Here

Here's the list I took . . . I was going for a list that had a more distinct visual theme to it than my Minneapolis list, and one that relied a little more on HTH combat instead of the shooty/frustration that my previous list thrived on: The Living Wrath of the Wyldspirit Glade 2150/2400pt. Wood Elf Chicago GT Army (2003) Deep in the heart of Athel Loren, not far from the King's Glade itself, lies a arcane nexus of Jade Magic known as the Wyldspirit Glade. The Wyldspirit Glade is not as famous or populous as many of the other Glades of Athel Loren, and its people are a simple folk by Elven standards. Despite this, the Glade is not without its defences in times of trouble. Its folk, like all Elves, are trained in the use of spear and bow, and its leaders are practiced in the arts of using living Jade magic to divine their opponent's intentions and impede their plans. Most notably, the Jade nexus of the Wyldspirit Glade draws many wandering Forest Spirits to dwell within its energy. The forests of the Glade are alive with living Treemen and Dryads moreso than any other Glade in all of Athel Loren. These living spirits make the land mysterious enough even for friendly Elven visitors - for intruders with dark intent, the living woods of they Wyldspirit Glade become a dark nightmare from which few return with their sanity . . . or their lives. Seer of the Wyldspirit Glade: Daieth the Prophetess - spiritual leader of the Wyldspirit Glade (Level 3 ArchMage and Army General) - 4X Dispel Scroll - 300 Points Daieth's Bodyguard - 9 Wardancers - First Dancer - 149 points The Elves of the Wyldspirit Glade: Clanleader An'nan Torval (Glade Guardian) - Hail of Doom Arrow, light armour, shield, extra hand weapon - 108 points The Wyldguards - 20 Glade Guard - full command, light armour, shield - 225 Points The Wyldthorns - 6 Archers - 78 Points The Wyldhornets - 6 Archers - 78 Points The Wyldbows - 6 Archers - 78 Points The Wyldnettles - 5 Archers - 65 Points The Wyldfangs - 5 Archers - 65 Points The Wyldthistles - 5 Archers - 65 Points The Ghosts of the Wyldwood - 5 Scouts - 75 Points The Living Forest Spirits of the Wyldspirit Glade: Nature's Fury - 9 Dryads - 180 Points Spirit's Wrath - 9 Dryads - 180 Points Everroot the Mighty - Treeman - 250 Points Gawarthu the Elder - Treeman - 250 Points The Reserves (extra 250 point Core block): The Wyldshields - 20 Glade Guard - full command, light armour, shield - 225 Points Back to top Calimehter Joined: 25 Jul 2002 Location: St. Paul MN (USA) Posted: Tue May 13, 2003 8:20 pm Post subject: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Thursday and Friday Kadmil treated me to a send-off lunch on Thursday (next time just come along for the trip, ya big lug!) then it was off to the city that Wisconsin forgot to hook up with the Sean Lukie (Ellindar) and the Mithril Realm gang for some pre-GT festivities. I ended up teaming up with an Empire player to take on Brad Diedrick's Skaven and Sean's Khemri. This game was an real eye-opener about how the Khemri magic phase worked, as we quickly lost one of our flanks to some nasty magic-aided Khemri mobility and then had to watch things go downhill from there. Then it was off to bed to get ready for the trip to Chicago. Many thanks BTW to Sean for putting me up Thursday night! Friday we loaded all the gear into Brad's van, and the three of us set out for Chicago, and despite stopping for breakfast and taking the scenic route through downtown we made it with plenty of time to get to the hall, get signed in and set up, and hit the hall for a few games. I spent most of my time just hanging around and talking with people I had met at GTs past, but I did get a pick-up game in with Matt Fahler's Dwarves, who picked up a victory against my Wood Elves by virtue of some very accurate bolt-thrower fire into my troops and a few critical break tests that turned my carefully scripted combined charges into a big ugly scrum in the center. I have to confess that I was a little worried at this point, as my army was still mostly untested and was not performing very well in the few games I had played with it. I had a brief strategy session with roomie Marcus Martin that picked my spirits up a bit before retiring, but I was still a little nervous going into . . . Saturday Game 1 - Paul Vinton's Lizardmen on the Frozen Waste table Its hard to start a tournament better than this. Paul is the 2001 Chicago GT winner, one of the most fun players you'll ever get the chance to sit across from, and every model in his army was converted to some extent . . . using everything from Kroo bits on the troops to real crab parts on the