Grand Slam 2

Another tournament has cropped up, Grand Slam 2, to be held this Sunday (3^rd December 2012) at Maelstrom (Eye of the Storm) and run by my good friends over at York.  Details can be found here.

In all honesty I should take Menoth as I know what I’m doing with them, but I decided to take Khador, basically because I wanted to field the big lad!!  I’ve got major surgery the following day so to be honest I really need to have a good fun time and not be bothered about how well I do so I think this choice is just the ticket!

As I’ve posted the pictures of the big lad, a.k.a. Konquest recently I needed a warcaster to run him, I used a cheeky Sorscha2 list a few times with a Winter Guard ‘Deathstar’ and Black Dragon Iron Fangs (poached from Dave).  That list was pretty brutal and good fun too, I also had Sorscha2 painted and most of the Iron Fangs… so I decided to take Irusk1!!!  I quite like the idea of ‘Fully Painted 2013’, an idea banded around by Muse On Minis, something I try and adhere to anyway.  This meant I had to paint up Irusk1 and a full unit of Kayazy Assassins plus Underboss.

Irusk1

Below are a few snaps of the painted Irusk1, I followed the procedure for painting Khador red as previously discussed in the Konquest article, the remainder of the model was done with standard techniques previously discussed for the metals, clothing, flesh etc:

Irusk1 - front

Irusk1 - side

Irusk1 - rear

Irusk1 - side

Kayazy Assassins

The Kayazy are a Khador Ally unit, which means that they are ‘faction’, but aren’t quite regular army and therefore required a different painting style.  I felt that they needed to be quite dark, given their back-alley, cutthroat, shadowy fiction and playstyle, but still retain some of the Khadoran colours for visual recognition.  I chose several dark-greys to base the main colours on, each of which was shaded with Badab Black, then re-highlighted back up to the original base coat, then further highlighting by mixing a cream into the base (not necessary on all colours given the dark pallet – just extreme edges).  I used P3 Greatcoat Grey as the base colour for the Kayazy clothing as this colour is present in the main army and would creat visual continuity.  I used very little red as it was just too bright for the Kayazy, though a couple of assassins did get Khador red hats!

Below are a few photos of the finished Kayazy unit and Underboss:

Kayazy Underboss

Kayazy Assassins - front

Kayazy Assassins - side

Kayazy Assassins - rear

Kayazy Assassins - side

The Irusk1 list is based around two units and Konquest, Irusk1 can run Konquest easily and support the infantry with his defensive/offensive spells.  His Superiority spell really takes care of a few of Konquests weaknesses, as it adds +2 SPD, +2MAT and +2DEF, the latter not really making any difference to a DEF7 model to be honest, but the first two are really important.  Irusk1 can use Battle Lust to basically give out ‘weapon master’ and fearless at will, making units such as Kayazy very dangerous to higher armoured and multiple wound targets.  Iron Flesh is a very good defensive buff, adding +3DEF, but reducing SPD by 1, this obviously synergises well with high DEF units such as Winter Guard Infantry and Kayazy and of course himself (given the Shrinking Kill Box Artifice unique to Grand Slam events).

Irusk also has Inhospitable Ground, a spell that makes his control area (14”) difficult terrain for enemy models, situationally very powerful, allowing the Irusk1 army the opportunity to ‘alpha strike’ the slower enemy.  If the enemy has little or no access to ‘pathfinder’ this is very strong, clearly the inverse is true against those armies with a lot of access such as Circle and Legion.

Irusk1’s feat is a double barrelled feat, where it grants friendly faction warrior models +2 to hit on ranged and melee attack rolls, but perhaps is more defensive in that it grants 4+ tough (super-tough!), fearless and immunity to knock-down for a round.  I found that hard to hit units such as WGI and the Kayazy, who benefit from this feat become very difficult to shift and can jam up enemy lines with less reprisal than without the feat.  Also the buff side of the feat stacks nicely with other buffs the two units inherently possess, such as gang, CRA/CMA and Kovnik Joe’s boosted to hit speech – meaning they are reliably accurate.

The list below is what I have been practicing:

Irusk1

*Konquest

Battle Mechanics (min)

Kayazy Assassins (full) + UA

Winter Guard Infantry (full) + UA

Kovnik Jozeph Grigorovich

Below is a photo of the Irusk1 list:

Karchev

The Karchev list is a bit bonkers to be perfectly honest; it is the exact list that I used to use when I first started playing and is as follows:

Karchev

*Beast 09

*Behemoth

*Kodiak

*War dog

Battle Mechanics (min)

Koldun Lord

Ogrun Bokur

As you can see it’s a bit different, having loads of ‘jacks and virtually no infantry – it is not very subtle and is fairly easy to predict.  It does pose certain problems for opponents and if you can’t deal with that many warjacks then it will probably hit like a sledgehammer.  With the currant meta shift towards Colossals and ‘anti-colossal lists’ this list will likely fall prey to such lists, still it is incredibly good fun to play and that is my primary objective for this event!  As it has a low model count then activation time for the 7 minute turns will be favourable (I hope).

The basic idea of the list is for Karchev to Tow the three heavies into position and let them wreak havoc under Unearthly Rage smashing the snot out of anything nearby!  The Bokur is there to take a shield guard hit for Karchev, though any concerted shooting effort will probably kill him as easy as any other heavy ‘jack TBH.  The dog will help Karchev with a bit of defence in melee as well as getting away without taking free-strikes.  The Koldun Lord can play sweeper with a decent magic shotgun spray as well as powerboost/un-disrupt a ‘jack.  As Karchev will have virtually nothing to hand out to his ‘jacks this extra point of focus could mean an extra fully boosted attack.  The Mechanics are in for obvious reasons!

When I first played this list my local gaming group was much smaller and had less variety of factions and models within them so it was quite a potent list, however in the last two years we’ve all broadened our gaming horizons and I feel that it is no longer a particularly strong list.  I’m using it because it is fully painted, meets the character restrictions, actually poses a good diversity to the Irusk list and is a damned good laugh to play!

Below are some photos of the Karchev list ready to smash face!!