Resurgence Recap

Resurgence has come and gone (a few days ago now), and the event was a blast! This is unfortunately a photo-free post of the event. All 3 of my games took the full time allowed and I didn't get a chance to wander around and take shots of the other games going on. Even my games were intense enough that I didn't remember to take pictures during
the battle. Overall that was a good thing though.

The Event:
This tournament was a hit. There were 14 players there, several of which I had never met before. In talking with some of them, there were a few that had played years before, but were just now getting back into it due to MK2. And despite opening it up to Hordes players as well, it was an entirely Warmachine event. I'm not positive on the exact breakdown, but there was pretty good representation for all the factions, looking roughly like this: Cygnar - 2, Protectorate - 2, Khador - 4, Cryx - 3, Retribution - 2, Mercs - 1. I have to give a shout out to my LGS as well. There's a different event organizer now and he had the tournament ready to go right on schedule. And other than a couple hiccups with assigning matches in rounds 2 and 3, everything went pretty well for being a new organizer.

My List:
25pts: Kreoss, Crusader, Devout, Zealots (10+UA), Choir (6), Knights Exemplar, Vassal, 3 Wracks
35pts: Kreoss -> eKreoss, + Avatar
50pts: Crusader -> Fire of Salvation, + Repenter, Hierophant, Orin Midwinter, Paladin, Covenant
I had a couple key goals to my list planning. First, I wanted to get the Avatar in as soon as possible, which meant I had to do some jiggery-pokery with swapping in eKreoss at the 35pt level. That also meant I needed to make sure the core of my list was already contained in the 25pt list, including the Vassal. Second, I wanted to have a serious Menoth knot, with an array of denial that would cause serious problems. It doesn't really come together until the 50pt level though, at which point the knot is in full swing with lots of spell denial, and knockdown protection.

My Matches:
My first match was against a pretty typical Deneghra list. This battle was actually pretty close, but my opponent played his army extremely well and with impeccable timing of his abilities. The match actually came very close to being won on scenerio by myself, but I ran out of time.
My second match was against the other Protectorate player who had brought a Testament list with lots of troops. Not surprisingly, we tarpitted in the middle and just kept punching each other in the face. I don't really feel like either of us had the upper hand during the match. Again, we ran out of time during my turn, but this time it would have been hard to actually clear the middle zone. In a longer time game I would have been able to grind it out pretty easily.
My third match was against Henry and his eSkarre list. We'd played almost this same exact battle previously. It really is a painful match because eSkarre's feat is just brutal, especially in a smaller model count battle. I ended up forfeiting a bit before time ran out because there was no way for me to really pull it out. The highlight of the battle though was when the Deathjack marches up, arm locks the Avatar (preventing both Enliven and the shield bonus), and the promptly attacks a zealot standing next to it which was Sancrosanct. Bam! Knocked down! There was much laughing at the moment as Henry realized his folly. Still though, a well played game.
Overall the frustrating thing about my first two matches was losing the initiative and then running out of time during my 3rd turn. In the case of the first match it probably made the difference between a win and a loss. The whole "dice down" thing really isn't my favorite thing. My biggest criticism of the event was that there could have been less time sorting out the pairings between rounds, and spend more time actually on the rounds.

The Results:
In the end it turned out that Retribution won the event. I was pretty shocked actually. The final match was a battle between Khador and Retribution. Unfortunately I was unable to get much more detail about the championship battle. I think that the specifics of the scenario caused a number of ties to take place, and I noticed that Retribution player was routinely done early with all his matches, which means it was likely that he was pulling off assassinations every time. I myself won the Protectorate coin, despite a pretty dismal record. I have to say, I really like the coins as rewards instead of the trophies from the SR4 tournaments.

The Community:
Overall I was pretty impressed with the players there. Everyone seemed to have a good time and I didn't see any serious rules debates. All 3 of my matches were quite civil and very enjoyable.
A shout out goes to Henry for being our Press Ganger lite, in the absence of our previous PG who has moved on to a different game now. *sigh*
One final note was that I got to be a part of a little community support behavior myself there. One of our Cygnar players had a Stormlance model that had broken right above the hoof. So I brought my trusty pinning kit (dremel, brass rod, glue, files, etc) and did a quick repair job for him.