Stegadon! His list was a Slann-free mixture of a bit of everything from the list with several skink support units running interference. Because of the free Woods in the middle alongside a large impassable lake, the battle turned into a tale of two halves. On the right side, early rounds of archery fire decimated the leading Kroxigor while I set the Dryads up in front of them to receive the charge. The Dryads predictably won combat against the weakened Kroxigor unit after they charged, but failed their roll to restrain pursuit and ended up barreling head-on into the Temple Guard just behind, whom I had hoped to soften up with the HoD to get rid of the rank bonus before the Dryads engaged. As it stood, the elite TG were a bit much for the Dryads to handle and they were broken and run down. The archery on the right side managed to finish off the skinks, leftover Kroxigor, and Salamanders on that side, but the TG were firmly in my DZ for the free VPs and had spooked off an archer unit in the end. The left side was where most of my melee ability had been concentrated, but we ended up in something of a standoff for a few turns as neither of us wanted to get into the charge range of the other's big monsters (2 Treemen vs. a CO-mounted Hero and a Stegadon) and were content to snipe away for a while. My archers on the left managed to get some Terradons and a timely Comet took out the rank bonus of his Saurus warriors and tagged a wound on his Hero, but his skinks and Stegadon giant bow managed to take out Gawarthu. Around turn 4 or so, I realized I was a bit down on points and committed some troops to the advance while the archers and Wardancers turned their attention to the remaining skink harassers. His Stegadon and CO- mounted Saurus Hero charged Everroot . . . but the combo of poor dice rolling on Paul's part and the good T and LD of my Treeman, I was able to hold against this charge. On my turn I brought my Glade Guard into the flank, and to add insult to injury Paul's general managed to fail a 1+ armour save and die to a single S3 spear hit! Between that, the Dryad's finishing off the thinned out Saurus warriors nearby, and the archers on the right side finally finishing off some of his weakened units while neatly dodging the Temple Guard, the game was out of reach for Paul in the final round. Phew! Paul played a sharp game, especially by forcing me to commit to a tough combat by winning the ranged-duel with his deceptively capable shooting troops, but some lucky dice rolling at the end turned a close contest into a big win for the Wood Elves. MVP of the game was no doubt Everroot. Paul had mistaken him for a piece of terrain earlier in the game and picked him up and placed him in the woods when we were shifting trees around for skirmisher placement (I guess I converted him a little TOO well!) and the big guy made Paul pay for suffering this indignity with a heroic stand against a rather nasty charge. Paul took it all in stride, and he received my Most Sporting Opponent vote and ended up taking home the 2nd place Sportsmanship Award in the end. Game 2 - Sean Lukie's Tomb Kings army on the Empire table Aha, a rematch! This particular version of Sean's well-known Tomb King army had a full compliment of spellcasting characters including the High Liche Priest, a skull-chucka, a Bone Giant, some Ushtabi, and a couple units each of chariots and cavalry. Unluckily for Sean, I had seen the various tricks and surprises of his army in action just the other day and had formulated a strategy for beating it . . . equally unluckily for him, the Empire board terrain worked out a lot better for me than it did for him. His Skull Chucka had to deploy on a hill to the far right, and the terrain off to that side left me a nearly-unassailable corridor for my Treemen to advance down the far right side to go get the catapult and the nearby characters. I let Sean's magic phase keep the catapult firing (it panicked a few things, but did minimal damage against my scattered high-LD troops), but managed to stay ahead of his ability to regenerate his troops thanks to an inspired performance by my archers (I only had 40 bows in the army, Sean . . . honest!) and a timely HoD shot taking out the Ushtabi. My Dryads moved out into the middle, and around turn 3 I used up all my scrolls to stop his extra magic movement after all his troops had moved into range of mine. From that point on, it was a matter of charging Treemen and Dryads just sweeping through his entire army one by one. Eventually, his characters ran out of troops to hide near, and Imotep fell in hand-to-hand combat with my unit of 5 Scouts. Snapped a pic of a