BattleTech Tournament Report: Carolina Classic 2026

Hey there, MechWarriors! By now most of you have probably read Liberty's account of beating the pants off of yet another Classic BattleTech tournament through the almighty power of Bear Violence. But must history only be written by the victors? Read on if you'd like to see what life is like on the OTHER side of the win/loss spectrum!

THE JOURNEY

With the Carolina Classic being in Greenville, SC as opposed to Southern Assault's North Carolina home, I was actually significantly closer to the venue than my more northerly friends this time, and I also wasn't driving through the aftermath of a blizzard (regardless of what panicked Atlantans might tell you), so I reached the Airbnb waaaay before everyone else. I had no idea what the door code was, but fortunately, I was armed with both an audiobook of Dracula (a book which holds up shockingly well, um, aside from the racism) and my nail polish supplies, so I actually had a pretty pleasant wait, and got my Marik Militia colors on for the tournament!

Unfortunately, in the moment I chose the most unflattering angle possible for a photo of my hand, and by the time I wrote this article they were chipped to all hell. Oops. Photo Credit: Lynn B.

I got a chance to play practice games of mission 1 and 2 against Tentacle and Liberty the night before the tourney and my dice were absolutely cursed. In two subsequent games I failed a basic 5+ piloting roll to stand my Flashman, hit its head during the fall, and had my pilot go unconscious off the pilot damage (once by rolling snakes on a 3+). It was my fervent hope that this bad luck wouldn't follow me into the tournament itself…

THE LIST

After testing a few alternatives which felt anemic into Liberty's Bears and Tentacle's ATM spam, I made the decision to try to go high-lethality, Inner Sphere Shitbox style. I built off Free Worlds League availability, since Purple Birb Strong reaches one of its purest expressions during the Word of Blake Jihad in the form of the Flashman 9M. Good ol’ Flashy was joined by a pair of IntroTech Banshees, the 3S (best-in-class Intro Assault) and 3Q (the funny one armed with only an AC/20 and fists), a Crusader 7W (which I am sad to admit is NOT as toothy as a Longbow 13C, contrary to what I put in the Heavy Mechs Championship article; I misread the Longbow's stats and missed the fifth and sixth MML-7s, but I do love my painted Crusader so YOLO), the good ol’ Blitzkrieg 3F for psychological impact, and a squad of Longinus (Magnetic) Battle Armor. Most of the list was 4/5, but the 3Q Banshee got a bump to 4/4 and the BA were 4/2 for anti-mech fun. The Banshees both had Precision AC ammo loaded, and the Crusader had a ton of Infernos for both its 9-tube and 5-tube launchers shoved in amongst its too-much-ammo.

If you've read Peri's analysis of the missions, you'll note a… mismatch, let's say, between this list and the priorities of the packet. Namely, while fairly tough and shooty, my list was slow. The Blitzkrieg was my fastest asset at 7/11, and with the Battle Armor mag-clamped on it was slowed to 6/9. This kind of speed disadvantage did not stop Liberty, but I'm afraid I'm much more representative of the Average Jane commander in this writing posse, and it definitely stung me. I'll break the pros and cons of this list down a bit more in my conclusions section.

I don't have the income, or really the painting bandwidth, to have a full set of bespoke mechs for every tournament I play, and when I settled on my list I already had two Banshees, a Flashman, and a Crusader painted… all in different paint schemes! Rationalizing that it would be weirder if some of the units’ schemes matched and others didn't than if none of them matched, I went ahead and painted the Blitzkrieg and the battle armor in new schemes for a completely variegated force.

My multicolored masters of mayhem, my misfit marauders! Photo Credit: Lynn B.

