Team USA 40K - Episode 4 - Heroes Cup

[Music] Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Team USA 40K podcast. This is our return from Heroes Cup. I am joined today not by Anthony Vanilla, but instead by my teammates from Team USA that went to the Heroes Cup with me. Heroes Cup is a tournament, a five-player team event run in Phoenix, Arizona by the wonderful green banner, a great event organizers. And so I'm going to have each of my teammates from that event join me and talk about our results. I guess this is a little bit of a spoiler, but we won the event. Team USA got first place, woohoo! And so Team USA got first place at the inaugural team event of the edition. Technically it happened at the same time as another team event, but you know what, same weekend, so it counts. And so I'm going to have each of my teammates join me one at a time to kind of talk through their findings of the edition. We're in a brand new world. We've got this brand new edition. We're at tournaments that are now being run with a different format from what we have seen in the past. And so this is a really different thing. And I really wanted to go to Team USA and go to Heroes Cup specifically for two reasons. One, green banner is awesome. They're a sponsor of Team USA. They support us. It only feels right that I support them back. Two, uh, this shit's crazy. The new edition is weird, wild, and wacky. And I actually, obviously I'm kind of, you know, getting ready for the WTC in August, but I really wanted to do a teams event that was relatively low stakes. So I could understand what was happening. I really just didn't want my first teams event of the edition to be at the WTC. That is what I thought would potentially just lead me to not understanding or missing some fundamental aspect of love edition because so much has actually changed. So I'm going to have my teammates on and join me and I'm actually going to start off with the one only wonderful Tyler Bortel, who is a coach for Team USA this year. Tyler, welcome aboard. Howdy, howdy, John Pleasure to be here. How you doing tonight? I am fantastic. At the moment, we're getting ready for a Team USA practice weekend, which will be flying out too soon. We've got that brutally quick turnaround where we, I think we both landed Monday morning. Or did you, did you get in before midnight on Sunday? I got back into my bed at 2.30 a.m. working. Nice. I hit my bed at 9 a.m. on Monday, which was rough. We're flying to Team USA practice weekend. I think my flight takes off about 72 hours after the last one landed. So, you know, that's two days of work, a podcast and a game night with my wife. So enough time for the motorcycles. Absolutely. Nothing more important. All right. So, so at Heroes Cup, you were playing Tau for us. I know a lot of people looked at the end of 10th edition into the beginning of lumped edition and said, Hey, Tau's, Tau's still good. What happened there? Yeah, as it, as it, as it turns out, I've been playing Tau. Honestly, I've been playing Tau since the very, very beginning. This is a little known fact about myself as a supposed bugs main, but Tau were actually my first army back in 2000. 11 question mark right around the advent of six edition. Yeah. So I've been playing this since I was, you know, basically in diapers. I took quite a long hiatus and was excited to come back for a team's based reason. I was playing in a lot of Tau in GW format teams events on the tail end of 10th edition because a couple of good friends of mine. Kid Smith Hannah from Team USA and Michael Heiner, who's been a recent addition to the advisory squad of Team USA put together this awesome storm search list and the storm search has my heart. So Tau happened to be in a really great spot. I worked them up a whole bunch. And as we switched over to 11th, while I was very excited about and continued to be very excited about bugs in 11th. So then oh man does the call of the rip tide back in and I chose to answer it this time around. It is a high octane, very exciting army that does a whole lot of damage and gets you to lunch a little bit quicker and who doesn't like that. I hate lunch breaks. I like playing for as much time as possible playing into lunch off. Although I did my best to speak and to avoid that. So you were playing Tau for us. And you were often a defender. This is very much a holdover from 10th edition where it's, oh, take the gun army and defend with it. But now that we have this new of any companion and all this other stuff, it's a little bit of a different dynamic to what it was in 10th. How, what kind of style of Tau did you bring it? How did it work within the 11th edition framework? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm playing Montcaugh Tau over here. Montcaugh being the GoFast Edas version of Tau as opposed to the more KG Coyon or the more Trixi ret cadre. The plan is relatively straightforward. Stand approximately 2.01 inches away from the opponent and apply gun to the affected area. So with that in mind, defending as a huge upside and that not only do I get to pick my table, pick a nice light board where not too many places exist to hide. But also I get to pick my deployment zone. And ooh, baby, does a gun army like to pick its deployment zone. I think there's a couple of different ways that you can rock this, depending on how you're prepared for, but me personally, I am a search and destroy enthusiast with my Tau. I want to be on top of my opponent while my expansion is so far away from them that they're never ever ever getting there. And as a result, going purge the foe Montcaugh worked out really well because against four of the dispositions, everything but recon so against taking hold against prios against the purge mirror and against disruption, you got to pick purge the foe. I'm sorry, you got to pick search and destroy table quarters and then apply a crazy amount of pressure really early on, especially if you're fortunate enough to go first. So that was kind of the mindset, big picture, and how the list was going to come together. You can read about the specifics, but we're still playing a storm surge or still playing riptides or still playing the twin lands. That aggressive action, kind of balled up into one to just run out and absolutely table someone before they have any chance to do all of this nonsense button pushing 11th edition shenaniganery, right. None of this hidden being far away from me. We're just going to get in and put bullets and heads and get out. I was honestly, when you like first pitches me when we were kind of like coming up with the team, I was kind of expecting you to like want to play dawn of war and play this like really like wide game where you could either like push one side hard and then like look down to the train kind of sideways, or where you could just your opponent didn't have a lot of room to get away from you and like get out of range. But a search and destroy was kind of what you you were wanting to be choosing with the tower. Yeah, 100% the way that I played tau in particular, I often describe it as world leaders with guns, because a lot of what I learned in how to take table space, I learned from Anthony vanilla, who I'm sure if you're listening to this show, you know who that man is. And he talks a lot about holding space as opposed to about holding objectives and making trades, right. I want my entire army to move as a wrecking ball going from one place to another executing everything around there crushing one flank and then moving over to the other. If you try to do that on dawn of war, I've found so far that people can often see that stretch the table, flip things into hammer and anvil and start benefiting from a hidden while racking up some points and I just don't have time for that right by contrast in search, you are on top of your opponent immediately. And they're going to have a much harder time getting all the way around backside of you to flip your home field as long as you're built for it. We've seen a lot of 11th edition things where it is just so damn easy to flip home fields, but as long as you tech against that reality as you taking your opponents home and your opponent not taking yours tends to be a recipe for success, especially when you have the firepower to back it up. Yeah, if I mean these fast armors like you have they certainly are able to what's funny is that I haven't actually I haven't played a lot of person five and played as it it's actually to the disposition that I played the least number of games with. I think I've only got like two in is there a lot of incentive to get the home field specifically or is it just minimize the number of objectives that your opponent can actually hold. Yeah, there's there I think it's just against priority assets that you want to take your opponents home field to actually score points that might actually backwards even weapon it is prios job to do it to us. So not necessarily a ton of literally stand on their home field to score points, but a whole lot of of get to where they are and make the fighting happen there as opposed to letting the fighting happen out and about right if we're fighting on my opponent's expansion objective they're holding it every turn their scoring points i'm trying to push them off of it. Maybe it works maybe it doesn't before fighting on their home field while they're never touching anything outside their expansion and there is not a single army in the game that doesn't need to hold on the old any objectives against purge the foe underscore points. So that was was kind of the mentality there was just take the fight to them and don't let them ever stretch things out or cord and off a safe zone. Yeah that makes sense so then I guess my next question is going to be how did it work like how. What did it do for you, Bob? Obviously, as a team, we were successful. But were there any moments where that kind of an approach didn't work? Was it successful all the time? Were kind of the factors that played into that? - Yeah, absolutely. There are kind of, there's a couple of different ways that you as an opponent can try to mitigate this strategy, right? A couple of them come down pretty early. Excuse me. The first one is, and the one that warms my heart as a rat enthusiast is, man, I just want to play a bunch of little guys who are going to run around. And it's okay if you want to come kill some of my stuff because it's also cheap and so fast. And we're just going to go stand the places and push the buttons. And, you know, we were going to get like, you know, you'll still, you might win, but you're getting like an 11, and you know, that's great for me. That strategy generally worked terribly. I played against Crafrold Eldard or trying to do that with Windrider. I played against Drew Carrey trying to do that. And man, the primaries with purge the foe just don't facilitate that if you're willing to, you know, kind of put your balls on the table and play really aggressive into it, right? The reconnaissance primary is the biggest one that comes to mind where they're trying to do actions on objectives and you're trying to kill stuff and stand on objectives afterwards. If you don't let them take objectives other