Warmachine Journeyman league week 4

We're now half way through the Journeyman league. This week we all had only one game to play as our club had an emergency meeting during the evening. The game this week was a 25 point game using the starter set for your faction but you could change your caster.

I actually managed to get something painted for this week and gained some points for it. I painted up my squad of banethralls that have been waiting about 4 years to be painted. The rusty metal came out really well. I started by painting the entire model orange with my airbrush, which ran out of pressure about half way through. then I drybrushed with boltgun metal and highlighted with mithril silver, then an overall coat of devlan mud. The smokey robey bit at the bottom was done simply by starting with black and progressive highlights with mixing in with white.

The Game

My opponent for the night was Dave Bartley of Mephiston's Wargame Blog. He was still using Menoth led by Kreoss. I'd played against him during the first week of the league and won but I wasn't confident about this game because I know he knows how to play this game. He's always the guy who gets asked the rules questions.

My force this week was the same as last week, it had a good feel when I was using it. I really like the banethralls and the skarlock thrall.

The mission for the day was the same as the rest of the league was still the killbox mission.

In my first turn I charged up a deathripper to use as an arc node and cast crippling grasp on one of his jacks. Little did I know that he has a spell that can remove ongoing effects, which he used quite a few times over the course of the game, much to my dismay.

I hid my slayer behind a wall with the skarlock thrall and the rest of my force tentatively moved up the board. The stalker ran up the left flank with the intention of catching his melee unit.

Dave retaliated by charging one of his heavy jacks into my deathripper but failed to do much to it because of the high Def on the little deathchicken.

My skarlock cast ghost walker on the slayer, which then charged through the wall into the large jack trying to beat up my chicken. My stalker managed to charge his squad of heavy melee dudes and I found out just how heavy they are, I barely scratched the one I charged.

Dave popped his feat, this knocked down all of my models that were within his caster's control range. This meant all of my models got automatically hit for a turn, which sucked big time. My stalker died easily, his high def doing nothing to save him as he flailed on the floor. All of my banethralls bar 2 died either from hits in combat of from fires resulting from the combat. Somehow my slayer and deathchicken managed to survive pretty unscathed.

I popped my feat but didn't manage to do much with it, Dave had a buff on his big jack that added 2 to a couple of its stats that negated the -2 I did.

My skarlock thrall ran around the corner of the wall and cast venom on the choir behind the jacks killing them all, mwahahaha!

We ended up with everything locked in melee in the middle for a few turns with our casters hiding on opposite sides, eventually my jacks emerged victorious from the fight in the middle and set their sights on Kreoss.

Dave managed to kill the slayer before it got to him, leaving just the deathchickens. Slowly but surely he picked of my chickens in combat until all that remained was Kreoss surrounded by wreck markers and Deneghra and my skarlock thrall. Kreoss had been upkeeping lamentation for ages, this spell makes me pay double the focus to cast anything while I'm in his control range, I hate it so much!

All that remained was the 2 casters and a skarlock thrall that couldn't cast any spells.

The only thing left to do was charge Deneghra into combat, so I did. Denny had 7 focus on her, failed to hit twice, then struck. I boosted the damage and did enough to finally finish him off. Far too close for comfort. The game was incredibly close..... A tough game is always more fun, thanks Dave!

I won't be able to play next week due to work commitments but I'll hopefully bolster my points by painting my remaining models instead.

The league standings for week 4 are:

Jouneyman Results - Week 4
                                             GP      HP     JP
1. Barrie Wardle                   16        7        23
2. Michael Towers                19        3        22
3. Adam Eaton                      19                 19
4. Ian Wardle                        18                 18
4. Carl Sharman                    18                 18
6. David Copperwheat          12        2       14
7. Dave Bartley                     13                 13
7. Martin Copperwheat         13                 13