So I did the tournament, went 2-3 and came 17th out of 38. Not a bad placing for a first time run and I picked up on all my mistakes and problems. I’ll do a full rundown, more for my own sanity than expecting anyone here to read it.

Game 1 vs Adeptus Astartes: Iron Hands

Right out the gate with the toughest, most meta army to fight against. He ran the iron father, a chapter master, a lieutenant, a Chaplin, 20 scouts, 10 primaris marines, 10 eliminators, a land raider, a deredeo dreadnought and a leviathan dreadnought and a thunder fire cannon

Mission was cut to the heart, deployment was search and destroy.

Secondary objectives:
I picked butchers bill, recon and behind enemy lines

He took big game hunter, king of the hill and recon

Deployment type really messed with me, I had a single small piece of terrain in my quarter, so hiding was out of the question. I staggered everything out in my zone so I could fan out as much as possible, knowing he’d want to just sit in the middle of the board. I charged my knight right into his central line, killing the land raider, all the tac marines that were in it, all the eliminators and planted myself firmly in his lines. The rest of my fire was pretty ineffectual and I needed to keep some easy targets on the board to claim butchers bill every turn.

Because of my callidus assassin he was out of cp by the end of his first turn. He managed to get my knight down to 2 wounds, kill 2 of my disintigrator tanks and my breachers with his shooting and killed the knight on the charge with a scout squad. My knight exploded for a 2d6" radius that only turned out to be 4", which only managed to finish off a scout squad.

My kataphrons then revealed themselves, overcharged and got 26 hits off of 10d6 on the deredeo. 17 wounds should have been 51 damage for him to avoid, but he used his half damage stratagem and the - 1 damage relic to basically cut my actual damage down to just 9 wounds.

From this point on it was downhill. My callidus charged his thunder fire to keep it tied up and ended up taking 4 wounds in overwatch fire from the tech marine, meaning I had to kill it as soon as possible to not get an lucky last hit on my assassin.

The rest of the game was a slow slog, with me hiding in as much cover as I could find to scrape as many points back to make the loss less impactful. Game ended 32-21.