14. Locked and Loaded

Hey guys, better late than never!  Here with a Lock and Load recap for everyone.  I had the lovely Katheryn Royer updating my local meta with the play by play, so I’m sharing them with all of you as pseudo battle reports.  The only event I participated in was the Iron Gauntlet itself. I wanted to take a step back to hang out with all the cool people at Lock and Load and spend more time socializing rather than playing.  We had an amazing time and it was a really nice change of pace to not get caught in a weekend long tournament grind. My pairing was Elara2 dudespam paired with a variant on Fancy Ryan’s Vyros2 in Shadows.

Round 1 was vs Kraig (Canada) who had Baldur1 Baldur2.  No Woldwrath in either pair and a really solid player, but I felt like his lists had too much overlap.  Unfortunate luck for him to draw me right out of the gate as I felt like Elara2 was really favorable into both flavors of armor skew.

Mike is bringing Elara2 in Defenders, and Vyros2 in Shadows.

Round 1 vs Kraig Hammer, he brought Baldur1 and Baldur2, both in bones.

Opponents drops Baldur2, seems relieved that Mike drops Elara. Board is very terrain heavy. Mike wins the roll and opts to go first.

Turn 1 of Mike's forces, shield wall bois advance/repo/shield wall, everybody else runs. Mike feels spooked by the woldwyrd and casts no upkeeps, placing elara behind a forest but presently in killbox.

Turn 1 of opponent, he sends a stoneshaper screaming into the front lines with teleporty shenanigans, but fails on his mission to get a first turn elimination on a soulless on a halb unit. Instead his hammer kills a nyss and upsets Skereth.

Wooden spraybois kill a halb with some difficulty. All wolds geomancy roots of the earth onto each other. Opponent is made uncomfortable by the threat of 15 by the halbs.

Mike BM muses about killing 4 heavies. At this point he has 48min vs his opponent's 49. He allocates aggressively to his Phoenix, and eyes his opponent's Sentry stone.

Elara2 feats and gives Scything Touch to her Phoenix. Siren aims and shoots away a woodboi. Phoenix charges a stone he can barely see and falcon punches it, then starts buying chops into Megalith. Leaves him on about half health.

Rightmost flank Halbs gain Desperate pace and charge into megalith and the sentry stone from miles away. Some LoS issues due to forests and clouds. Hot dice put Megalith into the dirt. Sentry stone also dies. Mike does not run his standard bearer or brian and loses out on bonus damage to a different wold due to command.

Skereth deals 17 damage to a woldguardian for the death of his nyss friend. Nyss hunters chop the solo that tied up the halbs. Halbs then crash into the remaining ST'd heavy and heavily damaged woldboi. Skinny wold almost dies, woldguardian also takes some punishment.

Opponent heals his wolds up with control phase regen, and healing fields bring them further back to fighting condition. Baldur is ported by stones into a circle of halbs. Woldwyrd shoots the heck out of the ST'd pheonix. Skinnyboi slaps him next, he retalitory strikes and chunks him. Next punch takes the fireboi down. More halbs die. Issyen gets offended again. Mike's right flank gets evaporated by sprays and punches.

At end of turn 2, opponent has 31min, mike has 27.

This entirely neutral commentator is shocked to see mike not try to get elara killed at this point, and so the turn opens up with the nyss shooting out a stone.

The crippled siren gets the heck outta the way for homeboi skereth, who chops the wyrd then repos to safety. The advance halberdiers chop away what remains of the lone stone shrimp.

The shrimp's energies go to baldur, giving him 2 fury to transfer with. Mike feels dumb for this. The undamaged siren punches out the skinnyboi that was left.

Thane stabs the treasonous nyss that was not in the left circle zone. Ryssovass do their best to chop at the numerous rockbois cluttering the rectangle zone.

Brian remembers how to move and then runs right back, hoping to contest but likely becoming a forgotten boi.

Mike ships clock and scores another point, 3 to 1. At this point his opponent has three shifting stones, a stone solo guy, a full health big boi, baldur, and a chef. Time is his 15 to mike's 11.

The punchboi tries to murder the siren, leaves it on a few that baldur himself comes to clean up. He covers himself with a smol wol and puts roots on himself, camping 1.

None of his stones are close enough to teleport to the far left zone, so they try to get in the way. The solo wipes out some more ryssovass, who didnt want to live anyway. The gobber runs to his death for some reason.

Both score 1.

