Pocket GT Report: DreadTober Style!

Last weekend, I went to a local "Pocket GT". 1000 Points, 5 Games, one day. Since I haven't been playing a whole lot lately, and I've wanted to run something like this for a while anyhow, and not least because it's DreadTober, I decided to take the following:

Company of the Great Wolf
HQ: Bjorn the Fell Handed, Hellfrost Cannon, Drop Pod
EL: Murderfang, Lucius Pattern Drop Pod
EL: Space Wolves Contemptor, Kheres Assault Cannon, Heavy Flamer, Saga of the Black Cull, Drop Pod
EL: Venerable Dread, Fenrisian Greataxe and Blizzard Shield, Drop Pod
EL: Dread, Drop Pod

If I'd really been pushing to win, I would have taken Chaos Daemons, but I wanted something that was just more relaxed and fun, and that would hopefully be quick enough to play that I'd actually finish all my Games on time for once.

The Missions were mostly Annihilation-style Maelstrom (The re-roll tokens were dropped since that post, but otherwise pretty much the same), and I was a bit surprised to find that we were going to be playing on 4x6 tables, despite the low Points value. I forgot to take many pictures, and many of the ones I did take weren't very good, because I didn't have my proper camera, and I'm getting used to the camera on my new phone, but I got a couple of decent ones for most of the Games.

My first Game was against the new Stealer Cult, massively MSU and played by the store's ringer, since there was an odd number of Players, and I was the last to check in. They are very effective in this format, being able to bounce around to score Maelstrom with ease, and the large table gave them lots of room to stay away from my relatively slow Units. I was still almost able to pull a draw, but Murderfang took a Rending Claw to the knee while trying to use a CC to slingshot to an Objective and got Immobilized a couple of inches too far away. This one was also a bit of a disappointment, since I failed at my goal of finishing all of my Games ahead of the time limit, but in fairness, it totally wasn't my fault. Stealer Cult takes a lot of time to play, especially when someone's still a bit new to it (as everyone is right now). I did manage to pick up a point when he underestimated Bjorn's ability to carve through the Unit guarding his Warlord, but still a 9-1 loss.

The initial drop. Bjorn was trying to take the Objective on the lower left, but managed a 12" scatter directly away from it

Bjorn braces for the counter-attack after slaying the Cult's Magus

Murderfang, Immobilized only a couple of inches outside of claiming distance from the Objective I needed to win the Turn

Second Game was against an old-school Ork army. A bit of a mis-match for him, since he had a bunch of Units that could barely hurt my Dreads, and it was the one non-Maelstrom Mission: Kill Points. There were still some great moments, like Murderfang Charging through the wreckage of his Drop Pod to wipe out a Mob of Boyz, only to get taken out by the Nob's Klaw, and in turn take out half another Mob when he exploded, and the time when the Warboss managed to beat the odds and take out my Contemptor, only to fall to my Axe Dread. 9-1 win for me, he got a point for his Lobbaz slogging across the board to get Linebreaker, since they literally couldn't hurt any of my stuff.

Even with his PowerFist crushed into uselessness, the Contemptor battles against the Ork Warboss

Kvedulf Ironhand avenges the Contemptor

Bjorn oversees the destruction of the last enemy from the very center of their stronghold

Round three was another odd one, against a dude who I'm pretty sure was very, very stoned, with a mostly bare-bones Ultramarine Gladius Strike Force, with the Points spent on Sicarius and an Armoured Task force instead of Special Weapons for the Tacs or Bikes. Ended up being a much closer game than I expected, because his mass Obsec let him score a lot of Maelstrom points, even tho he couldn't do much damage to me. It could have been a draw if I'd failed a 7" Charge in the last Turn, but I pulled it out. He did drag down Bjorn as well, but I still got a 9-1 win. My stock Dread finally redeemed himself, rolling something other than a 1 to Hit with his Multi-Melta for the first time of the day, and single-handedly scoring me First Blood and enough Maelstrom to win Turn 1.

