LGT 2022 was my fifth time attending the event, although the 4th time for 40k. Its had my personal best achievement (going 5-0 last year with my CSM/Death Guard soup list) and my worst tournament (going 2-3 in early 8th ed with Alpha Legion.)
All the events have been using a Chaos army of some description (ok there was one heresy event were I was technically running loyalist Death Guard list but shh) and given Creations of Bile have been doing well for me in my other events/local games it was easy enough to give them another go for the big one this year.
As a quick run down of the list - its aiming to be ultra aggressive and use its fights on death to win trade wars. There's a unofficial rule of 2 in the above list - it wasn't a deliberate choice to not pick 3 of anything but there was a deliberate thought to keep my types of threats spread out. The most eye catching aspect is probably the Patrol in addition to the Battalion. Previous readers of the blog may be aware that I really wanted 2 HQ casters in order to have access to Warpcraft secondaries, but I didn't want both a Master of Possession and a Dark Apostle in the list as I felt I had too much support and not enough punch when I went this route and with the Nurgle Daemon Prince a shoe in (the Deamon weapon auto wounds on hits and ignores phase caps, a super important ability when your army barley even does chip damage out of combat) it was hard to figure out what to go for. I'd thought about dropping all casters to open up Abhor at least, but in the end went for the extra patrol to allow a second Prince with mark of Slaanesh to keep Warpcraft as a back up caster who's main job was to cast 5+ FNP on the Chosen. The Chosen's job with the Apostle's 4+ only to hit and no re-rolls, 5+ fnp and Black rune to ensure they were -1 to be wounded at all times were designed to be the hulking bruiser of the army and get thrown straight at the enemy and take all the nasty threats head on - they might not always win but they hopefully shouldn't lose quickly at least.
Otherwise speed was the name of the game, 2 Warp Talon units to hit the flanks and 2 Possessed often with 1 of each taking a flank for early pressure. Behind them, again often split near the flanks were 2 Lord Discordants trying to secure the flanks after the first wave ideally caused a huge mess and took out any threats to them. Cultists, Spawn and Legionaires round out the list - cheap units for holding objectives, and in the legionaries/cultists case obsec + actions. Basic plan was to go for The Long War and Specimens of the Spider as secondaries - both reward killing units on objectives and trading in the middle and use my units to be hyper aggressive in taking opponents to deny opponents the chance to play around the Long War without heavily sacrificing primary. Then I could go either Banners or Warp ritual depending on match up or take a kill option were apt so I wasn't relying on a opponent giving up something in order to have a decent secondary game.
After taking top Chaos last year (Chaos keyword, so essentially top Chaos Soup player, 2 DG players got higher than be when any Chaos armies were included) ,aim was to go 4-1 and maybe sneak top CSM player
Round 1 - Abandoned Sanctuaries. Adam Smith's Necrons.
My Secondaries: Specimens of the Spider, The Long War, Warp Ritual
Opponents Secondaries: Treasure of Aeons, Ancient Machiner, Purge the Vermin.
Pregame thoughts - The advantage of game 1 is you can do a lot of stalking/research. Sadly my research showed my opponent was pretty regular attendee at tournaments as Necrons which wasn't the start I was hoping for. Otherwise the list had a few problems to deal with - Necrons Obsec and Secondairies both outperform what I can do and given my army does about 95% of its damage in combat phase the 3 C'tan are a real pain to deal with. I had to real deliberate between Warp Ritual and Banners as my last secondary - I wanted to have the Princes free to roam around casting Smites into the C'tan but felt there were probably going to be at least 2 turns were the C'tan would be screened so 7 on Ritual was going to be better than easy 5 on banners + maybe a few last on if the game goes well. The mission not allowing pre-game moves upfield was a mixed blessing - I didn't have to worry about any charges but I did want Necrons to the close the gap. Plan was simple with 3 objectives in no mans land, get upfield, be aggressive and try and force Necrons to run out of obsec units by trading into the middle repeatedly.
