Path to being a better Sportsman

 Another fun Test Game! I had the pleasure of playing Brett today. A new player to 40k and a fantastic player. I see great growth potential! Just needs more games.  Brett brought his Dark Angels, he is a huge fan of 9th ed strats so not having access to his Weapons of the Dark Age was a bit of a damper but he was a fantastic opponent regardless.  Lists are as follows and we used 9th ed points at roughly 1000pts (I was a little over but 10pts is minor): Brett's Dark Angels:  (Link is to the Excel that I made for stats) Captain in Termiantor Armour:  Thunder Hammer & Relic Shield Techmarine Grav-Pistol, Servo-Harness, Omnissian Power Axe Deathwing Terminators Dual Lightning Claw SGT 4x Thunder Hammer & Storm Shields (Storm Shields were +1W) Cyclone Missile Luancher, Storm Bolter, Power Fist Redemptor Dreadnought Macro Plasma Incinerator, Icarus Rocket Pod, 2s Fragstorm Grenade Launchers, Onslaught Gatling Cannon Assault Squad 4x Astartes Chainswords, 4x Bo...

 This is... tricky (Note, this is not a "We are Weaker now" post, I 100% expected to be less overall than 9th ed and am happy with this. This is my experience, understanding of the army, at least 1 play test, and discussion with other both positive and negative rolled into an article)  Since Thursday, when I say the Imperial Knights Faction Focus I had resolved myself to my favorite spikey bois getting weaker overall rules.  Weaker is a subjective term here. While Forcing Battle Shock tests and making units fail them is VERY important and good from a rules stand point, it has some flaws.  First off, your opponent has to FAIL that test. I don't know about you, but I have a Space Pupper buddy who has not failed a Dread Test so far in about 10 games. Like literally, failed 0 of them. This is going to happen. The reverse is also true, you WILL have players who fail 4-5 of them. Recently I played a Goff's Pressure list and while my opponent failed 4 Gheiststorm tests (one...

Preamble Hello my wonderful readers, I have not posted in a time. Life has been... interesting.  Today, I had the amazingly fun time to try out 10th ed using the Leaked Rulebook. No we dont have all the data cards for units, points, or abilities but thankfully GW's methodology is easy enough to analyze for pretty decent guesses (lets see later how off I was!) Now, most of you are wondering why I would do this, or anyone for that matter. Well, Knights are simple profiles stat wise and Space Marines have the most information out. Thanks to this it is rather simple to make educated guesses based on trends and such. Look, I was trained in the Navy as an Intelligence Analyst and doing these sorts of things was our job. Making conjecture from historical trends or ongoing trends and making assessments.  The Lists: Now what was played? Well my lovely opponent Maxxie played Space Marines, she normally plays Deathwatch but we dont have any rules (and GW has stated via FB there are no pl...

 I did it! I can not believe I did it! I did it... okay, yes I know, that is the third time I have written that (title, heading, now this) and yet... I can only hope you understand what this means to me! For the purposes of keeping names out of this I will not name the opponents I played but you are free to do your own research, wont be hard.  Letting people talk about their armies helped warm them up to me Arriving on the day had me so nervous. This, as was stated to me and I have reiterated here was my last chance at being in this meta and my emotional energy was tied to this. Thanks to some AMAZING help from some members of Tabled Talk's discord server I was recommended to read/listen to "How to Make Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. This was not the first time I had read it but over the last week I listened to it via audio book and applied what I heard. I think it helped a lot. Keeping a smile on my face, not arguing, letting people talk about themselves...

  Today is the day The tournament is today. I sit here writing this at 5:40 in the morning. I have taken a shower, have combed my hair, brushed my teeth and am nervous. Not about the 2 hour drive, that will be fine.  I am nervous over how things will turn out. I have my plan but in the end I know this is a losing battle.  How do I know it is a losing battle? Well, I seem to have gotten a yellow card from my last event by breaking no ITC Code of Conduct rules. I did not cheat, threaten, attack, malign, etc my opponents. They were all fantastic people. Yet I got a yellow card for events held by that group.  You can follow the rules and still lose in social situations. Odd that.  My Chaos Knights, there are many like them but mine have Scales! That is neither here nor there though. This is about today! About my goal to make it through the day and not be kicked out of the event! I will not lie, if I do get kicked out and its not for anything serious I will be frustr...

 What is Playing to Win? This is a curious concept to me. I was informed that I was at an event more to win than anything else.  What is the point of playing a game but to win? Think on it, if you went to an event that cost you money, wanted to play as many games as possible, and are currently 4 wins and 1 loss out of 6 games? Would you not try to play game 6 to win? Now, this is important to me. Vitally important to how I play the game I love. I can not STAND Gotcha's.  What is a Gotcha you ask? Well, it is informing a player after they have pretty much finished their movement you have a 6" Heroic Intervention. It is not informing your opponent you have a way to give a model a +9" move and it can still charge first turn.  These are things that happened to me over that weekend. They were situations that changed how I felt about the game immensely.  What about me? Do I do things like that? Maybe but I honestly do not think I do things. I let my opponent know abou...

 There is a Plan?  So there seems to be a plan. After my last RTT where I had an issue with my last opponent of that event it was recommended that I keep a Game Journal. An idea I took to heart and for most of all my Crucible games I kept said journal with my thoughts on the game, what I expected, and things I could improve or issues I was able to figure out (or was informed of) My game Journal's first entry This journal is a method for me not to say things aloud when it would be inappropriate. Something I am still not 100% on but for an off the cuff idea I would like to believe I did well. To me this is progress, to others, it is not quick enough of the progress they desire.  This is fine. I can only fix things so fast and if it is not going to be fast enough then so be it but I am not going to stop trying.  As I said in my last blog post, this blog will either show my journey or wither as my journey comes to an end in this endeavor. Still, I will go down fighting. ...