As pure luck would have it, and I'm sure a lot of people were breathing a nervous sigh of relief, the weekend of CanCon was the one glimpse of perfect weather after weeks upon weeks of horrible conditions leading up to the event. Not to mention the horrific conditions after the weekend too.
So, I'd made it down, I could breathe relatively clean air, my army made the trip unscathed in my new KR Case, and I was ready to play.
I was fortunate enough to play in the Tasman Cup pre-event team game between Australia and New Zealand, but I'll touch on that in the event wrap up. For now, I want to focus on my very first game of CanCon 2020 against this absolute legend of a man!
Bruno won Best Sports at the Rune Axe Team Championship last year, so I knew I was gonna be in for a great Game 1! He was bringing the new Sylvaneth battletome, which I was yet to play. I'd flicked through the book, but we really don't have many Sylvaneth players in Brisbane, so practice games against them are hard to come by. But I was braced for the worst.
The list was pretty well rounded, and I knew Durthu and that big block of Hunters could cause me some headaches. But my biggest concern was keeping his mobility under control!
The game kicked off to a good start, with my general parking his scrawny, green ass on Commanding Terrain in the middle of my deployment zone. My army will chew up as many command points as I can get my hands on, so increasing that CP income was excellent.
The scenario was Border War, so I needed to lock down my home objective, secure the two in the middle as early as I could, and maybe (if I was aggressive enough) cap Bruno's for a massive lead. Sylvaneth can be hard to get to grips with, however, and the ability to summon in heaps of extra dryads was in the back of my mind.
I had a pretty symmetrical deployment. My two units of five Ard Boys were lurking on each flank, ready to make a mad dash for the mid-table objectives. Pigs and Warchanters supported them on each side, while my Shaman and ten-man Ard Boy block got ready to bunker down on my objective. The Krusha made his intentions pretty clear from the start, getting ready to frisbee straight across the board and hit something.
I managed to outdrop the tree people, and knowing how much havoc the Sylvaneth can cause in the first turn with an empty board, I took priority. The last thing I wanted was to fight my way into a forest to try and find an objective while some pissed off blueberry bush rips my face off.
In typical "of course they did" rolling, the buffed up pigs were no-where near angry enough to make a massive charge, while the Maw-Krusha and the other unit of pigs (with some help from a cheeky Warchanter Beat) made successful charges and slammed into the front lines!
In a stroke of luck, I'd targeted the Krusha's roar at Durthu on the way in, and managed to chip enough wounds to bracket him, and drop his stats off their highest levels. This was a big deal, purely to avoid that flat-6 Damage sword that is so lethal when he is on his top bracket. I knew there were healing mechanics and such, but it was more pressure on the trees!
Naturally, I attacked with the cabbage dragon first. What could go wrong? I put all of the warboss's attacks into a puny Branchwraith cowering in terrain, while all of my Krusha attacks, with their Rend 2 and Damage 4 went into the six-man Hunter unit. I'd only tagged the end of the Hunters and Bruno had elected to re-roll his saves in exchange for a dismal 1" pile-in, so I knew the big guy was pretty safe...
As it turned out, instead of his brutal spear of brutal murdering, he'd packed his pool noodle. A single attack made it through on the Branchwraith, leaving her alive on two wounds. Well, there goes Smashin' and Bashin'... But it's ok, I'll still dent the big unit, kill at least one model and trigger Strength From Victory. Five attacks from the Krusha wounded. Sitting on a 6+ re-rollable save, the Hunters, against all odds, popped four sixes from five dice. My amped up death machine managed to inflict a total of seven wounds for zero models removed.
I may have made a terrible mistake.
Fortunately, the unbuffed piggies at his side were angry enough to compensate for the Megaboss' shortcomings. Between their impact hits, spears and tusks, and a little help from the Maw-Krusha's charge damage, they managed to trample two units of Tree-Revenants and a unit of ten Dryads! This was a crushing blow for the Sylvaneth, as it removed twenty bodies from the board with no trade, and also netted me my Secondary Objective, which was to kill three enemy units in a single turn. I'd managed to box in and lock down a big chunk of Bruno's army, and I'd spent CP on a bad run roll to make sure the five-man Ard Boy gangs made the middle objectives, so I was happy with how Turn 1 was shaping up!
My opponent knew the counter-punch had to be swift and firm. The early turns of the game were absolute mayhem! The first order of business was making sure that the Maw-Krusha ended up dead. Realising how precarious the situation was for his home objective, Bruno threw another unit of Dryads into the combat, hoping to pile in and help out in combat, to swing the numbers game in the forest folks' favour.
