Well, the Big Tournament was last weekend, and I am still trying to recover from that sleep wise, painting wise and sanity wise Five games over 2 days. My goals going into the weekend were to achieve a top ten finish and win Best Painted. It would be no easy task, that's for sure! There were 60 participants, with at least a third from out of state (there was even a 3 man contingent from Rhode Island!). Most of them were veteran tournament players, who rack up more tourney games in a month than I play regular games in a year. I knew that it could be tough if I ran into those 'gotcha' tricks sprung by an unfamiliar army. I have just seen the amended results, and it looked like I was tied for 13th. I could have gotten into the top ten if I had gotten to play my 6th turn in the second game. That would have been a max points victory for me instead of a draw. The player's choice voting had me 2nd. I was indeed able to win Best Painted, which was great There were a lot of very nicely painted armies brought to this tournament! My prize ended up being a chaos mortals batallion box, which was perfect. I have been hoarding any MoC stuff I can find, via Ebay or store credit from tournaments, etc. Most of the big stuff will be scratch built or heavliy converted, just like the Lizards. Soft scores had a lot of weight at this event. Sports, painting, comp and fluffly bunny scores counted for more than the usual tournament, hence the Fluffy Bunny.
Congratulations mate, must be a good feeling to get a reward for all the hours of hard work you no doubt put into your models. They really do look inspirational. What army came first overall? Were there any particular tricks or tactics that really stood out to you?
Most of the top armies were dark elves and MoC. VC armies also were at the top tables. For the most part, the armies with the top battle points tended to be on the very low end of sprtsmanship, painting, and other soft scores. The two top guys managed to do well on battle points but also had good soft scores. That is just how the tournament was designed. Winning games and getting good sprtmaship scores can be a tough thing to do sometimes. I did not face any of the most common armies brought to the tournament... DE, MoC and O & G. My last 2 games were against Lizards, which happened to be the first Lizzie vs Lizzie games I have ever done! For all the crying about the 2 EotG's, I was hammered by magic in 3 of the 5 games. Even if I rolled perfectly with all my dispel dice, I had no way of stopping all the spells coming my way. In only 1 of the 5 games did both engines come close to surviving the game. Most were gone by turn 2 or 3. I amused myself in my first game deployment against a Beastman army by setting up one of the skink & krox units facing backwards towards my own table edge. It really freaked out my opponent. He tried to deploy the ambush units away from it, but he failed the LD tests and they were eventually wiped out. In the same game, I had a skink/Krox unit win a fight against 2 dragon ogres that cherged it from behind! He whiffed on all attacks, and I was able to do enough wounds to make him run away. Then he was run down. It hurt him a lot, since that unit had 2 captured banners in it. Skink tank!