Psychic Choir - Tyranids Psychic Shriek thoughts

Last Saturday I ran the Psychic Choir list I discussed, and now I'm back with the results!

New Beginnings

So my GW hobby club, the War College, has finally come together and decided on a place to game. We agreed that Troll Country Games (off of Hampden and Monaco) was ideal as they were a store looking for a 40k club, and we were a 40k club looking for a store. Thankfully, I ended up knowing one of the two owners and in fact I had actually GM'd some D&D sessions for him. What a small world. The cool thing is, they are sacrificing quite a bit to accommodate our club's needs. We are pretty much guaranteed every table in their store on a Saturday, all War College members get a 10% discount on all store merchandise, and they are providing 6'x4' boards for us to play on AND cabinets for us to store terrain in!

Anyways, as life goes on in my tiny little world, I have also picked up a new hobby. It's something I've always wanted to do (whether it was professionally or for fun), but I have joined a Pro-Wrestling organization called Mid-West Extreme Wrestling (or MXW for short). Sure, they may seem like a run-of-the-mill backyard wrestling "club", but I've seen some real talent in this group and I'm excited to see where things go. I've been getting my ass kicked in training and I doubt it's going to let-up. @_@

As for other hobbies, I have been toying around with list ideas for 2,000 point games for both my Blood Angels and Tyranids. I'll probably post the lists here after I get in some practice with them which will come over the next few weeks.

Stay tuned!

Updates

Yes, this is one of those "post just to post" posts. I haven't been able to get a whole lot of painting/building/hobbying done lately due to real life stuff (two kids, wife, job stuff, etc), but I'm going to lay out the projects I'm working on and their progress so far. This also lets me know where I stand (and it's a quick-reference I can check on my phone lol, as my blog is enabled for web browsing now).

Blood Angels:
I started work on a 2,000 point list via my club's 40k Escalation League, and I believe I posted the contents a few months ago. There's 4 Las/Plas Razorbacks, 4 Predators, and a Stormraven in it. Sure, the list is not original, unique, or inspiring, but it surely is competitive and has won me many games (including scoring a SUPER CLOSE draw against the guy who won my store's Feast of Blades tournament). At the moment I have three Razorbacks and 15 Assault Marines primed bright red, and I've started painting black on the details of one of the Marines as a test model. Unfortunately, I still need roughly 8 Plasmaguns so I can convert the turret of the Razorbacks, and I need to do a LOT of work on my regular Predators as the sponsons have broken off tons of times over the years. Also, when I primed my Razorbacks red, there was a bit of shrinking and wrinkling of the paint in certain areas, apparently due to a chemical reaction between this new Army Painter primer and some old GW red primer. Isn't that awesome? Now I have to sand off that garbage and re-prime the spots. I'll post WIP pics later.

Tyranids:
I was in the process of painting up my bugs for Tacticon and GenghisCon, and since then my bugs have been horribly mistreated. I've played a TON of games with them, and unfortunately I don't have foam to store them in so they bounce around in cardboard trays and a tackle-box. Someday I'll purchase a shit-ton of foam from Battlefoam to store them in, and it'll be sweet. Until then I think I'm just going to have to be super-careful with them. Anyways, as I said a few posts back I've been really interested in using alternate units including Lictors, so I think I might work on building (and painting) a 2,000 point Tyranid list that doesn't really include the normal copy-paste stuff. I think I'll have a LOT more fun with it, and hey, if I win some games with them then that's even better. :)

Dark Elves:
They are still in-progress, don't worry! I have 40 Corsairs, 24 Crossbowmen, 10 Black Guard, a Hydra, a Supreme Sorceress, a Dreadlord, a Master, and a sorceress built. All I have left to do is roughly 30 more Corsairs, 12 more Crossbowmen (though I'm going to have 6 of them made as unit fillers because I actually don't have 6 more), 10 more Black Guard, another Hydra, and a Cauldron of Blood. I'm easily over half-way there, and my wife is making things WAY easier by cleaning everything ahead of time by de-spruing the models and bits and shaving off the plastic and metal flash. Fairly soon, I'll have 3k of Dark Elves fully built and ready for some kick-ass battles.

Cygnar:
Unfortunately my FLGS hasn't got in ANY of my preliminary Cygnar stuff (tokens, faction deck, etc), so I'm kind of stalled-out on them. Once the job situation gets figured out, I'll be able to start picking up little things here and there from other stores, but for now I'm waiting to use my store credit on the stuff I ordered, if it ever comes in. :(

So, stay tuned, I'll have pics of my WIP models up soon. Life is kickin me in the ass right now, and time is a very valuable asset at the moment.

Lictors

Thanks to Synaps3, Crispy, and Talonis, I'm going to be running some Lictors over the next few weeks (outside of my club's Escalation League for now). I've been reading up on different tactics and strategies on how to use them, and the more I do the more I'm dying to get them on the table.