The only pic I got of this Game. Behind the regular Pod is the Multi-Melta Dread, who just redeemed himself by taking out the other Vindicator

Round 4 was against a RavenWing Player who had been on the next table in Round 2, and said at the time that he thought my Army was pretty cool, and he wanted to play against it. I was worried, going into this, because his mobility could be a big advantage, but he had a ton of his Points sunk into a Command Squad and HQs, and I was able to clear out all his MSU stuff, assisted by a Sabotaged Mysterious Objective that took out a lone Attack Bike for First Blood :D We volleyed back and forth, but once I cleared out his little stuff, he pretty much couldn't score more than one Point per Turn, and I was able to pull out another 9-1 win.

I was going for that Speeder for First Blood, but couldn't quite pull it off

Kvedulf bunkers in the ruins of the building where his Pod landed. If I had remembered the re-roll on the damage chart for Venerable, it might have been enough to save him

I scored most of my VPs over here. Murderfang wasn't very happy about that, as few of them involved The Murderin'

Going in to round 5, I was honestly kind of astonished to be at 3-1. As an even better surprise, my Opponent was a guy I used to play all the time back in the 90s, who had moved away for years, and just moved back to town. Great dude, always a blast to play against, and equally surprised to be at 3-1. Unfortunately for him, his fantastic-looking Tallarn Guard also had few answers to my Dreads, and I was able to wrap it up for an 8-1 win.

Bjorn tries to wipe out the Ratlings for First Strike, but one survives. In the background, the Contemptor is barely visible securing the center of the field

The Tallarn Deployment. Unfortunately for them, they didn't advance aggressively enough, and I was able to keep them penned in

So yeah, I took a joke list, and managed to submarine my way to something like 5-6th place out of 30-ish Players over the course of a very fun, if extremely draining day. My knees are still feeling it. As a side note, there were a ton of Draws among the top players in a couple of early rounds, so the winner (Stealer Cult!) was actually 4-0-1 after beating the only 4-0 Player (Orks!!!) in Round 5.

What Is "Competitive"? (part 1)

Not just "which Units/Tactics are best?", but what do we actually mean when we talk about a Game System or a given instance of it being more or less Competitive?

I've seen a number of arguments about Tournament 40K that pretty much boiled down to the fact that none of the parties involved had an explicit definition of "Competitive Play", and their implicit definitions were not only poorly defined, but clearly different from each other's, so everyone was arguing across each other without ever actually engaging on common ground.

I have also seen a number of attempts at explicitly defining this, not just for 40K, but for competitions in general. The one I like best is that a given contest is Competitive to the extent that Player Skill matters above any other factors. Even with that established, tho, we've still got a lot of uncovered ground. Which Skills do we want Players to be pitting against each other? What are potential "other factors"? How can we measure the ratio between the Skills we want to compete at and those other factors? And finally, the bit that generates all the controversy, how can we tell whether given modifications of a system (i.e. Tournament Comp/Rules Changes) make it more or less Competitive?

In 40K, the skills we're ideally trying to compete with are actually fairly simple to describe. They can be divided roughly into two categories, List Building (finding the most efficient Models, Synergies between Units, etc.), and Game Play (positioning and timing on the table, when and where to make the most effective use of the elements chosen during List Building).

One of the biggest other factors, and one that applies almost without regard to what skills we want to compare, is randomness. We can arrange Games on a scale from those that are so random that they don't even really qualify as Games, because the Player has no actual choices (Punto Blanco Baccarat, Craps when betting Pass/No Pass, Candyland, Snakes and Ladders, etc.), to those with essentially no randomness, beyond perhaps who goes first (Tic-Tac-Toe, Checkers, Chess, Go, etc.).

40K is complex enough that we don't have nearly enough data to quantify exactly where it falls, but it's clearly somewhere between the two extremes. We see the same Players consistently showing up near the top of the various Major Tournaments time and again, so it can't be purely random, but there certainly are random factors, and they can be game-deciding, either because someone hits the far end of the bell curve, one way or the other, or because the Players are so closely matched that it ends up coming down to one dice roll.

The role of randomness in games is actually pretty fascinating, and a very complex topic. I've got another post planned just digging in to that.

Even in those Games devoid of randomness, tho, there is variation in the level of skill involved. Tic-Tac-Toe is simple enough that even children can completely solve it, working out that in any given situation there is an optimal play, and whoever goes second can always force a draw. The others I mentioned become progressively more complex, with Checkers having been completely solved by computers, Chess not completely solved yet, but sufficiently understood that the best computers can always beat the best human players, and Go still at the point where top human players reliably beat the best computers.

