Goonhammer Canada Open 2025

Written By: Andrew Lebedin

Hello all, and welcome to my blog coverage for GHO Canada 2025!

Before we dive right into the details of the event, I would like to begin by saying thank you to everyone who made this event such a huge success! Jay, Kari, Kylee, and Lawrence for all the tireless planning that needed to happen, the folks at the Deer Lodge Community Centre for letting us use their facilities, the folks at Goonhammer for allowing us the honour to host this event, and of course, all of the players who came out! 

This year, GHO Canada was a 62 player grand tournament! Over two days, players participated in six, 2.5 hour rounds! (With a delicious catered lunch both days, courtesy of Lawrence)

This event saw players come out from all over, and even managed to draw the attention of Frasier Parry! As usual, we also saw the normal Winnipeg crew show up to give a warm welcome to all of the out of towners!

As is expected at our events, the top 10 consisted of a lot of familiar local players, with Logan’s Tau, Kylee’s Sisters, and Brenden’s Templars to name a few! To the surprise of nobody, Frasier Parry stole the event win with a record of 6 wins and 0 losses, with a combined total of 513 battle points!

I like to think that us Winnipegers gave him a run for his money, with Fred, Sebastien, Justin, and Logan all having a shot at taking him down!

Aside from Frasier in first place, David Boer placed second with Tyranids, and Logan Antonation Placed third with T’au!

On a slightly more personal note, I brought along the fearless knights of House Mellifera (Noble Lance Imperial Knights) and managed to do a respectable 4-2. This was GUTI’s last event before Knights switched over to their new statlines, so I did my best to make it a good one! Canis, a Lancer, and a Castellan formed the bulk of my army, able to make short work of many foes, (especially Karl Mac’s 5 titanic knight list) with 2 warglaives and 2 helverins to provide some more bodies for scoring and actions. 

I spent the event hanging around the middle tables, and was fortunate enough to be paired into Frederick Schellenberg for the first time, a matchup that I managed to narrowly win thanks to the old Knights statline. Those emperor's children would have made short work of me if the event had been just a week later!

Another notable matchup was Joshua Lawrence, who took three baneblade variants! The constant fire of cannons kept my Knights up against the ropes, but I managed to steal the victory by keeping my guys safe and playing the objectives. 

Aside from the gameplay, we also had a paint competition, with players who wanted to participate being judged on their army as a whole! Points scored on the paint side of things, combined with battle points, and sportsmanship scores were used to determine who the best players were! We even had Mark from the local Warhammer store come out to help with judging!

All in all, with the exception of a small hiccup with our swag bags, the event went just about as well as anyone could have hoped. Thank you once again, both to, and from the whole GUTI team for making events like this possible.

If you’re interested in viewing any of the streamed games from the event, they can be viewed here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83qf7ZAnQJ4&pp=ygUPVW5pdGVkIHdhcmdhbWVy

And here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y9WaGZL0s4&pp=ygUPVW5pdGVkIHdhcmdhbWVy

If you’d like to read what the folks at Goonhammer have to say about our event, you can find us here - https://www.goonhammer.com/competitive-innovations-in-10th-cold-as-ice-pt-1/

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Daemons And Bugs And Orks, Oh My!