REMATCH: Tyranids vs NEW Death Guard 9th Ed Written BR

[stormcoil]

Hello Hive Mind! I have just posted a new written battle report you may enjoy. Find it here:

www.reddit.com/r/Tyranids/comments/mdf12m/tyranids_vs_new_death_guard_rematch_9th_edition/


As always please let me know what you think. Good luck out there!

[kwisatzhaderach]

Mar 26, 2021 2:56:56 GMT stormcoil said:

Hello Hive Mind! I have just posted a new written battle report you may enjoy. Find it here:

www.reddit.com/r/Tyranids/comments/mdf12m/tyranids_vs_new_death_guard_rematch_9th_edition/


As always please let me know what you think. Good luck out there!

Hi Stormcoil.
As always, it's a pleasure reading your reports.
Unfortunately I had a bad gut feeling when I saw that you had genestealers in your list, and you even spoke to that in the end.
Honestly I'd like to see you take John Lennon's exact list if possible, for a best out of 3 vs your DG opponent. 

Also, I'd like to see you get first turn against your DG opponent for the final round. Both times he's gotten first turn so of course you're getting pounded into pure biomass. Yes I know you won the first one. Yes you got some lucky rolls there...but he also went first. So it evens out.
I think you have the chops to make a more melee focused list work, but going second for the past two games is rough. 

Finally, Death Guard are an obnoxious army to fight against. Can't wait for them to get power crept out of existence. I'll leave it at that. 

[kazetanade]

Small mistake on the combat for Dima - if you had fought first on the Deathshrouds (piling out of 1" from the DP since they're both equidistance), then consolidated around the DP staying outside of 1" still, you could have stopped his pile in (he isn't in engagement range, therefore cannot fight and hence pile in). You'd have to spend 3cp to then pile in another 3" sideways but just enough to get within 1" combat, kill the DP, and consolidate into the tank. This would have made your game manageable since only 1 PBC isnt the same threat as 3 are, and the Dima can absorb 1 tank shooting relatively easily.

2nd: without typhus/his chapter, the poxwalkers strategem is pretty meh - he crops 1s MW to himself, 6s MW on you, hitting on 3+ and only S3. They are chaff, and they're only a little dangerous. They will fold to any proper chaff clearer brawler sequence unit - but are natural enemies to chaff users such as Nids. If you'd hit them with something as ineffective as Warriors, they'd be dead in the water. At the end of the day it was a poor match up Gaunts and Stealers vs Pox. Devilgants are a great option to kill pox.

3rd: the Dimas are not the game winners- they're brawl/elimination units to make things difficult for the enemy. I think in general we're expecting to lose 1 going 2nd, but assuming you can bait them into shooting into a protected SL, and the Dima made it into the 3rd PBC, his game would have been over even if he fights first with all that (please do not swear).

4th: knowing your meta (or opponent) has some heavy use of artillery and out of LOS shooting, you might want to bring a unit of TG - 9 more wounds is perfect for SL to survive any T1 hate from out of LOS shooting. That 1 model left (if any) is also an irritating extra model to action monkey or anything else you need. Having SL alive is the main threat to most enemies afraid of our movement range advantage, and people will always be baited into all in on him.

5th: genestealers are... genestealers. They're bad in any config less than 10, barely usable at 12, and really expensive more than 16. Using the MW strategem on bigger Gaunt units would have done more than 5 GS smacking pox.

[stormcoil]

Mar 26, 2021 5:51:34 GMT kazetanade said:

Small mistake on the combat for Dima - if you had fought first on the Deathshrouds (piling out of 1" from the DP since they're both equidistance), then consolidated around the DP staying outside of 1" still, you could have stopped his pile in (he isn't in engagement range, therefore cannot fight and hence pile in). You'd have to spend 3cp to then pile in another 3" sideways but just enough to get within 1" combat, kill the DP, and consolidate into the tank. This would have made your game manageable since only 1 PBC isnt the same threat as 3 are, and the Dima can absorb 1 tank shooting relatively easily.

This is great.  This is the sort of play that I don't often make as I don't play a lot with my melee lists.  Missing combos like this is exactly why I don't consider myself a good melee general.