I want to single out Go here, for a second. Not only is it so complex that computers aren't yet able to play it at top levels, but in a different way, it's so well understood, and so clearly skill-dependent, that  new players can be ranked fairly accurately after just a handful of games with players of known ranking, and modifications can be applied to allow players of quite widely varying skill to play a roughly even game.

There are other factors as well. Some are within the system itself. Most notably, a clear and unambiguous rules set like War Machine is more competitive than one like 40K where many points are poorly defined. I've seen people lose games at major Tournaments because of unclear rules that were interpreted one way in their usual environment, and another in the environment that the rules judge came from. Winning a game because of poor writing on the part of those who created the game says nothing about a Player's ability to compete. It is, at best, a random factor, and at worst, an opportunity for cheaters.

Then there are balance issues. No game so complex as the wargames we play can be 100% balanced, but there are degrees, and when the balance is so bad that some Factions/Units are obviously vastly better than others, the skill required for List-Writing goes way down, because the viable choices are so reduced, similar to how Tic-Tac-Toe requires less skill than Checkers, because there are so many fewer options.

Unlike traditional Games, wargames often feature a variety of Missions or Scenarios which can lead to further balance problems. 6th Ed 40K was dominated by gunline Armies because the Rules for the Scenarios had Players placing Objectives after knowing which side of the Board they'd be on, and allowed them to place the Objectives further back in their own territory than 5th had.

Balance is also an issue because a poorly balanced Game allows for fewer Playstyles, and thus there is less that a Player has to prepare to face. If you know that only gunlines are going to give you serious opposition, you optimize your own gunline to take on other gunlines, and just stomp all over everything else. If you're also getting viable opposition from Assault Armies, glass hammer Alpha Strikes, Null Deployment, and Armies that focus on high durability and Objective-claiming power, optimizing your list becomes a much more difficult affair.

It's also an issue because there's more to these Games than just the Rules. The term Metagame often gets simplified these days to "what lists am I likely to face?", but its original meaning is broader, and covers all factors outside the Rules of the Game that still have an impact on the Game itself.

For instance: we're all drawn to the Game by different things, and it sucks to see someone who has impeccable skills all but entirely shut out of competition because they can't stand playing Eldar, or can't afford a whole new Army every couple of years any more. New releases shaking things up is good, and it should be important to vary lists as the Game evolves, but Player vs. Wallet isn't a Skill we're ideally looking to test here.

The fact that we need to get through competitive events in a reasonable amount of time is another. There is some evidence that super-horde Armies with Model Counts in the 150-200 range can actually be really good in 7th Ed, but you don't see them gaining much success in Tournaments, because few Players are capable of finishing Games in a reasonable time limit with that many Models to deal with.

One more point to touch on in this overview: How do we measure how Competitive a given Game is? This is one of those things that illustrates that simple and easy are not the same. It's theoretically quite simple: run a boatload of repetitions, and see how regularly particular contestants show up in the top rankings, vs. how many people have a very wide spread of rankings. Repeat with variation in the assorted potential other factors. 40K, however, has far too many potential variables, and takes far too long per Game, to get a truly representative rating this way. By the time we got a large enough dataset, the Game would have changed so much that our data would be useless. There are, however, some analytical tricks we can look at to get some sort of estimate, particularly with regard to quantifiable things like Randomness.  This has already become ludicrously long, tho, so that will come another day.

Until next time, y'all have a good one, y'hear!

ClassicHammer 1250

There was a 1250 Point Tournament at Game Wizard on Saturday, and since I'd just (mostly) finished up this new ThunderLord, I decided to bring my Space Wolves. It was listed as being a "ClassicHammer" event, but I couldn't find the specific Rules for that anywhere (because my Google-Fu was weak. They popped right up when I looked just now :P ), so I decided to just go with a single Faction CAD with no FW, figuring that should suffice:

251  -  Wolf Lord, TW, Wolf Claw, PowerFist, 2 FenWolves, Armour of Russ
236  -  Wolf Lord, TW, Runic Armour, Storm Shield, Thunder Hammer, 2 FenWolves
140  -  5 Blood Claws, Flamer, Razorback, Assault Cannon
140  -  5 Blood Claws, Flamer, Razorback, Assault Cannon
160  -  3 TWC, Storm Shield, PowerFist
160  -  3 TWC, Storm Shield, PowerFist
160  -  3 TWC, Storm Shield, PowerFist

 The key point that I missed through not having the Rules on hand was that only Troops (and not even their Dedicated Transports) are Scoring. That hurt. Especially since we were running ITC Missions, which have a pseudo-Maelstrom component that frequently needs your Scoring Units doing things every Turn.

