A Christmas of Chaos

The Christmas season this year was absolute chaos -- and I mean that both literally and as a pun.

I only managed to play two games in the latter half of December, and both were in the span of two days. One was against my brother's new Word Bearers (he painted over all of his Black Legion guys! So brave. So committed.) and the next was against my buddy Joe's Death Guard. It was such a whirlwind to go from work to game, work to game, that I didn't even bother changing the battlefield between matches.

Winter tends to exhaust me more than any other month. My bar gets so busy during the holiday season and I lose all drive and interest -- everything just feeds the labor machine. Because of that I didn't make too many notes on either of these games, and time has scoured most of the finer details. So this is more of a highlight real.

My battlefield

 In both games we used the new Chapter Approved 2019 missions. As well as the new points! The CA19 missions are really good, I think. In my game against my brother we did one of the Schemes of War missions, I forget which. So we built small decks and drew objective from them.

In both matchups I used my current iteration of my LVO list, which I should probably post here at some point. Also I still need to send my roster to Frontline Gaming for the event. Gotta finalize that quick!

Ground forces.

My brother's Word Bearers, and also some Knights.

These used to be my Loyalist Knights that he just painted over.

This Dreadknight did not survive the Word Bearers Possessed bomb.

This guy ruined that Daemon Engine, though.

Schemes of War is fun. I kept this card in my hand and scored it through a cheeky Gate of Infinity to teleport my Terminators 1" from where they cast it.

Venerable Brother Ewan is back in the list, outfitted with a lascannon and a missile launcher now instead of his old Legends armaments.

My brother forgot his Oblits at home and thus had to borrow my one Centurion and two empty bases to proxy them.

Cultists jumping into my backline with Tide of Traitors.

These Terminators mulched those Possessed.

Then they moved on and mulched his Warlord.

By the time my deep strikers came in, most of the heretics were dead.

My brother forgot his Chaos Spawn and thus had to proxy with Jabba the Hutt.

My Grey Knights absolutely annihilated his Word Bearers. He brought a melee daemon army against Grey Knights. That's like the only truly great matchup for me.

The next day I played against Joe's Death Guard. He had recently purchased and begun painting a Great Unclean One. He brought along three Blight Haulers and had some gross combo where he could toll that ugly chubbo's bell and bring dead Blight Haulers back to life. It was really hard to deal with them, even with my bonuses against daemons. He's ignoring 1/3 of all smite wounds, after all.

This die landed like this as I rolled it. True Warp Fuckery.

A scrap of the highest order.

Terrible photo, but Joe does an amazing job painting these gross monsters.

This one was a pretty close matchup, but if I recall I think he won. He ended up... wait, no. I'm going to go check.

Yeah, no, I just ran down stair and checked the white board in my basement. I won. I managed to hold more points with my indestructible Paladins.

Fun matchup. I always enjoy playing against Joe.

For Christmas, I decided to paint up a squad of Havocs with Reaper Chaincannons for my brother. I'm still waiting on the other Chaincannons in the mail (they're coming from Poland), but I managed to paint this guy below on Christmas as a proof of concept.

I'm very proud with how he turned out, especially considering that I don't paint Chaos a whole lot.

Really liked how this foot turned out.

Gal Vorbak Red is a wonderful pigment and I'm going to use it on other things more often. Probably purity seals and such, rather than just using Khorne Red.

December was so busy. But we're back in January and I think I'm back on my bullshit again, so stay tuned for a proper battle report soon.