I agree with the rest of your points.  I was the most frustrated by the genestealers.  I've had bad luck running large blobs, so I was hoping mixing a few small units in would help me to clear small units of poxwalker chaff.  I didn't know he was going to show up with a horde, and genestealers just can't punch point for point with any of the new books.  They have to bully something by throwing like 300 points at 100 to come out on top, and that just doesn't work against a good opponent.  Larger units are also harder to hide.

I don't like the swarmlord enough to invest further in it with TG.  I know it can be good in the right hands, but I just find it to be too fragile when I still live in a heavy anti-tank meta.  If he works in your meta than keep taking him.

What made this loss tough was I think if I'd understood his army better I still could have won, even with losing 500 points before I got to move.  But I am going to be changing my list for sure after this game.

Thank you for the feedback!

[kazetanade]

all's good - I spent 3/4 of 8th playing variations of Genestealer Slings and Monster Mash into an extremely heavy anti-tank meta, so I'm intimately familiar with the pitfalls and the difficulties of running SL based strategies. It's reached the point I'm relatively confident of making newer Sling lists work against somewhat bad matchups as long as I dont lose my major tools (being HG and SL) straight on T1. But I can say that it's very tiring, and feels like walking a razor's edge all game long - it's not as pleasant or as relaxing as just rolling in with 6 Centurions and rolling a bucket of dice.

I personally feel it's a lack of understanding of poxwalkers more than his army in general - it's a relatively straight forward BOOM BOOM BOOM army that doesnt have many tricks up its sleeve, other than that huge zone of "you cant charge me and kill me".

This is also a bit hard to say for sure, but based on deployment, if you had loaded both Dimas into the bottom left side and just put SL way way way into the corner, you would have kept them 3 alive, and with a Dima and a SL alive, the game is an altogether different beast, since SL does damage in 2 phases while the Exos do it in 1 phase. The Dimachaerons are also stupidly hard for the rest of his list to kill other than the 3 PBCs - so basically if they had lived and could have been gotten into tagging range of the PBCs (PBCs cant fire the mortar in combat, so you're only eating the entropy cannons), it would have been game over for DG right off the bat. Even if it wasnt Dimas but just Horms that had gotten into PBC touch range, it would have been fine, since they're forced to burn entropy cannons into horms or to fall back and not shoot at all, with 2 Dimas and 2 Exos sitting near the midfield that can pounce on him any time.

[wormlord666]

Nice batrep as always. Keep it coming!
I have fared DG a few times and they are tough now. They do well on primary objectives and they have force you to go at them by choosing wwswf so they get the tempo from start and that is hard to handle.

[No One]

Just some stuff:

stormcoil said:

This gives his foul blightspawn a huge 12" bubble of always fight last and no rerolls.

90% sure there's no way to get no rerolls and droning wings at all, definitely not having both at 12". Also fight as if hadn't charged: not super relevant for you, but does mean you can't be dogpiled and can potentially do some cute stuff without worrying about charging targeting restrictions.

Finally, my right unit of stealers advanced up behind cover, and my left unit of stealers deployed my first scrambler. All three units of horms each raise one banner.

Scramblers and banners are both shadow operations.

[kazetanade]

Mar 31, 2021 14:21:39 GMT No One said:

Just some stuff:

stormcoil said:

This gives his foul blightspawn a huge 12" bubble of always fight last and no rerolls.

90% sure there's no way to get no rerolls and droning wings at all, definitely not having both at 12". Also fight as if hadn't charged: not super relevant for you, but does mean you can't be dogpiled and can potentially do some cute stuff without worrying about charging targeting restrictions.

Finally, my right unit of stealers advanced up behind cover, and my left unit of stealers deployed my first scrambler. All three units of horms each raise one banner.

Scramblers and banners are both shadow operations.

Blightspawn has fight as if hadn't charged at 6" base, and not eligible to fight until last on 3". Ones a relic.

[No One]

Yes. The strat is both +6" to an aura (which the 3" fight last isn't), and only a single aura. So a 12" fight as if hadn't charged, which is very relevant, and 3" of fight last, which is far less so.

[stormcoil]

Well my opponent may have made a mistake in what he told me, or I may have misremembered. He told me the strat added 6 inches to all of his auras, and so he had multiple things out at 12".

[miurath]

"On droning wings" indeed just adds 6" to one selected aura of mr. flamer