Dark Eldar: The Caledonian Uprising

Dark Eldar: The Caledonian Uprising

So my first tourney of the year and what an experience it was! The northern tournament scene is very different to the southern scene. A lot of this is due to the major players and generally what they succeed with. In the north there’s always a shift towards the major list, the Meta list if you like. Whereas in the south, there is a weird aversion to this list time. When imperial guard ruled the north, space wolves ruled the south. When Grey Knights ruled the north, Necrons ruled the south.

So with this in mind I launched into my next tournament with a sense of apprehension. Thanks to Dave and Franco for letting me stay at there’s in Nottingham and on the Saturday I and Luke ventured into the eye of the storm.

The List

You’ll probably know what I’m going to say here but I’ll put up the list just in case regular readers have forgotten!

Baron

3x blaster born (2 blasters haywire grenades) in venom

3 x wychs with haywire grenades in venom

Beastmaster unit

3 Ravagers

Eldrad

3 Jetbikes

Warp Hunter

The tournament

The night before the tournament I had the pleasure of contributing to the 40kuk podcast (where I plugged the blog mercilessly). At this point I was asked by Josh Roberts. What do you do for anti-flyer?

This is where the north south divide came in.

Down south the ‘ignore the flyer’ tactic is a valid tactic, as flyers aren’t as popular (still see quite a few). Up north flyers are the flavour of the month and every list bar one had one. It wasn’t that these flyers caused me horrible damage each game, but their ability to contest without opposition in turn 5 really hampered the ability for my army to compete.

Round 1 - Blood Angels/Grey Knights

This ended up as a pretty sound win for me with meph charging into the beast unit and dying horribly. The opponent’s army was small but it had two storm ravens. The turn they came on they killed a couple of tanks however as I had so much anti-tank around I took one out (two ravagers with prescience) In the end the opponent had one crippled raven and 5 slightly irritated terminators and I got a 18-2 win.

Round 2 – Necrons

This ended as an annoying loss. 12-8 mind but it should have been a win for me. Why didn’t I win? A mixture of bad measuring and blood night scythes. The opponent finished the game with a necron lord 2 scythes, 2 immortals and 5 necron warriors. Issue was because of his night scythes he landed his two necron units on objectives and I was marginally out of mine. The game finished turn 5 due to time issues and id have won turn 6/7 pretty convincingly however my inability to kill the scythes was my downfall.

Round 3 – Grey knights

A 5^th ed grey knight list…. Bugger.  Now I said I wasn’t as scared of grey knight’s in my last blog and that’s still true. However this was all the things I used to fear. I had to go first or it needed to be night fight. It was neither and as it was also kill points, I got routinely thrashed. Oddly enough I had almost pulled it back at one point, but one failed ld 9 test for the baron and his boys put paid to any chance I had. Down the tables I went!

Round 4 – Chaos Space Marines

My first win on the dice to choose who goes first and predictable the opponent seized the initiative. Fortunately my ability to kill vehicles wasn’t adversely affected and as such I tabled the opponent with the baron finally killing the final forge fiend. I was lucky to down the first flyer, but when the final one needed to go into hover mode, it was mauled by haywire grenades and with that the victory was secure. 20-0 to moi!

Round 5 – Necrons/Greyknights

More night scythe misery for me…. Neil Kerr (I finally got to play a scot!) was using a big paladin unit with Necron back up (2 barges 3 night scythes) and he got choice of deployment. This gave him a massive LOS blocking piece of terrain. As such he chose to go second and hid behind it with his paladins. Therefore I had no way to kill his paladins and draigo in 2 turns and as such his reinforcements all came on crippled my fleet of vehicles and landed 2 units in my deployment zone. It was a close game and Neil only won on secondary objectives (first blood and slay the warlord) But again as in game two, I lost a winnable game because I couldn’t stop those night scythes!

The verdict

I came 35^th which I was pretty disappointed with. I once again had bad luck with my deployment dice rolls (that +1 really doesn’t help!). The main reason however was the inability to kill flyers. If I could cause at least threat to these things I’d have performed so much better! So it’s momentarily back to the drawing board.

I think it’s time to incorporate some form of anti-flyer along the lines of a quad gun and maybe a fire dragon exarch to shoot it. I’ll have a play around and get back to you guys next time. Also next time I’ll be talking Tyranids in my next nemesis article. Until then… TATA