Morvahna vs Old Witch 35 points

Thursday being the day that I typically manage to get in some games, this one was no different.  Made my way down to the Dice Dojo, first checked out the merchandise to see if there was anything I really wanted to procure.  After that a guy wanted to play a 35 point game, so I accepted and decided to play Morvahna.  He was playing Khador with the Old Witch.  Pretty sure this was his list (I think part or all of it was planned to be his partner's 1/2 of their team army for Adepticon)...

Old Witch
- Scrapjack
- Destroyer

Nyss Hunters (max)
Gun Carriage
Iron Fang Pikemen (max)
Gorman di Wulfe

I decided to bring what has been my fairly standard Morvahna list at 35 points, which looks like this...

Morvahna the Autumnblade
- Ghetorix
- Wold Guardian

Bloodtrackers (max)
- Nuala the Huntress
Warpborn Skinwalkers
Shifting Stones
- Stone Keeper

We decided to play a scenario, we rolled and randomly got Sacrifice.  The scenario information is located on page 28 of the SR2012 rules.  The biggest thing of importance is probably that its a radial scenario.  I won the die roll and opted to go first.

Deployment:

Pretty standard deployment I suppose.  I haven't played a lot of radial scenarios.  Seemed that the best bet was to try to jam up the control zone rather than going for a scenario win.  Bloodtrackers are up on the hill and selected the Scrapjack (proxied by a bone chicken) as Prey.  Skinwalkers in a wall in front of Morvahna, Ghetorix and Guardian on each side, and the Shifting Stones spread out in the middle.  In hindsight I think I should have maybe swapped the position of the Guardian and Ghetorix  As well as putting the Bloodtrackers more towards the left side of my deployment.  His deployment is pretty apparent, the darker models are the Nyss, the other unit being the Pikemen.

Round 1

Nothing too interesting here, just moved my Bloodtrackers to clog up the middle, everything else ran towards the 12" zone, denoted by the center being that tiny little purple-ish rock.  I just realized that I apparently failed to take a picture of his movements before I took my next turn, but you can see where he ended up.  Biggest thing of relevance is that he killed a few bloodtrackers with blast damage from the gun carriage, and tried to create a choke point with some crow spell of the Old Witch.  After that, he feated, which meant anything ending their movement in the Old Witch's control area takes an unboostable POW 14.

Round 2

This is where it starts to get interesting.  He moves up, the 4" AOE templates are from the Gun Carriage, and took out 3 or 4 of my Bloodtrackers.  Morvahna upkept both Harvest and Regrowth from turn one, and I placed all of the dead Bloodtrackers back into play.  The 5" AOE was trying to create a choke point, but I had just enough room for a small base to go through, so I moved all of the Bloodtrackers through it so that I could get into a good position to go after the Scrapjack and then the rest of his army.  Morvahna put Restoration on the Skinwalkers bringing them up to ARM 18 or ARM 20 in melee.  Everything else basically moved farther to the left as well.

My opponent again decided to move up to get closer.  He shot out several AOEs at me again as you can see, the Pikemen advanced and Shield Wall'd (they also happened to have Iron Flesh on them).  Nyss got closer to my Skinwalkers, with one of them I believe engaging after a run.  I'm also noticing that it seems like about 1/2 of my pictures that I had thought I had taken are missing, which is sort of annoying when trying to recreate this story, but doing my best here.

Round 3

I go ahead and replace some more Bloodtrackers with Regrowth, upkeep all of my spells.  I shift the stones into a position where I can threaten a teleport from either of my heavies, as well as Morvahna, while still putting them in a good place to utilize healing field if needs be.  Bloodtrackers swing around the forest, put a small bit of a hurting on the scrap jack.  My heavies move to basically block lanes to Morvahna and the Guardian helps her to be immune from blast damage.

On his turn he charges the Skinwalkers with the Nyss, which kills 2 of them is all, puts some damage on the others.  From there we have the interesting situation of ARM 20 + 8 boxes against POW12 + 3d6 vs DEF 15 against MAT 6.  Needless to say, these 2 units are quite tied up for the time being, and I'm ok with it that way.  He charges Ghetorix and a couple other things with the pikemen, knocks out the Mind on Ghetorix, doesn't do a whole lot else.  Lobs some more AOEs around, and Scrap Jack kills like 4-5 of my Bloodtrackers.

Round 4

This definitely got fun.  Shifting Stones did some healing in order to re-heal one of the Skinwalkers, the lost aspect on Ghetorix, some small damage that Morvahna had taken, and some damage on the Stone Keeper.  Then for the first time Ghetorix got to Warp Snacking!  He killed I think 5 of the pikemen and managed to erase all of the damage off of himself.  I managed to kill the other pike men and Scrap Jack with the blood trackers, cycling Prey from SJ to Pikemen to the Old Witch.  Might have managed to kill a single Nyss with my Skinwalkers, but mostly they just tie up the Nyss.

On his turn, he manages to finally kill off a couple more Skinwalkers, blasts some AOEs out there, one of which finishing off my shifting stone that was up front, thereby ruining my chance to end the game quickly (I was really hungry at this point).  He also, tried to move Gorman up to Black Oil some stuff, that didn't work, oil deviated completely away.  Just enough rough terrain around Ghetorix to stop him from getting very far.

Round 5

Bloodtrackers aren't going to be able to hit Old Witch because now she has Iron Flesh and she's in an AOE, so instead the move up, kill off a couple of things, notably Gorman and get closer to the witch.  The Nyss and Skinwalkers continue to be tied up.  Then my Wold Guardian gets a charge on the Gun Carriage and that's deadski.  The rest of my army does its best to close the distance so that I can take out the 'jack and the old witch.

He tries to get some more damage out with the Nyss and doesn't get very far.  He does manage to kill my Guardian with the Destroyer.

Round 6

Basically, Ghetorix tries to kill the Destroyer, rolled awful damage, but there they are all tied up.  Bloodtrackers took some shots at the old witch, I might have hit with one or 2 of them, but they were long odds.  Morvahna gets into a good position to not get attacked, but be able to do something useful later.

I'm starting to get sort of fuzzy, but I think the Destroyer might have killed Ghetorix, or they were still just tied up in melee, doesn't make much difference.

Round 7

Bloodtrackers all charged the old witch in her AOE, it killed all of them.  Morvahna charges the old witch, and either took the damage or transfered it, again, fuzzy.  Boost to hit, boost damage and we're done here after a VERY long game.

Conclusions

This game went pretty slowly to be honest.  My beasts sort of got a little too clustered up, and I need to remember to abuse the fact that my Guardian stops blast damage if you stay close to it.  Probably against a list with only a few shots I can let my Skinwalkers go and try to do some more damage elsewhere.  Considering looking into ways of getting Ghetorix some Pathfinder as that hindered him a ton.

Morvahna continues to be strong at attrition against lists that don't have upkeep removal.