The halbs surround the poor gobber and get ready to flood the right circle zone. Skereth comes in to charge the solo and kills him. Elara apparates and runs into the far left zone to start scoring it herself, the nyss clear the last contesting stone, Brian is remembered and contests baldur's zone.

Mike scores 2, score becomes his 6 to his opponent's 2.

Clock is shipped and brian is cleared, and cannot stop mike's scoring, opting to not contest out of politeness.

Both share an amicable conversation regarding the matchup and alternate plays.

Mike takes first game, after having felt that he'd go 0-4 in the event.

Round 2 is vs Chris (Canada?) swinging Borka2 and Madrak1.  I was surprised to see Borka2 come out on this one. His list was a bit more infantry heavy than others I’ve seen with double Fire Eaters and Northkin Raiders to round out a Mauler and Earthborn.  I’ve had lots of experience vs both lists and like Elara2 as the slightly favored match. Shadows of the Retribution doesn’t hit hard enough despite being our “no tough and RFP” theme and Vyros specifically has to play perfectly vs trolls to not lose too many lights to Champions.  Sadly for both of us, our game-state gets disrupted by a clock error during a Retaliatory Strike that leaves a portion of my opponent’s turn running on my clock. We run for 2 minutes on his time, but isn’t an accurate correction. The game ends with less than a minute on my clock and ~one minute thirty seconds on my opponent’s clock which was super frustrating.  Otherwise it was a really close game that slid away from me a bit on attrition and scenario. Without enough clock to fight back I ended up with a loss here.

Round two! Fight!

Mike vs Chris Dancoclas, Ret vs trolls.

He presents Madrak 1 in Band, and Bearka in storm.

The matchup is Bearka vs Elara2.

Mike wins the roll, elects to go first, his opponent picks the side with a wall, hill, water, and forest centrally. On Mike's side is a burning earth, hill, forest, and trench.

Bearka's list is a mauler, pyre troll, earthborn. His list contains two units of firebreathers, max northkin raiders, two units of bears, some stones, valka, fellcaller hero, lanyssa, the northkin elder.

Mike promptly breaks elara2 before the game, so after some fiddling the game begins.

Mike asks his opponent how far the bears threaten, to which he responds "17 with hunters mark". After some balking mike tries to bunch his one hundred bois into a big cluster in the center. Spooky.

His opponent deploys with everything pretty centrally, bears ambush and all varieties of fireboi advance deploy.

Most of the trolls are hugging the left rectangle zone. The scenario is recon 2 btw.

Mike realizes that between raiders and fire eaters, the grouping that the bears force funnels his army comfortably. In spite of the first turn advantage, he finds himself dancing around threats.

Scything touch goes on the Phoenix, elara camps 5 far from enemy lines. Nyss in both flavors run up just out of reach of the bombas.

Halbs shuffle forward in a big shield walled blob onto a hill and eye the spray guys warily.

Mike ends his turn with 50min.

Opponent asks some threat ranges, does not like the 13's and 15's all around. All zones are threatened by the halbs and nyss.

Bearka gains harmonious, then advances into only skeryth's threat and next to a wall. He puts 4 onto the stone, drops 1 and camps 1. He then repos behind the wall. Stones pop speed and shuffle behind bearka and gain 2 fury. Raiders run, not full tilt but significantly forward. Lanyssa runs into a snow drift right behind them.

Earthborn runs to the far right flank, almost within that rectangle zone. Pyreboi runs next to his friendly objective. Mauler rile/runs. Fell caller runs. Fire eaters back out of halberdier threat. Valka runs up to the hill with them.

Opponent ends with 48min.

Mike spends some time in the tank as he wonders aloud if feat is worth it for a pyre troll and some raiders.

Phoenix advances and double boosts a shot into the fell caller hero, failing to kill him. Desperate paces goes on one of the units. Skeryth charges into a raider and forces tough, then repos back behind a forest.

The ryssovass run and put two bruddas in the right zone. The rest buddy up loosely.

Elara activates and feats, then tries for a boosted mark for death from the pheonix, and misses a raider. Siren on the right boosts a shot into a raider, the raider chops at lanyssa, hits her and kills her.

Nyss hunters advance and spread out, aiming to cra the raiders out. Some bad dice fail to kill two of the ones he tags. Six raiders remain.

Careful measuring gets a halberdier into the fell caller, one into a raider, and five into a pyre troll. The unit minifeats, and dice get chucked. All targets are downed. The charging halbs repo to be annoying.

Siren advances into the left rectangular zone with a focus for oracular.

Ends with 32min.

Opponent starts, considers diving a edt into mike's right flank. He ambushes one unit of bears on the right flank, then after some consideration brings the second unit alongside them.