Result - Chaos win 93 - 47
Postgame thoughts: Comfortable win on the scoreboard, although the momentum threaten to shift back very hard in the mid board when my Nurgle Prince with the ignore phase caps and auto wounds bounced entirely off the Voiddragon and got murdered (twice) in return. Thankfully the Slaanesh Prince managed to hold the C'tan long enough in the middle to ensure there wasn't a late swing. The gameplan worked well - the Necrons didn't manage much early damage into my Warp Talons early on and they made them pay dearly as Necrons spent most of the next few turns trying to secure there own backfield rather than retake the middle and I was able to repeatedly tag units to limit Necrons shooting. The large Warrior squad only had one chance to shoot all game and in fact elected not to do so in order to keep there charge manageable. With Necrons shooting nuetered, the C'tan couldn't carry the burden needed by themselves as my combat outclassed anything else Necrons had. An excellent start for Chaos.
Round 2 - Data Scry-Salvage Callum Brownson-Smith's Levithan Nids.
My Secondaries: Specimins of the Spider, The Long War, Banners
Opponents Secondaries: Mental Interrogation, Assasinate, Banners.
Pregame thoughts: So this is a really tough match up, and on the toughest mission in the event pack I'm likely to play (play the foreshadowing music here though.) Levithan is an army that can take my punch in combat and deal as good, if not better back. The Possessed v Warrior comparison is a good representation of the difference here, on datasheet the Possessed is tankier and faster with Bile v Levithan chapter tactics both very good in there own way but the Warriors have much better strats/command abilities to throw on them, have obsec and have a variety of scary guns. I played David Gaylards Levithan list which has alot of similarites to this, on this mission at Unconqourable a few weeks back (write up available on this site as well) and it was a real struggle flipping back objectives. Plan was to go very hard into the middle, try and get Chosen into Warriors if possible as they aren't blunted by -1 damage as badly as Possessed and can potentially grind them out if things go well and then expand into the flanks later if possible. If things went well with that, then given my opponent had Assasinate possibly back of in the late game to keep them hidden and try and take a lead on secondaries that way.
Result - Chaos Win 86-61.
Postgame thoughts: Jeez, this was tough game, and a utterly fantastic one with lots of momentum shifts. Losing the Lord Discordant and not killing the Malectopor in back to back combats felt like a hammerblow early and I really felt like I was always struggling for options. However two key things in my favour - I had more cheap disposable units and one decision to play safe with the Warriors. On the disposable units front I was able to keep my 50 point Cultist squad at the back doing the mission action all game which wracked up 12 points, whereas Tyranids ended up having to commit there respective action monkey (Tyranid Guard) up to try and slow down my Possessed and only scored 2 points on the mission action as a result. Speaking of the Possessed, when CP ran out for -1 damage on the Warrior my opponent put his unit on the right flank well towards the back of the objective to keep them safe, but put a huge unit I realistically needed a large high roll to kill out the game for a turn and allowed me to free up units elsewhere and ignore the warriors for a few turns. By the end of the game I was as good as tabled - I had 2/3 Cultists left hiding at the back as well as 1 chosen/4 Possessed right next to a Tyranid Warrior unit that could have murdered them both easily enough but chose instead to place a banner down on the last turn instead. Really happy with the win in a brutal game - always think its a good sign when you've lost the attrition war but managed to pull out a win regardless.
Round 3 - Death and Zeal v Simon Corder's Space Wolves
My secondaries: Specimins of the Spider, The Long War, Warp Ritual
Opponents Secondaries: Glory Kill, Mighty Saga, Warrior Pride
Pregame thoughts: Space Wolf secondaries showing the way they want to play - 2 based around killing my Characters one of which revolving in there Wolf Lord being a hero as well and the last secondary around charging me. All of these I'm ok with - head on head fights normally go Bile's way so happy to oblige. Wulfen feel like the key unit here - they have this really unfair broken mechanic were they get to fight on death for free, so playing around that with my combat army is going to be interesting.
Result - Chaos win 91-56
Postgame thoughts: Huge win for Bile, the scoreboard didn't necessarily show it this was the most comfortable win with scoring only stopped because I ran out of units to kill despite my best efforts as Space Wolves just kept charging in! I'd love to say I used my fight on death knowledge to play around the Wulfen, but in the end all that happened is they charged me 3 times and 13/15 died due to me fighting on death or tanking the hits and fighting back, otherwise I shot the last one and in played around a singular Wulfen fighting on death. Huge match up advantage for me here otherwise - Wolfs do hit MUCH harder than Bile, but Fight on Death more than levels the playing field and the Space Wolf aggression needed to be a bit more measured into Bile, as it was the game was mostly over by the end of my turn one and despite some fierce resistance from the Wolfs things snowballed quickly for them. Few little mistakes from me in hindsight, none of them particularly consequential but something to learn from.