than their expansion, they won't score points and they don't have an option but to put stuff on objectives at which you get to score points, right? In that Drew Carrey game, I went second, which you know, boom, bummer. But he had to come out and play the game, do second areas, try to set up some move blocks, try to get involved. He probably could have held back a little bit more than he did, but he tried to play in a, it seemed like a pretty normal way if you weren't familiar with exactly how the primary works. But as a result, I killed three different units and then ended the turn with the units that killed them standing on three different objectives. And the way that mission works, I just score 30 primary, turn one for doing that. That's nonsense, man. - This is constant rate. - Yeah, constant rate versus triangulate, I think, is the one. - Yeah. - Right, that's just, I score 30, which means if I hold my expansion on turns two, three, four, five, it's four points of turn, that's 42 primary. Forget about it, we're six primary. - 46? - Yeah, sorry, that's 46 primary, that's 45. That's max primary. Forget about the hold more that that objective that mission has, forget about any of that nonsense. Like I just, you just max, you just do. I mean, while the opponent has to come out, get onto objectives, take them away from you and then hit buttons, and that just didn't work. I saw this in the Eldar game as well, up against Windrider. Man, Windrider is an army that a lot of people seem very excited about, that I just do not get the sauce out. If I talk with fellow team USA member Rubin Zhao, who is a bigger name in the field, who really, really loves Windrider. And man, as soon as you know what that army is doing, it just doesn't have of the juice to get through some of these higher damage, higher durability, toughness skews, right? And a lot of the missions that that kind of army wants to play, a lot of the disruption stuff in particular, disruption to purge has to run in, take the middle and hit a button. And my god, if you just park your whole freaking army on that center objective, because you know that your opponent can't and do the kind of damage to face check you, or God forbid, if they try to face check you and fail, that they then get tabled, right? They're never gonna hit the button, man. And as a result, the rat primaries, the recon and the disruption, they just don't have the juice into purge that I really think that they were trying to have. So that strategy didn't work so well. A second major strategy that you might consider is try to run and gun and risk it all and make it a coin flip. Well, being an all scout army, I'm not really in a ton of danger against turn ones, having a lot of infiltrate. So that ends up being kind of sketchy. And then the third one you might try is, well, what if I can actually tank it, right? And frankly, that was the only one that worked. I had a game that I ended up losing 12/8 into Necrons. They had Catan, they had Doomsday arcs, they had the Silent King. And while I was able to work through all of those pieces by playing back and playing KG and actually playing fixed secondaries, which if I was a crazy idea at the time, he was able to leverage a couple of opportunities. He's in flip some things over once I was kind of running out of steam there. So I think if you want to play against Tao, you need to be able to demand some respect out of them in a way that DDA is a nightbringer and a Silent King can. And you need to be able to tussle with them and take a bit of a punch in a way that something like Rates can. So I thought that was a pretty well equipped army to deal with what I brought up to bear. But a lot of the kitschy or stuff, I don't think it does as it as well as people think it does. And a large part of this was that you played the same role in our pairing cycle every single time, right? You were our second defender in all five of our rounds. And this was a specific change to a love edition is that because you were a defender when you got to the time where you got to the table with your opponent, you were the defender. And so that normal thing where, right, I kind of most people saw a lot cause like, yeah, it sucks if you lose both the coin flips, you get to infiltrate first and you get to go first, that's bad. But if I get to infiltrate first, I trade five scouts for the surety that your storm surge won't scout move into my deployment. So if I go first, then it doesn't matter. So I just need to win one of these two role offs. But one of those role offs immediately went away, which probably lessened a lot the viability of that second plan that you outlined because you had the first infiltrate. - I will say the first infiltrate thing, I keep going back and forth on it, man. At first, I was like, oh my gosh, this is incredible. This is what I've always wanted to just, you know, 50-50 that I get to get what used to be the one for, but nowadays, because of that nine inch coherency rule that your units gotta be packed pretty darn close together, the ability for an army to screen out, basically the whole middle with one unit is really down the drain. Generally, they pick one flanks infiltrate on, I pick the other and I always get the better one now, but I'm gonna get one of the flanks. What I will say though, and this is like a slightly more niche interaction that I just kept seeing play out, is that a big thing that you want units to do, if you want to play something like Tau, is have your cheap trash unit stand on the outside of the little two and a half inch wide plates or whatever they are, right? So that I can't come in, tag those plates, see through them and hit you while you're trying to stage in your own damn deployment zone. But on several of the search maps, one of those two little L shaped plates is outside the DZ, so you need to infiltrate like two inches up in order to stand on it to prevent me from seeing your whole army. And if I get to put my pathfinders eight inches off the line, so you don't get to deploy on that teeny little strip, man, like you just lost basically half your DZ of available hiding spots. And it's not always worthwhile, 'cause you know, it's quite a pathfinders is still a good thing to have, maybe I want it for later. But that's always being an option to me that at worst I can coin flip at how, excuse me, how a game is gonna be played. It's a horrifying thing to plan for, and if you're building a team, man, you better have a plan for it. - Very nice. So across your games, I know you had some good scores, one close loss against the Necrons, but it sounds like the purge the faux plan in general was quite good for scoring. I know a lot of people went into the weekend thinking, oh, purge the faux is the best one. There's been a lot of internet hyperbole about it. Any thoughts on the disposition or any other lessons from 11th? - Yeah, totally disposition wise. I've been kind of on that, you know, that meme with the bell curve, right? Where on the front end, you're like, you look at purge and you're like, oh, my gosh, it just plays Warhammer and scores so many points. And then, you know, that's kind of the monkey brain version. And then the middle version, when you're, you know, digging around, owned and you're seeing how everything interplays and you're trying a couple of games, you're like, damn, every time I play purge, I get, I win, but I get like a 12. Man, I just can't push Diff, 'cause my opponent has such easy access to stuff. And I feel like I have come down the other side of the bell curve and then this, you know, enlightened blue skinned monk over here, saying, guys, we were right all along. Just, fucking kill 'em. It totally does work and it totally does push Diff. It's just that your plan to push Diff has to be pretty specific to what your opponent is trying to do. If you want to push disposition, you need an army that can stand on that center objective and not give it up easily for them to flip things over to you. God, the twin Lance, oh, so good for that. To say, hey, if you want to come stand on the center objective and push a button, you're taking a battle shock, motherfucker. Good luck passing that, or also six inch mega heroics now, right? That two CP, oh, the twins are gonna be in combat with you, punching you annoyingly hard and then moving 10 inches past you if you're not dead yet to be in your home field next turn. Like, if you build these kinds of things into your list, which as it turns out are the kind of things that I was already kind of planning to play, but as if you build it in strategy for the specific missions, God, this army can push Diff and the disposition is not holding it back in the slightest. So that's kind of where I'm at with Purge right now. It does do the thing. Maybe there's another hump and you know, someone's gonna figure out something that I haven't seen yet about how some kind of OC bomb or shutdown situation is able to actually tap it down, but I haven't found it yet and I've been looking pretty hard. Okay, all right, awesome, thank you. Last question, that any other observations, a battle of 11th, any new aspects of the addition that were either more or less significant than you thought? Anything else that someone would want to hear about before their first either singles or teams, event of 11th? - Yeah, man, I alluded to it earlier when I was talking about how easy it is to flip home fields these days. Screening is hard. Screening is by far my favorite skill to like both practice and also to see executed on a table. There's something so. satisfying about out double checking that all your measurements are in the right places and looking to your opponent being like would you like to rapid ingress when there's nowhere viable for them to appear because you settle your stuff up just right. And man oh man is that more difficult in the 11th between the nine inch coherency and the eight inch arrivals right it's just a little bit sketchier. So with that in mind build a plan for how you're going to keep your house safe if you're worried about what that happening right 12 inch no deep strike is a huge buff if you're playing tau I think you should be playing dark strider right now if you're playing GSC I think you should really be playing a clam of us. No one in necrons is talking about the geomancer but man I think that guy slams right the ability to say this section of the table is mine you don't get to come over here and if you try to drop in with reserves. i've got infantry with go to ground so i'm hidden outside of 12 and you can't come in within 12 to shoot me so it's going to take you minimum two turns to get there right like plan and like holding your backfield used to be a thing that happened automatically because you brought five idiots and now it's a thing that you need a plan for but once you have that plan and can like delegate that the rest of your games going to go a whole lot better so be be ready for that that's my that's my last tip of the 11th for y'all. Alright thank you very much Tyler you make me feel a little bit bad about not having any infiltrates my space marine list but yeah we made it work alright well thank you very much for joining Tyler thank you