Slaughter Smackdown 40K GT in Anaheim, CA

Rivan wrote:Speaking of BC Stern, since I've never really used him, I'm still a little confused on how or when my opponent can use his re-rolls for each re-roll I make

Recently i've become quite the Stern expert, as i've been fielding him in every game i can.

Here's how he works:

You can make one reroll of STERNS (not anyone in your army, just his) dice per PHASE. This means you may reroll a die in the movement, shooting, AND close combat phase on your turn AND do the same on your opponents turn, if you so choose, but only once per phase. Every time you do this, your opponent get a 'stern counter', which he can use at any time to reroll one die for any of his units (so he could use it in the same phase, or save them all for the CC phase, etc). However, at the end of every Close Combat phase all counters go away, so it's use em or lose em.

This means you may reroll a difficult or dangerous terrain roll in the movement phase, a shot/wound/run roll in the shooting phase, and a difficult terrain/hit/wound/psychic test die in the combat phase (or any other random die that BC stern. In fact, the deep strike scatter die is a die........

Now, a slight contention is that it says the reroll applies to brother captain stern's die. some people will argue that you therefore cannot reroll a run or anything that applies to the whole unit. I've never had a problem with this, but i can see people having a problem. if your deep striking, simply point out the model you put down that is scattering is BC stern. If your assaulting through terrain, hey, bc stern is assaulting first, so it's his roll.

MJ: Thanks for the info on Stern, much clearer now

And thanks to everyone for the inputs! Regardless of which list I go with, my strategy/tactics will still be centered around long range shooting. After all, even with the alternate list w/ BC Stern, I still have 8 psycannons. The more I think about it tactically, the alternate list w/ Stern has more pros than cons. At the expense of having 2 less regular GKTs, I have 2 hard-hitting models that strike at I5 and slightly stronger Troop units. Stern's force-weapon ability, HH and holocaust are added bonuses. Furthermore, two of the five rounds actually have bonus objectives related to HQ's so having 2 HQ's is statistically advantageous.
My main concern now is the comp aspect. I have no real experience with judging the composition of a list other than to recognize it as obvious cheese. Does having 2 HQ units in my army make it cheesy at the 2000 pt level? I personally don't think so but like I said, I don't know much about comp scores.

Grey knights if usually free comp, however the list your making would get average at best. It copies the save exact loadout of troop choices, has 2 identical LR, and the two Best models in the codex. It's just hard to make good GK lists with the limited models available. To get good gk comp you have to vary up troop choices, and you can't really do that in an all psycannon list.

Comp isn't just about "is it cheese" comp is about seeing a variety of units and making sure people don't just take the best things or one thing over and over. It is also to get rid of cookie cutter lists, as even varied lists may loose comp if it's the most common tournament list for the army, or every time someone takes that unit they take it that way.

If they know GK well, they'll know the las/missile variant is the common dread for us, but it should really hurt because it's needed, and they'll know that

Simply switching one squad from psycannons to incinerators would increase comp to at least average, but i'm pretty sure you don't want to do that.

switching one LR to a crusader might help as well. Though you'd loose the las, if you put the GM with the retinue instead of stern you'd garuntee a super tough shooty squad, and a lone Crusader with stern in it is a huge threat. Plus, hurricane bolters and a melta while moving are very shooty.

Can't see any amount of comp being worth the loss the TLLC on the LR's

@Zealadin: Totally agree.

I didn't realize so much goes into the "comp" aspect of a list. I guess I'll just have to prioritize my list's competitiveness vs. composition. And competitiveness definitely takes precedence.

Besides, the way I understand the comp scoring for this GT is everybody starts out w/ the max 30 pts. Every round, you can get a thumbs up or down on comp from your opponent. The first thumbs down is discarded and each thumbs down after that reduces your score by 6 pts. So, hopefully I get more thumbs up than down

Just to give you a heads-up. The sad thing is that most opponents don't see how important and integral multiple LR's are in a pure GK list. In most cases all they see is AV14 spam and comp score accordingly. I'm running an LR and Dread in my upcoming 1500 point main tournie instead of two LR's because my overall sportsmanship score always suffered a bit.

NemesisForce wrote:Just to give you a heads-up. The sad thing is that most opponents don't see how important and integral multiple LR's are in a pure GK list. In most cases all they see is AV14 spam and comp score accordingly. I'm running an LR and Dread in my upcoming 1500 point main tournie instead of two LR's because my overall sportsmanship score always suffered a bit.

That is unfortunate for us However, at 2000 pts, I find it extremely difficult to be competitive w/ just a single LR. What do you think of the GM/Stern combo? While I'm not an avid mathematician, just considering the "bang for my points" factor and overall effectiveness, I think I'd rather have a GM and Stern at the cost of a few more GKT's.

At 2000 points you should be ok with multiple LR's for comp. At least I hope. Stern/GM sounds cool but I've only ever used Stern once and Ghazzie put a quick end to him before I could see what he was capable of.

The added benefit of GM+stern is one can leave the squad to assault a different target, if so desired..

I do like the max troops, one crusader full of termies lists, and i always get comp points for taking some deep strikers, be they gk or termies

I initially liked BA because it gave me options that didn't strictly require LR's to be successful, cheap drop pod troops with locaters can get your GKT and PAGK (the FA ones) into position pretty easily. This being said I'm not working more on my BA army than GK for the time being, rumours being what they are