Treeman squaring off against the Skull-Chucka and the Tomb Prince: groups.msn.com/WarhammerPictures/gt2003.msnw? action=ShowPhoto&PhotoID=20 Game MVP was probably the Level 3 mage for saving her scroll till they were REALLY necessary instead of spending them piecemeal like she had in the Thursday night game . . . though the terrain really helped too by shielding my advance and forcing him to move into archer kill zones and Dryad threat-zones (with devastating consequences) to try and counter the Treeman threat on the flank. There was much good-natured smack talk during and even long after the battle, but he was still nice enough to let me in the car for the ride home on Sunday! Game 3 - Bob Koschak's Empire Army on the Chaos Wastes table Bob's from Minneapolis, but I haven't had the chance to play him much. That will have to change, as Bob was a fun and sporting opponent throughout this match. His Ostland boys didn't take to the fancy barded steeds and steam-powered toys of other Empire forces, and instead featured one of each artillery piece, a few units of infantry with their detachments, a couple handgunner units, and some pistoliers. He was also magic-defensive with a couple of low level mages and a Warrior Priest, so spells played virtually no role throughout this battle. This was the Objective fight, where victory points didn't matter, only whether or not you had a unit in base contact with the objective (in our case, a large monolith) at the end . . . or had more units of US5 or more than your opponent if you were both on the objective. As a result, most of my melee units were piled in the middle while Bob's Swordsmen (with Griffon banner and EC), Greatswords, Flagellents, and Helblaster did the same. My original plan was to fire the HoD at the Helblaster crew and hope to take it out, but Bob went first and managed to panic my hero's archer unit with a smattering of handgun fire . . . my "hero" managed to fail his panic test and failed to rally. So plan B was to just trundle forward with everything, let the Helblaster pick one unit off, and hope the survivors were tough enough to get the job done. The Helblaster picked out poor Gawarthu, and 13 wounds later (darn "6" result on the Misfire table!) my other troops were covered in splinters but otherwise unfazed - his general's unit of Swordsmen was even nice enough to flee 11" in terror from the other Treeman! One unit of Dryads managed to run off the Helblaster crew and polish off his small unit of Flagallents, while the other one was run down by Greatswords but at least managed to draw them away from the objective for a while. With his general's unit rallying right in the middle of some difficult terrain and being march blocked by my Wardancers and his Spearmen off to the far right crunching on my archers (which I was more than content to let them do so long as they stayed away from the middle), it came down to stopping the Greatswords as they swung back around. I had a good trap set up, but unluckily my surviving Dryads panicked when the cannon finally picked off Everroot nearby, and rallied in a bad spot right in front of the Greatswords. Luckily for me, their great combat abilities kept them alive for a few rounds . . . just long enough to trim down the Greatsword's rank bonus and let the Glade Guard get into position to block the Greatswords in Turn 6 and keep them a few inches from the objective that they were claiming. I got a camera shot of the stand of the Glade Guard below: groups.msn.com/WarhammerPictures/gt2003.msnw? action=ShowPhoto&PhotoID=21 Victory, but just barely . . . Bob was ahead in terms of pure kills, and if the game had gone on another turn or two I would have likely lost both the objective and the last of my army. Thanks to some computer glitches the first few games had started late, so there wasn't much time to grab dinner before we started . . . Game 4 - vs. Ian Bott's Vampire Counts on the Frozen Wastes table Going 3-0 in the first games meant that my Game 4 opponent would be a canny one, and Seattle native Ian didn't disappoint. He fielded a startlingly low-magic VC army with 3 units of infantry on the far left flank led by a Carstien vampire lord, supported by a ton of fast- moving troops. 