Wanted to show off the basing a little more here

Game 1 is basically not even worth discussing in any kind of detail. He had 22 ScatBikes, 6 D-Cannon, and a Farseer on a Jetbike. No one else had anything that could stand up to that kind of firepower, and he ended up handily winning the whole Tournament. His list is one of the big reasons they're changing some things up for the next time they do ClassicHammer. Partly changing the Maelstrom requirements and some other things (like Linebreaker) from "Scoring Unit" to "Unit". Possibly some other things. Frankly, I don't think they're going to fix the problem unless they're willing to outright change or ban a few things.

I tried out the black background for my light box. It's nice for these, but way too glossy.

Game 2 was a completely different story. It was against a Dark Eldar Player who I've played before, and had a really good Game with (he's the dude giving a thumbs up here, while I'm on the ice table behind getting my face kicked in by the Eldar), and this one was similar. The Mission this time was The Scouring, which meant in ClassicHammer that our Fast Attack Units were Scoring, making it a very different Game. A very brutal one, too, we both ended up absolutely mauling each other (I think I had 2 Blood Claws, 1 wounded ThunderWolf, and a damaged Razorback at the end, while he had something like 7 Warriors in 4 separate Units and a SkyWeaver). If I'd managed to kill one more Warrior in my last Charge, I would have had a crushing victory, but as it was, that last dude contested one of the 3 Point Objectives, giving Sheldon the victory on Scouring thanks to the points for killing off my ThunderWolves, while I squeaked out a win on the Maelstrom, and then eked out an overall win by having that one ThunderWolf in his DZ for Linebreaker.

Game 3 was kind of weird. I think the guy was the Ringer, but he might have just been someone that somebody loaned an Army to and brought along. Regardless, his Army was a mess of Proxied Night Lords Bikers being played as White Scars. He was really out of practice and way behind the times on his Rules. My buddy Nathaniel had played him earlier and said he was kind of on edge the whole time because he couldn't keep track of the Proxies. Ended up not really being an issue in this Game, partly because of his dice, and partly because, once I lose one TWC, the Units with Lords in become almost immune to Grav, thanks to the FenWolves taking the Majority Armour Save to 6+ and then having to get through a Storm Shield. But mostly because he had to get close to do anything, being mostly 12-18" Firepower, and that doesn't end well when you're up against ThunderWolves. I had all his Troops cleared out by the bottom of Turn 2, and then just threw all my remaining TWC into his Command Squad DeathStar to keep them tied up while my Blood Claws ran around and grabbed Objectives.

Hello, lunch!

I ended up tying for 6th out of 20, which feels pretty good given how poorly suited my Army was for the format. I also got a lot of nice comments on my Army's appearance, which was really great. Speaking of which, shout-out to Thor for tips on the snow effect. I used Blue Horror to tint the glue mix instead of white (perhaps a little too much, it came through rather more strongly than I expected), but it's otherwise pretty much as he described. I also used GF9 Snow Effect instead of Woodland Scenics. It's basically the same, but comes in a much smaller container, and after going over about half my SW with that, I'm pretty much out, so I've got a big tub of the WS stuff on the way.

Y'all have a good one now, y'hear!

TSHFT After Action Review

I'm thinking about what direction I want to go in from here, as far as competitive 40K goes. I'm well on my way to having a Battle Company together, just need some painting to run a War Convocation, and could also do a few different variations on Tau, Necrons, or some combination of them. On the other hand, while DK probably won't get me to the top, I expect they'll be able to get me some pretty respectable placings once I get them better tuned, and they are a whole lot of fun. So I'm looking over what I took to TSHFT, thinking about how I might take this up another level for the Storm of Souls if I don't come up with a TauCron thing or Convocation I like, or a Battle Company that I like enough to overcome the logistical issues.

KDK CAD
- Lord, Juggernaut, Gorethirster, Power Sword, 4++, Meltabombs
Fairly solid. Didn't do a whole lot of damage, but only gave up Warlord once. Should probably start running him with one of the second-line Flesh Hound Packs, as he tended to get caught up in fights that weren't really suited to his strengths when he was going off the front with the big Pack.

