WTF?: NOVA 2013

Hey Guys,

Bill here with a quick rundown of how my NOVA 2013 was, some quick ups and downs about the event, and some whining and crying about why my performance this year was so terrible lol.

Pros:
Venue- The Hyatt Regency in Crystal City treats gamers better than any venue I have ever been too. They are fantastic and while last year; food was an issue when trying to eat between rounds, this year; there were several new food choice locations which made the food much less an issue this year.

Torrent of Fire- This was a new software/app system that NOVA used which allowed users to track stats, see their table assignments, and even enter their results through their smartphone. Other than one minor SNAFU after bracketing needed to occur it worked great and I am a huge advocate now.

Terrain- A+

Internet coverage- A+

Awards ceremony was much faster- A+

Cons:

Where are all the judges?- Last year during the invitational they assigned a judge to each table to watch the players, help catch and potential slip ups and generally be there always to answer questions, look up rules, and help the process. This year I watched several players bolting across the room looking for a judge even at table 1 which was being broadcasted! Big fail here.

Prize support- For such a huge tournament, I understand they give away two $1000 dollar prizes which is absolutely amazing but to everyone else they get gift certificates that have to used on site (all but one of the vendors was closed when they gave them out) and people was Ben Mohlie who busted his ass all weekend walked away with one riptide (Irony at its finest!)

Allowance of unpainted armies- One thing I dislike about the NOVA which is not anything they can control is it always attracts many people who love the flavor of the month. Not only does this result in a really boring tournament from playing the same thing over and over but it also resulted in really just horribly done armies and some just straight up with unpainted models. I just personally feel like this kind of disrespects those who bust their ass to get their army done and generally have respect for the hobby. Granted my Tyranids are FAR from the best but I still finished all my models.

My performance:

Before I starting whining; Congratulations to Dark Star and our merc; Alan Bajromovich for taking the NOVA trios tournament for the third year in a row. I am very proud of Troy, myself, and the third person we have had for three years in a row for accomplishing this.

I was going into NOVA with high hopes, I practiced alot against Tau and Eldar, knew the missions well, had an amazing army for the the table quarter objective placement and my army is tough as nails. I hit a few bumps in the road though that resulted in me going 2-2 the first day. The second day I won a game, and lost the last game because we rolled off for victory and just played a fun game. So what happened?

I got really good against the net list tau and wave serpent spam. The problem with this; I didn't play them at all despite them making up over half the field. What did I play instead? FMC Daemons for 5 out of the 6 games I played.

FMC daemons are actually an amazing matchup for me and I practice against them a lot but a couple very important things made a difference in these two games I lost. In both games the players flew all of their FMCs in my face just as I had hoped (huge mistakes on their part). They do their to get ready to vector strike all my FMCs to death so they kind of have to. From here my plan is to enfeeble as many as possible; and ground and charge as many as fall and if they don't have iron arm they just die from the str 9 vs. toughness 4. I also have never played against daemons that take pure witchfire spells and lashes planning to just stay in the air the whole game.

Even with fateweaver it should take 12 grounding tests to ground 3 FMCs. In my first game I forced 8 the first turn and 12 the next turn and grounded 0. From there has able to keep flying on and off the board and which all of his FMCs scoring was able to win 1-0 objectives. In the second game; I made a pretty big error and mis-measured my deployment resulting in heavy damage on the first turn and than my opponent passing 14 grounding checks.

The moral of the story is while the bugs are awesome and still powerful in my opinion; I think my biggest mistake was not having the right tools to actually do damage along with all those grounding checks. I feel like if I played against the super powerful Eldar and Tau, I actually would have done better but was kind of blindsided by the consequences of opponents being able to stay in the air with vector striking madness.

The good news is I was very happy with how I played and think I made very little if any mistakes with the exception of one unnecessary Deathleaper death.

I am looking forward to more work on my Eldar bikes; Space Marines, and maybe even a second Eldar list I am working on to update my potential of actually doing damage and playing lists that are less of a "oh look what I can do with more guns." and more of a; I can actually do stuff!

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