Reader J. Cox brought his Necrons to Killadelphia GT last weekend and went 5-1. Come see how he did it!
Team Stomping Grounds throws a pretty sweet Grand Tournament. I attended the latest running of the Killadelphia GT in Philly on 16-17 May.
This was a two day, six game event operated by the fine folks at Stomping Grounds and powered by the Torrent of Fire tournament software. Format-wise, they had some pretty good stuff cooked up for this one: the tournament was a Battle Points event, where win/loss was more or less meaningless and whoever scored the most points throughout their games, took home the trophy.
The missions were also rather creative and very well done. Each round was a combination of either kill points or end-game objectives, a list of secondary objectives, and (dun dun dun) Maelstrom! Personally, I love the addition of Maelstrom that we got in the 7th edition rules. It shakes the game up and keeps things very dynamic. For this GT though, Stomping Grounds chucked the Tactical Objectives from the rulebook and made their own.
Each player was given a deck of 18 cards to be used during their games. Cards like “score 6+D6 points for controlling all the objectives” and “Score D3 points for blowing up a building” were gone. Instead we had a pretty balanced deck of “grab this objective” or “kill X unit” type cards. At the start of your first turn, you’d draw 3, but could only score two per turn. Most cards were worth 1 point, but some of the harder-to-achieve ones were worth 2. You also had to option to discard 1-3 of your cards at the end of your turn.
You would then draw cards until you had a new set of 3 to score for the next turn. This lead to some pretty tactical play where, if you were down on objectives or kill points, you could just start chasing the Maelstrom cards and get caught up easily enough. Also adding to your score was a list of several Secondary Objectives. Stuff like First Blood, Last Blood, Linebreaker, etc. Before the game started, you’d chose 4 of these and each was worth 2 points if achieved. Overall, a damn good format that was very fun to play.
Once all of your points were tallied up, you them compared your score with the other guy. The difference in points dictated how many actual Battle Points you scored. Here’s the chart:
For my entry into this little shindig, I decided to bring my Necrons out to play. Their new book is simply amazing and I was interested in how they would perform at a major event like this. List-wise, this is what I brought:
Necron Decurion: 1850 Points
Reclamation Legion:
- Overlord with Voidreaper and Phase Shifter:
- Immortals with Gauss Blasters x10:
- Tomb Blades with Particle Beamers, Ignores Cover, and Shield Vanes x 3:
- Necron Warriors x20:
- Ghost Ark:
- Necron Warriors x19:
- Ghost Ark:
Canoptek Harvest Formation
- Canoptek Wraiths with Whip Coils x6:
- Scarabs x3:
- Canoptek Spyder with Gloom Prism (Adamantium Will for everyone within 12in):
Canoptek Harvest Formation
- Canoptek Wraiths with Whip Coils x6:
- Scarabs x3:
- Canoptek Spyder with Gloom Prism (Adamantium Will for everyone within 12in):
So this army is pretty damn good. Every non-vehicle model has a 4+ Reanimation Protocol for failed wounds and 5+ if that wound is Instant Death. For the Warriors, if I somehow manage to lose a few, I have two Ghost Arks on hand to rebuild 2D3 more each turn.
My Overlord pretty much hung out with his Immortal buddies all weekend and used them for Look Out Sir purposes in melee before introducing his opponent to the sweet new Voidreaper Warscythe (bagged an Imperial Knight with it in Game 5). Turns out Master Crafted, Fleshbane, and Armorbane make for a pretty nice combination of special rules on a str 7 ap 2 weapon with 3 attacks base. Strategy wise- I would generally run one unit of Wraiths (who also have a 4+ reanimation thanks to their formation) on each flank, with my bricks of warriors in the middle and my Overlord with his Immortals at the center. With the Reclamation Legion, as long as those infantry are within 12 inches of the Overlord, they can reroll 1’s for failed reanimation rolls.
With all that in mind: here’s how it fared against my various opponents:
1. First game of the event; super excited to get things going and then I see the pairings: Justin Cox v.s Nick Nanvanti…crap…I didn’t think I would win this one from the second I saw that. Nick is damn good and wins GTs for this reason. Still, it was exciting to get a game in with arguably one of the best 40k players in the world and with how tough my army was, I thought maybe I had a chance. Nick (of course) played Demons with a big unit of Plague Drones. All of the drones ended up in assault with all 12 of my Wraiths, and there it all sat for 6 turns. Turns out a 3+ invulnerable with a 4+ reanimation is pretty hard for even this beast of a unit to chew through. We slugged it out, had a very good game, but Nick eventually managed to break through the wraiths and hop on the objectives, winning the game 18-2.