THE EVENT

I was the last to get my food at the Waffle House by a wide margin, but fortunately my ride didn't leave me in the time it takes me to inhale double hashbrowns all the way (and fortunately the tournament venue was close enough I could've walked if they had), I was a bit concerned about the host store looking at it from the outside, but it truly did seem Bigger On The Inside. I always find it interesting to see the differences in complexion between various game stores, and the vibe I got from Game Kastle Greenville's stock levels was that they had a much stronger Warmachine scene than my home stores in Atlanta, and an interestingly different array of hobby paint/pigment/basing material/etc vendors, but less investment in BattleTech. That was just a touch frustrating since they were offering 10% off of BattleTech to tournament participants as a thank you, but the only real draws for me out of what they had were the Black Remnant pack (which I only want for the Blood Asp and Flashman #2) and the vees box with the Hetzers (which begs the question of whether I don't play more vees because I don't have more vees, or if having more vees wouldn't change that). Still, I came away with a cool clearanced metal-era Warmachine Satyxis pirate queen mini which I'll probably end up using as a Tiefling PC somewhere down the line, so I can't complain too much!

ROUND ONE: KNOCK DOWN

First round pairings were completely random. I was matched against Nathan, a really nice guy, but inexperienced with the game; he'd been pulled along to the tournament by his brother. He was running a fairly nasty Ghost Bear list which felt a bit like a Bizarro World version of Liberty's squad: Kodiak 4 for bear violence, Rifleman IIC for large pulse hate, and two points of Elementals (both flamer-armed) for a sprinkling of battle armor, but where Liberty doubled down on bears, the list Nathan was piloting brought extra speed in the form of the always-dangerous Fire Moth H and an Arctic Cheetah Prime. His entire force was at basic 4/5 skills.

This game started off on a strong note for me: The Fire Moth zoomed up to try to eviscerate my Blitzkrieg as I prepped it to make its own attack run, but through the power of God and Anime (AKA heavy woods), the Blitzy took almost no damage, while the Fire Moth lost half of its body to a precision AC/10 round from the Banshee 3S. From there, though, things went… less well. The Rifleman IIC did its thing and rained accurate hate from long range, and the oncoming bear distracted me from the real approaching threat: the Arctic Cheetah, which was doing a good job of making itself hard to kill by hopping from woods to woods as it neared my objective building.

This Fire Moth ran into the wroooong neighborhood. Photo Credit: Lynn B.

By Turn 4 I'd failed to do any particularly significant damage to him past the bifurcation of the Fire Moth, and hadn't managed to ID his commander. Worse, the Arctic Cheetah and its Elementals reached my objective building. I'd gotten my Blitzkrieg into position to take a shot at his building, but 1.) I missed, where his guys were adjacent and couldn't miss, and 2.) the full auto-hitting damage of an Arctic Cheetah Prime and a point of flamer Elementals outstrips the damage of a UAC/20 double-tap anyway, so I couldn't have won the damage race on that turn anyway. I feel like I could've potentially still pulled the game out from there - only the Banshee 3Q had taken significant damage, and I would've had decent positioning going into Turn 5, buuut between my opponent's inexperience and my own lack of sufficient urgency, we were out of time for the round. He'd done objective building damage where I hadn't, and a crippled Fire Moth could hardly make up that difference, so I had an extremely low-scoring loss.

Alas, undone by a critcial failure in base defense. Photo Credit: Lynn B.

Between rounds I had my first MRE experience - everything was edible, and the blackberry jam was a real highlight! Definitely a solid “I can't be arsed to eat an actual meal on my tournament lunch break” option, and it left me time to do some shopping and chatting before the inevitable arrival of…

ROUND TWO: DRAG OUT

This round was frustrating for me, though that was in no part due to my opponent. I pulled West, Liberty's round-one victim, as my second-round opponent. Like Liberty said, while he's new to BattleTech he's a very solid player overall, doing a great job of translating his 40k skills to this new and very different arena.

