This week, with the rather large points bump, I decided to swing more toward knights than Space Wolves.  I felt the need to do this mostly because I wanted to be able to use my custom knightly house and actually have the name mean something in terms of getting a household bonus (as compared to having a household name, but no bonus).  I also took the opportunity to run a relic dreadnought – something I’ve been trying to fit in all league, but kept getting trumped by other options.  The tradeoff for this was that I’m not running Bjorn the Fell-Handed or Murderfang – everything has its price.

For this match, I was expecting an armored force, because (due to scenario) infantry had all their movement distances halved.  What I wasn’t expecting, however, was a titan killer – an Astra Militarum Shadowsword.  The opening turn of the game, the Shadowsword’s Volcano Cannon annihilated my Warden while the rest of his force (and the remaining guns on the Shadowsword) began to tear down my Deredeo.  In doing so, I recognized his strategy – he would stay at the back of the table while I had to cross no-man’s land.

On my first turn, I brought my Errant out of cover and leveled his Thermal Cannon at the Shadowsword…  …And rolled a one on the number of shots roll.  Spending a command point, I rerolled…  …And rolled a one again.  Even with my Deredeo and all my other shooting, I barely scratched its armor.  Still, everything moved a little closer, and I started to close the gap.  On his turn two, I ambushed Jarleiv with his infantry and clogged up my lanes with dudes, this turn I lucked out that his entire round of shooting failed to take down any of my models.  Undeterred, I tried again at the Shadowsword with my heavy firepower, while my dreadnoughts cleared out the infantry; this time my firepower managed to take him down to almost half health, but not quite.

The next turn would mark the end of Jarleiv and both my remaining knights as his hero tore it up in melee while the heavy arms melted through heavy armor.  On my final turn, I vowed to take out the last of his infantry with my two remaining dreadnoughts.  I fired everything I had – two heavy flamers, a twin heavy bolter, and a storm bolter at a nearby group of 10 cultists.  With all of that, I managed to take down only a single guy.  Even wading into melee only netted me two more kills; a pretty pitiful count for a pair of Space Wolves.

With that, I congratulated my opponent – he managed to shred my force extremely effectively and had properly guessed the counterplay to my list.  This marked the end of the league for me, an unfortunately crushing defeat.

Overall though, I felt that the league was pretty fun.  I did enjoy creating my hero and streamlining him for close combat with the various upgrades.  Still, the relics and command cards never really worked out for me as they were more fit for infantry heroes and by the end I still wasn’t using anything more than the weapons available to the Chaplain Venerable Dreadnought.  My plan in the near future is to put together a data sheet for Jarleiv with a fair cost and some other ideas I had for making him interesting (though also probably pulling off some of the more doubled-up upgrades – attack spam was a bit overpowered).