for playing a hero's cup with me and congratulations on our win hey oh all right thanks for having me john take care bye bye so next up i'm going to have the one only Ben juric on and Ben was our chaos space marine pilot running a good old fashioned pack bound zealot. Which he's been having a lot of tournament success with recently Ben welcome aboard thanks for having me john glad to be here yeah happy happy to have you are running pack bound zealots which definitely meant that you had to be playing priority assets. Yeah i was playing one of the one of the 3dp detachments i've been playing around a bunch of other CSM stuff but we kind of we kind of ended up on you know me needed to be prior so prior what so in this situation this was a choose this position first and then army second. And I had a variety of choices across you know my book but I have these freshly painted chaos space screens and I definitely wanted to bring those. Yeah awesome i was really excited for that i know that that's an army even working hard at there's also fun to see me in person those models are looking great and so then i'll your role with the team for I would say four of the five rounds around five is a little bit of exception because our opponent offered us a challenge but your role was mostly to first defend. Take something kind of problematic for the rest of the team and then roll with it you're running. Well actually how about you tell us what you're ready i'm running your classic pbz but you know in the last uh in the last few weeks we we you know with the left condition launch it lost about 200 points and stuff if you're taking you know near the exact same list. The the cool thing about this about it is that a lot of stuff is just as good as it was i if you if you pay attention like my Colorado list or my Dallas Dallas I had success with before it still is like the core of like abadon and crabs and shooting platforms and bashtore. And then on top of that we also brought you know the here here on brick and like a little bit of trash like move stuff around we played with like having demons trash but then we decided we're going to bring demons as an army so we've come from that so I'm that being a very flexible space into my list and we. Design something we thought would work with prior however I totally win this event was zero reps on prior but a bunch of reps on space means because i've been playing a bunch of like experimental stuff with like with with with a with fell hammer being being out there and like some purge the fill builds and we we decided that you know how. Tau pergifo was a little bit better in the situation so we swung it back and then I ended up on prior and in like previous discussions we're like well what if we just kill people what if the mission doesn't matter. And I unfortunately found out that the mission does matter. I love that we're getting different kind of lessons from each army it's a it's nice to hear that not everyone can play birds the phone. But I know that it was it was quite the quite the break from where pack was maybe a month ago. Yeah I think there's a I think there's a version of of this list that that does quite a bit better but building tall when the mission demands that you push you know two three four buttons a turn in some cases. Man it felt really bad to draw cleanse in the prior mirror when i'm supposed to be sabotage those objectives at well. So I only had four pieces of trash in my in my army and I got that got that got exposed pretty quickly, especially into other tall lists like scintillating Legion. Yeah, and this was I think almost certainly just an unfortunate reality of the timing of this so for heroes cop our lists were due the Thursday before the tournament, which I will say is much closer to the event than I would normally expect that at an event. But that was only eight days after the immune storm field manual updated and so once that municipal fee manual updated and we start getting points and we're like oh. It looks like those two crabs went up like a hundred like 170 160 180 points is 160 any two crabs on a 160 for you or something may know see some crimes might have even more the point is a ludicrous and a deserved amount of points is how much they went up and so we didn't have a ton of time to adjust and we were kind of still figuring out our dispositions and everything at the same time so we're kind of like taking shots this early event. Yeah, and I definitely didn't mind those learnings and I will admit that some of this was just pure hubris where I was just like a prior it'll be fine, everything's going to be fine and it was fine in a lot of cases where I what where I couldn't where I didn't get exposed. So the you know some of the learnings are in into you know as me being first defenders that I I went out with a losing record that's not something I get to say too often I went two and three personally at this event. And I had the team covering my butt in a lot of cases, but this is a team event there's a lot of things that we set up specifically down the line where we were looking at our you know at our you know our first offered attackers. Wow, we really can't let our demons and GSC play these things we really can't attack into into into any of this or is this something that Tyler can't play or are there two things that Tyler can't play. So in much of the case once we kind of you know felt it out and discovered that I was not really like a hero defender that was in beginning a lot of points no matter what I chose I was a defender that was going to clear the way we we executed that plan and we in it that's a role I'm used to on most teams I plan on. I you know I played with team USA you know I pirate up and a few other events I played team art or you know a few events across the country and I am often a first defender and it takes a different kind of psyche to first defend because you had to be okay with like. With you know eating the stuff nobody wants and having a rough time. Yeah and as always you know beyond something as simple as the record I always have to give my praise that you are my absolute favorite wet blanket to throw on the other team because you do it with a smile and it is really valuable to say like you know not every. You know not every defender gets to be a hero defender not every defender gets to be selfish and just say oh this is the one that is better there were definitely situations where Ben was offered two armies and it was something that he would have scored more points into and something that was really scary for the rest of us. And like cintillating legend where I didn't really want to put our towel into cintillating Legion I didn't want to put our gene circle this into Legion I didn't really want to put our demons into cintillating Legion and you know what I didn't really want to play against it either be honest it's really nice I just saying Ben take my problems away please and you know watching you do it with style. Yeah and you know we were kind of feeling out like what what this CSM list will be doing in the first defender and what pride like what this you know disposition does as a defender because that's something we discovered was you know what what does this what disposition defend well what maps are available to them what makes their map what makes our mission easier to play that's something that we're discovering in teams play and it's it's a very new thing in the in 11th edition and I you know I quickly discovered there's like okay I needed to be you know a little bit more conservative with what I was doing because even in like the games I was winning. I had like my army through my opponents like skull on his home like killed you know seven 800 points of his army on my go turn and he still scores a seven and I'm like that's not a thing that would happen in 10 that'd be a 20 oh so it's a I found it also relatively difficult to push with this disposition as well. Yeah I think that's that's a kind of a shared experience where in order to take your opponent score to an actual zero you have to you have to be really focused and aggressive about how you kill them um I think it's also very disposition based because like what each army has to do depends on the disposition is playing against. And so I certainly noticed to that like when I'm playing take an hold I stop my opponent from scoring by getting there like by actually killing their ability to take a hold right the way that I adjust my opponent scoring is to kill everything that is trying to hold objectives and to blow them off of every objective that usually people have to more objective hold it when they play and take a hold. But then prio is like kind of the like the do a little bit of everything it's do an action do a kill do a do a hold and so you have to stop their ability to do every. And in the mirror, it's due a bunch of actions, which I got put in the mirror more than a couple times. I learned that I, especially with my list, not built for it, I hate it. So definitely ran into like a situation where it's like, if I had understood prior a bit differently, it definitely would have built my list quite a bit differently to, you know, plan to that mission, but still do what I was doing. It's still, you know, have crabs and be doing damage and doing everything else. But like, if, you know, in hindsight, if I, if I like make like 200 points and changes in my list, I probably do quite a bit better just with that, you know, just with those learnings there. And it's, you know, we're, we're taking home a lot of really valuable lessons. And John, we were able to invite my wife out to come coach for us. And not a single person underscore projections was accurate within five points. The majority of the time, not a single person. And a lot of that came down to, you know, if, you know, end of turn scoring, holding on the cards. I've seen more 30 point turn fives, you know, in this edition and this where we're at right now, then I have, then you could ever, well, it was nearly impossible, like, you know, beforehand, you know, 10 points in secondary, 13th and primary. I've seen more like 25, 30 point turns on bottom of fives in this. And that is just so warping and so difficult to predict as well because you have no idea that it's coming. Yeah, it is a, it is a very difficult thing, unfortunately. And it's the way that these cards stack. It's the way that these primary score, I, similar to you, definitely had some issues giving accurate predictions, which is unfortunate because I, I would have said that I was fairly good at it by the end of 10th edition. I often, I often leaned a little conservative, but I, I was always pretty accurate when I said a game was going up, it was going up. And I don't think I have overshot a prediction in, in quite a while. And yet, an 11th edition that has absolutely happened to be as well, kind of what you're describing. I think the learning curve on this for Tuesdays, but it's going to be quite steep for a lot of people. Yeah, I think it's going to be a whole new skill to learn and something that's a bit of a crap shoot because there's so much that there's a bit of agency that's outside the players hand. It, you know, at the