This weekend was the Feast of Blades tournament in Denver, Colorado. Over 100 players who won qualifying events all over the country battled through 7 rounds of the Feast of Blades Invitational to crown a champion. The Feast Invitational used its own tiered missions featuring various combinations of kill points, objectives, and quarters. You can check out the mission packet used for the Invitational Tournament here. Cheers to 40kNation for their live coverage of the event, which came off incredibly well! They’ve mentioned in chat that they’ll have recordings of all 7 top table games, along with interviews and commentary and such, available within the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for those if you missed the games live! This was a weekend for Daemons. The top tables were dominated by the dastardly denizens of the warp, with 3 of the top 4 armies being Chaos Daemons. The final game featured brutal daemon-on-daemon violence between Gareth Hunt’s Daemons and Alex Bessinger’s Daemons. Today for your viewing pleasure (and, for the next few minutes at least, as a 40k blogosphere exclusive!) we’ve got the army lists of Feast of Blades winner Alex Bessinger and runner-up Gareth Hunt.
Alex Bessinger 2012 Feast of Blades Invitational Winning army list – 2000 points – Daemons:
Headquarters:
HQ1: Herald of Tzeentch
Troops:
Troops1: Horrors x9, Changeling
Troops2: Horrors x8
Troops3: Plaguebearers x7
Troops4: Plaguebearers x5
Elites:
Elite1: Flamers x9
Elite2: Flamers x9
Elite3: Flamers x9
Fast Attack:
F.Attack1: Screamers x9
F.Attack2: Screamers x9
F.Attack3: Screamers x9
Fortification:
Aegis Defense Line, Comms Relay
Our notes on Alex’ List:
Alex minimized his HQ expenditure so he could maximize the real strengths of the Daemons Codex (neither of which are from the original daemons codex!) – screamers and flamers. With 27 of each, his army had incredible offensive potential and simply overwhelmed opposing forces with a dense saturation of highly mobile, highly resilient threats. Alex’ ace in the hole was the changeling, which came up with a huge play in the final game. Glamour went off in the first turn, and caused one unit of Gareth’s flamers to burn another unit of Gareth’s flamers, killing 7 out of a unit that hadn’t yet fired. Alex was fairly aggressive with his deep strikes in general, but wasn’t hurt by mishaps all that often on his way to the championship.
Gareth Hunt 2012 Feast of Blades Invitational Runner Up army list – 2000 points – Daemons:
Headquarters:
HQ1: Fateweaver
HQ2: The Masque
Troops:
Troops1: Plaguebearers x7
Troops2: Plaguebearers x7
Troops3: Plaguebearers x7
Troops4: Plaguebearers x7
Elites:
Elite1: Flamers x9
Elite2: Flamers x9
Elite3: Flamers x9
Fast Attack:
F.Attack1: Screamers x6
F.Attack2: Screamers x6
F.Attack3: Screamers x6
Fortification:
Aegis Defense Line, Comms Relay
Our notes on Gareth’s List:
This list made particularly strong use of the force-multiplying power of Daemons’ HQs. Fateweaver gave the daemons added resilience with his reroll-saves bubble, contributed a bit of firepower (though I’m not sure he ever actually managed to turn anything into a spawn), and gave gareth a huge chunk of very mobile quarter-grabbing points. The masque was used to clump enemies together to set up massive flamer barbecues and pull enemies in for assaults. Combined with the Masque, Gareth’s flamers were incredibly effective at wiping units out, and his screamers did what screamers do – eating faces all tournament long. While Gareth was only running 4 scoring units, which is fairly low for 2000 points, 7 plaguebearers proved quite durable and always seemed to be enough once the rest of Gareth’s army had eaten just about everything else on the board.
Closing Arguments:
The final match was an incredibly close and hard-fought game, and I highly recommend checking out the recording once it gets posted on 40kNation if you missed the live netcast. Daemons as a whole performed incredibly well at this event, and showed a shift toward heavier reliance on Screamers and Flamers than the Flying Monstrous Creatures we’d seen in a lot of past 6th ed. Daemons lists. The speed, resilience, versatility and alpha-strike potential of these units caused serious problems for a lot of armies. And to make matters worse, there were a lot of armies in the field that just didn’t seem equipped to handle daemons. Both of the top players commented that what worried them most were fliers, but flier-heavy armies didn’t seem to be making their presence felt at Feast of Blades.
Congratulations to everyone who feasted on blades at this year’s invitational. Thanks again to 40k nation for broadcasting the event, and a big thanks too to the Feast judges who hopped into chat to answer questions, keep everyone updated, and chat about rules! Great job guys!