenged Chris when he went to move a unit backward because I didn’t think this was allowed. It took us a good five minutes to find that rule and was proven wrong. I’ve only been playing since the start of the year and Chris for a good sight longer than that. The long and the short of this dispute was that he had killed some of my models and I went to remove them from the back rank taking from the right in a line. Chris said that I had to remove models evenly from either side and I said that I didn’t think that that was the case and that it was only the case for a single rank. He said “It’s been this way for years; why would they change it.” and I said that I’d never seen it in the 8th edition rules, having not read any other edition. I was under the impression that when removing models you took from the back rank and took them from that side and deleted them in a line. It turns out that neither of us are right and you can basically remove however you wish. I began a conversation over on the Warhammer Fantasy subreddit to see what others thought and I think I got diddled here. There was at least one round of combat where I had troops that were denied attacks because he didn’t let me remove them appropriately and I was left with troops only in base-contact with his character in a challenge. This little discussion likely wasted a bit of time and with the combat being quite confusing, we ran out of time. We finished off his sixth turn but I didn’t get mine. I was at the point where I likely would have defeated his general and definitely would have shot off his halberdiers and engineer.
This game left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth and not because Chris’ attitude was bad, just that he was so convinced that he was right and turned out to be wrong. I also felt the game finished at a time that was a bit too convenient. I lost 8-12 but it likely should have been 10-10.
At the start of the final round I was beginning to get a headache that later developed into a full-blown cold that took me out of action for three days. This game I was up against Rhys McGlinn and his Warriors of Chaos list. This was a really tough list and Rhys is much more of a “power gamer” than I, so I prepared myself for the worst. He had an unbreakable, flying Daemon Prince that I could hardly hit, let alone wound, a chimaera, a big unit of Chaos Warriors and some Skullcrushers. The game was pretty dull, I managed to shoot and magic off his Chaos Warriors while his Chimaera and Skullcrushers killed everything except my bunker unit which was held up by his Daemon Prince. He was unable to penetrate the 2+ ward from the Banner of the World Dragon and I was unable to penetrate the utter filth that is the Nurgle Daemon Prince. He challenged me every turn which I accepted to deny him attacks, reasoning he couldn’t kill my noble but realistically that sealed my fate. Eventually he got enough lucky attacks through at the same time to kill the noble and then Alarielle followed. I probably should have denied the challenge, let him send my Battle Standard Bearer to the back and not worried about losing combat, given how unlikely that was. I’d have had more attacks on the Prince and likely eventually got a few wounds through. We reached a point where I had nothing left and he wasn’t going to be able to kill that unit so we called it there; 6-14 in his favour from memory. It might have been 4-16 though.
The army overall performed roughly how I expected. In a three round tournament, you are subjected heavily to the ‘luck of the draw’. My list really couldn’t handle heavily armoured units and that’s what I faced two of the three games. Rhys won and Chris came second so I’m continuing my trend of doing well early then getting smashed by the eventual winners. Small field means this is pretty likely though. Overall, I’m not sure where I placed; somewhere in the middle. The prize support was really good and I will likely play the next event. I’m not sure I like 1500 points instead of 1600 just for the evenness of rounding and I do think that I’m a bit gimped playing High Elves, an inherently balanced army, in the world of filth and power that wargaming in Hobart has proven to be on occasion. I’ll be advocating for the implementation of Swedish or some other balancing composition system for the next events because, for me, it makes the game more enjoyable when there’s a bit less metagaming and a lot fewer ridiculous combinations of items and abilities.