beginning of the event, I was able to into like the more stable conservative matchups. I was able to be pretty accurate with my predictions. My score of predictions is usually within one or two diff, if not, if not on. I was like, okay, that's pretty good, but then like toward the end, you know, any game that got like a little bit of volatility in it, you just really didn't have a good grasp on it sometimes. And we had that across the board where like some players are like, you know, projecting a three, a six and they come back with a 13 or, you know, or higher. Like we saw that happen. A lot of people that were like, oh, I'm only going to get 15 here. Oh, oops. I scored, you know, 20 some points, bottom of five, it gets it to 20. So it gets a little bit out of hand and that that's going to be, you know, especially with the margin of error, you know, that draw window being a bit smaller now. That's going to be a difference making. You know, people are going to draw games, lose games or win games in the back of this. Yeah. The, you know, speaking of the draw margin, this is where, of course, we're referencing that in order to win a round in a five player team event, instead of needing to score 56 points or 55 points was the usual benchmark in 10th edition. You don't have to score 53, which I got to say feels pretty impactful because I think we had a round two. I think we only scored 54, which was conveniently enough for the win, but in 10th edition would have held up as a draw. Yeah, we, that was into our sister team of the old glory team USA in round two. We had a nice little civil war. Yeah, um, that was, uh, that was, that was very, very good fun. Uh, and I was, I was happy to come up on the, uh, on the north side of that civil war, but, uh, it was, uh, it was definitely, um, you, you could feel how tight the rounds were and how swingy the ends of each game were for every game that ended up being a lower win than we expected. As we saw these late game swings happen. Oh, well, I still had three units left, so I scored 26 points on bottom of five. We also had some losses come back better than expected by the exact same margin, where, you know, people were predicting some pretty rough spots like, yeah, I, I think my opponent's gonna score 100 points. I can't stop them. Oh, okay. So I actually, I ended up scoring 91 points. So, you know, it's 119. 119? Yeah. Like, what are we doing here? Yeah. And that, that's just not a thing you saw on the previous edition and it's taking while you used to, like, we even saw 100, 100 draw, um, in our, in our, in our GSC near the last round. There's, there's going to be a lot of wacky things you're going to see and there's going to be a lot of wacky experiences going on in the left edition. And I'm so glad I got to learn a lot this early because it's, because if I learned this later, I would feel, you know, unprepared for anything going forward. This is a, it's, it's been a ton of fun though. It's in, you know, I, I particularly like the, the, the, you know, mixing the dispositions and have never been a mix and match. I think that's a cool place to be. I think there's a lot of excitement. Um, and I'm just, you know, while, uh, we took home that, we took home the W, um, and, you know, I, and I did my job. It's a, I would like to do better, uh, always, that is, uh, always the chase. Uh, so before I let you go for the night and move on to, uh, to our next teammate here, uh, do you have any insights on chaos space marines after the event? And do you have any insight on one thing from 11th edition that either took you by surprise or was more or less relevant than, than you expected, something that someone would want to know about before their own first terminus of 11th. I think chaos space marines are the most flexible, powerful army, um, going into 11th edition. I think, you know, outside like other space marine armies with the loyalists that you can literally pick a dispo and build around it and most likely do just fine. Um, they, they're good, you know, I think they are a top pick for taking hold. I think they're a topic for the foe. I think they're a topic for reconnaissance. Like you can pick a dispo build around it. They have great data sheets. They play the game well, um, a lot of their detachments seem, see quite a few buffs here. And a lot of stuff that you weren't really paying attention to before a lot of, a lot of like, you know, units that were kind of sitting in the back of the book are coming forward. And even like their allies, you know, that a little beast of Nurgle, the scout on the middle and, you know, and be a little low not bastard. Like there's, there's so much good stuff to be played in CSM that can play any of those missions. I would, I would have a hard time arguing that you should not ever bring CSM on a five or an eight minute team. Um, so if you, if you're a fan of CSM, go for it. Crabbs are still good. And if they nerfed crabs in a few weeks, I promise you the army is still very playable. Um, as far as, uh, as far as things that can't be by surprise in 11th, um, we kind of touched on it a little bit, but it's really just the scoring. The scoring is insane. I, I cannot believe how easy it is for some dispositions and some lists to, um, be almost completely uninteractable or just like not really be killing you, but still just be scoring because they know they have a job as an asymmetrical setup. And if you, if you don't table them and they're just, you know, looking at their end of turn scoring, uh, they're still going to score 70, 80, 90 points. Like I, I was bewildered when someone, you know, scored 21 points at top of one. I mean, I was like, how in the, like, how am I going to beat this? I'm so stupid. I went down. Uh, I, I definitely have the same feeling. I played against a disruption player at one point. And I think they scored like 13 or 15 primary on top of one and I was like, what, what? It is like, you know, pointed a bunch of buttons and actions and just said, yeah, I'm going to do three actions. I'm going to get to 15 points right now. I was like, huh, I really didn't think that's how that was going to go. I was like, oh, you're scoring way more points than I expected. And, and same thing, these points can like, either be, it can be like a, dries a desert or can be a waterfall of feels. Yeah. And, you know, hopefully you're on the waterfall side of it. But that's the part that, like, just like, really caught me with my pants down on this edition. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I think that's fair, fair, fair. All right. Awesome. Well, uh, thank you very much, Ben. Thank you so much for, uh, for joining me today and, uh, I really appreciate it. So next up, we are going to move on to John Garza, a member of Team USA, one of our advisors who is on the team playing demons. Thank you for having me, John. Hello, hello. So, uh, welcome aboard. And, uh, you were playing a slanesh demons for us. You were running the Legion of Access build, something we thought was pretty interesting. And, uh, you were running it specifically as reconnaissance. Yes, uh, I was running it as reconnaissance. I, you know, allied and warped tied to get that battle line detachment, uh, to sort of fill a role in the team. I thankfully, uh, from your side, you let me have that. I had started out as take it, hold it guard and was not really fighting my stride with an army. Uh, so I went back to my first love, which was, you know, sleddash demons. Mono Mele is, uh, apparently supposed to be dead this edition. That was hoping to prove it wrong. Yeah. Well, you had quite a, you had quite a solid run for it. Uh, I was honestly quite impressed with the Legion of Access, um, with this new edition, there's always this like these, these, there's tons of ideas right here, right? There's a lot of like, oh, is this thing good now? This was bad before. And I think all of us struggle a little bit with this thought as we are going from addition to addition of we acknowledge that things could be different. But until we see otherwise, we kind of assume it's the same. And I'm not going to lie to you, John. I thought sleddash demons, Pearson as humans was not good at the end of 10th edition. And I'm willing to let people try things, but, uh, I was a little curious how it was going to go. I was like, oh, this would be really cool. if John's right, but I don't know if I'm willing to bet money on it until afterwards. So I was actually kind of impressed with how I did. You know, I think that's a pretty fair take to be honest. So much demons had their time in the sun back when they came out and got missing and took those series of hits. I will say that a few of the new sort of mechanics inside of 11th, like the hidden rule pretty much is what made it seem viable to me like stacking those minus one to hit. And might as well blister skill modifiers with cover to sort of hide your demons and prepare for like that all in push on like turns three and four. Really sort of spoke to be as like possible that maybe this could be like a decent avenue for scoring some points. And it had enough speed to maybe be in the correct places for reconnaissance where I found like speed seems to be king. You're trying to play that disposition, right? You have to be able to get to the places. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, the slush human certainly were fast and reconnaissance is one of those one of those missions where it is very unconventional. So the role that we normally used you in was as an attacker. We were trying to feed an all combat hidden janky scoring army just like into like shooting armies or things that we didn't think could fully handle it. And so we often kind of used you as a pair with Fluff our gene circle pilot in that role. How how did that role suit you? How did that feel for you? So that role really fit me quite well. I think the beautiful part about slimesh demons sort of trailing off at the end of 10th is people forgot how they play and how they sort of operate. And then when you're offered, you know, slimesh demons versus Fluff on GSC, you're normally going to pick the slimesh demons, right? You don't want to go into the fact should expert, you know, first love with addition tournament. I found that most of my opponents, right, when we sat down the table and we started like getting the train set up, they were not only trying to like parse what their new mission was based on like the disposition. They're trying to figure out which of the three maps played into this army that they haven't seen in like over a year at this point. And then like, oh yeah, what does this do? Like what does the mask do? What is the changeling do you mean on a six up if I put my storm surge on your home base, I might not get to shoot and lose the game. Right, like it put a lot of doubt and sort of uncertainty in the matchups that I feel like for people who picked me specifically like the purge the foe players that I ended up into. I had mock ca one round into, you know, chaos space Marines who were expected to bring back diff, right, I heard their captain talking to them all of a sudden that sort of like doubt sort of tilted the matchup in a way that I sort