At long last, we now have our second-ever doubles event from Kings of War Wisconsin! Last year was skipped due to far too many personal scheduling conflicts. Now, due to current scheduling considerations, instead of a standalone event like before, this would be tacked on to the second-annual Northwoods GT, allowing our former local community all-star Squirmin Vermin to return to play in the doubles event on Friday, and then run the GT over the weekend, and our friend Joe to do the inverse.
Early planning for the Doubles section had completely blind pairings, where we’d all show up with our list the day-of, and then be assigned a buddy by the TO, who’d also have the week before to figure out any problematic potential pairings to nix. I was actually very excited about this approach, as after prepping for the GT with the same army idea over and over and over again, I was ready to embrace some chaos and some fun!
…However, not everyone interested in the event was interested with this approach, and after some feedback, the approach was soon amended, allowing for folks to pair up with a buddy of their choice, provided the buddies “bribed” the TO by donating to the overall prize pool for the GT coming up over the weekend, and neither had rankings above a certain cutoff for US Masters scorings. I forget the exact cutoff, and the TO still had final say in pairings, but being a predominately Midwest event, seeking attendees from MN, WI, and IL, “gaming” the ranking cutoff with a duo of very strong players did not seem hard to do.
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| I'm running the Undead! Read on for more. |
Ultimately I declined (sorry!) to pair up with anyone. I really wanted to embrace the random here, and also didn’t want to drag anyone that cared about their rankings down with me, as I still don't really know how rankings work. I am a bit loathe to try and quantify my fun, but we’ll still set up a few loose goals for the event:
- Get paired with a new face. This one is entirely not up to me, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed.
- Play one new player. Especially if the first goal flubs, I’m hoping to at least play against somebody new to me!
- Enjoy all three games. We have a lot of MN folks coming up for the weekend, with a strong contingent from the Twin Cities, where they are on the front lines of some modern stochastic terrorism. We’ll not sweat the small stuff in these games, and have some good escapist fun.
- Win one game. We’re going in blind, and with a slower, run-of-the-mill list, and with Shambling too! We’re not aiming for the top tables, but winning a game would still be nice.
With blind pairings, I think running more of a combined arms list, or something that could actually move around the battlefield would be far better, but I was drawn to the Undead, with a desire to try out Zuinok and my new pink Revenants, though the rest of the list was up in the air. I eventually took to the Forum to get some feedback, and help break my swirling circular thoughts, eventually settling on the following:
Building for 1k is hard, as is for blind pairings. I think ideally, I’d have preferred to run some KoM or(free) Dwarf combined arms, and but I had no real time to paint the latter or test out either of these alternative ideas. This Undead list should be enlightening though, and I’m looking forward to seeing what it can do! Up to test and discuss are:
- Zuinok Iceblood. At 1,000 points, I felt limited to one hero, and Zuinok isn’t all that expensive. His “Whispers in the Utterdark” heal works on Decaying Horde units (all skeletons and zombies), so I figured I should lean into that. I wanted a 3rd spell. Scorched Earth was the frontrunner, but I eventually settled on Wither and Perish, as the general goal with the list is to grind, and this could get repeated uses. With his Elite at range, I opted for the smaller version of the spell, as I cared more about the effect, which just cares about hits, than the damage.
- Revenants Horde. They look sturdy! I’m bullish on the Undead and the Revenants in particular. We’re taking them stock due to a lack of points, and we’ll just get some games in to see how the base unit does.
- Skeleton Spear Horde. I originally had some more disposable and reactive regiments, but I was worried about Inspiring coverage, and so upgraded to a sturdier horde. Deployment is a concern, but we’ll figure it out. I don’t expect to face much cavalry, but if we do, they can take point, otherwise they can hold a flank, hold tokens, or focus on the scenario while being prickly to engage and hard to move.
- Zombie Trolls. In 3E these were really efficient buys, excelling at the grind. In 4E, they’ve lost attacks, but I still think they will be ok. We’ll give them a go and see how ther do in the new edition.
- Wights, Hanns. With 250 points left, we could have done a lot, but with a blind pairing, I felt like I should bring a hammer, and settled on the Wights. Lacking the “Decaying Horde” trait, they don’t synergize with the Raise the Dead Command, nor with Zuinok’s heal, so with the final points they’ll get Hann’s for Lifeleech 2, which can hopefully help them stick around just a little bit longer.
I ultimately leaned towards running the larger units to help with Inspiring and generally sticking around, and a hammer unit of Wights, in case my opponent needed some help. And speaking of, my assigned buddy for the day was the great Kenny Lull of the Combat Phase podcast fielding his new Forces of Nature and the following:
We have played Kenny a few times before, so we unfortunately struck out on the new pairing front, but his enthusiasm is infectious, and he had a new army, one I was keen to try and learn from! He went with Elemental-themed Forces of Nature, and we even have all the Elementals represented! I am excited to see how they do, but with two slower, shambling lists, we'll definitely have our work cut out for us in the speedier and more dynamic 4th Edition. Wish us luck!