Stonebearer activates first and sprays halbs, killing one. Stone activates and prays for speed, gaining two fury. Fire eaters have one boi aim and the others advance into ideal fire spray positions, spraying each other and shooting some halbs.

Raiders activate and shoot some nyss hunters and ryssovass. Skeryth is a bro and shield guards a shot and shrugs it off. Bears charge in and mulch a nyss hunter.

Bearka activates and advances and feats. The EBT charges into the right siren, who retaliates and becomes stationary by it. Hot dice erase the siren utterly. The second unit of bears run backwards to threaten a second wave.

The mauler tries to charge the phoenix but there is a halb in the path. Parallax inducing 3D hill makes it challenging to measure the threat of a fire eater. After some accidental bumps, the fire eaters just run instead. The mauler advances and mulches the offending halberdier.

[The hills used during the event were a nightmare to play on.  A bit too tall and a bit too steep required a bit of abstract placement.  During the game, my opponent and I were able to agree on placements without too much fussing!]

When Mike had retaliatory struck the earthborn, the opponent had shipped the clock for the attack.

[This is where I get my two minutes.  It was impossible to determine exactly how much time was lost and 2 minutes felt like an easy number I wouldn’t have to argue over.  Any judge involvement would result in a draw or double DQ essentially. My opponent agrees and we carry on, but I’m playing the rest of the game fairly tilted from the mistake]

He scores a point.

Top of 3 Mike goes for a shot into a fire eater, misses the boosted 9. Tiny unit of Halberdiers charge into some fire eaters, one of the two toughs. Several halbs fureeze. One boi from the other unit chops the fire eater who toughed, the rest attempt to be a second wave for the left flank.

The phoenix charges valka on the flag with boundless charge, but mike fails to realize that the mauler was surrounded by only frozen halbs. It charges but fails the damage roll, only doing 4. Valka gets killed by the falcon punch move. It then opts not to chop the mauler in the interest of not becoming frozen.

The rysovass are now in range of charging the mauler, and so two of them attack him. Two others charge the earthborn on the right. Mike forgets that scything touch is on the pheonix when he chops at the mauler with defenders.

Nyss hunters advance to the bears and raiders, in a very classical mike 'idunno' fashion. The bears' armor holds, and mike kills a handler. The ebt takes a lil dmg from the nyss, but then gets charged by hero issyen who does a cool 19 damage to it.

No-one scores. Mike has 17min.

Bears activate and murder lots of nyss hunters. Opponent realizes his ebt was not leeched from before attacks were made, they decide to resolve it by the ebt not making a threshhold check but keeping the one fury on it. Raiders advance and chop at some nyss and shoot bombas. Two nyss hunters remain, with no cylena to inspire them.

The crippled ebt shuffles out of the way of a bear who's got his eyes on skeryth, then snacks on a defender, to get to 5 hp.

Stone shuffles around to be in position to project aura onto what is about to be a very forward murderbear and prays for strength. The fire eaters struggle to stay upright on the hill, and spray down what's left of the halbs from that first unit. The hill continues to weirdly affect the nature of the sprays.

Resuming bearventures, one runs and skirts the melee of the last nyss in the right rectangle zone, the other charges skeryth and dismounts him, making me wonder why it is that doing 10 overkill damage doesnt just kill the from a dragoon. He cheekily dismounts to be contesting the zone but out of range from the remainder of the bear initials.

Bearka, in a bold move of confidence, advances to be within 6 of his left mauler and puts rage onto it for free. He is now in a considerable amount of mike's boi's threats. He then sprays or something and kills some bois. Then he repos back to safety as I wonder how I forgot he was cav.

A mauler starts to kick the phoenix, murdering it cleanly.

Nobody scores, opponent ends with 11min.

Mike once again opens with an attempt to shoot a fire eater with the siren, who toughs this time. Ryssovass activate, and charge into a bunch of guys. Mike laments not putting scything touch somewhere before activating the bois.

The stone aura at 11 fury reaches out and doots all the bois, making mike's defenders ping off the armor of the mauler and bears. The sole remaining nyss hunter and his soulless friendo try to work on the bear in front of them. Turns out engaged weaponmasters do even less than charging ones into arm 20+.

The still minifeated halberdiers activate and charge into some bois, but before he can activate another bearka charges into the first, becoming back in range of some halberdiers.

Despite being in a very close attrition race, mike opts to charge bearka with 3 halbs in response. The rest go into the mauler. Mike decides against cmaing with the 3 bois on bearka and therefore misses with two of them during minifeat, then flubs the damage, dealing 1. The mauler lives with 3. No scything touch in either direction.

