This will probably be my last post for a while because of IRL stuff, and suitably it’s also kind of the last chapter in a year-long 9th edition journey I made with a bunch of local hobby friends. I’ll try and keep this short and sweet with a summary of the game and some pictures of the highlights, since I already talk about most of what went down in the podcast episode below.

As usual, Kinpatsusamurai put together an amazing table, and we ran a mission from a Crusade book out of necessity since I’d actually forgotten the Matched Play book that we were going to use originally. It ended up working out great, because we found a scenario with destroyable objective markers, that punished charging and large squad size, and basically added a lot of twists to what was already a twisty, swingy game. It was Eldar vs. Deathwatch, the same matchup as when I started playing against Kinpatsu ages ago, so it was a really nice note to end the podcast on.

There was lots of good stuff that happened in this game. I finally remembered to use Phantasm, I made good use of strategems and made threats on multiple fronts, and it was the first real time I’ve run my Fire Prism as a Fire Prism and not just a proxy transport. I couldn’t be happier with how the Fire Prism performed. If anything, it performed a little too well given how many Guardians and Rangers I lost when the Corvus Blackstar exploded! The Howling Banshees also got a pretty glorious charge against a couple of marine squads and a Watch Master, but the last standoff of the game was the sword girls against a Leviathan Dreadnought, which ended tragically for them.

Definitely things I can take away from this to learn from in 10th and in other games, since my 9th edition games with KS and Xenonmage will likely live on indefinitely – I definitely need to keep my squishier units back, and have to be less afraid of just keeping my Rangers and Shroud Runners in back or in cover while they’re harassing opponents instead of running them right up into Dreadnoughts’ faces. KinpatsuSamurai was smarter about this, which is why his Vindicare Assassin is going to be retiring and going to college on the bounty money he made from taking out my psykers. I also need to be more conscious of what my opponent is deep striking in – those Terminators are no joke!

I had a lot of fun doing this year of battle reps, and as usual it was a delight to play against KinpatsuSamurai – can’t say enough good things about the tables he puts together. Looking forward to taking some of the lessons I’ve learned into the new edition, and tweaking my Eldar lists from here. This might be the last out of this run of games, but their days of terrorizing my friends on the tabletop are far from over! And hopefully I got a little less bad at 40k in the process.