Round 4 - Tide of Conviction v Giulio Ghermandi's Drukari
My secondaries: Specimens of the Spider, The Long War, Banners
Opponents Secondaries: No Prisoners, Take them Alive, RND
Drukari lists never seem to end!
Pregame thoughts: Against ITC top Drukari player now, not an ideal mission for me - I'd always prefer a 5 with a central objective but not terrible either. The Dawn of war deployment + boats gives Drukari an ability to push my objectives without putting there fragile but powerful infantry in danger, but again fight on death gives me a lever and a great way to counteract the various fights last they have. Having played v a excellent local Drukari recently my main aims are to be aggressive to keep the fight on there side of the board and to to try and keep all my models in a unit within 0.5 inches of each other so they can fight through each model easier to try and stop Drukari boats making themselves closest target so I can't pile into Incubi/Wytches etc and have to hit them.
Result - 86-68 win for Chaos
Postgame thoughts: Given the match up, this was probably closer than it should have been. Whilst go forwards will all the aggression normally works, I overdid it here and was punished early losing a Warp Talon and Possessed unit for little benefit as Guilio expertly set his trap and baited me in. From there it took awhile for momentum to settle as things went back and forth - both primary and secondary were essentially even for the first 3 turns and it was only turn 4 were Chaos sneaked again for the first time helped by the critical failed Corsair charge to give them 12, and with the advantage of last turn scoring in there favour Chaos were able to swing 16 point lead over those two turns as a result. Really good game, one I felt I had been outplayed in the early turns but managed to at least leverage my match up well enough to recover from the start. Also I never want to fight another -1 damage Wrack or Grotesqe again, they were nightmarish to kill.
Round 5 - Secure Missing Artifacts v Simon Miller's Drukari
My Secondaries: Specimens of the Spider, The Long Warp, Warp Ritual
Opponents Secondaries: No Prisoners, RND, Take them Alive
Pregame thoughts: Back to back Drukari, more favourable mission this time more confident about this one. I wanted to really set up a head to head clash so deliberately made sure I move the no mans land objective more central to force Drukari into another front rather than let have 2 hidden back in deployment zones even if I could do likewise - I wanted both sides to be aggressive rather than let us both wrack up primary points sitting at home.
As the game was about to start Zac (tournament organiser) came over to inform us that if you won the game then you'd end up staying for another round, which if you were in the top 10 you'd get a bye for whilst the other undefeated players would play round 6 to ensure that there would be knockout games from there to the end with a potential 5 rounds to go. It did slightly affect my planning in the game as I felt if I could secure the game early and get a big win I might be eligible for top 10 (was on table 5 at the time.)
Chaos Win 95- 64
Postgame thoughts - Very happy with how the game went - broadly in line with how I wanted the match to go. The fighting over the no mans land objectives drained Drukari's forces, despite seemingly never ending, into a war of attrition, and whilst it took until turn 4 to get a lead on primary for Chaos they were scoring heavily on secondaries throughout whilst Drukari were slowly falling behind there as well. Whilst the Drukari pressure did keep my primary down throughout, the fact that they kept contesting objectives right till the end did at least meant Bile and Long War were both maxed which is a rarity and the forgiving mission primary meant I only ended up dropping 2 points. From there it was a wait to see if I'd managed to make the top cut and get a bye
Round 6 - The Scouring
So as it turned out 21 players went undefeated, so 5 players had to be eliminated in the round 6 games to get us down to 16. As it turned out I was 11th at this stage and was the lowest ranked player to get a bye, just avoiding the extra game. Instead I managed to have 3 hours to try and 'declog' my brain and chat with the others hanging around and resume a few debates with previous opponents - like is Fight on Death a good mechanic for the game and should Tau be allowed to exist? The only downside was it was starting to get late and the food trucks had left at this stage and I was rather hungry now. On the plus side, the bye did count as a 100-0 win which is technically the only time I've scored 100 points in a game, hurrah?
Round 7 - Conversion - Colin McDade's Sisters of Battle
My secondaries - The Long War, Specimens of the Spider, Banners
Opponents Secondaries - Defend the Shrine, Leap of Faith, Sacred Ground.