He then measures out elara charging a now angry bearka, and puts scything touch on herself.

Then he ends turn. He has 6min 24sec, 0 cp, a unit of halbs, 6 ryssovass, a dismounted skeryth, and a thane.

Bears activate and chop issyen and some ryssovass. The opponent once again forgets to do the leech/frenzy check on his mauler, and he agrees to roll a threshold this time, fails, and kills a halb. The rock jesus throws a thing at a ryssovass in the forest, killing a halb. The raiders activate and chop + quick work into the healthy unit of halbs, making it much less healthy.

The stone tries to get away from the halbs, and pray for speed. The udder unit of bears tries to kill the ryssovass in the zone, who toughs four times, then finally dies and his friend to a handler.

Opponent punches a halb with the last remaining fire eater, then ships clock, scoring 2 to make the score 0 - 3. He ends turn with 3.01 min.

Mike opens with the ryssovass, chopping at the mauler and pinging off armor twice, before electing to chop a raider with the third boi. Elara boundless charges herself, boosts a charge attack at the three health mauler, finishing it then teleporting by the flag and in the rectangle zone.

Mike charges a bear with a thane, and the opponent slaps clock and countercharges it with bearka and kills it while staying on the flag.

Mike does not contest that zone and flag, he passes clock and his opponent runs something inconsequential into mike's zone, scoring to 7 vs mike's 2 and ending the game.

[The play here would have been to contest the flag and continue to try and grind down time and decrease the scenario lead.  I had won the attrition on the left side, but had no answer for the bears on the right.]

R.i.p. the dream.

Truthfully although the end of game board state looked very rough, with 4 bears 2 raiders and many support idiots to contest, mike was in a position to try to tie by the end of the game, by virtue of more expendable models and a better threat.

I think a bit of weird target priority and some appropriately competitive gotcha moments coupled for a lost game. Needing to consider ambushing bears and countercharge everywhere was rough on mike. Still a great game.

Mike decided that if his opponent this round was cryx he was going to drop, and he got a cygnar boi and immediately felt bad for that attitude as he realized his opponent flew in from england.

Hi Jake!  Lucky for me I was unaware of the legendary status that is Jake Wilstrop.  Blinded by ignorance I charged into the matchup not knowing how good this guy actually is.  The Vyros2 list is teched for cloud walls specifically, and is supposed to be favorable into Cygnar, so I was really excited to get this type of high calibur practice win or lose.  I was expecting Haley2 into Vyros for better Imperatus management, but Haley3 is so flexible a comfortable player and drop her into a huge range of matchups.

The matchup is now Vyros2 in shadows vs Haley2 in trencher funtimes. The other list from cygnar was haley2 in heavy metal with centurions and a hurricane.

Mike wins the roll, opts to go first. This is standoff, and they both pick the pathfinder objective.

The side the opponent, Jake, picks the side with a large hill made of construction paper and "HILL" written on it (3D hills are a pain) and a smol forest, mike has a hill and water, and theres a wall, forest, and large obstruction in the center.

Mike deploys favoring the wall, his opponent has long gunners on the left flank and alexia and her dedbois on the right, with the rest of the cygnar nonsense central. The infiltrators deploy on the left, narn on the right.

The... commandos? Deploy on the right, and finn on the left. Both have 57min for their first turns.

Imperatus and two sirens get behind a wall, vyros casts synergy and decel and gets behind his objective, the voidtracers get within 5 of impy for domination, narn runs to flank. Arcanists run behind the jack. The infiltrators run up and space out. The spears run full tilt.

Opponent disperses his commandos around in respect of flame burst. Trencherinos durdle around and stay out of infiltrator threat, and dig in. The doggo runs to be out of range of most if not all guns. The tactician guy puts feign death on the trencherinos, trench busters protect haley and the important solos. Everything else runs uninterestingly.

Mike begins his turn, our gracious english opponent gives us some cough drops.

He measures everything, and ascertains that basically nothing is in threat of not-vyre-lights, and eiryss3.

Narn aims and kills a freshly made bigboibane. Siren gets a third focus from an arcanist, boosts at a not fluxed trencherino, fails. Contests the right circle, has a boi for oracular. Udder siren on the left also walks into the little intersection between the circle and rectangle zones and takes a boosted shot at a different guy not in flux, he is possessed after failing tough and chops a grenade guy in the butt.

