Grand Tournament Recap – Space Wolves

Welcome back! It’s been a while. My kids refuse to stop growing, and they’re getting bigger and more involved, so while I have been playing games and painting models, I haven’t been writing about that process as much as I would like.

I was able to attend a 34 player event this last weekend, and take my beloved Thunderwolf Cavalry out for a spin for the first time in a long while.

I think this list is fairly well positioned in the meta, not by dint of being the best marine list you can play (I think that is likely Ultramarines, Iron Hands, or, possibly and due entirely to playing priority assets, Salamanders), but because it’s a very good anti-marine list. Everything in my list murders t5 and t6 bodies without thinking hard about it, brings enough anti-tank to deal with transports or maybe 1-2 hard targets like a Repulsor or Land Raider, and is very, very fast.

I have some thoughts about changes I’d make if I take it to another GT (which I might be doing in 4 weeks), which I’ll discuss further at the end.

This report is going to be a little less verbose than normal – I don’t really want to belabor every detail of the games but there are a couple of pivotal moments in each I thought were important and I want to reflect on.

Round 1

Round 1 I found myself facing off against a CSM Priority Assets list piloted by Sara.

I dread seeing Priority Assets on the opposing side. I think it’s a horrific matchup for Take and Hold, and it’s one of the main things that I did not like about playing Take and Hold going into this event.

I lost the die roll, Sara moved up and did the primary action on the middle objective with the Beast of Nurgle and passed the turn over after putting the Nurglings in the center and the brick of Legionaries on the far side.

I made an uncharacteristic turn 1 blunder here, misremembering the timing of the stratagem that lets you pick up a unit of Wulfen or Thunderwolves specified your opponents’ fight phase, so I went all in on the Legionaries and the Nurglings with the initial idea to use the fight and fade on the Thunderwolves to get them safe and then pick up the Wulfen.

I had to abandon that mid-turn when I re-remembered, and as a result left my Thunderwolves stranded in the middle of the board after fight and fading the Wulfen back to the objective after murdering the unit of Legionaries and characters.

This was a massive blunder, especially when I had such an easy out of “back up an Impulsor, apply melta, screen with Fenrisian Wolves” to the Nurgling “problem”.

Sara killed all my Thunderwolves. I rapid ingressed MORE Thunderwolves.

I played Wulfen yo-yo again this turn, murdering the Vindicator and running away, while tying up the Predator in melee with Fenrisian Wolves so it could not draw any lines to them. The Thunderwolves, stranded by my use of Devastator Doctrine to try and draw two lines on the Defiler (I needed one higher than I got for the back Impulsor) were, as a result, only able to make a charge into the Venomcrawler on the objective, with a few that probably could have moved around to engage the Defiler which had taken some damage from the first Impulsor.

Sara opted to Heroic the Defiler up, which let me get four wolves instead of three into it. I don’t know if this mattered, because they overkilled the Defiler by a large margin, but it was probably not the wisest use of CP and Sara regretted it later that game when we discussed.

The Venomcrawler also died.

Now, I have a solid lead on attrition, Logan and Terminators dropping next turn, and most of my resources around still, but I’m already down by about 15 on points just due to the insane nature of the Prio/Take and Hold mismatch.

Vashtor moves up and kills my Impulsor. Shooting plus a Discordant plus some terrible save rolls make all my Thunderwolves dead.

The waiting Forgefiend drops on my home and kills all three attached Bikes to my Chaplain.

In response, I have a horrific bounce turn. Vashtorr? Alive. Discordant? Doesn’t get attacked at all. Forgefiend? Alive.

The only thing that worked out was the Wulfen killing the Predator full to dead and running away again.

Fortunately, Vashtorr and friends also don’t accomplish much this turn, so even though I’m down by about 30 points at the end of Sara’s turn four, I am able to table all the CSM models bar and swing up about 40 points in two turns to end up with a reasonable victory margin, but it was close right up until there.

Other than my horrific misplay of the Thunderwolves on turn 1, I also felt like I really needed to use my Company Heroes better to screen my home objective after they had secured the other two. I think a better play pattern would have been deploy them near the top expansion, move them to the center on turn 2, and then have them screening the home objective completely on turn 3 onwards.

This would have stopped the Forgefiend from denying me a large chunk of points, and kept alive many bike models to have more resources to chase down things later in the game.

Round 2

This round, I was paired into Cody piloting an Ultramarines list running a bunch more traditional units than the current Deathwatch Terminator hotness. I’ve played into this list with Deathwatch Terminators and I felt pretty good into it, and I think this is strictly worse against me because it has pretty limited mobility by comparison. As long as I can contain the Inceptors, I’ll be okay.