3 units of wolves, 2 units of Ghouls, a 3-base spirit host, a banshee, a black coach, and a unit of 10 or so Fell Bats! Ian also got first go, and was on top of me in a hurry. On the far right, my Archers and Wardancers managed to take out the bulk of the Wolves. In the small gap in the center (my free woods and the lakes plugged things up again) his Coach moved rather brazenly in front of the Treeman hiding out in the Woods . . . Ian had mistaken him for a piece of terrain! For the second time at the tourney, the converted treemen had blended a little too well with the trees for my free woods! When I declared my charge on the coach, he was shocked to discover this oversight. I apologized and offered to go back, since I did feel rather guilty that my conversion effort had confused him, but Ian just grinned and said "my mistake" and carried on. The dice gods, however, were not about to let my handiwork go unpunished. After the coach was destroyed, I suffered some serious karmic backlash. The HoD arrow rolled low and only killed one spirit host base, so I set up a trap for his Spirit host to get the Glade Guard in the flank. Unfortunately I lost a few Dryads in HTH despite their great stats and Willow aspect, and the spirit hosts pursued clean past my first Glade Guard unit and got into the archers along with the Fell Bats. At about the same time, my other Dryads attempted to charge his weakest Skellie unit on the far left, but failed their terror check (a Wraith, of all things!) and ended up camped out in front of his general's unit. His Lord's unit promptly crashed into the Dryads, and through them into the second Spearman unit I had been holding in reserve, which quickly succumbed to the Vampire's wrath before I could get to its rescue. I was a hurting unit at this point, but after some jockeying around I managed to get the left-flank Treeman into the rear of his general's unit at the end of the game to try and take out his general, but managed to miss a Treewhack and get run off despite only taking 1 wound and having rear bonuses. I wasn't down by a tremendous amount of points, but I was still down and I had virtually no way of getting them back, so I conceded after my last fruitless magic phase. I have to admit I was discouraged during this game by the cold dice rolling in some key situations, but Ian was a fun guy and we went to the bar afterward for beers. The pub quiz was shorter than usual this year, but it was still a chance to have some fun and hang out with the gang and swap war stories. So ended Day One - 4 great opponents, and a 3-1 record. Not bad at all!! Sunday Game 5 - Jon Redmann's Vampire Counts on the Chaos Wastes This was the pseudo-Flank Attack scenario, where our main armies deployed in opposite corners and then our reserves came in the other two corners in Turn 2. Jon's army was a magic-heavy Necrarch army with several infantry units and a few flank guards. Jon's army had a lot of detail painted on his shields and army gear and had it mounted on a large town-style display board, and ended up with an Appearance award. I deployed my archers in an arc with my melee support units scattered nearby, and awaited his advance. Unfortunately, Jon had a bad Game 4, and was in a bit of a sour mood for our game. It didn't get any better for him early on, when my archer lines pounded away at him while he was trying to cross through a difficult terrain situtation involving blood pools and rocky ground. He tried to give up early on when a first turn Comet and archer deluge took out a tremendous amount of his troops early on, and then tried again when my Dryads started rolling through some of his weaker infantry units as they got closer to me. Each time we talked through it, and Jon managed to get into a better mood as his magic gradually managed to work through my scrolls and keep his surviving troops alive, and his Grave Guard managed to stomp some Treeman and Dryads before being reduced to half-strength. Thanks to some last-minute Zombie-raising to contest quarters and some untimely failed psych tests on my part in the last round, he was able to bring it within 30 points of being a draw, but I still managed to pull out the victory. At the end we each ended up forgetting to give each other some critical points (from me a unit of Dryads below half strength that I had missed, from him a unit standard that he had forgotten I had) so we had to change our scorecard twice, so between that and the early frustration I left this game with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. Game 6 - Dan Rothman's Vampire Counts on the Chaos Wastes Gah, my fourth Undead army in 6 games! Dan had the most magic-heavy army I'd faced yet, with a Master Necromancer instead of a Vampire, along with a pair of other Necros. Other than that, his army looked a lot like more like Ian's than Jon's, with only a couple of infantry units and a larger than normal number of fast movers, including 2 units of 6 Fell Bats. It was pretty obvious from Dan's list that he was counting on raising some new unit of Zombies