I finally went to my first ‘national’ level tournament.

The Las Vegas Open!

Summary:

• I’m a total scrub at W40K games, only playing a few games a year
• I spend 99% of my energy on the hobby/painting side
• I only played 3 of the 4 games in the friendly tournament (the blending class overlapped game 3).
• Of the 3 games I played, I went 0/3!
• I played Eldar twice and Chaos Demons once.

Game 1: Chaos Demos – Shaun

• FateWeaver
• ~14 Chariots of Tzeentch
• I couldn’t get past the Jink Saves. Chaos can re-roll ones, and the Jink save was a 3up (night fight) and then a 4up… So each wound only had a 33% chance of landing, and each Chariot is both a armor 12 vehicle AND a multi-would model. Without ignore cover, I just couldn’t land any significant wounds.

Game 2: Eldar – Noah

• Farseer
• Warp Spiders
• 2x Wave Serpents
• Jet Bikes
• Eldar Scorpion Type II (super heavy)
• Super fun game. Noah is super cool, we we’re having beers, joking around, and had a great game. While I lost, I (barely) took out the Scorpion, and I ALMOST took out the Wraight Knight (got him down to 1 wound) right before the knight laid the assault beat down on my plasma-cutioner and punisher Leman Russ squadron.

Game 4: Eldar – Todd from TableWar

• Farseer
• Wraith Knight
• Wraith Guard with Warlocks
• Jet Bikes
• 2x Wave Serpents
• I couldn’t get past any saves. I think I removed maybe 3 wraithguard and 2 jetbikes by the bottom of turn 4.  I still learned a lot… I definitely have to tweak my list!

My thoughts (as a total n00b, what I learned):

• Competitive W40K comes completely down to ‘dice management.’ Minimizing the incoming dice is the primary tactic I didn’t have a good answer to.Especially games 1 (Chaos demons Jinking like crazy) and 4 (Eldar with 3+ armor & invulnerable saves). Even though I was throwing a high volume of attacks/hits/wounds out with my gun line, all of those wounds were ignored one way or another (Jinks, cover saves, armor saves, invulnerable saves, many with re-rolls). These lists are all about ‘mitigating’ incoming dice.
• I don’t really enjoy games where my opponent is so effective at mitigating almost all of my dice… so I need to either build answers to this into my list or stop playing and just go 100% hobby.

And my ‘Dwarf Face’ from the faces and eyes class. Lyn from metalhead minis, thanks for a great class, I learned a ton!

All in all, LVO was great fun. It’s a well run tournament in a great location. I hope to go again next year.