Last year, I started making videos where I recorded my 40k battles and then make jokes and commentary about them after the fact. Turns out, making Battle Report videos takes a lot of energy…you know, energy that I could spend painting more minis! Or you know, other important stuff. Well, this March started a brand new escalation league at my store, so I thought maybe this time I would do some blog post versions of my battle reports.

New year, new army right? Eh, no. While I'm working on painting up some Black Templars, I decided to use my Grey Knights again for this year's league. First of all, I'm still learning a lot about the Grey Knights, so more experience would be helpful. Second, I spent all of last league furiously painting up units to make sure to use them on following weeks/months when the points would go up. I really didn't want to be that way this time around with the Templars - I actually want to take my time with them. I have a ton of Grey Knights stuff painted up now, so I have a lot of options for army lists.

Round 1: Grey Knights vs. Dark Angels

Speaking of which, Month 1 starts with 500 points, so here is the list I started with. I really wanted to use Grand Master Voldus as my warlord as I got him late in the league last time. Also, he has the ability to cast 2 psychic powers, 3 if I spend a command point, which I really wanted to take advantage of. Using him means that I have to take the Wardmakers brotherhood, which ended up saving my bacon in Game 2 (spoilers). I also knew I wanted to start heavy with a Dreadknight, as I know they have been awesome in competitive lists. Decided to just fill the rest of the list with regular strike squad marines as there wasn't many points left.

Unfortunately, this round was a makeup game as I couldn't make it the first day, so I don't have the mission available to display. But it was basically an objective game where you wanted to claim more objectives than the opponent. You would get 4 points each round if you had one objective, another 4 points if you had 2 or more objectives, and another 4 points if you controlled more objectives than your opponent.

I'm going to summarize this game with the fact that the was the first game of 40k that I had played since November 2021, so there was a lot of rust being knocked off in this game. Only now, I know I suck at things like starting placement and strategy, so I spend forever trying to think about what to do differently, only to continue to suck at them. I'm sure my opponents really appreciate that. 

Please excuse the crudity of this model

I always forget to take pictures during matches, so we'll use my in progress Black Templars as substitutes for the Dark Angels. For my opponent, I was basically facing a similar makeup: a warlord, squad of marines and a squad of terminators. Of course, we are talking primaris marines, so not exactly "equal makeup". Going first, I decided to make up for my short comings by being aggressive - let my Dreadknight use its teleporter to get it quickly into battle, followed by getting my Strike Squad next to it by casting Gate of Infinity. Ideally, this would have let me mow down the excess units and reduce the numbers of attacks against me before it even got to his turn.

Reality Kicks Back

"Wait," you might be saying, "That doesn't look very smart…" Yeah I know that *NOW*. For those that are not aware, Teleporting the Dreadknight & Strike Squad requires them to be put back on the board at least 9" away from all enemy units. My opponent had spaced out his forces so that my ideal location, which would have been behind that small group of Marines, was unavailable. The only option I had to teleport was basically in front of the Terminators. At the time I thought that would work out: drop a bunch of guys on top, focus fire on the Terminators (aka the heaviest firepower he had), then he'd be crippled and I'd mop up everyone else.

In actuality, even though I went first, this is what happened:

See, his Terminators had some extra abilities that made them extremely hard to hit with my rolls, plus they all have great saves for the few shots that do get through. For instance, my strike squad had 28 dice to throw at them in the shooting phase, and only *ONE* wound got through. Terminators have 3 wounds each, and there were 5 of them. So I basically threw everything at them and just dented one guy's armor. Then on his turn, he moves everyone into a vice grip around my troops and opens fire, wiping the board of everything except my warlord. I conceded not long after (I also had to get a second game in that day).

What did I learn?

1. A practice game when you haven't played in over 3 months is always a good idea

2. Figure out if you have a good teleport location *before* casting the spell/spending the points on it

3. Oh….so that's what it feels like to go up against Terminators.

So that's week 1 of this new league. What else could I have done better? What would you have brought for 500 points? Let me know in the comments below.