Hello everyone, and welcome once again to Bonus Experience,
By this point, anyone who’s following along knows the gist of my approach, but just in case, here we go in one sentence: When learning a game like Warmachine/Hordes, your goal for every game should not be to win, but to accomplish some specific learning goal. I’ve given the examples of killing tough targets with Circle and trying to stay adaptable in the Who’s the Boss format. Now, I’m going to take things a little different as I move into the home stretch with this series. I’d like to talk about my first ‘real’ Warmahordes tournament and how long a way I’d come since I started playing to learn.
The Tin Man Tournament
So let me set the stage: For several weeks, I’d been involved in an unofficial home-grown journeyman league, and this tournament was the finale of that league. The field was thus quite diverse, with several experienced players from the area and also some new folks who’d come up through the league. These were all guys I’d gotten to know, and I was excited about the prospect of playing in a tournament with all of them. Then, there was the monkey wrench; we didn’t have a Press Ganger at the time, so our tournament organizer was the store owner, who enjoys making people suffer in inventive ways. So this was no steamroller. Rather, we were playing a series of scenarios which the owner had come up with, all based on the Wizard of Oz. I’ll hit the details of each scenario as we go, but needless to say, they were a little crazy. So there was a little bit of the adaptability I talked about last time involved in playing these games, but the most important thing for me was to keep my cool. I wasn’t here to win games, I was here to have fun. And this time, I meant it.
The Games
In round one, our scenario involved our most expensive model being stuck under a house while a hurricane raged all around. For me, having Megalith stuck under the house for the first two turns was a problem, but having a windstorm blowing my opponent’s models all over the place really just made Krueger’s plan work better. It’s easy to mess with your opponent’s positioning when the scenario is already doing this for you. I was playing against an infantry-heavy Skorne list, and my opponent was very unhappy with the scenario. I eventually won this scenario by an assassination, but I would have felt fine with a loss. The scenario was very random, and I feel like I was better prepared for that than my opponent.
In round two, the scenario was even weirder: our battlegroups were being affected by various buffs and debuffs to simulate rapid ageing. I’m not sure what this has to do with the Wizard of Oz, but apparently it’s related. Anyway, I found this scenario really entertaining, and I thought I played it very well. Spoiler: I lost this game, and was completely satisfied with having done so. Yet again, I was able to use Krueger’s ability to move my opponent’s models around to make sure that he could not benefit from the turns when we had buffs, and I could. Unfortunately, this led to a very one-sided game, so I made what felt like the right decision, but objectively speaking was probably wrong.
My opponent was playing Skorne again, but this time with heavy warbeasts. I’d already killed Molik Karn, and was faced with the choice between killing a Bronzeback Titan or a Titan Gladiator, knowing that the one I didn’t kill would be able to kill one of my heavies in return. I figured if I killed the Bronzeback, the game was pretty much over, but I wasn’t trying to go for the throat. So I killed the Gladiator, and then watched the Bronzeback kill every remaining model in my army. So, I lost. But I pretty much asked for it. At the time, I felt kind of bad for throwing the game away, but it didn’t take much time after the game for me to get over it. I had a decision for the explicit purpose of playing a better game, rather than for the purpose of winning. Mission successful, I guess.
The third and final round is a pretty short story. The scenario was a really convoluted one involving trying to set your opponent’s caster on fire, or throw water on them (because they were the Witch, and therefore could die to either fire or water, obviously). So my opponent and I just ignored it and went at each other. I won’t lie, I was off my groove from the previous game, and I played this one pretty miserably. To compound things, my opponent was someone I’d played several times during the league, and he knew how to play to my mistakes. Short version, he killed Krueger pretty quickly, and that was the tournament.
The Lessons
The point of this series is always to learn something. So what did I learn? Well, I got to re-establish my own strength in adaptability. I had a much easier time dealing with the wacky scenarios than most of the others in the event, and I was also able to deal with unexpected matchups pretty well. I faced Skorne twice and Khador once; this was the event that led me to christen Kingston, Ontario Warmahordes as the Big Red Meta. If I’d known this, I would not have brought that epic Krueger list, since it wasn’t great at killing high-armour targets. But I still had fun playing all three games. More importantly, I learned that my approach to gaming had worked.
Despite the hiccup after round two, I felt really good about the day and I definitely had a good time. My opponent from round two, the one I felt like I gave the game to, ended up going undefeated and winning the event. And I, much to my pleasure, brought home the painting award. My painting is something I’ve always prided myself on, and it was really nice to get that prize. So there’s another lesson – I always want to bring painted armies to tournaments and I want to get as many of those painting awards as I can. Finally, the most important lesson was this: despite bad play and losing games, I really enjoyed the tournament and knew I wanted to play in more. And you know what? I’ve played in a fair few local events at this point and I still feel that way. I haven’t played in any big tournaments yet, but there’s one coming up for me, and I’m really looking forward to it.
The next instalment of Bonus Experience won’t be about that tournament, though. There’s still another step to cover in my story of learning Warmachine/Hordes: my first WMH convention, the mighty mighty Templecon. I’ve got lots to say on that topic, since the experience was really not what I expected. One could even say, I got a bit of Bonus Experience. I hope you’ll join me for that one!
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