- Lord, Bike, Axe of Ruin
Meh. In my first three Games, I didn't even manage to get him killed off to bring in the Bloodthirster. In the other three, he went down like a chump, the 'Thirster killed off the Unit that killed him, and then it got pancaked by Grav. Definitely getting replaced for serious Games.

- 2x8 Bloodletters
- 2x1 Chaos Spawn
Solid. Mostly just Objective Holders, but when they got a chance to pitch in on fights, they carried their weight. Not crucial, tho, so if I need to trim Points, the Spawn can go.

- 3 MaulerFiends
OK. As much as I love them, they're really vulnerable to Grav, and only having 2 Attacks on the profile at I3, WS3 is pretty lame. Much as I hate to do it, these guys may be getting dropped for a Chaos Knight or something else with similar speed, but better durability and hitting power.

- Void Shield Generator, 2 extra Shields
Solid gold. I ran up against 5/6 Armies that were heavy on Grav, and even against the Tau, it shielded Culties from Pulse Rifle/Carbine fire, and soaked up quite a lot of Ion and Heavy Burst Cannon fire.

CSM Allied Detachment
- Chaos Lord, Mark of Khorne, Juggernaut, Axe of Blind Fury, 4++
Total rock star. Occasionally he gets carried away and hits himself in the face, but most of the time, this guy is great. If he just had BftBG, so I didn't have to worry about keeping his companion Unit alive, and he generated extra BT in Challenges instead of turning into a Daemon Prince and getting wasted by Grav, he'd be perfect.

- 10 Culties
Great. Given how aggressive the rest of the list is, these guys pretty much always got ignored, and just sat back and camped an Objective. They only died once, and that was mostly because they were stuck as the closest thing when a SkyHammer Assault Squad scattered like 11" from where it was supposed to hit.

Gorepack
- 3 Bikers, 2xMelta, Combi-Melta, Meltabombs
- 3 Bikers, 2xMelta, Meltabombs
OK. I need to work more on how I use these guys, since they almost never actually got to shoot their Meltas. They'd end up hanging back too much and then by the time they got in range, everything was locked in Combat, and I ended up just Charging them in. Either that, or I ditch all the Meltas and just run them as light Combat Units and Meltabomb caddies.

- 2x5 Flesh Hounds
- 12 Flesh Hounds
More rockstars. These guys have been the backbone of the Army since day 1, and that didn't change here.

Depending on what all I take out, that's gonna leave me with something like 550-650 Points to fool around with. Definitely room for a Chaos Knight there, and then probably bulk up the Gorepack a bit. Maybe even another Bike Squad, to give me someone else who can carry Meltabombs, since multiple Knights are pretty much a hard counter to this list as it stands.

I would also note that there wasn't a single moment when I wished I'd brought my Helldrake. Dudes with 3+ Svs camping in hard-to-reach places with good Cover Saves aren't really nearly as much of a thing anymore.

Heart of Fire!

So, as I mentioned last week, this past weekend was TSHFT, The Seattle Heart of Fire Tournament. I finally managed to attend for the first time since 2007. I took my DaemonKin, which I've been running as my competitive list since I first took them to a tournament as a goofy fun list since I didn't know the power level at that store and then accidentally the whole thing. I've got them fairly well tuned at this point, I think, tho I am running a few things (like the Biker Lord with the Axe of Ruin) just for fun and/or because I just got that BloodThirster painted. The quick version is that I had 6 really fun games and a great time over the weekend.  Read on for more detail:

Off to TSHFT!

Got the whole thing more or less ready to head off to Bellevue in search of Victory and Glory. My actual camera is already packed up, so it's just a cellphone pic, but I think the overall effect comes through. Some of the stuff in the back isn't actually in the list, it's just there to summon with the Blood Tithe and/or the Axe of Ruin.

Y'all have a good one, and hopefully I will remember to take pics and get at least a rough after-action report up.