This is the take and hold mirror, which I am much happier about than playing into Priority Assets. I lost the roll off and went second.

Round 1

He put some scouts in the middle and moved things around a bit, putting nothing but some Incursors on his expansion objective. He put one Impulsor by those, and then another one on the far side so that if I decided to go after it with Wulfen he’d be able to punish that with a Dev Doctrine Repulsor Executioner.

On my turn, I decided to be a cheeky devil and drop Logan on his expansion objective. He only had one Reiver on it, and I was able to drop them all in such a way that the Repulsor Executioner would need some absurd advance roll to have a prayer of getting to them thanks to hidden, and so that his Victrix brick would need something like a 15 on 3d6 in order to make the charge. I also thought I might just be able to get a cute charge and clear off that Impulsor, limiting his ability to push into my line there considerably.

I pushed my Thunderwolf Cavalry into the middle of the board, and stuck the Company Heroes on the expansion top left. The Thunderwolves charged his Scouts in such a way that he had a 10″ heroic with the Victrix, and my Thunder Hammer Terminators made their 9″ charge.

I mistakenly decided to fight the Impulsor instead of the Reivers, but I couldn’t avoid getting within 3″ of the Reivers, so I didn’t take the objective from him after all. I did get a free Impulsor though I guess?

My Thunderwolves ate the Scouts alive and then used fight and fade to run back to my side of the center, with the Repex not functionally having a line on them thanks to how far back it was.

Round 2

Cody ripped a really good advance roll on his Victrix Guard (uh oh) and moved his remaining Impulsor up to shoot my Company Heroes.

I lost one Company Hero to the shooting, holding onto the objective thanks to Objective Secured, and then Cody made the long bomb charge into my Terminators. I think I should have used Rapid Ingress on my Thunderwolves here to set up a next turn charge but I just…didn’t?

I popped fight on death in response to Cody using +1 AP and Lance, lost every single Terminator and Logan and killed back almost all of the Victrix Guard with Fight on Death.

Cody had left me three objectives all to myself, so I scored a lot of Primary, and decided to lay down the hammer here, charging his Techmarine with my Thunderwolves and his exposed Eradicators (my Impulsor murdered his) with Wulfen. I made a BIG goof up here, and didn’t screen the top left corner from his Inceptors, which he’d picked up a while back and I had forgotten about.

Round 3

Inceptors dropped (sigh), Reivers advanced menacingly on my Impulsor on the bottom so I rapid ingressed wolves there, and he retreated his Repex and gave it Tactical Doctrine with Guilliman before the big blue boy moved up to the center.

The Repex…is actually terrifying now, and it sure murdered 4 of 6 Thunderwolves with zero help.

I lost a handful of Wulfen, and the Reivers on the bottom made their charge into my Wolves and killed one and a half somehow, and then failed to die back to my colossal irritation. Fortunately, I passed the beginning of the fight phase battleshock check.

I struck back by killing everything but his Repex, Two Incursors, one or two Reivers, and Kaius.

In a moment of complete disaster, my Impulsor failed the 3″ charge into his Inceptors on the top left, and Guilliman fought on death and cleaned up the Wulfen that killed him.

That said, Cody was bleeding resources faster than me and I was well up on Primary so that just made things potentially very tight.

Round 4

I keep messing up my positioning with the Company Heroes now that the Ancient has to die last, and he was able to take me off the center with Inceptor shooting because of it.

Kaius and Cato ran away from my Thunderwolves and the Repex murdered my Impulsor and a number of Thunderwolves. Kaius and Cato failed their charge into my now exposed Eradicators.

More stuff died, leaving Cody with one Eradicator, one Reiver, and Kaius with the Repex wayyyy back there.

Kaius made a heroic into the Gravis Marines that hadn’t moved so that I could not trigger Catos’ reactive move and killed two.

Round 5

Cody was down by a good bit, but he had a cute play that I had predicted where his lone Reiver on one wound came up to charge my bikes holding down the center.

Unfortunately for him, I play against a lot of Death Guard and I know the “expose your remaining resources to something horrible with one innocuous dude” trick, so I overwatched it with my bikes so it couldn’t charge them and make them take a potentially game losing battleshock test.

He controlled the one expansion at the end of his turn, and I was poised to kill Kaius, take his expansion, and score whatever I wanted to to end the game.