Alexia gains one corpse. An arcanist gives a harpy another focus, who flies forward and shoots at a not dug in guy and kills him, crit knockdowning to deny the tough. A trenchbuster takes the shot off a different trencherino and eats five damage for it.

Final arcanist gives another harpy more focus, who flies forwards and shoots at the other trenchbuster and does 6 to him. Mike takes a luls shot and misses, which makes the buster dodge forwards.

The infiltrator unit advances, eiryss shoots at the hammer jack, then the unit repos. Spears walk forwards. Siren tries for a boosted 13, misses. Vyros decelerates and feats. Then he unfeats. Then he feats, for realsies. Camping 1, behind large obstruction.

Opponent kills narn with commando aoes, longbois kill two infiltrators by getting into the woods. Everything repositions, damage is done to jacks as Mike forgets he casted decel.

Opponent scores a point in his friendly zone, a thrall kid contests mike's zone.

Ends clock with 36min.

Mike charges with spears and kills two longunneronis, eiryss' bois charge in, eiryss charges a longgunner and infiltrators run to engage some of the rest. Eiryss takes a cheeky blessed wm shot into the pupper, hits but he toughs.

Synergy begins with a charging siren, who's blessed boosted puncho takes out a trencher. A harpy shoots out the 5hp trenchbuster, then shoots the objective with his second shot. Siren walks up and shoots the dog and kills it. What a monster.

Siren way on the right flank advances and shoots a commando, getting within 5 and possessing it to kill a friend. The anatomical from the commando should kill his friend, but both mike and jake forget that rule.

Vyros chops the bingboi contesting his rectangle zone, building synergy to 2. A harpy walks and punches a commando blocking imperatus from barrelling forward.

Imperatus with 3 focus and conc powa charges the objective and kills it, sidestepping into haley3 past, boosting a punch into her. Gets a boosted punch and kills her, then carefully considers his options for his second sidestep. He chops at an arc node over the wall and he dodges or something.

Mike ends with 23min. I believe the commandos have not mission objectived yet and there are 9 of them, so imperatus might die. The longgunners activate, most of them aim and the two that are tied up try unsuccessfully to poke the ninja and miss. One aimer gets the 9 to kill a spear, the rest cra into a siren.

..but he oracular visions it. Ouch. Ragman approaches finally, puts up nega armor powers.

Thorn walks up and punches imperatus a bunch. A commando walks up and punches him too, giving the busterguy flank for later. The rest shoot the lone siren in the circle zone. They then repo to be annoying.

Alexia advances to start chopping impy. 16 risen later, alexia almost kills him. He has 6 left.

Haley activates, makes thorn move, camps 2 and fluxes. The trencherino busterino charges imperatus and punches his lights out with a 6 6 5 2 to damage. Ripperino.

Ends at 21min, I got distracted at some point I think and mike has 3cp and jake has 2cp.

Oh yeah the objective. Woop.

Top of 5, mike forgets that vengeance on the spears is a thing, and only needs to score 3 and contest to win.

[I 100% made my Vengeance moves here, but they were not in range to make attacks.  Kat tells lies here. They actually charge in and do shit for damage which stops me from scoring the zone]

The extra attacks would have improved the likelihood of capping the left circle, what with the hammerboi in it now. What a bing bong.

Spears charge the hammerguy, dub ones the attack on the first, the other does 6 dmg.

Mike clears the commando in his zone with a voidguy, but definitely never gave vyros pathfinder with the objective (he forgot) and charges over the wall, then forgets that they cant tough from vyros in melee, barely gets the damage from quick work to kill the other final idiotorino in the circle zone, then repos to be capping both zones.

[Kat misses the start of my turn here.  I’d wager 90% of the Warmachine community doesn’t know exactly when Objective buffs go onto models, myself included.  After my opponent flips the clock to my turn, I say to him verbatum:“Vyros is getting Pathfinder from my objective, but I don’t know when that happens, so I’m going to allocate my focus and he’s going to have Pathfinder”.  My opponent agrees based on my cheeky, but vividly clear intention and I place a bead next to Vyros to mark the effect. Kat is too busy chatting instead of writing proper updates to witness this interaction. Meanwhile at home, all my friends think I’ve just won the game by cheating XD]

The siren charges the Hammersmith with p&s 15, punches well and finishes him. Mike contested with the spear and scores three to win 8 to 3 cp.

Easily my favorite game of the weekend and my favorite game of Warmachine in ages.  I can do a convention recap later if you guys are interested, but the batreps were the main focus and super juicy.  I hope you enjoy!

-Mike (and also Kat)