Settled in for WCGT

After a little playtesting and some serious drunken thought, I did manage to settle in on a list for West Coast GT.  While I feel that the Ogre list and its variants and the Slaanesh DoC armies were more competitive, I decided to put them aside for something unusual.  Having just come off of Masters, with its hypercompetitive atmosphere, I realized that in two years at WCGT I have always brought the softest army to the event.  Even having done this, I have always done pretty well, winning one year with combat night goblins and coming in 13th with no magic woodies under the old book.  I decided I would like to keep the trend going and (more importantly) that the style of play that the Masters format creates is not something I enjoy in the slightest.  So, while I will keep running the tougher stuff at events that traditionally invite it (Broadside, Alamo), I am just going to run what I enjoy and let the chips fall where they may.  On the one hand, it can be frustrating to lose a game simply because you brought a knife to a gunfight, but I have my trophies and I am fine getting drunk and slogging it out with the hobby guys.  To that end, here is what I came up with:

Glade Lord on Forest Dragon, Shield, Obsidian Blade, Armor of Destiny
Spell Weaver on Unicorn, Hex Scroll, Talisman of Preservation, L4 High
Glade Captain on Stag, BSB, Asrai Spear, Starfire Arrows, Enchanted Shield, 5++ Ward, OTS
Shadowdancer, L1 Mage of Shadow, Dispel Scroll
Waystalker

20 Glade Guard, Banner, Musician, Trueflight Arrows, Scarecrow Banner
25 Eternal Guard, Full Command, Gleaming Pendant

6 Wild Riders, Shields, Banner
6 Wild Riders, Shields, Banner

Eagle
Eagle

Ok, so first the cons:  It has a lot of points tied up in some very frail characters.  Without the Sisters units, it is very thin in the monster hunting and magic utility department.  The Wild Rider units are much smaller than I like to run them.  It is a little light on fortitude for this kind of list.  There are no Waywatchers.  The entire army depends on the dragon doing well against hard targets.  The BSB is not as well protected in this army as I would like it to be.  Finally, I have to get a dragon pained up in the next couple weeks, which will be tricky for me as I still have bad nerve damage in my thumb from a cut long ago and I was never that good of a painter to begin with.

Now the pros:  Aside from some of the fast cavalry bits I normally take, it has every toy I like in the army in there in some form.  While smaller than normal, the Wild Rider units have shields and with the way I suicide them every game anyhow, they are a lot more expendable.  I get to use my nice converted Eagle models, though one used to be my BSB I doubt anyone will care about a guy on one of the models.  The shadowdancer has some really neat tricks you can pull with her in conjunction with the Eternal Guard and your free forest.  I never really rolled 4++ wards worth a damn on my BSB before, so the minor defensive downgrade probably won't even be noticed.  I really like dragons and have two awesome models to work on for the one I want to field.  It has both the dispel scroll and froggy scroll in there.  Finally, it comps a whopping 16.2 in the Swedish system that this event plans to use, despite being really not much of a downgrade from my normal list that comps 11.5 in the same system.

So, the Chupacabrahs has a BBQ at Zack's bachelor pad and we did some playtesting.  I chose to try this list to see if I enjoyed it or not, with the idea that if I didn't I would default to the ogre army.  I played four games on the day, two against newer guys running netbuilds and two against GT veterans in the club.  The first two games were against a dragon led Dark Elf army with a witch star and stronger high elf infantry list with abundant shooting.  In both of those games, one unit of trueflight was enough to apply the pain to the enemy shooting and my mobility let me dictate the combats.  I then played against a DoC  double thirster with Horror spam army in one of the WCGT scenarios.  Against that list, I struggled a bit, though I did manage to win through the scenario.  I used my ranged units to target the DoC units that had gateway when I likely should have tried to apply some hits to the monsters.  Finally, I played Zack's nurgle WoC army.  I was so tired and drunk by that point that I just played flat out stupidly and Zack stomped me.  In my drunken haze I did learn some useful things, however.

Lessons learned:
1) Eternal Guard with a Shadow in a Venom Thicket are pretty good.
2) Don't commit the Unicorn or BSB to combats early, ESPECIALLY to large infantry blocks.
3) A lone Waystalker is still pretty god damn annoying to deal with.
4) Monster Mash armies are going to be an issue unless I can position my Wild Riders better.
5) I will have a hard time scoring bonus points in the Mickey Scenario.
6) A dragon lord with Obsidian Blade is an enemy elf player's worst nightmare.
7) Witches do not like Fiery Convocation.
8) Sisters probably cost way too much comp to justify being used in this system.
9) Eagles are still useful if the rest of your army is fast enough to take the heat off of them.
10) One large unit of surgical Trueflight guys and one sniper is all the shooting you really need.

I will put up some pictures later once I get more done on the dragons.  But for now, my list is handed in and I am committed to this army.  Hopefully I can get a little more testing in on it before the GT happens.
~Q