Big takeaways here – screening isn’t optional, and placement of the Company Heroes Ancient is really important.

Also, maybe kill the Reivers instead of the Impulsor next time, they caused me no end of grief, and I could have been several inches farther away from the Victrix with my Terminators, and they made the charge to the inch.

Finally, BOY Repulsor Executioners make many attacks. I think I should have left Guilliman alone for another turn, murdered the Repex with the Wulfen, and run them away into the back corner to then come kill the golden boy the next turn.

Round 3

Round 3 I was paired against Xavier and his very cool Ork army. This was another Take and Hold mirror, which I was very pleased with.

He won the roll off for first, after deploying very conservatively. I decided to see if he really wanted to trade his Squighog Boys for an Impulsor so I scouted it up with the Phobos Librarian.

Round 1

Turns out he did want that Impulsor. He used the Beast Boss to Rile Up the bottom unit and then sent them on a mission. They made their long-ish charge into the Impulsor, but thanks to Armor of Contempt, it survived on 2 or 3 wounds.

I decided that I was very pleased with this outcome, so I hopped the Librarian out of the Impulsor and fell back with it. He used his “take a bunch of hazard checks” stratagem and the Impulsor died, which was fine because then all of his Squighog Boys also died to charging Thunderwolves and charging Wulfen (who ran away at the end of the Fight Phase).

Round 2

Xavier scored 3 on Primary from his home objective and moved up his one Kill Rig to shoot at my Thunderwolves. I used Rapid Ingress on Logan’s unit to try and deny the objective to him, and he shot at them instead and killed one Terminator out of the squad before passing the turn over.

I elected to back Logan and co. up, but I sent the Thunderwolves in full speed ahead to murder the Kill Rig and tie up the Beast Snagga Boyz. I felt like, at this point, the game was functionally over already. I was up several hundred points of material and I was going to keep Xavier to his second turn in a row of 3 primary while I was maxing it every turn.

He also had drawn secondary objectives that weren’t particularly good for him, so he hadn’t scored any of those either.

Round 3

This round, Xavier decided it was “go” time, so he pushed his other Squighog Boy unit up with the Kill Rig behind it, threw Ghaz out of the Battle Wagon, and fell back with the Beast Snagga Boyz.

I used Rapid Ingress to bring my Thunderwolf Unit #2 down behind the first ones.

He shot 4 Thunderwolves to death, and then failed his re-rolled charge with the Squighog Boyz into the Fenrisian Wolves and failed Ghaz’s charge into the Thunderwolves.

It was officially Alpha Strike Turn ™.

Big Thunderwolves at Battle Wagon, Wulfen at Squighogs, Chaplain at Squighogs (more on this) and the small Thunderwolves on Ghaz to prevent the inevitable Heroic Intervention.

The Wulfen demolished the Squighog Boyz, which let the Chaplain and Bike friends do an Overrun fight into the other Kill Rig. With the small amount of damage it had taken from the Eradicators shooting at it, the thing lived on a handful of wounds.

The Battle Wagon exploded, Ghaz demolished the two Thunderwolves in combat with him, and Logan and his 4 Terminators really, really killed a bunch of Gretchin.

Xavier looked down at the table for a couple of seconds and conceded, which I felt was probably fair.

I felt like, at least on paper, this is a pretty difficult matchup for me but I overestimated the amount of damage Tankbustas can really do to things that aren’t vehicles, and even though he’s got very similar damage output to my list, my things are a little faster and the Wulfen in particular can stay Hidden which dramatically increases their survivability.

Round 4

Out of the remaining undefeated lists, the only one I was super concerned about list-wise was a similar Space Wolves list, and none of the undefeated players were on Priority Assets so I was just kind of happy to play into whatever.

This time, I got paired into my friend Wyatt running a nasty CSM double Defiler Take and Hold list. I like this matchup in general for me, but Wyatt is very good so I knew I’d need to be on point still.

I won the roll off for a change!

Round 1

I moved some Company Heroes onto the center, put some Eradicators hiding on my Expansion, and said go – first turns against gunlines aren’t particularly exciting.

Wyatt responded by moving up a couple of Venomcrawlers and toeing terrain everywhere with Defilers. He drew a line on my Impulsor with his far Forgefiend and did a couple damage to it.

I picked up my Wulfen here. In hindsight, I think this was likely a mistake.

Round 2

I decided that this was a mini “go” turn, and I was going to go Devastator Doctrine, need a 3 on the advance to get my Impulsor on the bottom right into range, and try to kill his Flamer Defiler, his forward Venomcrawler, and expose just the tanks.

