Tournament: Dragon's Lair 4/2/11

(picture by frank)

Using a 1500 point mech guard army, I pulled off a 1st place win at the Dragon's Lair tournament yesterday and took home a Storm Raven. My list:

Company Commander
4 flamers
Officer of the Fleet
Chimera (heavy flamer)

Veteran Squad
3 meltaguns
lascannon
Chimera (heavy bolter)

Veteran Squad
3 meltaguns
lascannon
Chimera (heavy bolter)

Veteran Squad
3 plasma guns
lascannon
Chimera (heavy bolter)

Veteran Squad
3 plasma guns
lascannon
Chimera (heavy bolter)

Vendetta

Manticore (heavy flamer)

Manticore (heavy flamer)

Medusa (camo netting)

First game was seize ground/pitched battle against Jon C's space wolves, consisting of a wolfrider wolf lord, 4 or 5 mixed loadout wolfriders, another wolfrider wolf lord with 15 fenrisian wolves, 3 small squads of grey hunters with 2 rhinos, and 1 squad of missile launcher long fangs. From the beginning it would be wolves coming across the table and me just trying to shoot the hell out of them before it was too late. My own saturation of fire and Jon's terrible luck with 3+ saves combined to get me a big win.

Second game I played a kill points/dawn of war mission against an unpainted guard army, who seemed much more well versed with the previous codex and rules edition. It seemed like he had a pretty small guard army that he had inflated into 1500 points using veterans and carapace armor: Yarrick, two small ratling squads, four or five veteran squads on foot, a couple heavy weapon squads, 2 basilisks, and a standard leman russ. Now that I write this out I'm not sure how he pulled off the heavy weapons teams - he also insisted he had given the army improved comms and asked if my vets were light infantry, so... Maybe not a big deal for a friendly game but surely a tournament is something just a little bit more than a friendly game? I noticed he was playing a completely different army for the third game, so who knows what was going on. In any case, after losing a couple chimeras early on, I took him apart piece by piece with heavy ordnance and the command HQ outflanking in the vendetta and got full points.

Third game was against Frank at the top table, with probably the most boring combination of competing armies, deployment, and mission: foot marine gunline, mech guard, spearhead, and capture and control. I zoomed around with the vendetta for a few turns, making ridiculous cover saves, before I realized that I'd never be able to contest his objective with it (not being a tank). After the manticores failed to make a dent into the marines holding his home objective, I saw a draw coming and just castled up, fending off outflanking scouts and shooting a couple squads that were within range. The game ended on the 5th turn, just as his librarian was drawing in to contest my objective with a last-minute gate of infinity. Big draw, but my other two wins were good enough to secure first place.