No, what was frustrating was how very close I came to victory and how capriciously the mission rules yanked that away from me. The flow of the game saw his Spider and Dragon press towards the more-accessible of my two MREs, defended by my Banshees, while my Flashman pushed to try to dislodge his Catapult from its sniper spot, my Blitzkrieg went after the sniping Warhammer, and my Crusader tried to help against targets of opportunity from midfield. His Spider fell during a secondary-points-grabbing DFA attempt on the BNC-3S and got itself crippled soon after, and while my cursed standing-up-roll luck somewhat continued and got my 3S stuck on the floor and surrounded by enemies, the Spider and the Dragon had too much armor to chew through and weren't able to cripple it. My Flashman survived inadvisably becoming the meat in a Grasshopper/Dragon sandwich, my Blitzkrieg shredded an enormous amount of armor off the Warhammer and simultaneously managed to pick up the MRE on its first, 7 or 8+ TN, attempt... Things were looking good!

Unfortunately, we weren't playing with horseshoes or hand grenades... Photo Credit: Lynn B.

Then, disaster struck. My Blitzkrieg took over 20 damage from the Warhammer while running away with the box. It failed its 6+ piloting roll to avoid falling down. It failed a second PSR and lost control of its MRE. And then, despite my attempts to follow in Liberty's footsteps by helping West with TN math and heat… we were out of time, again at four rounds played. And while the Warhammer had no armor left on the entire right side of its body and likely wouldn't have survived a fifth round, it was alive. In the accounting of scores, we both got points for retaining control of our MREs (since I'd dropped the one I picked up in his territory), I got points for crippling the Spider… and he won off the points for having attempted a DFA. 15-12.

If I'd held onto the box, I would've won. If I had had jump jets anywhere in my list other than on battle armor, I would've won. But he could attempt a DFA and I couldn't, and my PSR doom continued to tell on me. That hurt, with my only consolation being that mission 2 was low-scoring for everyone (I am counting 49 points as “low scoring” for Liberty, since it's exactly half his next-lowest score in this tournament [that man is a monster]).

Paint voting took place between rounds 2 and 3. We each got one poker chip and could only vote for our single favorite paint scheme, which broke my heart; there were several folks who really did a great job, and I would've loved to have spread my flowers! I'll share more on painting in the results section of this report.

ROUND THREE: FIGHT

Dean, my third round opponent, remembered me from our previous encounter in the first round of Summer Fever II, and fortunately didn't hold that against me! He was running a mildly-upskilled FedSuns list, with an Orion MD and Hatchetman 6D toting RACs, the DG “Double Gauss” Jagermech, a Thunderbolt 9S, and the somewhat-underwhelming Trebuchet 7M.

We were playing on the bottom table, and Dean had been there the round before, and I had played on the other side of that neoprene in the previous round, so the TO quickly shuffled things around to give us a new map and we landed on Caustic Valley. It's a pretty terrible map when played short edge or with certain objectives (as I recall our friend Connor played Round 2 on it and his opponent was able to legally place an MRE in a position which was literally unreachable without jump jets due to the elevation changes!), but for a long-edge kill mission I thought it was actually quite fun. We largely dueled over the denser half of the map, and the biggest empty space in the middle of the map was broken up by a 2-level “dropship” template, so there were ample opportunities to play line-of-sight-breaking games, especially for Dean's jumping mechs.

Unfortunately for Dean, my list simply brought more violence to this matchup. Turn 1 I knocked the LRM arm off the Trebuchet and rattled it badly enough that it spent the rest of the mission defensively jumping around at the extreme edges of the fight and contributing nothing of import. Turn 2 my Blitzkrieg ran up on the Jagermech, ate its gauss rounds without significant damage, then blew the Jager's head off with an UAC/20 shell (and landed the double-tap, so even if one hadn't gone head, the Jager would not have had a good time). The same turn, the Thunderbolt missed its secondary-points-seeking Charge against the BNC-3Q due to its piloting upgrade turning the piloting-differential modifier against him and got savaged in the process. Turn 3 I turned most of my attention to the Orion and one of my BNC-3S's lasers touched off an ammo bin and killed it, while the 3Q landed its own vengeance charge against the Thunderbolt to get me those bonus points.

Where the killing started... Photo Credit: Lynn B.