Unfortunately, this did not work out. I rolled minimum damage for all melta guns that went through, leaving the Defiler on 3. I opted to try and kill it with my Librarian, but that only left it on one.

Even worse, the Venomcrawler which was shot at by the full unit of Outriders and then charged by the unit of Outriders ALSO lived on 1. This wasn’t even Wyatt rolling incredible saves on anything, I just handed him no wounds at all with most of the bike squad.

I think in hindsight, I should have gone for a Thunder Wolf charge here as well this turn.

If I move the center left Impulsor back a few inches to leave a line, the Thunderwolves are only about 23 inches away from the Defiler and they’re MUCH closer to the Cultists. I could have had 2 Thunderwolves engaging that Defiler easily after a charge and pile-in, killing it, Cultists, and then preventing the second Defiler from touching the center objective with my melee ranges so that it had less lines of fire the next turn.

Even if the Defiler had died, I think they could have charged Cultists and the Venomcrawler and tried to pile-in on the Lord Discordant or get an Overrun fight into something that way as well, setting the line of engagement well back and giving me a lot more breathing room.

The crackback killed both tanks, 5 Eradicators, and my Librarian, as well as taking my expansion objective from me with the Lord Discordant because the second Defiler was able to get onto the center objective.

I used a Rapid Ingress on my second Thunderwolf Squad.

Round 3

The wheels truly came off the truck this turn. I was able to charge and kill his banged up Defiler, do a bit of good damage to his other one, and then completely failed to kill the Venomcrawler again, left the Lord Discordant on one, and forgot that I needed to drop Logan’s unit this turn so I could rapid ingress my Wulfen the following turn.

Unfortunately, I continued to roll apocalyptically badly and Wyatt continued to roll pretty good to great. His Defiler made seven attacks back at my unit on 4s sustained rerolling and handed me 11 saves, which I failed 9 of, leaving a single Thunderwolf behind.

Wyatt killed everything on the table except my rapid ingressed Logan unit on the center objective.

Round 4

I am down by about 15 points here, but I still have a chance to even this game out against all odds. It requires Logan and his friends to kill the Defiler, and for my Wulfen to make a 9″ charge and kill both his single wound models.

If that happens, I can tag his remaining ranged pieces with Terminators and set up for a big, last turn push with Wulfen, but it’s going to require a little luck.

The Defiler is on six, Logan’s unit has a pile of flat 3 damage attacks. I used the Lance stratagem, the Defiler lives.

Wulfen make their charge, they connect with both the Venomcrawler and the Discordant Lord. The Lord Discordant is on 1, I need one six to wound and it dies.

I hand it zero saves.

The Defiler once again hands me a pile of saves (I think 7?) and I fail all but one and call it there.

Immediately after the game, Wyatt told me that the universe wanted him to win that game, which I felt pretty keenly in the moment. However, with the benefit of some analysis, I definitely made mistakes this game in hindsight, and I think that if I had played a little better I could have mitigated the apocalypse of the dice disparity and still come out on top. Unfortunately, I let myself tilt and didn’t make those plays and Wyatt stayed cool and capitalized on my mistakes and dice for a well-deserved win.

He went on to win the whole thing too, so major props to him!

Round 5

Long-time readers of this channel might recognize these Death Guard models, because they’ve been featured more times than any other army on this blog. Final round into….my good friend Chris!

Who…is playing the list/disposition I think I have the worst matchup into in the entire event. Woof.

He’s starting a YouTube channel and did a nice recap of the event there if you’d like to hear about his journey!

I lost the roll off again!

Round 1

Chris’ list works like this – castle up around Mortarion, punish things that come close with reactive moves and heroics, drop a big shooting brick to kill a bunch of things, and concentrate on 2 objectives because that’s what priority assets has to do.

To that end, he popped some Poxwalkers up on two objectives, did the Priority Assets action and passed the turn.

I picked up the Wulfen brick; I need them to kill the Blightlords later.

I made a decision based off half emotion and half logic this turn – I was tired, I’d just lost a very disappointing game, and this matchup is awful, so why not go for a turn 1 pseudo all-in?

I used Logan’s ability to bring the second Thunderwolf brick in bottom right, then used an auto six advance to move Bikes up and rolled a five to advance the other Thunderwolf unit up.

One of those times, he reactive moved his Poxwalkers to screen his Spawn and Deathshroud from my Chaplain unit, which was fine because that let me make a shorter charge with my Thunderwolves that had just arrived.