of benefited from right because they didn't exactly remember how it worked. It's a it's a really spooky thing on I was I quite enjoyed, you know, getting getting to watch an action and you put up some you put up some very good results over the weekend as well. I was quite impressed with how you did attacking a bunch of the like the theoretically new bullies on the block right I think that on day one, if I'm recalling correctly, I put you into firestorm space Marines, which is like the, you know, the new space Marine that's rising up to challenge ultra Marines with like adding at libraries or Fulgaris to. All these flavors and getting to do all this cool stuff and then I think I put you into mock caught and then I put you into a CSM list with a I think one or two crabs in like a veterans long war something is that correct. Oh yeah, no that you pretty much now that yes that was exactly it was the murder talent with a with a crab singular crab which I'm thankful for fair enough fair enough. But but we put you into our means that that theoretically had a lot of damage and yet you were able to swim upstream through that and score a lot of points with reconnaissance. Oh yeah and a lot of that was due to the and I will admit this freely the purge versus reconnaissance matchup spread being that consecrate versus triangulation right it really put the onus on them to push forward and table be kind of like Tyler said right you kind of have to put your balls on the table and kill me in my deployment zone. And wait, if I have slow as divas if you miss that shot right if a four up comes up a little bit extra or if that changeling goes off you do just sort of explode and a lot of my opponents. I I simply didn't move from my deployments on the first turn because I can't do the action right I can't score points on my first turn so I'm not going to let you score anything without taking a larger risk. So I hit everything I sat on my literal back light of the map and waited for them to come to me that first turn because they started to feel the pressure they started to push out a little too aggressively and I found that even though they had the damage because they had to compromise position to get it in the right spots. I was able to sort of flood one side and do the whole washing machine trick right where we split it in half and I get to overload that with my rapid ingresses and then do the triangulation on two three and four as long as I just don't lose anything on turn one don't interact. Yeah and then you know with triangulation I think first concentration obviously we heard Tyler's take on it is one of those things were once you score points they're good for the rest of the game and so keeping your opponent off of it for a couple of turns and then getting it for a couple turns is a really big snowball in both directions actually. Oh yeah absolutely I definitely heard and I took this advice from Tyler right oh he let me kill three things turn one I consecrate all three objectives and then I didn't have to worry about my points the rest of the game. I was like all right so I need to not die right that is step one turn one we sit behind our lines we make sure that if we're going to score points we're trading it for that action for our own because. You know dead models do score points in triangulation that's the only rule I usually like it when they don't score points though yeah well that's because you like table people John I liked ready around it just pushing buttons. Yeah it's funny because like that doesn't sound like what that doesn't logically sound like what I would want my son as humans to be doing but as soon as you said it's like oh you know what they actually they're fast on the move characteristics right because I think of my EC you know the other son as sharp me. Not being an amazing action army because all of my speed comes from my advance roles and I was like oh but slanesh demons all the speed is the move characteristic they don't actually advance and do that much I know you've got some advance in charge of some bad line. But broadly speaking you're fast because of the movement characteristics that actually makes it easier for you to do actions are there any like action enablers in the like you advance an action bad line or anything with that new attachment. Unfortunately warped I doesn't give you advance in action. That would have really made my life much much simpler. But it's also why like the list had a couple of of loanops and then a three man of unit of like fiends does to sit around something that moves 12 does the action and then I kept to beast of Nurgle inside a deep strike like small profiles that I could drop in locations that I need them to to hit that and then also get hidden. Which was kind of the most important at new aspect of 11th for me when it came to scoring points. Well your unit your army of all infantry and beast without guns. I have two guns my Jew. Of course they are psychic and on the keeper but yes no 100% I I shot them once the entire tournament. Yeah. Yeah obviously the keeper itself isn't going to get the hidden but it can it's still kind of tough with that minus one to hit stacking with cover. Yeah absolutely I found that armies that didn't have an immediate way to ignore modifiers or ignore cover killing a keeper was a pretty risky proposition right. And a lot of them found that they did not have what was required and then the thieves of painstrap which you know with the rulings that were given to us we got to do it after seeing the saves. Really made allocating enough damage to each unit quite difficult to figure out because if you killed just enough to pull me back into hidden or out of line of sight. All of a sudden your entire sort of shooting plan falls apart. You said after the saves is is that how thieves of pain works hours is it's after you roll the saves. So in this event I spoke to Jason the head judge and was asking him how thieves of pain would work in this event historically thieves of pain back in 10th you would do it right after the wound roll right when it was allocated to a model and that's when you would thieves up. But now in 11th the wounds are allocated in groups first and then it's the damage step when the models are selected. So they moved okay so I think I'm getting it now so it is allocated when it's allocated to a model in the unit is when you get to trigger thieves of pain previously you allocated to a model before you rolled the saves now you allocate to a model after you fail the saves. - Yes. - So because-- the trigger itself has moved, thieves of pain has moved without changing any of the wording on thieves' pain. That is, that is, that is, deviously better. Wow. It is shockingly better and then it is also very hard for anyone to figure out what all the ramifications are, right? Which, you know, fair play, I also have to figure it out live when I'm being shot, but no, it is a lot better because you know exactly how much damage, how much of that unit you might lose, and how much of it you can put into your battery and expect not to die. Which is the contorted epitome, of course, combo. Of course. So, obviously, the contorted epitome, which I, as I recall, gives a filmo pain to its unit against mortal wounds, therefore allowing it to, you know, thief the pain and then ignore a good quantity of it so that it can keep stealing pain. Alright, theoretically, let me make sure I got this interaction, right? If I shot fiends next to demonets, no mortal wound filmo pain here, just 10 demonets and you rolled your dice and you rolled the 20 saves I gave you, you could look in at the dice roll of 20 dice and say, yep, I like to thieves of pain and you take them as they're allocated. So, you take all of the ones and those turn into mortals and then you take all the twos and those turn into mortals. You take all of the threes and those turn into mortals and then by the time you've killed the 10 demonets, then all the saves count. But at that point, you're mostly like fours, fives and sixes and so you don't take nearly as much damage because all the passes are what's left in the pool. Yes, exactly. You sort of cheat the saves step of this as well. Yes. It has vastly improved. Yeah, that's crazy. Wow, okay. Yeah, and because it's triggered off every time a model is allocated a wound, you can actually wait until you like say you take the first four and then begin thieves of pain. So, you can really sort of divvy up the damage. Yeah, at least with this ruling. Okay, yeah, fair enough. I mean, I would be anxious to see an FAQ from Games Workshop himself on how this is supposed to work. But certainly, you know, if you go to an event and you ask the judge, that is gospel from the next two days, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I used it to survive Montcache, you'd be in the face. Very powerful. Okay. Awesome. All right. So, wow, really interesting. Now that the event is over and you had your run with the demons, do you have any thoughts on demons as a whole or specifically Legion of Excess? Now that the event is over? Yes, I have some bittersweet thoughts after the event is over. While Legion of Excess was a whole lot of fun, very interesting and dynamic to play and definitely has good matchups, I think you can agree with me the amount that I had to be protected from bad matchups, like kind of far outweigh the benefit, right? Any sort of psychic army that we ran into or something with the ability to ignore mods or, you know, anything with oath of moment, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Yeah, who would do that or flavors? Really just sort of ruined the game plan of stacking that minus one to really create that survivability. I would think, I could thieves of pain, something and end up losing both units because I could just shoot through everything that I could put forth, right? So, with that said, scintillating Legion just appears better in a team's aspect. So, if you're going to run demons or take it away from your CSM, it feels like that's the clear choice as far as which one is the strongest of the demons that I've seen. Though I have heard some talks about, you know, some blood crushers or something. Yeah, I think that a demons really have a new lease on life with the new addition and potentially have several builds. But certainly, you know, one of the members of our sister team on TMSA was also running scintillating Legion or was also running demons and was running scintillating Legion. And I think old Maddie Greene also quite enjoyed playing demons in London. All right. Final question, then. Do you have any thoughts or reflections on how 11th played now that you're done with your first event of the addition? Anything that either was less or more impactful than you were expecting? Anything someone else might want to know before they're first tournament? Sure, absolutely. I would say there are two things that really struck me in 11th as super impactful, specifically for what I was trying to do, which was melee pressure. The new hidden mechanic and specifically, he sort of go to ground like super hidden where you can make it 12 inches. Really was worth the effort to set up. Like when I do a charge and