Throughout those initial turns I'd managed to keep my Flashman 9M glued to his Hatchetman; despite its greater speed, he kept jumping it in places where I could bring the close-range lasers to bear and I was simply wearing its armor away with all the inexorable inevitability of the tide. On turn 4 the Flashman got into one of its side torsos and left its structure points on single digits, perilously close to death-by-Inner-Sphere-XL-engine. Unfortunately for the Hatchetman, the Thunderbolt had moved out of line-of-sight of the Crusader that turn, so I YOLO-lobbed LRMs at the Hatchetman from downtown. My TN was shitty, but I had plenty of ammo and heat capacity, so I had no reason to not pull the trigger… and then BattleTech Ensued.

The MML-9s both missed. One five-pack hit. The Hatchetman's ECM turned off my Artemis. Three missiles hit it. The 3-damage cluster didn't go to its open torso, but rather hit its head. The pilot rolled snake eyes and lost consciousness. The unconscious pilot couldn't stop the Hatchetman from falling over due to having taken 20+ damage.

And it fell directly on its open side torso. RIP.

Moments before the Hatchetman was unmade. Photo Credit: Lynn B.

We played a quick fifth round which saw the Trebuchet jump out of LoS and the Thunderbolt back down an alley with my conga-line-of-doom following it. He did manage to score a small moral victory by pushing my Blitzkrieg over the line to “Crippled,” but I crippled the Thunderbolt, and while we could probably have squeezed a sixth round in given how little decision space he had left open to him, I declined to beat the proverbial dead horse any further. 104-38 victory for me!

Where it ended. Photo Credit: Lynn B.

RESULTS

Purely on the strength of my final round, I landed at 12th place, ahead of Tentacle but behind other friends-of-the-blog Connor and Saracens. Despite being a smaller tournament with less backing than Southern Assault V, they'd managed to pull together enough prize support to let everybody get something, and I took home a couple of cute little 3D-printed hovercraft to expand my motor pool.

Josh (Crunchy_penguin), Alex (Commissar Planet), and Ryan (GeekyFrignit, who will be the TO of WarZone Atlanta's BT tournament in May) rounded out the three top-ranked generals beneath Generalissimo Liberty, and Virginia-based tournament organizer Thiel (obsidiananubis) took Best Sport. I also want to give a shout-out to former Atlanta-area TO Clamps and Ryan's son Rand (who's a better BattleTech player than many folks three times his age) for ending up just off the podium rankings by virtue of absolutely clobbering each other in a high-violence Jade Falcon civil war in Round 3, tying at 105 points by nearly tabling each other.

I'm used to player-voted paint rankings letting everyone nominate their top three, but fortunately competition was stiff enough that not everyone agreed on a #1! Still, 21 of the 32 participants didn't get a single vote, and the top three shook out with 5, 5, and 4 votes, respectively.

Joshua Hysong's 1st Crucis Lancers took first place! Photo Credit: Lynn B.

My vote went to these phenomenal Periphery champions painted by Matt Knapp! Photo Credit: Lynn B.

Will Parr's Snow Ravens took third place! Photo Credit: Lynn B.

I feel extremely honored to have received one painting vote (one more than Liberty! X-P ), on the strength of my variety of freehand. I was idly chatting with a guy who was looking at my models, saying how no one was going to vote for me because not even their bases matched, when he set his poker chip down then and there! I can't honestly say I deserved it, but thank you, stranger, for the little ego boost!

CONCLUSIONS

You may notice that I never really mentioned my battle armor in my round-to-round writeups. Sadly, this is because I completely misplayed them every round, too focused on dropping them someplace protected quickly so that 1.) they wouldn't get shot on their deployment turn and 2.) I could get the Blitzkrieg back to 7/11 speed ASAP, and they basically never engaged in a significant fight ever. I was actually in range to fire the heavy machine guns maybe twice, at medium range, and they never hit anything, the regular MGs didn't do much better, and Anti-Mech 2 never came into play. In the future I don't think I'm likely to bring magnetic BA unless I have either an alternate delivery system (non-mag-clamp) or they're mounted on a jumping unit (whose jump MP isn't penalized by mag-clamps); the slow ground speed just throws me off.

