Jan 15 2020

Time for Change

Warhammer39999.com turned 10 years old a few months ago and I didn’t celebrate. There are a number of reasons why, but I largely attribute it to the fact that I really haven’t been playing 40k. Instead, I’ve been playing board games on the regular (more on that later), but without 40k or painting, it didn’t feel like it’s worth blogging about.

Of course, life gets in the way as well, but I’m going to lean on the first convenient excuse.

But more than that, I also have been needing some sort of change. When I think about it, I think the core reason is that my best friend moved away. Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes, I get it. It’s just hard because I seem to make a great friend, and share time with them, and they wind up moving away. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that I live in Alaska, but I think that’s largely just life in general.

Anyway, I’ve known him since high school, and we were never very close. Well, a couple of years ago, he went through a divorce and I reached out to him. Turns out, he’s pretty awesome, so we spent alot of time together. He had a plan to move out of state when we reconnected, but it was all based upon multiple contingencies, and they seemed like they’d never come to fruition.

Last year, things changed though, and it started to look inevitable. I think that’s really the reason why I was feeling down and looking for some sort of change. Since I couldn’t pinpoint what was the root cause, I couldn’t figure out how to resolve it.

Well, now that I know that it’s a loss of closeness, I decided to do something new in 2020. What’s messed up though, is that I decided that–for some reason–the answer to a lack of closeness was to cancel my weekly gaming group. Yeah, I don’t think that’s real intuitive, but that’s what I opted with.

I still love gaming, so I plan to play where possible, but maybe scaling it back is a good thing? Time will tell…

Oct 10 2019

MTG Decks on TappedOut

Years ago, I discovered TappedOut.net as a place to make magic decks. I love the idea of building decks and wind up often enough buying cards to make decks, but I don’t really find the time to do so. Occassionally, I’ll hop online and craft a deck on the site because I’ve since learned that I very rarely actually construct a deck in real life.

At first, I started making decks there to document the decks I owned, but I did a horrible job of keeping up with that, so I then deviated to just jotting down ideas. Sometimes they turn into completed decklists and sometimes not.

Tappedout may not be the ideal place to store things like this, but it was what I found years ago, and so what I’ve used. Every once in a while, I want to go back and look at a deck I’ve made, but their library feature for someone with a large number of decks isn’t ideal. So, I figured I’d document the decks I’ve made to date so I can always go back and look at them when I need to. Without any additional pomp, here goes:

Alternate Win Conditions

Specific Cards

Mechanics

Tribal

Other

Works in Progress

Jun 17 2019

Batrep: Imperial Knights vs. Hive Fleet Proteus (55 PL)

It has been some time since any of my local group has played a game of 40k. We’ve bantered about possibly playing a game sometime, and even suggested that we’re overdue for an Apoc game (and, with the impending re-release of the supplement, we’re due to host one).

It’s unusual–at least, as of late–for there to be enough interest, that we decided to capitalize on it and supplant our regularly scheduled board game night with games of 40k. In total, Sam, Brandon, and Simon showed up (a truly unusual cast of characters), and we paired up for games of 40k.

I wound up paired up against Sam and his army of knights. Sadly, I hadn’t made my list yet, and didn’t want to be seen as engineering against him. I also wasn’t particularly feeling like building a list, so I just went with quick and easy…

Sam’s Imperial Knights

1x Knight Warden (Warlord)
- Avenger Gatling Cannon
- Reaper Chainsword
- Icarus Autocannons
2x Armiger Helverins
2x Armiger Warglaives

I didn’t ask for a list from him, but given that he only had five models, I figure I can reasonably piece together what he had. Though I’ve not faced his Armigers before, I’d heard of them and this seems like a logical force that Sam would use on a regular basis. In short, it wouldn’t have taken that much effort me to have come up with exactly what he was playing, should I have wanted to engineer against it. Continue reading →

May 15 2019

MTG Draft Night: War of the Spark

We’ve been putting off MTG draft nights for too long, so last week we just put an ultimatum out: draft was going to happen that week for sure.

Because we had short notice, a number of the regular crew weren’t able to make it. That was, in essence, fine because we were going to try to limit it to 8 people anyway. As of late, the numbers have ballooned to as many as 12 people at a draft night, which makes logistics and seating in my house quite difficult. So, by limiting it to eight players, we figured to make it a little more reasonable.

We talked about how to equitably reduce the player count down to eight though, and came up with a number of possibilities. Do we draw names from a hat? Give priority to some players based upon pre-determined qualifications? Make it a free-for-all? After much deliberation, we opted for a combination of the latter two.

First, we gave prioritization to those who come to game nights at least somewhat regularly. Five of the most common people that play at draft nights come to game night as well. I like the idea of rewarding those who come on the regular, so we started there. For the last three spots, we had six people leftover (based upon who attended last time). To make it fair to all of them, I sent out an email blast and just made it first come, first serve.

To my surprise, a number of people just couldn’t make it on short notice. In fact, of the six people, only one was able to attend, leaving us with two extra spots to fill. I wound up opening it up to a former co-worker of mine, and his girlfriend, and the happily accepted. We also had a last minute cancellation the night of the draft, and absolutely scrambled to fill that spot. I personally asked at least half a dozen people, none of which were available. We ultimately found two people that could fill the spot, and settled on Sam’s friend: Dison. Continue reading →

Apr 24 2019

Painting Termagants (again)

Though I’ve only played one game of 40k in close to six months, I’m starting to get an itch. Well, maybe not so much an itch, but at least I feel apprehension towards the idea of playing the game. While that isn’t exactly high praise, it’s at least a start!

So, I started working myself up to speed by painting a couple of Zombicide models, which I’ve since finished. So now, I’m moving on to Tyranids. The irony isn’t lost on me that I started with something that actually took more skill and time per model to complete. The thing is, that painting Tyranids en masse takes more than just talent–it takes staying power. I wanted to see if I had it in me to knock out at least a couple of models before I started painting 30 at once.

Yup, that’s what I went ahead and did. I’m not exactly certain why I have 30 ‘gaunts laying around, but sure enough I do. I originally had paid a friend, Mitch, to paint these, and he eventually gave up and brought them back to me hat in hand, so they were partially started. Mitch moved out of state in July of last year, so they’ve been sitting around at least that long. If I sleuth around more, I recall he gave them back on the night of a MTG draft (which, after a bit of searching turns out to be Ixalan–which although I posted it on June 4th, it turns out the draft night was actually May 18th).

That’s a long winded way of saying that it’s been nearly a year since I got these back from a failed outsource painting experience. I don’t even recall when I’d purchased these…

The good news is that they’re all armed with devourers, so they should shred up whatever opponent I throw them on the table for. Well, that’s if and when they get painted.

For now, let’s call these decided a “work in progress.” More to come on them eventually…