I begin to use pylons to get my position to strike, making sure that my consolidates get me behind hidden or touching terrain or the like super hidden is definitely worth it, right? A lot of my mental load went into forcing that to sort of control space and bring people to me. So if you're a melee army, I feel like that's worth your time. And then the second thing that really struck me is double ones in charging is a really sad thing that you must count on happening to you at an important time, right? Yeah. Like you just have to, you like just have to have a CP spare for it. Oh yeah, absolutely. And if you have a stratagem that lets you advance in charge, but it's in that charge face, there is one out of 36 times that that is just not going to work, right? You're going to charge, you're going to fail. Even though you've set up everything the best you possibly could, you're two inches away. And that's a real failure point for your army that's going to be relying on making this role probably 12 times a game, maybe more. So you can almost expect it to happen. And it definitely happens in one of my games, specifically the 1010 where I had a keeper two inches away that I needed to get into a rip tide, role double ones, auto fails, and I had already used a CP referral on a different charge earlier in the phase. So that's just something that you have to sort of build into your plan and understand is a possibility. And it just adds a volatility that you have to expect in teams if you're going to take like a melee centric army. Yeah. Shooting addition yet again. I'm sure you're so sad, John. I like my call that actually. I like to learn this. All right. Thank you very much, John, for the insight and lessons. And thank you so much for playing the weekend with me. It was very happy to have you by my side and very impressed with those slash demons. So thank you so much for joining me, John. And then next up, we are going to have Flouf Cox joining us with Gene Star Call. Welcome aboard, Flouf. Hey, John. It's so great to be here. Thank you for having me, boss. I know. So great to talk. It's been days like plural. So Flouf, you were playing Gene Star Call for us at Heroes Cup. Obviously, we had a successful run of an event. But you had the, I would say a questionable honor of being our disruption player. You know, the trash detachment that no one else wanted. Yes. I very funnily got handed the do your best disposition and was told to just go. It has had very normal effects on my mental health. And I've loved having to practice to like two dozen games. I practice with disruption. Yeah, it's so fun. Look, disruption builds character. That's what they say, right? Truly, you know, being able, having to do more to get less points is something that I feel everyone should strive to do in their life, you know? Yeah. Well, hey, you scored plenty of points. I know what you're talking about there, Flouf. So you were running Gene Star Call and you were also specifically doing all new detachments, right? Yes. So I ran a triple one point detachment, which is just to very shortly get into it. Here is the uprising, which benefits all of like our assassin loan op characters, piercering brood swarm, which buffs up all of my piercings to be strength five, toughness five, and give some upie downing and all the school reactive stuff. And then xenocult masses, which buffs my favorite unit in the army, the neo fight hybrids, the heal more, the good full hit rerolls, they kill you. It's great. Yeah, very nice. So getting to combo for new detachments is kind of interesting. You have to like really play into this, this new detachment point system. I think you were the only one of us who did the triple one DP. Certainly the majority of lists I saw in the tournament were my detachment from before or my detachment plus one little bonus thing. Yeah. It I really kind of got into the weeds of like what makes it attachment in terms of like I'm looking at my old swarm host list for like host of ascension and it's got like two decent enhancements like two to three strats I like to use and like a good army or a detachment, right? But then like if I can find like a quarter of a detachment rule and like one to two good upgrades and then like one to two good strats and three different things, it's kind of like I'm running away with more stuff than I had before. And that's where like the the triple one pointer is really kind of caught my eye. it that makes sense. Yeah, it does make sense. I've played triple 1DPs for a couple of other factions. Obviously not GSC, I'll leave that to the experts. But I played it for certain armies like my Dark Angels and my Emperor's Children. And I very much felt after the games of like this was cool, but I was missing some fundamental aspect of the army. Yeah, I think Emperor's Children is probably where I felt that the most Dark Angels, like almost worked. Or it felt like close to functional or functional enough. But like Emperor's Children, I was like, yeah, I'm really missing some core aspects here by taking three 1DPs. Yeah, I think, and I won't say that the triple 1 point of GSCs without that. A big contrast is taking Xeno cults with these other two 1 pointers versus final day, specifically for just a return to reserve strat, right? Because I'm used to, when I commit a Neophyte brick, I'm able to pick off a flank, do some damage, and then pop back up and continue that chaos somewhere else. The triple 1 pointers don't have access to that. So like to me, that's like their one like downside, which is big, especially for an upie downing army to not have upie. It's a little rough. But so long as you play with like this is going to sound a weird but more intent. And you're more than fine like committing that resource when you actually do. And understanding what it might do the next turn and the turn after that, you can kind of get over that hurdle. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, you definitely had the all the different aspects where you had the early pressure, you had the reserve shooting, you had the random janky character bullshit. It is interesting that most of what gene historical does did feel like it was distilled separately into 3 1db attachments. Or it's like, you know, like those are kind of like the three core pillars of historical bonuses. Yeah, we'll see that was the thing, right, is that these 3 1 point attachments focus on all the things that like to have the buffs in the army to where, you know, the characters really like the rerolls for consistency. The Neophytes are some of my favorite things and being able to, you know, spam a keyword and then reroll hits on that helps out their damage. And then whatever the purestrain thing just transforms them into a whole new thing, right, but it's not focusing on bikes. It's not focusing on flakos or stuff that like is good on their own, right? They don't need a detachment. They don't need strats. They don't need rules. They just do their job. And so you are able to focus on all of your rules on these units that are good force multipliers. And that's where I was like, okay, this actually like, there's some juice here, right? Yeah, very interesting. So the way that your role kind of fit into the team was your the disruption player. We usually had Ben and Tyler on defending duties, which means that oftentimes you are kind of being thrown in, thrown in with with Garza and the Celeste teammates, just kind of like into armies to go drag them down to earth. Yes. How how do that role suit you in the army? So here's where we kind of get into playing disruption broke my brain, because I realized that with the 40k that I knew in 10th edition, doesn't really exist in 11th edition playing the like cutesy little I'm gonna, you know, deny your primary and Tiki. Here's five guys over here. Doesn't play all that well, especially when in my testing, it seemed like a lot of lists for kind of being warped into this like low unit count to deal with purge kind of army list, right? So I just kind of said, well, if I'm going to be attacking a lot of things, the break point for pier strains seems pretty nice. Neophytes re-rolling lethals is just kind of good damage. I think I'm just going to play this as blue purge and just run it people, right? And then if I'm advantaged in terms of the units that I'm bringing, I can play very aggressive and, you know, use my resurgence points to buy back more pier strains and then, you know, just keep the foot on the gas. But if I'm disadvantaged, now I can use the upbeat downy of the pier strain detachment and buying resurgence using resurgence points for like these cheap little five man's to like go to actions and all that kind of stuff. And so by using resurgence points, I could kind of like based on how on what I attacked, I could change what the detachment and what the army did, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. It's funny because, you know, Ben mentioned that playing priority s csm, it was almost as he was trying to play yellow purge. Yeah, by that, it sounds like had a little bit less flex in the game plan, where the priority assets pack around zealots was really forced into I'm going to kill you and score afterwards. And you kind of had a little bit of a flex of I would like to kill you and score afterwards or as I'm doing it. But maybe I can play a little bit of a rat game if I don't think that's going to work. Yeah, so that was that was kind of my thing is that I really realized that, you know, there's going to be two main armies in the game. It's going to be like these hyper pressure lists that are purge or they're pretending to be purge, right? Or there's going to be your rat lists. And I kind of realized that a lot of times you're, if you're going straight into just the like pure purge stuff, you know, like Montcato, they look at my list and they go, there's a lot of stuff here. They can probably outrat me. I don't want to deal with this. So a lot of times I can kind of end up going into other rat lists. And that's where like this like modal version of GSC really helped because then that's when I go, oh, I can be the aggressor here, right? I can I can be the aggro deck and just, you know, run at you because there's also things like, you know, disruption versus recon in my opinion is very slanted towards the recon player. And, you know, I think the only way to get around that is dead models don't score points, dog. I'm running at you. Like I got to figure this out, right? So yeah, that's kind of where all of my chips were lying kind of going into this. Yeah, the old adage. Dead model zone score points, which we've established is not true for crime since first this part, but for everyone else, it's true. So, okay, very, very interesting. So for our first event with 11, it sounds like you, you've got enough games in advance to skip over the oops. I tried a 10th edition plan in 11, which I know first edition of 11, a number of people kind of fell into that trap. Yeah. It's it's one of those things sort of like primary doesn't matter in the way that it used to, right? Like I don't for most of my dispositions like matchups, I don't need to hold my home point. It only matters for like hold