I made all three charges and Chris used Heroic Intervention to put the Deathshroud in.

At the end of the turn, I lost a handful of wolves and one bike, and he was down 20 Poxwalkers, most of his non-Poxwalker character from that unit, and two Deathshroud and I had pushed him completely off the objectives.

Round 2

The crackback was, predictably, brutal. Chris dropped the Blightlords in the center top of the table (so I counter-dropped with my Wulfen brick) and then shot or fought every single Thunderwolf dead. He was able to do the Priority Assets action again with his Spawn.

I moved up my stuff, got overwatched on my Wulfen (lost two because I screened two of his flamers), and decided to go after Typhus with the Bikes.

Dice went minorly off the rails here, with Typhus surviving and killing two more bikes and three Blightlords surviving. The Blightlords fought on death with a strat and killed a bunch more Wulfen.

I used the fight and fade stratagem to run the Chaplain away from Typhus, but I kind of regret this decision because it gave Chris an easy kill for “in the center” and I didn’t really want Mortarion coming out to the middle and this incentivize him to do so.

On the flip side, it meant he didn’t “control more” on his next turn so it denied some primary.

Round 3:

Wulfen died, Deathshroud dropped, the Winged Demon Prince came into my backline to score some Behind Enemy Lines. Mortarion failed to shoot my bottom Impulsor to death (that’s okay, Death Lords Chosen mortals finished it off next turn) and charged and killed my Chaplain to score Assassinate.

I rapid ingressed my Logan brick in Chris’ deployment zone in response.

On my turn, I was able to shoot Mortarion to death, but the Demon Prince began its streak of perfect invuln saves against melta shots (it made 7/7 over the next three turns of shooting). I charged it with my Impulsor to stop it from moving around the next turn profitably, and Logan and friends murdered the Spawn on Chris’ expansion objective, leaving him with only one non-home objective again.

The Rest of the Game…

From here, two main ideas happened. One, his remaining Blightlords and the Demon Prince cleaned up the top left corner of the table, while Logan made a big charge into his Poxwalkers on the home objective, and then advance back to contest one of the central objectives. His Blightlords had to fight every turn, his Deathshroud had to advance every turn, and as a result he never was able to do the Priority Assets action again. This let me sneak out just enough primary points to win by 2.

All that was left end of the game? Two blightlords, Lord of Contagion, Winged Demon Prince, Deathshroud unit and 3 Eradicators, Logan’s Terminators, and 2 Fenrisian Wolves.

Chris did a good job pacing this game, it would have been really easy to bleed out resources too quickly after I’d made all of my turn one charges.

After the game, Chris and I had a 2 hour drive home together and we talked about the matchup a bit – apparently rushing him turn one is the only real “out” I have, which is good to know.

Conclusion

This was a very fun list to play, but it has some consistency issues that I’m not quite sure how to navigate. The lack of re-rolls anywhere but the Wulfen, especially for the low number of Eradicator shots, means that averages only really start to appear over the course of an entire month worth of games.

This list is also super vulnerable to flamer overwatches. The Wulfen aren’t a fire and forget missile, you need to be able to hit something with them every turn for three turns in order to win most games because nothing else in the list reliably cracks 10 man terminator units, monsters/vehicles with 16+ wounds, etc. Every time the unit gets overwatched and loses 2-3 models, it really hurts the list.

I would like to fit in Njal to be able to turn off overwatches, and I would like to fit a unit of Incursors in the list. I am not 100% sure where those points come from. There are only a couple of places that I think it makes sense to cut things out. First, I could cut the Bike Chaplain which is enough points to fit Njal in the list, but I’d have to really work for the points for the Incursors. I could cut Logan’s unit, and that would let me fit Njal and 3 Bladeguard to attach him to in the list, but that means I don’t really have a deep strike threat and I really like that turn 1 drop.

I’m going to tinker with the list a little bit, and see if I can rearrange things in a way that I like.

In the meantime, I think there’s a couple of serious warcrimes masquerading as lists in Salamanders and Iron Hands that look really, really fun to play that I might try out. Iron Hands just looks like consistency: the list due to the access to re-rolls and ignores cover, and Purge the Foe is a good disposition for that.

On the flip side, the Salamanders lists get to play in Priority Assets, and given how lopsided I feel that matchup is into Take and Hold I think there’s definitely something to be said for bringing that disposition simply to prey on the weaknesses of the matchup scenario.

Also…I kind of want to paint Salamanders characters, they’re cool!

Thanks for reading, see you next time!