In the next few days, I should receive hard copies of a guest article written by Focke.  It is an article on a friend's growing pains building up a BT army for an escalation league, if I remember correctly.  I'll find out soon enough, as Focke is emailing me the articles to review.  If all goes as planned, they'll be part of next month's updates.

This will also play into my own article that will talk about building competitive armies at low points levels for the Black Templars.  They synergize well together, so I think my article will be a nice introduction to Focke's escalation league articles.

I've gotten quite a few hits from DakkaDakka the past week or so.  If you are the one linking to Implausible Nature  (I don't use Dakka so its not me), thank you.  Every link or post including this website helps!  :D

If the person spreading the love does, in fact see this post, would you be so kind as to let me know where the link was shared (i.e. the threads)?  I would appreciate it.  ;)

Email:

"I just wanted to send a short message to thank you for all the work you put into your website as it provides as an awesome source for information on everything BT.  Using all the ideas and lists you give and walk through I've actually been able to construct my own list that has yet to be defeated around here (although I've only used it in about 6 games but so far so good tabled 2 opponents :D). 

Anyway I'm rambling just wanted to say thank you and keep providing a quality service to the most zealous and righteous of the space marines."  --  BL

Reply:

You are absolutely welcome.  In fact, thank you very much for sending this.  It took a little bit of the sting of the day's terrible tournament away (worst possible opponents, scenarios were ridiculous, and got ruled against using our 4th edition codex AS 4th Edition).  I very much appreciate it!  :D

Congratulations!  Definitely a great start!  I'm happy that I've given you the tools to be successful, as that is most certainly the goal of Implausible Nature.  Hopefully you will continue to do well and as always, if you need anything, just holler.  :)

Thanks again for writing!

*Editor's Note:  This is only one of many such emails I've received to date (and appreciate every single one of them), but after today's long day, I was absolutely thrilled to have this waiting for me in my inbox.  It made the day not as horrible, giving me at least one bright spot to the day.  So thank you BL.  :D*

So, as you all will be seeing soon...this was quite possibly the worst tournament I've ever attended.  Ever.  It made me emo pants.  There was a great many things that contributed to this, and I'll list what I can remember.  I'll go more in depth here in the next few days.

• Our original Tournament Organizer (TO) got sick this week, so was unable to organize the tournament.  He was the one that wanted to go with the Nova-style tournament.  Unfortunately, he got sick early in the week and I didn't know this...so replaced him with a store employee that only occasionally plays 40k.  Not a good thing.
• The scenarios were crazy bunk.  They were completely unbalanced, changed pretty much all the rules of 40k, and made it impossible for mechanized armies to win.  You will see the stupid when I post them up later.
  
• In each game, I played the absolute worst opponent that I could have played.  If not for the scenarios, I would have had a decent shot at the win each game.  Instead, they made my opponent's lists amazing.
• After I deployed AND moved my forces in game one, turn one...I reminded my opponent that the Black Templars codex uses the 4th Edition rules.  My opponent disagreed and he called the TO over to make a ruling.  The new TO ruled in favor of my opponent, much to my complete shock.  He said that I had to force upgrade my codex to 5th Edition, since pretty much all the other chapters had been re-released.  I asked if I had could then edit my entire list to account for the new "reduced" prices of things, but he said no.  He also said I had to use 'Kill Them All', 'Righteous Zeal', and other various dumb 4th Edition rules that we're forced into using even though he was making me use 5th edition rules for all wargear.  Completely ridiculous and hypocritical.  So with my smoke launchers pretty much useless, and me being in the open, I got creamed...but more on that later.
• We only got two hours to play our games.  Most standard tournaments allow 2.5 hours per game.  Two hours doesn't give you any lee-way if playing a slow opponent, and can be difficult to finish a full game even with the quickest/most knowledgeable of players.

So basically, it came down to it being impossible for me to win the tournament with the army I brought.  There would have been no way to know this beforehand, as we got "surprised" by the scenarios, thinking we were going to be playing the Nova missions.  Well, you'll all read about it soon and you'll laugh at the fail.  Now excuse me, I need a beer real bad.  lol.

Also of note is that I'll be finishing all of the other updates within the week now that my tournament is done.  So that means my competitive vs casual gamer article (and off-shoot list building article), Marshal Wilhelm's guest articles, and how I would build low point BT armies.  The last would be for primarily beginning players, or for people who do escalation leagues.  :)

Because of the tournament prep, obviously this month's updates are not on time.  Apologies, but personally, since this is my first tourney in a very long time...some me time is required.  :D

Plus, you get all of the fun and exciting coverage that goes along with it.  Especially fun and exciting is the battle reports.  I just hope that my opponent's have no issue with me taking pictures of the game.  :)

I finished assembling most of my forces, but I don't think I'll have time to finish building up the necessary vehicles to put out my second list.  So back to Plan A, which I suppose is better, since I've got more experience with the list.  Its too bad, but cannot be helped.  I'll spend the time to put the rest of the stuff together on Sunday.  I'm also supposed to start painting Brandon's Blood Drinkers soon.  He thinks I'll get his entire 1k army done in 1.5 months.  Ha ha ha.  Nice try.  :P

In other news, I made a slight tweak to my gunline list.  After playing a few games recently, I decided to take the missile launchers off the two normal dreads and gave them heavy flamers instead.  This will give me some counter-attack punch in the list, which it was sorely lacking before.  It'll also give me more flamers for emergencies, while maintaining decent long range AT firepower.  I made the change a while ago, but kept forgetting to change it here.  Hopefully no one went out and bought missile launchers for their dreads.  :/

As the subject suggests, I've been focused on putting forth a great effort for this weekend's 40k tournament at Misty Mountain Games.  For the better part of a month, I've been play-testing, tweaking, and assembling my forces for battle (Black Templars).  Its the first tournament I'll have attended in a good while, so I want to put forth a good showing.  Black Templars all the way.  Got to represent!  ;)

You can find more on the MMG tournament here.  We'll find out if I get labeled the dreaded WAAC player or power gamer.  I hope not, as I could use a great finish to put some weight behind my advice here on Implausible Nature.  But more than that, I hope to have a great time playing some awesome people in competitive games.  Its the greatest thrill this hobby can provide and I cannot wait.  :D

This is just a self-reminder about BroLo's profession.  That is all.  ;)