If you don’t get the reference, that’s on you.

The Oceanic Championships of Warhammer are the brainchild of Josh Diffey, owner of Melbourne’s Gaming Arena. It’s a pretty standard 2 dayer, with the main attraction on offer being a Golden Ticket to the Warhammer World Championship for the first place. In Australian AOS terms, a Golden Ticket is one that comes with some funding attached to offset the ruinous expense of international travel.¹ Winners of certain Australian events automatically receive a ticket to the OCC qualifier or you can just buy one, like I did.

Josh has wisely farmed out the running of the event to Justin “JC” Clark and the Craichouse’s own Zak Rockman, two guys who are very much the Young Turks of Australian Age of Sigmar.² The boys have managed to grow a strong Melbourne scene based around the Gaming Arena. For those unfamiliar with the minutiae of Australian wargaming venues, the GA is a gaming venue / store in the northern suburbs of Melbourne with 50-odd purpose-built tables. The tables are magnificent, high enough that a full day’s gaming actually improved the miserable state of my poor aging back, and they have drinks service. As an added bonus, the full liquor license means there are no goddam children inside.³

For all I know there are 100-table gaming venues on every street in America, sandwiched between the gun shops, mega-churches and strip joints, but there is nothing like it in Australia. GA does good business 7 days a week and I heartily recommend a visit if you are ever in town. The only downside is they are still obliged to hold Trading Card tournaments to pay the bills, but the Magic dweebs are generally pretty good about not making eye contact with proper gamers.⁴

Tell ’em, Ogre

Anyways, I decided to head on down to the Big Smoke to attend the event. I’m not especially interested in a trip to the World Championships. A combination of misanthropy, pessimism and profound doubt that I’d have any less distaste for the people overseas than my fellow Australians makes international travel a dubious prospect. I’m also too damn fat to sit in an economy seat for 20 hours.

Still, a competitive two-dayer is not to be sniffed at when Hobby is more or less the only thing you do with your life, outside of work and doomscrolling news feeds on social media. Plus I’ve been really enjoying the new GHB. Work and general idleness have prevented me from writing a lot of articles about it, but I’m loving AOS 4.5. After two events in a month, my only complaint is not ordering the battle tactics properly on the App. Seriously Gee Dubs, I don’t need to do any extra thinking.

So what to take when you want to compete at an event but not necessarily win? All my games in the GHB so far had been with my patented 5-drop, 120 Ghoul FEC list. I’d taken it to Cancon earlier this year and been flogged with it but with a few tweaks, I was running at 7/8 wins in this GHB with an event win already under my belt, and I wasn’t tired of playing it yet.

Unfortunately it’s a lot of bodies and a lot of time. At a less competitive event I can normally bully my opponents into accepting a few non Swede-approved movement techniques for large units of models.⁵ That wasn’t going to pass muster at an event that was probably going to produce enough finnicky measurement and clock-watching to turn the stomach of anyone but a European Worlds Team.

My initial plan was for an Ogor Monster Mash. I’d played against one at a Teams event and they looked like a lot of fun, and I do like to roll out the only genuine Destruction army from time to time.⁶ Still, it required painting my last Stonehorn kit and I would still be taking two Thundertusks to round out the list. A Monster Truck list featuring two Thundertusks would be an excellent opportunity to show the whining Destrosexuals who infest the Craichouse Patronage how a Destruction faction is meant to be run: with vim, vigor and an outside chance of bringing home a 3-2 result. But I’ve run fun lists before, and the enjoyment dries up by the third time some Giga Chad kicks the crap out of you with an S-Tier net list.

The other option was good ol’ Khorne. In the last GHB I’d hit on a competitive Mortal list format that was as good as guaranteed to produce a 4-1⁷ and there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t work again. Trouble is that I was a bit bored with running it, and I would probably spend the rest of the year playing Khorne with the sure-to-be-awesome new Battletome that was on the way. I mean, we are only getting a new foot hero, for the second Battletome in a row. That means that they must have put all the work into an awesome set of new rules, right? Right?

It was a quandry.

In the end I did what all gamers do in a pinch and threw a dice on it. To my instant regret Mawtribes won, but I wasn’t about to do a Joel McGrath and risk the wrath of the dice gods by changing my mind.⁸ I was taking the Mawtribes to an all-too-likely ass-kicking. With that in mind I crafted a list that would allow me to try out some new stuff and test a couple of ideas.

So, finally we have….

Generic Gore Pilgrims 38: I was born to walk alone. 1990/2000 pts

Ogor Mawtribes
Beast Handlers
Drops: 5
Prayer Lore – Everwinter Prayers

Battle Tactic Cards: Wrathful Cycles, Attuned to Ghyran

General’s Regiment
Frostlord on Stonehorn (330)
• General
• Mage-swallower
• Elixir of the Frostwyrm
Icebrow Hunter (100)

Regiment 1
Huskard on Thundertusk (270)
• 1x Chaintrap
Icefall Yhetees (100)
Icefall Yhetees (100)

Regiment 2
Huskard on Thundertusk (290)
• Touched by the Everwinter
• 1x Chaintrap
Icefall Yhetees (200)
• Reinforced

Regiment 3
Huskard on Stonehorn (300)
• 1x Chaintrap

Regiment 4
Huskard on Stonehorn (300)
• 1x Chaintrap

Faction Terrain
Great Mawpot

5 Monster Trucks, 4 Priests and a bunch of Yhetees. The idea of the list is to smash as much of the opposition up as possible with D3+3 mortals wounds on the charge from the Monsters, plus whatever they can manage in melee. The Frostlord is the star of the show with an auto-rampage that lets him move 2D6 inches after charging, along with the Mage Swallower Big Name that subtracts a point from enemy Wards in a 6″ bubble around him. For something different I gave him the Elixir of the Frostworm:

It adds a bit of survivability to what really is a butter-soft Monster these days, and can finish off a crucial unit when you get bogged down. It’s also one of those “I forgot to use it” artefacts, so we will see how it goes.

