I had my first chance to battle the Grey Knights this week at the local game store(local being a relative term since it was a 90 minute drive). Pictured above, my space wolves attempting to meltagun a Land Raider Crusader. I have to say, I am not as impressed with the way the army plays as I was when just reading the codex. As a Grey Knights player(hesitant to play them until the bandwagon leaves town), I had high hopes for them. It appears the leadership of 8 is actually important with such an elite army. My force was my typical space wolves at 1750, 2 vindys, LRC with 15 bloodclaws and wolf priest(awesome scoring unit!), 5 wolf scouts with melta gun, 2 grey hunter squads with one meltagun in drop pods, 2 rune priests, and Ragnar. His forces consisted of 2 10 man squads with halberds and one guy carrying a 2++ rod, both riding in Land Raider Crusaders, I think a leader type of some sort(he got stuck out of position and in a vehicle the entire game), and one each of the 3 assassins. Granted, the player was still testing out the codex and was not fully optimized, but I had no problem overcoming this force with my own semi optimized list. I tended to avoid close combat(nemesis weapons look scary) and was able to just control the shooting game. I will say the LRC with psy ammo upgrade is awesome, even if a little harder to fully utilize. I was able to use my drop pods to fully neutralize his assassins and then use my vindys to keep his grey knights mounted up. We were playing roll dice and tie and that certainly didn’t help. The game was going to be a nice tie(as always), but in round six, I landed a vindy round into his squad holding his objective and he failed his leadership….and ran right off the board. Winning on a bad die roll? I’ll take it.
My buddy Jestyr traveled with me playing his WIP deathwing against a WIP Ultra army. Why someone would put off playing ultramarines this long and still want to play them is beyond me.
As you can see here, a classic castle defense, which did not work against all those cyclone missile launchers. Jestyr made short work of him. The player, while normally a strong adversary, recently switched from jetbike eldar to power armor, so I assume that is where the disconnect occurred.
My second game had me playing against a completely mobile bike army(ok, he had one pod and one vindy). I played my same force(with the addition of a squad of wolf guard) against 40 bikes, a vindy, a pod with dread, a captain on bike, and Khan on bike. It was going fairly well until turn 3 when one bike captain took out half my army. It was very humiliating, so I will not relate it here. I would like to say thanks to Castle Perilous for providing not only a place to play, but a ton of beautiful terrain and various game boards. This is a wonderful store to play in with a very active gaming community.