Pregame thoughts - So a bit of backstory to this one first - In my round 5 game I'd ended up playing on the table next to Colin and fellow Bile aficionado Dom Maidlow (of who'd I'd played at Unconquerable and both of us had ended up borrowing elements of each others list as a result.) Dom had said rather wistfully during his game v Colin that he'd rather be playing Drukari and I'd responded rather hubristically saying that I'd never lost to Sisters with Bile and I'd be happy playing them instead. Fast forward 6 hours later and I'm at a stage were I'm playing number 9 in ITC ranking overall and 2nd highest rated Sisters player and weirdly not feeling as confident as my historical less tired past self made out. The game itself was going to be tough - Colin had deployed very conservatively at the back so I could deploy on the line with impunity and try and rush forwards. Given the right objective was the closest no mans land objective to Sisters I made a (correct) guess that this would be the one they would pick for Defend the Shrine and set up much stronger towards this objective than my equivalent on the left flank - if Sisters wanted the Shrine I was determined it was going to cost them dearly.
Result - Chaos Win 89 -77
Postgame thoughts - Suitably, typically brutal game. After a few good early turns the question turned to could I survive the Sisters counter attack long enough to make it to the end and I just about did. I thought the moment when the Zeraphim made a non-miracle dice deep strike charge into my Legionaries on the top left objective was going to swing the game back to Sisters (and exactly killed them off it just to rub it in.) The game had several potential decisive swings but denting the Sisters defend the Shrine to only 6 points was a real point of difference between the Sisters - with Sisters deploying defensively I had more units there and even though Sisters managed to hold the objective via Obsec for two turns they never had enough spare units to push me out of there deployment/away from middle and the Shrine at the same time and when the Discolord traded with Vahl it marked the end of the Sisters chance to defend. Sisters really force a aggressive response with the power of there secondaries and there units are just so murderous. Chatting with my various opponents after the game they often (rightly) had a good natured moan about the strength and challenges of Bile's fight on death but when a 112 point Sisters repentia unit can kill 30 wounds worth of Chosen through no hit re-rolls, transhitmen, -1 to wound and 5fnp and survive the fights on death swing back with a model left you'll forgive me for thinking that CSM need a powerful combat mechanic to keep pace!
So at this stage I was still undefeated and into the top 8. It was 6 hours after the majority of people had left the venue and I was shattered. A long sleepy drive (with windows open in a freezing car to keep me awake) and some shovelled down food later I had to set a worryingly early alarm to get back to the venue next morning to ensure I wasn't getting stuck in the M25 rush hour traffic. Whilst I hadn't planned on getting to day 3, I was able to attend as I've booked the day off after a 40k tournament to recover/have a actual weekend for awhile now so I was able to attend.
Round 8 - Recover the Relics v Nassim's Tau
My secondaries - Banners, Ritual, Specimens of the Spider
Opponents Secondaries - No Prisoners, Decisive action, Banners.
Pregame thoughts: All the nope. Tau pose so many problems for CSM - they don't really care about fight on death, they are super efficient and killing you and are mobile enough to stay out of threat range and dance back in when needed. When playing tau in the past I have one plan - to try and deny them primary for as long as possible before getting murdered but the primary on this mission is horrendous. Que the foreshadowing music from earlier, as the round 8 'bonus' mission is in effect outside the normal mission pack with 3 easy to defend homefield objective for each of us and a hold 1/hold 2 so I need to cross a very sparse no mans land and make charges onto 2 objectives to deny 4 primary. I had two gameplans depending of if I went first or second. Go second - I can try and play super defensively, hiding stuff to try and force Tau to get closer to get no prisoners points (I'd hoped they might take Assasinate as well and fall into that trap but it was a super long shot) and try and sneak a primary lead late on or if I went first it was a all out rush to see if I could get in position for a turn 2 strike onto Tau objectives to keep the scoring down. I won the roll of for first turn (kinda wanted to go second but both had there pro/cons) and went all in on rushing downfield into the Tau guns (presumably my army fuelled with thoughts about charge of the light brigade as it moved up.)