The Kurnoth archers made sure he headbutted a few arrows, before the Scythe Hunters fully piled in, forfeiting their re-rolls for saves in order to inflict maximum damage! As tenacious as the Maw-Krusha was, and requiring a Sylvaneth double turn into two, he simply couldn't withstand that kind of punishment, and went down hard. That opposing objective was going to be a tough one to claim from the almost full-strength Kurnoth unit.
Taking full advantage of the double turn, Bruno started making some big plays for objectives.
The Gruntas that had found themselves isolated until now, received a charge from both units of Kurnoth Bowmen. This wasn't the worst thing in the world, as it meant my piggies were punching on, but they'd been caught off the charge, and so missed out on all their handy bonuses. The one saving grace was that they still had their Violent Fury buff up, so they were still ready for a good old fashioned brawl. The left hand objective was under some serious threat, however... I was going to have to throw something at those Dryads ASAP!
On the right hand objective, the unassuming Branchwych had put her perfectly laid plan into motion! She hurled down the Acorn of Ages, before summoning a fresh unit of Dryads. The Spirit of Durthu also stepped through the magical forests to materialise on my flank, confident that his Kurnoth companions could handle themselves after slaying the Maw- Krusha. Both units made their charges, and slammed into the unit of five Ard Boys, who were just minding their own business on an objective.
Through some absolute miracle, two Boys managed to survive Durthu's onslaught to take swings at the Dryads. I needed bodies dead, and as tempting as it was to start swinging at the already-slightly-damaged Durthu, he wasn't what would hold the objective for the scions of Alarielle. I managed to kill a couple, but the Dryads finished off the two remaining Boys, and claimed the objective.
When my turn came back around, the Grunta's who had charged in with the Krusha suddenly found themselves with no-one to fight. Rather than brawl with the Scythe Hunters unsupported on the other side of the board, they used their Ironfist Mighty Destroyer move to bring themselves back into range of the Warchanter (who also had to Mighty Destroyer to get into range). He put Violent Fury on then and away they went! Barrelling into Durthu and the Dryads, they obliterated both units in a terrifying display of raw power. The Warchanter charged in as well, more so to get another body on the objective than to contribute his martial prowess, but he was left with nothing to swing at after the pigs were done!
The left objective was starting to swing in my favour, too! The Gruntas were stuck in a slow, grinding attrition war with the Kurnoth Hunters, but I was sloooowly clawing ahead. My Warchanter tried to heal one of the pigs, but to no avail. His Violent Fury was this time bestowed upon the five Ard Boys, who had a singular focus this turn. Kill those Dryads! And kill they did!
Bruno was losing bodies faster than he could summon them, and I'd managed to keep pressure on by spending a truly immense number of Command Points! But he had one more wild late-game play in his back pocket.
His Branchwych, who had spent the game avoiding all forms of negative attention from the Orruks, managed to drop another woods in my territory, and out popped the three bow-hunters. They took some pot shots at my Ard Boys, but just missed out on that 9" charge to take the fight to on top of my objective. A few Dryads that had helped out with the death of the Maw-Krusha made a run down the middle of the board, but were intercepted by unit of Gruntas' out of sequence Ironsunz Charge. Fresh of their kill of Durthu, the pigs made short work of four Dryads.
In the dying moments of the game, the other unit of Gore-Gruntas, having killed one unit of Kurnoth Bowmen and the other teleporting away, lined up the now-very exposed Arch-Revenant, and ran him down!
In the end, the Scythe Hunters held down the enemy objective, and the Bow Hunters near my objective were left isolated. I'd managed to rack up a pretty healthy lead on the scoreboard and landeded a 20-0 win! Off to a strong start!
I had a blast playing against Bruno. He went on to win Best Sport at CanCon, and rightly so. He got my primary vote! I think outdropping the Sylvaneth and slingshotting across the board in the first turn was crucial to victory. I was able to get to grips with the opposition before movement, forests and magic mayhem got too out of control.
The Orruks were able to take a strong stance early, and catch the tree-people on the back foot, and I was happy with how the army performed overall. The Ironsunz offer the tools to keep a huge chunk of your fighting force in combat almost all game through one form or another, meaning I was able to maximise that combat damage and land the win!
Sitting pretty in the top bracket, my round two had the potential to be as manic as the first round match ups. In a pool so big, it's impossible to predict what you're going to hit. And I ended up going into Round 2 against Jack Solomons and his Idoneth Deepkin!
But I'm getting ahead of myself...
Thanks for reading.
Gabe
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