So, here's a list I think I'm going to run on Friday:

HQ
Hive Tyrant (Lash Whip & Bonesword, Twin-Linked Devourer with Brainleech Worms, Wings, Old Adversary, Hive Commander, Leech Essence, Paroxysm)

ELITES
Deathleaper
3x Lictors
7x Ymgarl Genestealers

TROOPS
10x Genestealers (one is a Broodlord, all have Toxin Sacs)
10x Genestealers (Toxin Sacs)

HEAVY
Trygon (Adrenal Glands)
Trygon (Adrenal Glands)

FAST
5x Shrike Brood (Lash Whip & Bonesword, Scything Talons)
20x Gargoyles
3x Spore Mines (these mess up the opponent's deployment in Dawn of War)

Basically, the WHOLE army starts in reserves. The Hive Tyrant grants the army a +1 to reserve rolls while he's "alive", so my units will start coming in on a 3+ in turn 2 (which should be roughly 2/3rds of the army). That's more than a 50% chance to bring in either Deathleaper or the Lictors which would then grant my army a net +2 to reserve rolls, meaning anything that didn't arrive that turn gets to come in automatically on turn 3. Knowing this ahead of time can really help me out when planning where to deploy.

I plan on testing this, and other variants of this list, over the weekend and throughout next week. I'll post again with my initial results and thoughts probably sometime this weekend.

Strike from the Skies! Half-Assed Text Batrep: Nids vs Dark Angels

Last night I used a pretty cool Tyranid list that I came up with for shits and giggles. I had decided recently that I was going to use my Blood Angels for my club's Escalation League, but for some reason after reading Synaps3, Legio Minimus, and The Back: 40k's Tyranid articles, I've been hooked on bugs!

Here's what I ran:

General Update

GenghisCon 2011 is less than two weeks away, so I have ramped up the amount of models I'm painting daily to ensure my 1850 pt Tyranid list gets finished before the tournament. I won't be changing my list all that much from the Tacticon version, but the good news is that my playtest games have gone fairly well.

Also, I have made part one of the final purchase of stuff for my Blood Angels, and here's what's on it's way:

• 2 Stormravens
• 2 Furioso Dreadnought kits
• 2 Razorbacks
• 3 Baal Predators
• Lemartes
• Astorath the Grim

I already have two Furiosos and two Baal Predators, but what this order will allow me to do is field six predators (three regular and three Baal) and be able to switch between Furiosos, Furioso Librarians, and Death Company Dreads. How I'm going to make the Dreadnought parts interchangeable is another story...

And now on to Fantasy. My club has been successfully running 500 point games of Fantasy for our Escalation League over the last few weeks. While several people (including myself) have yet to paint their minis, we have at least had regular attendance. The week after the con, we are upping the points level to 1,000, and we are also introducing Magic without the 6th-level spells (for now). I learned a lot playing against a Lizardmen player who was running Temple Guard and Sauruses, and I plan to have more of a tooled-up force to be able to combat builds like that.

In other news, I made FIVE MORE YouTube videos a few weeks ago so make sure you check them out at www.youtube.com/sonsofsanguinius.

Thanks for stopping by and stay tuned for update pictures of my Tyranids!

A new list, a new strategy

So, after play-testing a bunch of the lists I put up here and others that I built on Friday nights at my LGS, I decided to try something new based on a lot of feedback I had gotten from multiple sources including Auxellion. Here's a list that has three elements to it: A fast assault element, an objective-holding shooty element, and a deep-striking/outflanking element.

HQ

• Swarmlord with two Tyrant guard (Lash Whips)

Elites

• 3x Hive guard
• 2x Zoanthropes (Mycetic Spore)

Troops

• 15x Termagaunts (Toxin Sacs)
• 15x Termagaunts (Toxin Sacs)
• 15x Termagaunts (Toxin Sacs)
• Tervigon (Adrenal Glands, Catalyst)

Fast Attack

• 7x Shrike Brood (Scything Talons, Devourers, Adrenal Glands)
• 20x Gargoyles (Toxin Sacs)

Heavy Support

• Trygon
• Trygon

So, the Shrike Brood will fly behind the Gargoyles while the Swarmlord and Zoanthropes advance behind the Termagaunts. The Trygons will Deep Strike and the Tervigon will Outflank for gaunt spawning and overwhelming a flank. The Hive Guard will take cover mid-field for some nice vehicle harassment, and the cool thing about this list is that all three elements will have Synapse and Shadow in the Warp (with backups). I believe I have enough distraction units (Gargoyles, Trygons, Zoans, Gaunts) to let the REAL nasty stuff do what they need to do (Swarmlord, Shrike Brood, Hive guard, Tervigon) which would be winning the game, or at least that's the plan.

Hive Fleet Hydrus, Concept Art

So after finally coming up with a Hive Fleet name, I've also decided the paint scheme I want to use. Thankfully I have Dawn of War II, so I can apply practically any paint scheme I want to Marines, Eldar, Orks, AND Tyranids. Here's what I came up with:

 

So, the main body will be Bleached Bone covered in a Gryphonne Sepia wash, with the muscle fibers and other minor details starting as Dark Angels Green then being highlighted up to Snot Green. The chitin will be Chaos Black with Regal Blue highlights, though at this point I haven't determined if I'm going to highlight the Regal Blue with Skull White or just use Ultramarines Blue.

Soon I'll add some pictures of some tests of this paint scheme.