Game 1 at Clash of the Titans

After a hour and a half trainride I made it to Odense. There were buns and butter, tea and coffee!

My first match was against Jesper and his Dark angels. I talked many times with Jesper at the clash tournaments but I never gotten to play him till now.

Jesper plays a shooty Dark angel list.

Belial

3x5 Terminators with th/ss and CML.
10 Tacticals with missile launhcer, powerfist and plasmagun in a rhino.
5 Tacticals with meltagun, powerweapon in a rhino


2x1 Landspeeder with missiles
3+1 Ravenwing bikes + multimelta attackbike

2 Predators with lascannon sponsons

Pregame thoughts: the missions are all the same. Alot of different parameters to gather points. Its possible to effectively get up to something like 50 points. And even if you loose bigtime you should be able to score a few points. I will focus on outmaneuvering him, staying away from his terminators and trying to destroy, or at least stunlock. his ranged fire as fast as possible. His terminators would be the happy recipients of 84 poisoned shots. I expected to remove one group each round where my venom fleet was intact.

Deployment: dawn of war

I won the roll to begin but gave it to Jesper. He deployed nothing and neither did I. I put my 3 reaver bikes in reserver.

Turn 1
The dark angels moved onto the table around the center with his terminators, they were flanked by a predator on each side and landspeeders behind them. It was a textbook deployment. I would only be able to come onto the table and do a moderate denied flank. His rhinos rushed up on one extreme flank against a couple of objectives.

I turboboosted evrything in on the middle and out to the right putting the raiders and ravagers with nightshield as much into the corner as possible. With nightshield they might just be outside range of most of his shooting and everything would have 4+ cover.

Turn 2
I braced for the pain. The shooty dark angels were sure to make a dent in my paperplane fleet.

And watched in amazement as everything single shot fell short of range (thank you night shield), missed or were shruggred off by the cover save. At the end of the dark angelss shooting phase where everything got to shoot the only result were ONE stunned venom.

Ok so now it was my turn.
My venoms moved out towards objectives to start scoring points of them each round. My shooting began and having placed myself so far back in a corner, I might have issues reaching his armor with my ravagers. So the first round I focused everything on terminators and rhinos.
The round went well, 7 or 8 termintors died, amongst them two of the CML terminators. Belials squad was down to Belial and a single buttbuddy.
The ravenwing bikes were also shot of the table and a single rhino exploded with a group of wyches in a raider standing next to them.

Turn 3

So far everything was going well. I had removed about a third of the Dark angels longrange fire platforms, so now he would only be able to shoot at 5 different targets.
Seeing how his terminators were poisined to death by my venoms, Jesper decided to focus all of his remaining fire onto them.
In yet another spectacular display of dice being dice, he only managed to shoot down a single one of them and immobilize another, with his entire fire base.

My reaver bikes came in turbo boosting up towards the predator on my extreme left flank, away from the rest of my army. In my turn three i moved in for the kill. I send my wyches and succubus against one objective and the marines sitting there. The venom fleet moved around to sit on more objectives and unleashed the torrent of poison on his terminators. The ravagers shuffled around to get clear firing lanes towards the predators and landspeeders.
I killed, stunned or shot weapons off everything, except a single landspeeder that refused to die. Fair enough I guess :)

My wyches killed a group of marines in close combat, 10 poisoned powerweapon attacks are nice, and gained a furious charge pain token. I consolidated towards Belial and buddy.

Turn 4 and 5

At this point the Dark angels have stopped being a coherent fighting force and is isolated little pockets of resistance being mopped up.

The shooting is nonexcistent, but in closecombat he destroys a venom with thunderhammer to the face and Belial and buddy charges my succubus, wins combat and break the squad.

In my turn the succubus and wyches regrouped. All my warriors squads turboboosted out to objectives and i sat comfortably on every single objective as I killed his last remaning landspeeder for a clean sheet.
The dark angels got tabled.

I got 45 points and Jesper got 5.

Postgame thoughts: well its not like theres much gamewise I can use to improve my game. I deployed well and did not do anything really stupid, and then everything else was decided by Jespers dice.
Jesper is a really cool and nice guy, so eventhough I was glad I had reaped alot of points, I still hoped his dice would be more fair to him in the next games.