Result - Tau win 92-86
Postgame thoughts: To be honest, at the end of the game I had no thoughts. At this stage the lack of sleep, odd nutrition situation and mental effort had taken a toll and by about half way through the game I'd got a splitting headache and was in a bit of a daze - I actually had to take a walk/lie down outside for awhile after the game as I didn't feel in a safe state to drive back for awhile. Thankfully(?) Tau don't really really on interaction so I could tune out on Nassem turn and roll 100's of saving throws and remove my models from the table and refocus during my turn to move my tattered remains around. When I had time to refocus and think back, I was happy with how I played despite the loss - I did forget I had a Warp Talon unit in deepstrike who did actually have the potential to close the gap in points but it would have required a 11 inch charge out of deepstrike (after Tau -2 to charge strat) and I'm not sure it would have been enough to change the result (there's a outside chance were they tag something and stop it falling back to change the game but its a huge long shot.) That noticeable aside, given how battered my army had gotten keeping the game close on the scoreboard was a result - I'd kinda written the game off before even arriving. There a part of me that thinks on a different mission I could have won given the scoreline (I might have even edged it if it was a hold 2/3 mission), but equally over the event I'd had a pretty good run of match ups and missions so I can't complain overall.
As for the event overall - I was thrilled with how I did. I'd hoped going into this I'd have a decent shot at top CSM to go with my top Chaos award last year but despite ending up 5th overall, I was third on CSM rankings. Still going 6-1 + bye was great and no shame in losing to Tau in round 8 of an event on a tough mission/terrain set up.
As for the list itself - I loved it. Its about as fast as you can make CSM without Bikers (who I tried but didn't rate) has decent durability and the list felt well rounded with various spread of threats to allow me to choose match ups for each fight were needed. The second Lord Discordant without a relic probably is the most cuttable option, but nothing jumps out as a super obvious pick to replace it - without it the 4th HQ + Patrol looks odd and then you end up back with a awkward choice around HQ's. Abbadon is the elephant in the room when that option comes up as he brings the extra smash HQ option without a patrol, but to be honest I don't rate him highly in this list - he's slow, lags behind and I tend to dominate the middle without him. Lots of Chaos lists doing very well with him so he's clearly not a bad choice, I'd just rather have something faster and the 2 Lord Discordants do offer a non-trivial amount of shooting that can pop the odd transport and at least force opponents to pretend to hide stuff turn 1. The Slaanesh Prince is another cuttable option that creates a problem if you do. He's fragile and not that damaging for his cost, but has a really good spell (that can be replaced) but he makes Warpcraft secondaries so much scarier without if its just the Nurgle Prince casting them.
Warp Talons and Possessed were probably the stars this event - typically the Chosen were my MVP over a tournament and they were certainly awesome but the Talons probably get my pick for best unit. A little fragile they can disappear much quicker than you'd like but with a nice general usage attack profile, fly 13 inch move and a 5+ invul they were at least non-trivial to kill and tended to bully anything else contesting flanks and dig out obsec units hiding at the back. Not sure they survived a single game, but they didn't need to be great, and when they normally had Possessed slightly further back doing a very similar role with a tougher to remove profile following up. Certainly some varied Bile options available - but as far as this version of the list goes I wouldn't make any tweaks to the list if I went to the LGT again tomorrow.
Onto a side discussion I had repeatedly - is fight on death too much as a legion trait? Probably yes - but there's at least some defending it. As I mentioned in my Sisters game Chaos units don't really hit as hard/fast or even necessarily as resilient per point as a lot of other top tier combat units (Repentia, Incubi, Sanguiary Guard etc) so they do need something to help keep them on a level playing field (ignore that Emperors Children won the LGT and came also came 3rd) and you can argue its not as powerful as say Leviathan's trait, but its certainly up there with most powerful trait in the game. Fight on death army wide does skew the match ups too much though, and whilst CSM might not be a problematic army for the meta, having such a strong rock/paper/scissors element for army creation is not ideal. I hope GW doesn't copy how Dark Harlequins went as it did feel like overkill - I think a happier middle ground would be one of:
Only allowing a subset of units to fight on death one of characters / Core / Deamonkin /Unmarked units for example
Having fight on death be worse than making regular attacks - only trigger on a 3+ on a per model basis or imposing a hit modifier so your still incentives to make charges
Remove fight on deaths army wide, but give Bile a 0CP strat to fight on death so its a choice and crucially limited to a single unit per turn - this would be my personal favourite as it keeps the flavour of the army but adds in a different element with more skill/decision making and potential counter play options from the opponent.
Hope you enjoyed reading this!