Battle Report - Death Guard vs Eldar Corsairs

My first Warhammer 40K game of 2016 was against my good friend Richard McManus. I haven't had a game against him for a couple years now I don't think so I was really looking forward to this. He has bought into the a Forge World Eldar corsair army and wanted to give it a try. He didn't have much and I still won't play any Death Guard who aren't painted so it was a small game of just 1000 points.

I remember the old FW corsair list was quite nasty. I never played against it but I did watch a couple games. At the time I found them, like their craftworld cousins, rather too good. This time around they seem much more balanced. Their psychic powers are a bit odd but can be tactical and strangely they have their own perils of the warp table that makes me wonder why you would ever include a Void Dreamer in your army. A roll of 1 turns the psyker into a daemon of Slaanesh and goes over to your opponent's control! That never happened however.

The mission was the awkward Tactical Escalation. We faced off against one another and I was a little surprised at what was fielded by my opponent. He had a prince, a void dreamer, two squads of basic corsairs, 2 units of jetbikes, so vyper type things (maybe hornet's?) and a warp hunter. I wasn't expecting quite so much in the way of vehicles but that made it much more of a challenge. One unit of corsairs and both HQ's sat in reserve ready to leap from the webway to cause me problems.

My list was a basic level 3 sorcerer, a 5 man squad of csm, two squads of 10 man plague marines (with 2 meltaguns each), a rhino and a helbrute. I had been expecting more ground troops but as I still don't have much painted this was what I could managed to field.

Usually in these missions I find myself overwhelmed by the number of capture objective cards I draw so I made a point of starting next to the two objectives in my deployment zone. I then didn't see a capture objective card until the last turn when I was uncannily sitting with a single model on that very objective. My opponent on the other hand simply swept forward and starting grabbing a perfect set of objective cards. Oddly though, we seemed to draw the same ones throughout the game.

The Warp Hunter proved to be the biggest pain in the backside as it just sat there at the back and pummeled my forces. I lost so much to that tank that quickly I realised that there was no way I was going to pull a win out of this game. Two attempts at summoning plaguebearers and my sorcerer suffered a perils from one, losing a wound, and the second deviated and went into ongoing reserves. Neither unit did much more than be a speedbump for the corsair warriors.

My sorcerer went down to a warlord challenge before even getting a chance to swing his staff. By that point I was resigned to my fate so I didn't worry. The game ended turn 6 I think when my last model came off the table. Richard had beaten me 15 vp to 1 vp.

It was a fun game despite the crushing loss. Corsairs... Interesting to play against. We're going to have a rematch in a couple weeks and we'll see what transpires then.