The 40K league has begun and ....

... my first opponent will be someone unknown to me. As far as I know anyways.

Im gonna face a chaos space marine list. The army I played extensively for close to three years. Theres not gonna be any surprises there.

The list itself is pretty straight forward and probably a very nice matchup for me.

Before I go on to discussing the list im facing im just gonna go over the league.

Pairing and matchups

Its 24 people participating in a league over the next three months. Each round is about 2 weeks and we have to get in a single game against an opponent during that timeslot.
The pairing system is swiss draw, random for the first round, and for subsequent rounds pairing is based on tournament points.

2 For a win,1 For a draw and 0 for a loss.

I was hoping for a good matchup for the first round, to avoid some of the tougher armies. And ohh boy are there some tough armies out there.

Scoring, deployment and missions

Scoring, deployment and missions are rolled at random for each single game, from an extensive list made by Patrick who is the organiser of it.

The short version.
There are two kinds of scoring, standard rules and everything non vehicle with WS and over four models at the beginning of the game.
Deployment has six options, the three standard ones and alpha strike which is like dawn of war with HQ and Fast instead of troops. Also ambush which is like spearhead but with forced 500+ points in reserve and Fog of war which is like pitched battle but with hidden (written down) deployment.

The missions, all nine of them, consists of primary (10 battlepoints), secondary (6 battlepoints) and tertiary (4 battle points). The primary and secondary shifts around on all nine variants between killpoints, scoring of objectives each round, holding objectives at the end of the game, getting units into the opponents deployment zone and so forth. The tertiary objective always is victory points

A win, draw or loss is then converted into tournament points.

Back to my first matchup.

My first opponent as mentioned plays chaos space marines.

Abbadon the Despoiler
Daemon Prince with lash and wings
Greater Daemon

3 Terminators with 3combi plasmas in a Landraider

5 Thousand Sons with bolt of change and meltabombs on the sorcerer in a rhino
5 Chaos space marines with a meltagun and champion in a rhino with extra twin bolter
5 Lesser Daemons

3 Chaos bikes with 2 meltaguns

2x 3 Oblitorators
Vindicator

Thoughts on the matchup:

Now this is probably a dream matchup for me.

Chaos in general and this list in particular is short on longrange fire, which is the doom and demise of my dark eldars. The list has a pretty nice close combat elements but since it based on two things 1) Abbadon in a landraider, and 2) Two monstrous creatures im foreseeing some difficulties for it.
Surviving with a landraider is pretty uphill struggle against 22 lance weapons and surviving at all with monstrous creatures, that are difficult to hide, against Venoms is neigh on impossible.

Then theres the third factor I have to deal with 3) the obliterators. But as a longtime chaos player I know too painfully well that massed fire of strenght 8 will kill them eventually. And failing with my lances then theres the spammed shots from the Venoms.

That said im not gonna jump to any foregone conclusions, the mission, the terrain and the dice are all factors which might play into the hands of the chaos player.

But all im really hoping for is a good and fun game where I dont make any mistakess