The Banshees did great work across all three rounds. People are not prepared for the kind of TNs you can get with large-bore Precision AC rounds, and with their basic tech they're cheap bricks who won't die unless you find their ammo crits. The 3S requires just a touch of care with heat-management, but nothing too taxing.

I still love the Flashman 9M, but it is simply a truth that its real value is in the short-range laser light show; the HPPCs routinely disappoint me with their slightly-awkward range bands and the swingy nature of firing a small number of high-damage guns. As a result, it's a much better mech for long-edge fighting than for short-edge, and that very much played out here.

The Crusader 7W is a bit clumsy, and like most MML mechs it can't show its true value until it gets to SRM range, AND there's only a scant handful of minor reasons to take it over the Longbow 13C, but I do love the look of a Crud, and at least the MML-5s are in the side torsos and not the legs! It does die easy with so much ammo in it, though; in all my test games it was the first victim to pop, and I was shocked it made it through the entire tournament intact (even after catching an unlikely long-range LB-20 slug from the Kodiak 4 on an 11 to-hit roll early in round one!).

Play speed continues to be an issue that haunts me. I feel certain I would've won my round two game if we'd gone the full eight turns, and I might have won the first given more turns as long as the Rifleman IIC didn't (successfully) turn on the Blitzrieg and kill it. I am beginning to realize that the ability to press your opponent politely is actually an important tournament skill. Liberty is phenomenal at that (between his system mastery, cowboy charm, and, uh, ability to kill at least one mech a turn so that your decision space narrows quickly), and Simeon, the guy who tabled me in my first tournament (on his own way to victory through overwhelming violence), also did a good job of pushing me through that game. Classic BattleTech is a sufficiently difficult game that any skilled player is likely to get paired into someone slower at some point in any given tournament, and the culture of play around BT is never going to occasion answers like chess clocks (which I feel would be overkill anyway).

I keep commonly ending up at four rounds played in normal-length tournament rounds, and Time-to-Kill in Classic is such that short-edge games really need to get to round 5 to reach a decisive result, I feel (unless you're bringing absolute ultraviolence, I suppose; Liberty quite possibly feels differently). I think I've finally gotten to the point where I'm at a decent speed with my own TN math, but I don't have such system mastery that I comprehend the state of the whole table at all times and can math out my opponent's shots as quickly as my own, and I think that's probably necessary for consistent dominance on a Liberty sort of scale (It really isn't just the bears; I just had a conversation with him the other day about how several other Clan assaults could run the table the same way if you're allowed to double up on them, and he's also shown dominance with Periphery Bullshit like Task Force Stampede's Precision AC/20 spam).

Still, I'm the only component I can control in any given tournament setting, and I'm simply going to try to up my reps with my list between now and Brawl in the Bluegrass to see if I can run it just a bit more smoothly. It helps that my list for that has no LB/Xes and minimal SRM spam, so rolling should go quicker.

SPECIAL THANKS

I want to take a whole section here to say thank you, reader! Here in the floating, skull-shaped fortress that is Supreme Goonhammer HQ, it's easy for me to get lost in my head and focus on, say, Reddit complaining because I gave someone's favorite IntroTech mech a C-, or to spiral into Imposter Syndrome-y feelings because I’m not as skilled at this game as Liberty or as experienced as Valk or as amusingly hyperbolic as Peri, and so on. The absolute greatest gift this tournament gave me was another chance to interact face-to-face with readers who enjoy our (inclusive of my) work here at Goonhammer! I love this game and its universe, and it means so much to hear that I’ve succeeded in sharing some of that joy with y’all! You are what makes the work we put into this site worthwhile. In all sincerity, thank you for following my tournament journey and the rest of our BattleTech coverage!

Until next time, may the Peace of Blake be with you / the Great Father watch over you / all your House scrip spend like cash, delete as appropriate!

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Tags: tournament report | Battletech | Carolina Classic