Dazzling Denizens of the Dallas Dynasty Duel Reports

[Astroking112]

Greetings, everyone! Over the course of these past two years that I've become reacquainted with HeroScape, I've been systematically finding viable targets and indoctrinating them into Valhalla recruiting friends to have a good time playing a great game.

Amongst these people are @Leo Ultra , @Angi , @Stormyman , and even more without accounts here. We run a small Discord server to vote on dates and formats for the monthly events, so if you ever look at one of the crazy things that we've done... Just know that it's a group effort.

Also, big thanks to @Rÿchean , @Dignan , @rym , and everyone else at Plaid Hat Games that I don't know the usernames of. They run larger and more conventional D/FW tournaments that we also attend. If any of you (or anyone else in the area) ever want to come to one of our game nights, you're more than welcome to!

With that out of the way, I'm going to dedicate the next post to keeping an index of the various events that we've either run or attended. Unfortunately, our past records might be a little shaky, but thanks to Stormyman, we do have some nice pictures to spice things up!

[Astroking112]

Index of Events:

1. D/FW Draft Tournament 2018 Practice
2. D/FW Draft Tournament 2018
3. NHSD 2018
4. First Official UTD HeroScape Event
5. Hot Lava Death
6. C3V Public Playtesting Event (Will occur on March 1st)

Previous Attendees:

1. @Astroking112
2. @Leo Ultra
3. @Angi
4. @Stormyman
5. @Odzaepher

[Astroking112]

Our first event happened back in Spring of 2018, when we were preparing for the upcoming D/FW Draft Tournament 2018. Both VC and CUC units were allowed at this event, letting me take good Hatamoto Taro with Tomoe Gozen for the first (and only) time outside of house games. Unfortunately, I don't think that I ever actually drafted them together... Getting Kaemon Awa was too tempting every time.

Because building maps takes time and we didn't have too many people confirmed to be coming, we only built three maps for this event. There was Fissure, Swamp Thing, and Vulxinla, a map of mine and Leo's design that had no business being there but was already built:

Just in case you were curious, that's a Glyph of Thorian in the center. The starting zones are divided between the top and bottom levels, so it's kind of a bloodbath to try and grab the glyph to avoid being wiped out by ranged units on the top.

Stormyman and I were assigned to this map first, and I took Tagawa Samurai Archers against his Marrden Nagrubs and Wo-Sa-Ga. The giant Marro made a frightening advance, but then a lone archer from the bottom level shot up at her and managed to deal 2 wounds from 2 attack against 5 defense, half-killing her almost instantly... And she didn't live through the turn. This left a bunch of giant Marro-less Nagrubs running about against Samurai, without much that they could do.

He also had Iskra Esenwein in his backlines, which I completely ignored until she moved out 6 spaces, summoned the Retchets of Bogdan 6 spaces ahead, and then flew them forward 6 more spaces to immediately surround Hatamoto Taro and get three 12.5% chances for an instant KO... Luckily for me, Lethal Sting didn't trigger, but I've rarely underestimated the Retchets after that. Those things are terrifying.

We retired this map from the event after that, deciding that if we were practicing for an actual tournament, we should use more conventional battlefields.

Stormyman went on to Fissure after that, taking his vampires against a friend's Vipers. My details are fuzzy on what happened in this game (since I didn't play it), but he took lots of nice pictures, so I'll let them do the talking.

Who won? Did I even get the order of them right? The world may never know (but @Stormyman probably does).

While he was taking some nice pictures and playing against our friend, two other nerds without the foresight to take pictures (read: me and @Leo Ultra ) were playing a match on Swamp Thing. Leo was testing out his favorite faction, the Varkaanans, while the entirety of the units that I was bringing to draft were either Samurai or CUC Einar Imperium.

I was nervous about going against the Varkaanans, since I had never played them before and hardly even knew their stats (and he was proxying literally every single figure with stuff like Omnicron Snipers, making recognizing them even more difficult...), but this also made me not comfortable with building an army solely based around them to try and screw up his plans. I hoped to lose the dice-off to determine who gets to draft from the pool first... rolled the D20 20-sided die with bated breath... and got a 20. Welp, there went my plans.

As I was looking over our combined units, I was unsure of what to do. If I took a Samurai build like Leo was expecting, then he would be free to build his own ideal army that I wasn't as prepared to fight... But if I committed myself to a Varkaanan army, then what would I even do? My eyes fell on a single card, the natural answer for what to draft first in any situation:

[Note: For context, one of our earliest games together was my Samurai legion against his Elven Wizards in the 700 point range on a huge battlefield. After a brief initial skirmish in which I claimed the Glyph of Valda (Move +2), I got irritated by the death of a Roman Legionnaire and sent in Kaemon Awa as a suicide attack, engaging the Wizards to force them to face Counterstrike if they used a normal attack while still benefitting from Quick Draw Release Special Attack. Leo panicked, trying to run his Elven Wizards away while Kaemon Awa chased them around the entire map, single-handedly slaying every last one.]

He was perfect. It made it seem like I was committing to the Samurai without committing to anything! Leo proceeded with his plan to draft some of his Varkaanan buddies... which I wrecked next turn by drafting some as well. He was understandably confused and irritated as I jumped between our own pools, ending up with an army of Kaemon Awa, Quickblades, CUC Khosumet, and Bahadur against his more traditional Greyspears, Arktos, Manauvi, and some other wolvish thing that I'm forgetting.

To make matters worse, I proceeded to place almost all of my Order Markers on Kaemon Awa instead of the brunt of my army, moving him up to claim the hill to my left. Leo took this as a personal insult, viewing it as me saying that I could kill his entire army with just Kaemon Awa again, and began to rush in with the Greyspears. While this hadn't been my initial plan (I just didn't want him to get the first strike on me with his Swiftfangs), I decided to take him up on the challenge.

Now, I don't know what godly forces propel Kaemon to be such a legend, but he actually started to pull it off. Even without Counterstrike, he deflected attack after attack while felling Greyspears with his double-attacks, putting the Greyspears and Arktos out of commission and removing one of my main threats. He then proceeded to rain down attacks on Manauvi from ranged height, forcing him off of the glyph. I think that I ended up only taking about two turns with units other than Kaemon Awa that game, because I had been nervous that he might die with only 1 life before saying, "Eh, screw it, I'm going all in with him" and placing OM's exclusively on him anyway.

This was the second time that Kaemon Awa single-handedly annihilated an entire army on his own, and it only secured his place as a legend at my table. To quote a good friend of mine:

Originally Posted by Leo Ultra

A legend indeed...

With several games under our each of our belts, we decided to call it a night. Within just a week, we would be moving on to the first tournament for many of my friends (in the past, only Angi, Leo, and myself had been to one of the D/FW events), so I was excited to see how everyone would do in a bigger turn-out.

[Stormyman]

Regarding the pictures from the Heroscape Day tournament on 10/19/2019
Here is a link to a google folder with the pictures. They are mostly of the pieces/games. Thanks goes to myself and 3 others whom do not have accounts here.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...yf?usp=sharing