more, but in those matchups, I can just kind of like maybe set something back there or if they don't have hold more, I can just kind of go somewhere else, right? With the disruption versus disruption matchup, you know, you're just kind of like making sure that your opponent's not on your home, but you don't actually need to be there. So it's it's this weird thing to where how you score primary and how much you stop your opponent from scoring primary from taking points is it's so vastly different that sometimes depending on the matchup and depending on what dispositions can be playing this like trading game isn't going to get you as rewarded as maybe just, you know, just running at your opponent, right? Or fully taking a turn off. It's it's a weird space and I haven't fully figured it out. But with about like a dozen and a half games, I was able to be like, there's something different here and I need to just make a list for whatever the hell is different and hope I'm in the ballpark. Yeah. How do you how do you think it worked? Like, you know, now that we've gotten our five games, we got the tournament. Obviously, we won. So, you know, good amount of success there. So, but how do you think the plan worked? Yeah, so I mean, not to too my own horn, I think it did work very, very well. With the disruption thing, having this modal thing to where I'm going into matchups that I feel very strong into like a green tide orks or to carry, I can just be like, I can be the aggressor here. I have the volume to just disrespect you. I'm running at you, right? Also with GSC final day later on. But into these matchups that are very heavily aggressive towards me and I'm disadvantaged, I was able to be like, okay, I'm playing Keepaway, Teehee, you know, stay away from me. And in all of my games, I did not score lower than 90 points. So, I'm either scoring hard and, you know, getting these 17s and 18s or me and my opponent are both walking up to 90 points and, you know, I'm looking at the two people that I blunted. They were their highest scores for their team. And if I can take that role of, yeah, dog, I got that you totally got these 17s the past two rounds. You and I are going to hold hands and we're going to get like a 10 or like an 11, 9 something like that. That is a success to me. That is like what I set out to do with this list was accomplished. And I'm very proud of it for that. There's still definitely some tweaks. I don't think this is a perfect list. But for like week one, I'm happy. Okay, awesome. So now that the event is over, do you have any observations on what you want to do next? Just like build more. I like this sound so we like a silly to say, but like it's it was cool to see how dynamic this army could be while like, you know, even fundamentally with how the detachment is set up, it's something that we would never have been able to think of in 10th edition, right? Three different detachments. But then there are things to where I think all of our single point detachments are very strong and they play well with all of our other detachments that I think there's a lot of combinations out there that need to be explored, right? Whether it it's, you know, Xenocult and Xenocreat, the double Xenobilt, or your Taka Riki, a great number of Art of War, and a GSC player, I greatly respect, just did very well with biosynchic brood surge and Xenocult, and he's running take-in hold, right? There's so many different combinations with GSC that I think we still have this great setup that we've had in length edition and 10th edition to where our internal balance is super good. And so I'm just of the mode of like, I'm putting on my explorers hat, and I'm going into the jungle brother. I want to explore, I want to deep dive and figure out all the things. So that's like, that's what I'm excited for. - Yeah, there's, I think a lot of Armies are sharing this. So I'm glad to hear that you feel Gene Storkel was in a similar boat. Do you think you're gonna stand disruption or maybe try to break free from the present? - I also, I think right now, I'm going to stay with disruption because I think, and I'm gonna try out the other dispositions 'cause I also, I coach and I run a little small little channel so it'd be nice to be informed enough on those dispositions to tell people about them. But I think how I see disruption right now is that it's very hard for a lot of armies to play it, but every team needs it. And I almost see it like a soccer team sees a goalie, right? It's not in some games going to be the flashiest role ever, but if you don't have a good goalie, you're gonna lose the game, right? And so if your disruption player can go into, you know, their star hitters and get that 10, get that 11, but also still be able to go into a matchup they're good into and get their 15 or 16 or whatever. I think teams with those kind of anchors are gonna be a lot more advantaged going into, you know, into fives and eights and stuff like that. So that's where I want to set up and just be a good anchor for whatever team I'm on. And then maybe if we get some bounds between dispositions later on, then I'll, you know, spread my wings and explore a bit more. - Makes sense? All right, now regarding 11th edition itself. Now that you've done with the event first event, you got your practice and you got to actually, you know, realize it on a tabletop, is there one or more things that you notice that were either less or more impactful than you expected making that jump from 10 to 11? Was there anything that really stands out to you as, well, something that someone would want to know before they go to their first tournament of love edition? - Hidden is insane. I, like leading up into this, like I even remember doing like when they were doing the, like, here's a faction, a little preview every day and here's your two detachments and here's this one that messes with Hidden. By like the 10th one, I was like, Mike, it stopped using the word hidden. Please, let's never use that word again. And I was just so convinced it was going to do nothing. But like, melee units that never shoot and always have hidden are super impactful, rapid ingressing with hidden, like 12.1 away and you're behind a pipe, so you have go to ground or whatever the hell, like that's super impactful. Like this rule can force a lot of interaction that wasn't there beforehand. And I think that's just a lately very, very cool. So I think weirdly, the best way to put it is hidden is both underrated and overrated and it should be explored more, if that makes sense. - Yeah, it certainly does. I very much felt the impact myself in my own games using Hidden on, you know, well, all this space for infantry that I brought. - All right, just being able to make like a durable, elite brick just basically have a loan up. I said, yeah, I'm not going to shoot my bolter. It's like, oh, great, now I have to get close to you. That's probably going to turn out fine for me, you know, it's great. - Yeah, the, you're not wrong. The bolter pistols on my melee units have never been this useless. - Exactly. - I'm usually the kind of person that likes to like whip five bolter pistols shots at something as I go in and then chuckle as I do one damage if the avatar can about once per tournament. But, you know, it's those days that go behind me now. - It's very similar to a host of ascension before it got nerfed, like the second or third time. We had a strat called Return to Shadows, which was when you shot us any of our infantry units, we could return back into reserves, right? It was really good for neo-fight breaks. It was just basically like, hey, if you shoot this 20 man, I go back into reserves and I reset my detachment buffs. And so I would just go to like role leaders players and work players that I'm shooting at, that I'm playing against. I'm like, you don't have guns, don't shoot me. And it's like, that's the same sentiment in 11th of, yeah, man, don't shoot your little pistol. It's not worth it, take the loan up. It's so much stronger. - Yeah, even when I was like pushing units forward and saying like, oh, this unit's about to die. Anyways, I might as well shoot the pistols 'cause it's right in front of my opponent's army. Even then, I still found myself after that being like, huh, they're shooting me from more than 15 inches away now. Like, sure, they could've easily shot me no matter what. But now they get to back up and shoot me. Now they get to cross court me and they don't have to use the guns that are near me to do the job. I was still noticing, I'm like, wow, I just like really am not gonna use the pistols on these things ever. - Yeah, anything you can force out of your opponent no matter how minimal it is is impact, right? It's still resources. It's board position, it's tempo. It's something that you are making them have to expend. And thusly, like, it's just more value you're getting out of that unit, right? - True indeed. All right, well, I think that wraps us up. Thank you so much for joining us. - Yeah, of course. - And yeah, so I'll go ahead and close the episode now with my own thoughts on the old space marine. So I was, of course, the fifth member of the team. And I was running my space marine as a reclamation force. So this is the, this is the, like, captain tightest best day ever attachment. And I combined it with a librarian's conclave. So this was fun. I basically was like, I really wanna get the librarian's conclave in. So I'm gonna give up all the good space marine attachments that I played before. Cause I really wanted to try something new. And I got to bring in what I kind of after a little bit of thought was the best 2dp to attach when I could add two space marines. I don't think reclamation forces as good as Blades of Ultramar, but it is noticeably able to be combined with librarian's conclave. And so I kind of built my list to be a very take all comer. It falls where it falls. And I was our taken hold player. I found out with some practice games that taken hold could set up a very consistent scoring plan. And one that I was, I was quite happy with. And so I was, I was very content to just say, I don't want to be the, you know, the defender that gets to make the choice, you know, kind of that here defender like we saw with the towel. And I also don't want to have too much of a pairings preference necessary. You know, we saw that with the slenash demons. They needed a little bit of protection against certain aspects. I really wanted to go in with my army and just say, yep, the space marine card is here. The space marines are gonna go do whatever they do. Sure enough, I never defended the space marines. I only attacked. I think in four of our five rounds, I did not first attack. I just second attacked. It was the space marines waited to the end and they went where they went. The only exception to this was round five when our opponents offered us a deal of mere matches where we both had a gene circle player, we both had a space room player. And we just, you know, traded cards and said, all right, space friends, space friends. Yes, you played just, you know, we have three cards left. Let's do one defender set, which was very fun. I enjoyed that. But anytime there was