The Road to 6-0, or maybe not…
Written By: Andrew Lebedin
Hello folks, and welcome to my blog coverage of the Western Canadian Team Championships, held September 6th and 7th in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan!
This event was a 2 day, 5 round teams GT with 16 teams, totaling 96 players from all over Western Canada. The unofficial “Team Guti” that went out this year consisted of myself, Wilfred Beaulieu, Ben Gerling, Rudy Friesen, and co-captained by Sebastien Demeule and Matt Van Ginkel.
Arriving to Saskatoon on the Friday evening before the event, the team met at Fuddruckers for a meal and debrief before retiring for the night, with Wilfred and I staying at the hotel that the event was held at, and the rest of the gang at an Air BnB.
Day 1 started bright and early, with doors opening at 7:30. We had a nice little corner of the banquet hall, being placed in pod 8 with TRIDENT Gold as our round 1 opponents. Spoiler alert, we did not leave pod 8 the whole weekend.
My round 1 opponent was Scotty B, playing Awakened Dynasty Necrons. While I initially approached this matchup with confidence, I soon had nothing but fear and frustration as the masterfully piloted Necrons bullied me off objectives one by one until I was on the backpedal. While we exchanged friendly banter, Scotty forced me to fight tooth and nail for point after measly point. Even with 10 OC a piece, I had to resort to body blocking his models for even a small chance to prevent his scoring.
Even though I was unsuccessful in securing a win, I managed to deny him a huge victory over me, with the final game score being 8-12 in his favour.
Easily one of the best 40K games I have ever played. Scotty is an amazing player, and was a fantastic opponent.
Unfortunately, much of the same rang true across the board for the team, leaving us defeated in the first round of the event.
After round 1 we broke for lunch, and the team had another debrief while we looked at the round 2 pairings.
Weapons of Cash Reduction were our opponents for round 2. The pairing process landed me with Subterranean Assault Tyranids. A matchup that I fortunately got some experience with, having played Curtis Strong for a practice game in preparation for this event.
My opponent, Dan Bishop, started out about how I expected, redeploying all of his heavy hitters into reserves to surprise me later.
A well screened back line of armigers, gave me the full confidence to push my titanic knights up the board first thing. I took my expansion objective, and one of the center objectives (Hidden Supplies has 2 center objectives), and I was poised to take his expansion easily if I played my cards right.
Turn 1, passed, with little interaction from Dan, and turn 2 progressed just the same. Everything appeared as though the game was in the bag for me… and then turn 3 hit. Suddenly, all of Dan’s heavy hitters were in the middle of the board, pushing up into my knights. Three well placed haruspex killed a lancer, and then another. His zoanthropes made short work of my errant, and suddenly I was once again finding myself on the backpedal. Forced to resort to well played secondaries and challenger missions, I managed to bring what may have been a total loss back up to another 8-12 loss, with our team taking a 53-67 loss.
By game 3 I was tired, my feet hurt, and our team was disheartened. One Ping Only was our opponent. Pairing left my favourable matchups, like both flavours of knights, to other players on the team. I got stuck with Leagues of Votann, a matchup that had me concerned initially.
Fortunately for me, my opponent’s greed caused him to over extend, which allowed one of my lancers to munch his warlord early on. From there, it was just a matter of making sure he couldn’t extend out of his deployment zone, which I managed fairly well. I pulled away with a 15-5 victory, which was enough to change our luck around for a tie for the team!
Exhausted, the team split for the night so we could rest and mentally prepare ourselves for day 2
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Day 2… round 4. MtG Refugees were our opponents, and Supply Drop was the name of the game.
My second Necron opponent of the event, but this time I was prepared. My game with Scotty in round 1 had me prepared for the monster that is a 20 man blob of warriors with a million attached characters for reanimate shenanigans.
Another hard fought battle, I struggled to take down any of my opponents units throughout the first half of the game, while he slowly chipped away at my knights.
Unfortunately, his expansion objective disappeared first, which not only left me with an extra turn of scoring over him, but going second meant I could score big on my turn 5.
Some clever positioning meant I was able to trap his necron warriors in such a way that they could not fall back from combat, nor could they reanimate onto the objective to out OC my errant and Canis Rex.
Scoring the big 15 points for center objective at the end of turn 5, I pulled a respectable 13-7 win. I was the only one on the team to win, however. Our heaviest hitter, Sebastien, got stuck with an unfavourable matchup into chaos knights, leading to a 0-20 loss, and similar results ensued for the rest of my teammates.
Such is the way of teams I suppose.
A nice chill lunch followed the round, with Rudy, Ben, Wilfred, and I ordering some pizza from the hotel restaurant.
Our final game of the weekend, into another TRIDENT team, this time being TRIDENT Obsidian. We finally lucked out on pairings
Ben’s space marines into Chaos knights, with a respectable 9-11 loss.
Matt’s T-sons into Chaos space marines, clutching a 13-7 victory.
Sebastien’s World Eaters into Custodes, with a decisive 16-4 victory.
Rudy’s ork mirror resulted in a 16-4 victory as well.
Wilfred unfortunately struggled into world eaters with a 0-20 victory.
I got paired into Space Marines. One of my worst matchups on this team. I made sure to carefully position my knights to score consistent points for a draw. What I thought would be an easy kill of a combi lieutenant, resulted in possibly the worst outcome; Guilliman used heroic intervention.
A high roll spike on Canis was able to take him out, unfortunately though, he stood back up thanks to his ability. On my opponent's turn, he charged Guilliman back in to finish off Canis. A well timed fight on death allowed me to trade Canis into Guilliman, scoring my oath and giving me the boost I needed to win. From that moment, my knights pushed across the board, taking all three no man's land objectives. My opponent got put on the defensive, and I tabled him and won the game.
Our team managed to win the round, landing us securely at 12th of 16 teams. Not the greatest, but definitely not bad considering that this was our first teams event.
This was definitely the most challenging event of my Warhammer career, but I suspect that it won’t be for long. Over these 5 rounds, I, as well as my teammates, definitely grew as players, and it has reignited a passion to push myself to become a higher level of player.
Matt, Rudy, Sebastien, Wilfred, and Ben all performed exceptionally well, and I couldn’t have asked for a better crew to head out to Saskatoon with. We all supported each other, and pushed ourselves to go further, and that support was critical for our overall success as a team.
While the road to 6-0 may have ended up at 3-2, I will continue to practice and improve to hopefully find myself winning an event someday.
Thanks for reading!
