Adepticon 2012: Part III

The Adepticon Grand Tournament starts at 9 am on the schedule, but in reality that is check-in and army display preparation. So if you get down to the grand hall at about 8:30 AM Friday morning and people are milling about turning in army lists and checking in with the scoring table. Once you hand over your army list you get your mission packet and the judges let you know that the first round starts at 10:30. You find a spot and set up your army for display while frantically going over all the missions to determine how screwed you are. My first thought was ‘Crap! Every mission has kill points’ I even sent a text back to my buddies at home to let them know how screwed I was with my 19 kill point list as I glanced around at Grey Knight armies with 5 and 6 kill points!

Once you find a spot to display your army sit down and start going over the missions so you are prepared for the first round. I had a bottle of water and a granola bar to keep me hydrated and blood sugar balanced and waited for a judge to come around and score my army. When the judges come by you want to be there because the judges will flat out ask you if there are any unique conversions or special models. They have over 250 armies to judge and they can’t analyze each individual mini. If you are there to talk up your army it will help you with points, instead of getting a 36 I managed a 40 (which isn’t bad for a speed painted and dipped army!) just by pointing out a couple things to the judge. Now this doesn’t mean be pushy, but be available to answer a question if the judge has one – it will help you out. Other guys set up and bailed, coming back to the infamous ‘YOU HAVE BEEN JUDGED’ with no idea what they got or if they left some points on the table… If you don’t get judged before the first round you have to leave you army out over lunch so they can score it – but if you don’t have the strip of paper, you haven’t been judged!

At about 10:30 AM, more or less, the pairings will get posted throughout the hall, at least 5 places in the hall they get taped to the wall. Don’t worry, everyone will form a huge line leading up to them so you won’t be able to miss them.  The pairings will be in alphabetical order with your name and your table number; you meet your opponent when you get there. They give you a couple minutes and then start the timer for the round, a big clock viable from around the entire hall counts down from 2 hours and 15 minutes.

I arrived at my table and found an army of Nercons waiting for me, on a Necron themed table no less! I quickly scanned for scarabs and seeing none, felt a bit better. In my preparation for Adepticon I played my good friend Brian at least 5 times with his Necrons and the last two lists he used on me were very similar to what my opponent was fielding. A couple large squads of warriors and immortals, two annihilation barges, a nasty squad of Lychguard with six wraiths and a Destroyer Lord. I positioned my guys in the middle to immediately seize an objective and wait to weather the storm of wraiths and Lychguard.

As I had expected from looking at pictures of last year’s tournament the terrain was close together and there was allot of it. I used rhino’s on one flank to bottle up the gap between terrain and force the Lychguard to fight through them, successfully tank shocking them away from by main body which was busy with the Wraiths. My plan worked and the Necrons were forced to come at me piecemeal, I pulled out a win in 6 rounds taking 2 of the 3 objectives. It was almost exactly what I had practiced against Brian with and I was glad to have fought so many practice games against Necrons. When the game started I had a plan and I executed it, it was a hard fought game and without using the tanks to keep the Lychguard at bay it would have turned out completely different as he would have pulled off the double assault he was going for. 

After completing the score sheets together we went up to the scoring table to hand out sheets to the judges, they looked them over to make sure we filled them out correctly and sent us on our way. Looking at the clock I had a few minutes to spare before the next round so I went to check on the Forgeworld booth in the vendor area and alarmingly enough the line was still huge. So I filled up my water bottle and took a short walk before round two. I was only 4 hours into my first Adepticon and I had already accomplished my goal of winning one game and having a great game against a good opponent, everything after that was gravy!

still practicing_

Tallarn