The Road to TSHFT

These are the last few plastic Models I need to paint (plus an old-ass Ordo Malleus Inquisitor who I've been meaning to prime for ages, and it seemed amusing to include him with this lot) for my TSHFT list for next weekend. I also still need to build and paint my "Void Shield Generator", but that's going to be pretty easy. I'm just doing a big monolith-type thing with chaos symbols all over it that roughly fits the footprint and silhouette of a VSG. Most of the time needed for that is just going to be waiting for sealant and primer to dry. Should be doable over the next 8 days, given that I don't have much else putting demands on me in that time.

I've been kicking around and trying out a bunch of variations on the list since the Elvensword Ambassador Tournament (I never did get around to doing up a write-up. I ended up taking 5th in my bracket, narrowly losing two games to the clock (one of them, I literally only needed another 45 seconds), and roflstomping my other two opponents). I've finally decided on this:

Daemonkin CAD
190/190  -  Lord, Juggernaut, Gorethirster, Power Sword, 4++ (Warlord)
155/345  -  Lord, Bike, Axe of Ruin
160/505  -  2x8 Bloodletters
064/569  -  2x1 Chaos Spawn
390/959  -  3 MaulerFiends
125/1084  -  Void Shield Generator, 2 extra Shields


CSM Allied Detachment
170/1254  -  Chaos Lord, Mark of Khorne, Juggernaut, Axe of Blind Fury, 4++
050/1304  -  10 Culties

GorePack
111/1415  -  3 Bikers, 2xMelta, Combi-Melta, Meltabombs
096/1511  -  3 Bikers, 2xMelta
160/1671  -  2x5 Flesh Hounds
176/1847  -  11 Flesh Hounds

My Warlord goes with the big Unit of Flesh Hounds, the CSM Lord goes with the smaller one (As long as he's part of a DK Unit, his Unit kills count toward the Blood Tithe, tho he doesn't generate the extra points for kills in Challenges or his own death), the Biker Lord goes with the Bikers without the Champion gear.

The Void Shields should help a lot to mitigate some of the issues I've had with Alpha Strikes, while cutting the Spawn down to just solo Objective Grabbers and ditching the DK Culties and Possessed cuts down the model count and the number of extra steps dealing with random Attacks, random abilities, and extra Initiative steps, so that should save me some time. I also dropped the Helldrake, because it's really only proved great in one Game out of my last 10 with it. The limited fire arc makes it really awkward to use, and a couple of times it's ended up stuck in Reserves until Turn 4, which sucks.

I'm not in good enough practice to win the thing, but fast Assault MSU gives a lot of common Armies trouble, and there's a surprising amount of durability here, so I'm hoping to be able to go 4-2 for the weekend.

The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Good

I had been planning to start this off with a BatRep featuring an old gaming buddy of mine who just moved back to town, but I keep stalling out on writing that up, and I figured it would be better to get something going here than to just sit around waiting until everything magically came together. So, instead, I'm going to kick this off with a bit of a ramble about perfectionism and trying not to get paralyzed by it.

I'm representing Khorne DaemonKin in the Elvensword Ambassadorial Tournament on October 10th. I just locked in my list last week, going with the following:
Combined Arms Detachment
55        Herald
58    8 Cultists
58    8 Cultists
170    Heldrake (BaleFlamer)
130    MaulerFiend
130    MaulerFiend
130    MaulerFiend

Blood Host (1 extra Blood Tithe per Turn) 
* SlaughterCult (Units benefit from an extra Blood Tithe effect less than the paid for effect)
205    Chaos Lord (Juggernaut, Goredrinker, Axe of Khorne, Sigil of Corruption, Meltabombs)
80    8 Bloodletters
80    8 Bloodletters
185    5 Possessed, Rhino
160    5 Chaos Spawn 
* Gorepack (Flesh Hounds gain Hammer of Wrath. Bikers gain Shred on their Hammer of Wrath Hits)
111    3 Chaos Bikers (2 Meltaguns, Champion with Combi-Melta & Meltabombs)
111    3 Chaos Bikers (2 Meltaguns, Champion with Combi-Melta & Meltabombs)
256    16 Flesh Hounds
80    5 Flesh Hounds

Is this perfect? Far from it. Is it even what I would ideally run within the Tournament's restrictions? Nope. But due to a bunch of Metagame factors, it's what I'm running.

"Metagame" is usually used these days to refer to the Armies and Units one is likely to see in a given setting, or as a shorthand for how casual or competitive a given setting is. In its broadest sense, however, it refers to all factors outside the Rules of the Game itself, and it's these factors that have pushed the list into this form.

