Friday, January 3, 2014

Warmachine Battle Report - eFeora vs the Witch Coven of Garlghast

And now for something a little different ... one of my Cryx playing friends (and an especially devious one) went toe to toe in a series of three matches in mid November. We were practicing our death clock play, but we weren't ending the game if someone went over.

There are a number of proxies in this match on the Cryx side of things. Until writing the up, I didn't know what the Witch Coven looked like.


The scenario was Outflank and I have mentioned before that I am reasonably comfortable with this one (after having lost some of my earliest matches in spectacular fashion). Two zones, standard SR2013 zone scoring rules.

The Lists:
eFeora
  - Judicator (bonded)
  - Vanquisher
  - Castigator
  - Repenter
  - Repenter
Temple Flame Guard with UA
Vassal of Menoth
Choir (max, which is rare for me)
Vassal Mechanik


Witch Coven of Garlghast
  - Egregore
  - Skarlock Thrall
  - Defilers x3
  - Harrower
  - Seether
two Warwitch Sirens
a Pistol Wraith
a max unit of Satyxis Raiders with Sea Witch
and the Satyxis Raider Captain

I am incredibly concerned about feedback. Also, my opponent is a devil with arc nodes and is the Cryxiest Cryx player in my meta.

Menoth wins initiative and elects to go first. Cryx remains on the side with the big multi-elevation hill.

DEPLOYMENT
Menoth
The Judicator pre-deployed centrally. I have made mistakes on this scenario before and knew I wanted to try to march the Judicator straight up the pipe. The TFG are represented by the Errants.

Cryx
Cryx messed up their deployment, reversing where jacks needed to be. The harrower is up on the mountain when he should be over by the woods to take advantage of pathfinder and ghost shot. Instead, the seether is over by the woods. In the image Egregore is being represented by the unpainted Gerlak Slaughterbane and the witches are the figures surrounding him.




TURN 1

Apparently I forgot to take a picture for turn 1 and Feora forgot to allocate anything. Those were indicators that food was needed and I ordered us some pizza from the shop next door. Feora cast escort and put ignite up on the TFG. The Judicator advanced 6”, everything else moved forward … forgetting to use the extra two inches for escort. The TFG ran. Menoth definitely had serious concentration problems at the start of the game.

Cryx raced forward and engaged the left zone. The Raiders bounded ahead on the right and popped into the Menoth forest. The Coven advanced some. Spells went out. Being able to cycle +2 spd upkeep spell on 4 already fast jacks is pretty fantastic.

TURN 2 - MENOTH

Menoth upkeeps both spells and moves forward with the Judicator. Since the Satyxis are immune to blast damage, the Judicator attempts to lob deviations into the Coven. A Defiler gets a deviation and catches on fire. The heavy jack contesting the zone catches on fire from the Vanquisher. The Repenter advances and contests the left zone, the Castigator advances and contests the right zone. The TFG redeploy / run to the right to slow the approaching Raiders. The Right flank Repenter sprays a couple sacrificial Raiders.




TURN 2 - CRYX

The left zone heavy jack throws the Repenter into the Vanquisher, but it still has a toe in the zone. The right side jack advances into the zone. The Raiders charge in against the TFG, pass their command check against Terror, and kill several. Some of them do huge end runs to enable them to eat Menoth with free strikes if the TFG move or turn. The other Defilers advance. The Coven advances, hits the Castigator with a spell that crits and shadowbinds the Castigator so it can’t advance, and then drops a cloud between the Castigator and themselves and then feats reducing the LOS limit of all of the Menoth models in their control range to five inches. All zones contested, no points scored. If you look carefully at the picture below, you will see the Menoth army ringed by Raiders and arcnodes. As I said, my opponent is a Cryx devil.




TURN 3 - MENOTH

Feora allocates three to the Castigator and two to the Judicator. Some of the TFG attempt to charge and murder Satyxis to little effect. Then the show starts. Menoth looks up some rules to double check some things and Cryx looks up some rules to make sure everything is going to happen the way Menoth thinks. The Judicator activates and advances. It sacrifices its initial attacks and spends a focus to double-handed throw the Castigator. We decide from looking at the rules that you do not need a target to throw at (just a direction). All the Judicator needs to do is hit and beat the Castigator on a strength test. The Judicator boosts to hit to make sure, and throws the Castigator 8.5 inches on to the Coven. We actually forget to do the proper deviation, but when we looked back over our notes, there was only a very small chance it would have resulted in a different outcome  The Coven are all pushed aside via least disturbance … and take POW 17 Collateral Damage hits, snuffing them out. The Castigator didn’t even get to activate and use his powers!! (Which, upon reflection, would have been a challenging activation because it would start knocked down and is shadowbound. Hooray for Collateral Damage!)




Victory for Menoth via Assassination

This is the first time I had ever defeated my Cryx friend, and I felt like I did it in a super cool way (akin to how he often gets victories). I was really psyched. I had recently listened to the Chain Attack Dojo podcast about power attacks and knew I had double-handed throws in my tool kit for this list. The Castigator gets bad press because for the 8 points you could select a Reckoner or almost any other excellent Menoth Jack. In truth, it was the Judy that got the work done, and I am ok with that. Of course, if it didn’t work, Feora was gonna die the next turn. If you look at the last image you can see why, 3 arc nodes totally in range of Feora.






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