2. Tyranids. My opponent this time was Dallas. Great guy, ended up drinking and hanging out with him all weekend. The game itself was a little slow and predictable. He had 4 Flyrants, 3 Mawlocs, and a smattering of Lictors. Flyrants shot stuff to little effect, I picked up all the easy kill points from his Mawlocs and Lictors and walked away with a solid win.
3. Game 3 was against a guy who, when asked “Hey man, what are you playing?” proudly announced “Centurion-star.” Awesome..another thing I hate dealing with. He went first and was kind enough to donate Tigerius to the warp for me by rolling a Perils, rolling a 1, and failing his leadership. I think this kinda shook him up and made him lose the faith in his super effective deathstar. I charged it with 12 wraiths and 10 scarabs, pumped more little bugs into and there it all sat for 6 turns. I don’t know why he didn’t just Gate out of there, but if he wants to play with my army of robot bugs, I’m going to stop him. I spread out across all the objectives, watched my Overlord introduce a Dreadknight to the new Voidreaper warscythe and again, walked away with a solid win.
4. This one was particularly great for me. I got paired with TJ Meyers and his Tau/demon army. TJ is another excellent player from Team Stomping Grounds who knocked me out of the top spots at the Del-La-Warr Open GT back in April, so I kinda had an axe to grind. And grind it I did. Same old tactic- charge things with wraiths, which works great against all things Tau. Similar to Nicks list; TJ also had a large unit of plague drones. However, they were not supported by Fateweave and were far easier to deal with without their guardian flying demon chicken. My Wraiths whittled the drones down and left only 3 or 4 standing, each with a single wound left when he finally killed off my wraiths and broke out of combat. However, this happened at then end of his turn. After a bad consolidation role, those drones were within rapid fire range of 40 Gauss Flayers and 10 Blasters. I threw a bunch of dice at that problem and away it went. We ended the game with most of the Crons still standing and a single Pink Horror on TJ’s side. He had some seriously bad dice and again, I was able to get a solid win out of this.
5. Chip “Torrent of Fire” Boyd. I really like Chip and he’s always great to play. He had Tau with 2 Imperial Knights. I was able to tie the knights up with my wraiths long enough for my overlord to mosey over and rip one apart with Voidreaper. Karma came back in Mr. Boyds favor however; I tried it again on the 2nd knight and my Overlord met his end to the Dirty D of a Reaper Chainsword before he could swing. My wraiths avenged him however, and knocked the Knight down in the next turn. I then made a pretty big mistake: I moved my Wraiths out of range to receive the Reanimation Protocol benefit from their Canoptek Spyders. Chip capitalized on my carelessness and ate them up with Crisis Suits ad Riptides. A great move on his part, but in the end, I was able to pull it out on kill points due to two units of Kroot that were falling back at the end of the game. Another win, but a close and awesome game.
6. This one irritated me a bit…maybe it was because this was game 6 and I was really tired. This guy was very new to the game and had only been playing for 2 months. He also had a Necron Decurion so we both knew it was going to be like grinding two rocks together and see which one splits first. However, I spent 2 of the games’ 3 hours watching him move and re-position models, premeasure, and check rules in his codex. I get it, hes new and all, but he ended up winning the game because we ran out of time and he was 2 points up on Maelstrom…while I was holding a pair of 2 point cards I would have scored next turn. Torrent of Fire says this one was a loss, but if we had been allowed to finish, I would have scored those cards, jumped onto several key objectives and won the game by a wide margin. With that in mind, Im gonna call this one a win.
Overall, Eldar played by Matt Defranza won the event, finishing just one point higher than Eric Hoerger and his Necrons. This guy had some very cool looking Wraithknights converted to look like three of the Phoenix Lords. Personally, I ended up 30th out of 58. While I won quite a few games, I didn’t win by a very wide margin, which resulted in lower Battle Points.
Also, some of my Warriors weren’t based, which kinda screwed my paint score. Sorted purely by Battle Points, however, I was 16th overall. Killadelphia was an excellent event. It was very well-run, had great missions, and drew some seriously skilled competition. If you can make it next year, I highly recommend going.
About the Author: Rob Baer
Rob Baer
Job Title: Founder, Publisher, & Managing Editor
Founded Spikey Bits in 2009
Socials: Rob Baer on Facebook and @catdaddymbg on X
Bio: Virginia restless, miniature painter & cat dad. He blames LEGOs for all this, as there was something about those little-colored blocks that started it all. Spikey Bits sprung from Rob staying motivated to hobby on his backlog of projects, while sharing his knowledge with others during the early blogging era.
LEGO maniac and scale model hobbyist in the 80s turned miniature wargamer and trading card player ever since. He’s played every edition of Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy (since 5th Edition), but Titans of all sizes will always be his favorite! It’s even rumored that his hobby vault rivals the Solemnance Galleries, containing rulebooks filled with lore from editions long past, ancient packs of black-bordered Magic Cards, and minatures made of pewter and resin.