First off, there are the additional Rules imposed by the specific event. The Ambassadorial Tournament has a couple of twists. The core restriction is that each Player may only use a single Codex, and each Codex may only be used by a single Player in each bracket. So it's gotta be pure DaemonKin. The next biggest impact on what I took was that no Forge World Units are allowed. If that hadn't been in place, you'd better believe there'd be a Brass Scorpion in there. The third big factor here is the Detachment limits. Three total Detachments are allowed, one of them must be a CAD. The overall Detachment in a Decurion-Class Detachment doesn't count, but each Choice within that does count as a Detachment, whether it's actually a Formation or just a single Unit. Without those requirements, I might well choose to ditch the CAD entirely, and just run the Blood Host, using the extra Points freed up to add more MaulerFiends, Flesh Hounds, Spawn, or Bikers, and trusting entirely to my ground game to hold out against Flyers.

Other restrictions are based on what Models I have available, or can get by the 10th. I only have a single Heldrake, and given what a nightmare it was to build and that I still haven't finished painting it, getting another ready to go by the 10th would be difficult at best. I also don't own a BloodThirster. I probably wouldn't use one as a basic Choice in the List anyhow, but a Biker Lord with the Axe of Ruin (Bearer turns into a BloodThirster when slain) is a great cheap Unit to fling at the Opponent to make difficult choices for them, and would give me far more utility than the Herald. But I don't have a Thirster for him to turn into, so that's not an option. I also only have three MaulerFiends, and none of them have Lasher Tendrils. A fourth would have strongly pushed me toward a double CAD build so I could run all of them, and probably just folding the Flesh Hounds into the CADs and ditching the Bikers as well.

The last big factor was time. I'm really not sure if the Blood Host is worth taking the Possessed and BloodLetters for. The extra Blood Tithe is great, but that's 345 Points worth of Tax Units, on top of the 171 for the Herald and Culties in the CAD. I'd been going back and forth on that, and if there had been more time, I might well have ended up with something more like:

CAD
JuggerLord
Biker Lord with Axe of Ruin
2x8 Culties
2 HelDrakes
5 Spawn
3 MaulerFiends
GorePack
2x3 Melta Bikers
15 Flesh Hounds
2x5 Flesh Hounds

Some sloppy shorthand there because I didn't have this one handy in a nice form to copy and paste, but you get the point. Basically only the Culties are chaff here, and even they can do some good by hiding in Reserves and holding Backfield Objectives in the late Game. But I didn't get enough testing in, and when the deadline hit, the first list is as far as my evolution had got to. This is also true on a smaller level, too. I've been constantly going back and forth on whether or not the Axe of Khorne is really worth the extra 15 Points over a Power Sword for the JuggerLord, which would also give him an extra Attack (and also let me get the big pack of Flesh Hounds back up to 16 for the sacred number), but wouldn't give him any at-Initiative AP2. Again, that's just where my thought was when the deadline rolled around.

Add in the option for Forge World stuff, and removing limits on Models I don't have, and the picture changes again, to maybe something like:

CAD
JuggerLord
2x8 Culties
HelDrake
4 MaulerFiends, 2 with Lasher Tendrils
16 Flesh Hounds
Brass Scorpion

There's actually one more class of Metagame considerations in play, which I didn't really give enough thought to when working on the list, which is the Scenarios that are being used. I generally play Maelstrom, but all of the Scenarios used for this Tournament are based on end-of-Game scoring. These lists all have a bunch of fast stuff that can run around and capture Objectives Turn-by-Turn, but not much that's good at just sitting and camping them, and the aggressive CC Playstyle the list demands doesn't always leave me with a whole lot left at the end to jump on things then.

The third Scenario has another twist as well: The Primary Objective is to clear out FOC sections, so if you wipe all your Opponent's Troops, that's 9 Points, if you wipe all their FA, that's another 9 Points, and so on. The catch is that any FOC area that you leave empty (except for LoW), your Opponent automatically scores. This was another factor that pushed me toward the Blood Host, because none of the KDK Elites are worth taking on their own merits, and I didn't want to leave any slots empty. On further reflection, I've gone back and forth on that, thinking that perhaps the free 9 Points I'd give up there would be worth it to make another slot that much harder to wipe out. But again, the deadline came down, and that's what I had.