an option, I left the space marines towards the end. And this army did a really good job of that. I was very happy with it as just a take and hold scoring machine. Certainly the staple feature of the army to me was this captain, Titus blade guard veteran wardens of Ultramar abomination. Where there are, I believe, six distinct wound allocation groups to go through of those four of them have invulnerable saves. And so I got to do a lot of alternating of, oh, you point a bunch of, you know, high damage shots at me. All right, I'll first put it on the idiot humans. When they're dead, it'll then go on Sergeant Metaurus. And so, you know, six las cannons later, you killed the three humans, because I rolled a one, two and a three. And then all the four ups all hit Metaurus. And I was like, oh, well, Metaurus passed all his four ups because he's holding structure. And so it is a very fun, durable, just shockingly durable unit. And I played it really aggressively. I just got to throw that unit on the midfield, never, ever shoot its pistols, and just take advantage of hidden. And what I found was really good with taking hold was to just take a pretty high OC unit and whip it onto the center. And you'll say, yep, this is on the middle now. I have this. And that was something that was surprisingly difficult for a lot of my opponents to deal with. If you put something high OC on the objective with Titus, this detachment combo, let me bump my OC. There was a flag in the unit, that bump's the OC. So the stupid Titus and Bladeguard unit was like 39 OC if I actually went down the rabbit hole. And so I basically just whipped it onto the center in every single game. And I will say, and this is a surprising thing, in the, I guess I played five games, Warhammer, so that's 25 battle rounds, I held the middle objective, turns two through five, not not contested held the objective. I think in every single game, I don't think there was a single point where my opponent looked at that objective and was able to say, not to worry, I have put more to see on it than you. Taking hold, I find it doesn't have, there's some, but it doesn't have a ton of split middle. And so I played into a bunch of taking hold beers, and I played a bunch of like, I played, I think I played one purge of the foe, and then I played one reconnaissance, one disruption, two taking holds. And all four of those, I would have to check Prio again, but all four of those have a single middle. And so I just fastballed Titus and the crew onto the objective. And so that was a really good scoring pattern. It worked really well for me, if people came out, there was an ultimate army waiting behind it, and I would step out and shoot my opponent with a little bit of a moment. A big part of that counter punch was the Liberia's Conclave, having the Stern Guard veteran unit as one big brick of if you put your tough thing to fight my tough thing, your tough thing is gonna eat 20 plus mortals. And that felt distinctly powerful. Just to have this Stern Guard unit with fused a lot for anti monster people, five plus, I can give it sustained hits, I can ignore hit mods, I can give it a plus one to hit, it's a plus one to move with oath, it reels hits against the other target, it reels wounds against the other targets, it's Stern Guard. It was crazy, a lot of people got shot by that unit and were like, wow, I knew you were good at killing this, but I didn't think that would also kill, and a unit of four second tower robots trivially easily, I didn't give up for all the guns. It would kill a defiler relatively easily, if I ever had to do it. It's also shockingly good and just like normal thing, it's like it also like just lifted a squad of custodies because I could, it's only mortal in sixes there, but it was very powerful. So I was really happy with this Ultramarine list as just a catch all waiting at the end, and it scored very well. Some of my games were high differential, some of them were lower differential, but in all of my games, I found that the space for int can go into anything and score 90 points, I could score 90 to 100 points in every game because space marines have enough stuff, have enough CP to do a lot of secondaries, I'm not gonna get table, I'm very hard to push, I'm gonna hold my primary. And so that does a very safe recipe for points which I distinctly enjoyed. Yeah, it was very interesting to have the army do that, I think space marines are uniquely suited to be that flexible option at the end. You can build space marines to be a very focused thing, like a portfolio list, like a portrait rather secret iron from a list, but my play style, I think, lends itself more to being that flexible. So when we were composing our team, I chose my disposition last. I tried to let my teammates get their choices in so that they could play with their comfort with, and then when taking hold was the last option left, I then just built the flexible space marines list and I waited at the end of the parent cycle. And that was just simply powerful. So I really enjoyed that. I think that the main mechanic that I was abusing was hidden and the size of the objectives. It was very easy to put a lot of the warden and blade guard unit on an objective, have ever in behind terrain, you know, on each side, on each corner of the building, I had a blade guard veteran hugging the wall with his arm on one side and the sword on the other to make sure that he had to go to ground. I had a bunch of the wardens behind the walls and then I had another blade guard on the other side, hugging the wall, doing the same thing. And so it was distinctly easy. I would say to just get my models on the objective and put the OC on it. And in some practice games, some opponents, you know, fell for the trap of, oh, I'll just try to kill the Titus Brick, a thing that is very difficult. My closest game of the weekend was into a fellow member of Team USA Celesta and she scored the most points against me without I think allocating attack against the Titus Brick. Instead she just was like, yeah, you were gonna hold the middle, I'm gonna try to play for both of the expansions at once. And that ended up in actually a relatively close game. We both scored a good number of points there. So yeah, I think at the end of it, what I would say is that I was quite happy with how the army played. I think since I was able to record a lot of content about Love the Dition for Art of War, I had a pretty good handle on the addition going in. The things that stood out to me the most was how aggressive I had to be to deny my opponent real points. My first two games went well. I was fairly aggressive but maybe not maximum. And I was a little bit conservative in my game against Celesta and her sister's battle. And afterwards I was reflecting on it 'cause I didn't score the Diff I wanted. I scored a 12 in that game, a good score but I frankly had wanted more. And I thought that for the amount of influence I was able to exert over the table, I was expecting to score more. And I decided that when Celesta was not taking the bait of jumping on the wardens, I needed to be more aggressive with them and shove them. Instead of just being content to say, well, I'll just hold the middle for the entire game. And so the last two games of the weekend after we had that break for dinner, I got to reflect over that game and what I thought I did wrong. I just started shoving this big super unit around onto people's objectives. And so for the day two, I was able to say, all right, if you're not gonna immediately bite on the warding unit, I'm going to actively be throwing it at other objectives to make it into a problem for you. And that led to some really high differential for me on day two, which I was very pleased with that, that kind of that internment adjustment when I found that I wasn't able to push Diff in one of the games that I wanted to. And then I guess if I had to pick something that was most impactful and most surprising, I think it really was how aggressive you have to get to push a big differential. Take a hold, I think it's a very natural thing to do because take a hold is all about holding objectives. And therefore your opponent's primary is mostly about holding objectives as well. So that's the one where I think what you're doing most takes away from what your opponent's doing. I found out when playing some other dispositions that it would be like, oh, my card is telling me to do this. But me doing this scores me points, but it doesn't take away my opponent's points, right? Like, priority is telling me to go hold the center and action it. But me doing so doesn't inherently deny my opponent's any points. It's just letting me do my stuff. And I found that taking hold is one of those dispositions where inherently me accomplishing my goals is stopping my opponent from scoring their goals. And that's something that's actually quite valuable. So I was very excited for this. I was really happy to get out there and play a good real tournament of a lumped edition. And I'm really just excited to know more. I was very much trying to say this is an experimental space marine list, an experimental, I should say. And I think that I'll be going over to something more like Blades and trying out the priority assets and seeing how that feels next. But I had a really good time with it. And it was great to take a lot of my teammates on team USA to a tournament. Several of whom were teammates I had never actually played on a team with. And also to go to a different part of the country. I've never played where him or in the state of Arizona. You know, at some point, I would love to say that I've gone to a, you know, to a tournament in every state in the United States. I still have a number to knock off, but it was nice to get one more. And it was great to kick off the addition with a really well-run event. I always have to tip my hat a little bit to the green banner crew because they run a very smooth, well-organized event. And so I distinctly enjoy that. All right, thank you so much for listening to this episode ever. And hopefully you enjoyed it. Enjoy hearing some of our initial reads on the edition. Of course, if you want to support Team USA more, you could also find our podcast on YouTube and on Spotify and on Apple. So wherever you listen to it, you can find us more places. And we do have a Patreon as well. You can find the links on all of the websites. And that just took a quick way to show us support. If you like to, if you want to support Team USA, we are gearing up towards the WTC. As a matter of fact, WTC is going to be in like six weeks from what I'm recording this, which is way too around the corner for me to say, ah, I just played my first tournament game of the edition, like three or four days ago. And now I have WTC at six weeks. So that tight turnaround is quite spooky, but I think on, on our next episode we'll be after the Team USA practice weekend. And so I expect we're going to have quite a lot to talk about. And of course, Anthony, even though we'll be back with us next week because while he did not attend the Heroes Cup, he certainly will be at practice weekend. Thanks for listening and I'll catch everyone next time. Bye-bye.