right away to support his troops and fast movers, so I deployed some of my skirmishers behind my own lines to be ready. Dan was sending most of his infantry through a small-ish gap between my free forest in the center and some difficult ground on the left with his speedsters spread across the board. Luckily, I got the first go, and was able to savage most of his faster troops before they could get going and cause me the same trouble that Ian's troops had (it helped that there were no ethereals this time). Ian got the survivors up next to my lines and created a few new units back there too, but I let these go in favor of stopping his movement spells to keep them trapped where they were raised (my strategy throughout the game whenever he would raise new units), and my skirmishers were able to easily handle his troops in the next round's charges. In the meantime, I had managed to Treesing my forest in front of his Grave Guard as they were advancing. By the time he had worked through my scrolls, I had destroyed his newer troops and support units, and surrounded his infantry lines and hit them hard with Dryads. Dan's spells were now mostly spent desperately trying to regenerate his left-side infantry troops as the Dryads, Wardancers, and Treemen mercilessly mowed them down. Even the Glade Guard got in on the action by taking on his lone unit of Wight Cav and busting it up via combat resolution. Dan did manage to win the award for "Most Humiliating Defeat of a Treeman" by breaking one from combat with a unit of 12 raised Zombies (I know, I know ) and then running it off the board with a lone Fell Bat, but that was pretty much his only success as my troops were able to keep him surrounded and trapped while I slowly worked through them. We called it after 5 turns when his characters had run out of places to hide and his Grave Guard were still stuck with no good charge targets. Dan kept up his good spirits till the end, and I was able to give him some pointers about taking out Wood Elves during and after the game (his only other loss had been to Wood Elves as well). Postscript The awards session was a good take for our group. Sean managed a clean sweep of the awards, going home with Army Domination, Player's Choice, and Overall Champion trophies. It's literally impossible to do better than that! Brad managed to get 2nd appearance, Marcus went home with 3rd Tactician, and some of my fellow Minnesotans went home with awards too (notably Eric Hagen's sportsmanship award and Jon Redman's appearance awards). I was amazed to have my name called for 3rd overall. On the 40K side I didn't know as many people, but Erik Johnson won a Best Army award . . . I'll have to convince him to go back to the Wood Elves so we have a better shot at Army Domination next time! Of course, the only downside to all that award winning was that we had to wait around long after the goodbyes had been said for the staff to take some more pictures of Sean's army before we were able to depart for Appleton later that night. Final Thoughts - I was very happy with the performance oof my army, especially since it was mostly untested. - Even after going 5-1, I would still havve to say that having two times the number of Treemen and Dryads is not twice as good. They were certainly valuable and nice to have around, but when you have so many of these troop types and fewer support troops it gets harder to find them the "ideal" combat situations that they thrive in, and you become vulnerable to certain armies that have a good way of dealing with these troops (such as Ratlings for the Dryads or Cannons for the Treemen) than you do if you have a more flexible army. I did not manage to go a single game without losing at least one Treeman, and they are a bit pricey to be dropping like that. - Still, I scored maximum theme points foor the "Living Forest" army, and significantly improved my sportsmanship score from my earlier shooty GT list at Minneapolis. From that perspective, the themed list and focus on HTH fighting was a success! - The appearance score dropped a categoryy from 80 to 60 points even though most of the models were the same (in fact, I added more of the best looking ones IMO). I really don't know what to say about that, other than that I was not the only player at Chicago this year to be victimized by irregular paint judging. Warlord Merkit had the exact same thing happen, and post-game conversations with the judges didn't exactly restore our confidence that they knew what they should be looking for. - The painting scoring was perhaps the onnly downer of the entire tournament, though. Another great time in Chicago!!

ric_li