Patriot Games from Jester's Point of View #3 First Match

For game one I was paired against a Daemon player by the name of CJ.  His list consisted of:

Epidemius in a unit of plaguebearers
Plaguebearers X2
Flamers of Tzeetch
Soul Grinders X2
Fateweaver
Daemon Prince x2
Flesh Hounds with Karanak


Table 18 at the tournament.  Before the matchups had been posted me and the guys had joked about table 15.  'You know you are playing on table 15, right, Jeremy?' they said.  You know - the table covered in trees and difficult terrain.  And as the tournament gods would have it - guess where I ended up on the first game?  I was nervous about it until I saw that I was playing daemons.  Yes the mass forest would always give a cover save, and yes I would immobilize if I oved through the 3/4 terrain covered board, normally.  But against daemons I would simply castle - not move much - and let them land in the terrain and footslog through the stuff.  Fortunately my list is built around shot saturation and isn't based on low AP shots.  I always assume my enemy will have a cover save.

The first mission was simply kill points, with bonuses for doubling your opponent, and keeping half your KP's alive.

The game began with a roll off for the emperors Tarot.  He got a +1 to his dice roll, but I still won the selection with a lucky dice roll.  I elected to let him go first with the deep strike in and I kept things off the board.  The table we set up on was over 2/3 difficult forest terrain and this was going to be a challenge for both of us.  CJ deepstruck fateweaver, epidemius and company, a soul grinder and a unit of plague bearers into a corner of his board, where he could avoid dangerous terrain checks.  For my turn things came onto the board and started shooting.  I chose to deploy as far away as possible in the opposite corner and I attempted to bubblewrap my hydras and manticore with more expendable units, mainly in preparation for the flamers of tzeentch.  I also chose to put a vendetta in the other corner with a psyker battle squad on the ground.  I was hoping that the closer proximity of this unit to his, would cause him to commit too much in their direction and leave my fire base alone except for the flamers.   Since Fateweaver allows the reroll of all saves of units within 6" he was my number one priority target.

 I concentrated all my lascannons and hydras on Fateweaver until he was dead - I knew the reroll of all saves near him was a game turner.  The manticore also took its toll on many of the plaguebearers over the course of the game, blasting away at them as they advanced across the board.  CJ was also greatly slowed by the dense forest terrain and it took him a while to get t.o grips with me.  He was able to assault a unit of guardsmen with a plaguebearer and killed them, but was otherwise unable to get in to hand to hand.  At the end of the game CJ had commiteed to attacking the vendetta on the right, but rather than allow it to be assaulted the psykers boarded it and it flew 24" away, and across the board.

CJ also had some pretty bad luck.... His flamers did not come in until the last turn (officer of the fleet) and then they experienced mishap and were deployed across the board.  Karanak also died to a bit of bad luck - taking a wound on his deep strike into terrain.   I enjoyed playing CJ - He was a super nice guy.  I would enjoy playing him again on a fairer table, where the terrain wasn't as disadvantageous to his army. This mix of dangerous deep striking for him and the slowed movement didn't let his stuff get to grips as fast as it needed to.

I ended the match with 17 out of 17 possible points