The other four Monster Trucks are all Priests. The Huskards on Stonehorns are a must-have for any BCR army. Their rampage can give Crit (Extra Hit) on Companion attacks from the other big boys, which can add up to a lot of damage, and they are fairly heavy hitters in their own right. The Thundertusks are …… less so. I mean they do have three 5-damage attacks, but it isn’t the least bit uncommon for them to do exactly nothing in combat. You do get to sing the “Thunder, Thunder, Thunder Tusks!” bit from the cartoon when they occasionally manage to do something, which is not nothing. More importantly they are also Priests and it is their job to cover the table with this:

With four Priests, one or two can bank points while the others can cover the board in obscuring terrain for the crucial 5++ Ward, giving the whole mess a bit of survivability. Plus the rest of the Prayer lore is really good, best in the game before Papa Nurgle got in on the act. One of the Tuskards took the Touched by the Everwinter trait to allow him to be the only other model in the game besides Zenestra to reroll ones for Prayers. Good stuff.

Between the Thundertusks and the Huskards there is a surprising amount of 4+ to hit shooting in the list. Famously useless even when you do remember to roll for it, but in a 5-game tournament you are going to be pleasantly surprised by the output at least once. Anyhow, if you wanted reliability you would play a Non-Destruction army like Gloomspite Gitz. I gave every unit a Chaintrap because it was easier to measure 12 inches on everything.

As for the rest of the list, I thought long and hard before saying fuck it and settling on Yhetees. Largely because I adore the models I have, they are the cheapest proper-unit wounds in the Ogor faction and they have a unique ability:

You can move out of combat with that as well. Surely it has to be useful at some point? Also 12 of the buggers on 50mm bases have a lot of board presence. Opponents do tend to take them way more seriously than they merit.

After some thought I swapped out a 3-man of Yhetis for an Icebrow Hunter. The Icebro is fairly useless but can deploy off-board and count as 5 on objectives, which is enough to win him a spot in a competition with Yhetees. He also adds a few more pieces of hilarious short-ranged, hits-on-4’s shooting to the army’s whiff count.

For any Mawtribes players reading this, I did consider Gnoblars and the relatively awesome Scourge of Ghyran Ironblaster, but decided against both. From a purist perspective I’ve never liked to cross the Gutbuster/Beastclaw Raider streams in my army and if I’m putting everything into securing a 5++ ward, I may as well take units that can use it. As for the Mawpot over the Mawpit, I still don’t own a Mawpit and I’m reluctant to buy models for an army that could be off to that great Legends pasture in the sky next edition.

For battle tactics I went with Wrathful Cycles and Attuned to Ghyran. In my previous games I’d gone with the Win More combination of Restless Energy and Intercept, but if I was going to get flogged at the OCC, I might as well try something different. Wrathful and Attuned are geared towards max points first turn. Hold the center and hold more objectives, and after that allow yourself a good chance to score if you are getting your ass kicked. The decision of which units to nominate for your opponent’s Intercept is pretty relevant these days and honestly, I’m kind of fucked. I guess Thundertusks in the hope that my opponent hits them instead of something useful.

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Anyhow, that’s it for me. I’ll be back in the next week or two with a wrap up on the events and my games.⁹ It’s great to be back in business. As always any complaints or criticisms can be directed to Editor Pete who loves dealing with that kind of shit. Unless you’re on Reddit and feel like commenting on how much you hate my writing style. This is your regular reminder that I hate your fucking face. See you next week.

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1. Without prize money attached, giving an Australian a ticket to an international event is handing them a bill for at least $3000. ↩︎
2. Not because they run bathhouses (as far as I know). Zak is the current captain of the Australian Worlds team, and JC has his hand in everything. ↩︎
3. Yes, I know we have to grow the next generation of hobbyists, I’d just rather it was done where I couldn’t see, hear or smell the process. Like making sausages. ↩︎
4. Some people regard it as a double standard to look down on other types of geek. I say take an objective look around next time you’re in a gaming store. Trust me, we’re the cool ones. ↩︎
5. “Ya see, I just sort of put the front ones forward and push the rest behind, like so. Overlapping bases? OK Karen. Lemme just fix those for you. Happy now?” ↩︎
6. Indifferent allegiance abilities, shitty warscrolls, propelled to greatness by a talented and dedicated player base. The polar opposite of Gitz and Orruk Warclans. ↩︎
7. 2 x 10 Skullreapers + Anvil + Wrathmongers. Daemons are strictly for schmucks. ↩︎
8. Joel once did a twitter poll and a live streamed dice roll for “What army do I take to an event?” and went against the results. ↩︎
9. Unless I get beaten so badly I can’t bear to write about it. ↩︎