The World Team Championships returned and concluded four weeks ago, with Team Australia taking home the gold. This week we’re talking with some of the players from the event about their experiences, with an assist from the Art of War team. Today we’re joined by Matt Morosoli, who helped Team Australia take home the gold.

Before we dig in, it’s important to note a few things:

1. The WTC is a teams event. If you’re unfamiliar, you can find a primer on team 40k events here.
2. WTC used a pods system similar to FIFA for pairings, where teams were placed into pods for early matchups, with pod winners advancing.
3. WTC uses differential scoring (also referred to as “20-0”), where a player scores points for their team based on the difference between their VP score and the opponent’s at the end of the game. A margin of victory of 50+ VP awards 20 points for the victor and 0 for the loser, while a game with a differential of 5 VP or fewer will award both players 10 points.
4. The WTC uses its own terrain setups, which are uniquely dense compared to many other layouts you frequently see at other events.

WTC Terrain Example

Matt's Recap

Fresh off a podium finish in the warmaster GT and 26 hours or so on a plane between Melbourne and Belgium, I was ready to roll at the first ever World Team Championship. This was my second time playing the ETC/WTC format in Europe and for those who don’t know, we take this format really seriously in Australia. While a lot of Americans spend their year preparing for the LVO, we spend it preparing for ATC - which is our smaller WTC-style format where teams from each state attend and play a pseudo WTC.



I was piloting a MSU drukhari list featuring grotesques, incubi, hellions, smash characters, and bloodbrides - we had built this to trade into other melee armies such as sisters and Blood Angels as well as being able to trade with some of the Necron lists that we were expecting to see. After a few years of preparing to be allowed into Europe, we had assembled what I believed to be 8 of the best players in Australia - supported by an awesome coaching staff - we felt we were ready to challenge the podium and maybe even take a win. As everyone already knows we were successful in taking out not only the win, but also the award for the Most Sporting Team, which I’m incredibly proud of!

So how did it go playing a book that only a handful of teams decided was good enough to take? Let’s find out!

Round 1: vs. Greece (Blood Angels)

I played against the Greek Blood Angels list in our first round of the event, fairly comfortable that I could trade with the army, as it was one of the matchups we’d practiced a lot for the Drukhari. I was able to essentially deploy on the line, making sure to screen my key units from the Forlorn Fury pregame move of the Death Company and begin attacking objectives. My opponent deployed in a castle and because we were playing Data-Scry Salvage, a few of my units were able to attack the left side of the board while the majority of my army was able to attack the right side closer to his castle. After 3 turns of trading grotesques and incubi for sanguinary guard and Death Company I had too many units left and was able to rack up the points in the last few turns of the game. The key mistake my opponent made, and a lot of BA players make, was putting infiltrators out on both of the objectives that are close to the corner of the board; this gives fast combat armies something to charge on turn 1 to take even more board space, and this set up a situation where he had very little to hold objectives outside of combat-trading units. The game ended 18-2 Win for the DE.

Round 2: vs. Finland (Adepta Sororitas)

The sisters matchup was another one that I had practiced a lot and was very comfortable going into. Unfortunately I had to go first, and in all of our practice we’d seen that for the heavy-trading playstyle, the 2nd turn added 5-10 points on the final turn, sometimes even more if the sisters player can adequately defend the shrine. A unit of sacresants holding an objective managed to tank both a unit of incubi and then my bloodbrides which was incredibly frustrating, costing me 4 primary points in each turn where this happened. After attacking that objective for a few turns and failing to crack it, as well as removing some of the zephrym, retributors and repentia from my opponents other flank, I was informed by one of my coaches that the round was safely won. At this point I stopped attacking my opponents objectives, shoved as much obsec on my home objectives as possible and rode out the game.

The net result was a 9-11 Loss for the Drukhari. I do think this was winnable if I kept attacking however there was also the possibility that we could drop a few more points if I did so - this event is a marathon, not a sprint and it was definitely less mentally taxing to hang back and take the draw (or close to it).

Round 3: vs. Warhammer Undivided (Adepta Sororitas)

After playing sisters in round 2, I was paired into an almost identical matchup in game 3. At this point my fatigue clearly started to show; I made a few pretty key mistakes in deployment that got the game off to a really rough start with my opponent able to secure a 12 primary on the first turn, courtesy of me deploying my units too far back to adequately attack the centre objective where he had planted some novitiates. As the mission was The Scouring, he was also able to cash in 15 points on sacred ground on the first turn which is an incredibly powerful thing to be able to do. Further problems began to show in the second turn where I had deployed some of my hellions and grotesques too far away from my opponent and wasn’t able to make any relevant charges, ending up giving my opponent a 2nd 12 on primary in the second turn. Our game really turned in turn 3, i failed a few relatively short charges, including one on a rhino as a part of a multicharge, allowing some repentia to live, and another charge on some zephrym, this really cascaded into primary denial and the game kind of falling apart. While I was able to hold on for a few more turns, my opponent took away any ability for me to score effectively and managed to secure a maximum win of 0-20 Loss in favor of the Sisters.

Round 4: vs. Sweden (Adepta Sororitas)

Confident that my two losses to sisters on Day 2 were primarily the result of bad luck and fatigue, I volunteered myself to play against the Swedish Sisters player in game 4. We had built the Drukhari to do well into sisters and in our practice games, it had. Jonathan's list was very similar to the previous two lists I had played against, however it also featured a Castigator. On turn 1 my opponent sent a unit of novitiates into my unit of haemoxytes and was able to completely remove them from the board. I was pretty amazed this happened, however upon reflection and checking the math they kill about 7, so killing 10 isn't necessarily the biggest swing in the world. I retaliated by killing the novitiates and tagging a rhino my opponent had placed in preparation to countercharge my army the following turn.

On the second turn he pushed up into a couple of the ruins that were really effective at staging his combat units and was clearly preparing to begin attacking the center and my primary - I countercharged these units with my bloodbrides who were able to kill an entire unit of zephrym and a unit of retributors at the same time, a unit of hellions was also able to wrap a rhino so the repentia could not disembark which was able to buy me an extra turn of holding primary and trading down on the sisters. My opponent countercharged and killed these units, however I was able to retaliate and remove those units with my final trading pieces. I was able to rack up my last few secondary points and ended the game with a 12-8 Win for the Drukhari.

 

Round 5: vs. USA (T'au Empire)

This is definitely where things started to heat up. At this point the US and AUS were the only undefeated teams and we had done a lot of prep into their lists. Unfortunately at the end of the pairings process I ended up pairing into Jack’s Tau - not a great matchup, and even worse when the majority of tables where I could safely hide were gone. I spent a lot of time in deployment screening off the planes trying to protect the hellions, as they are very effective at killing the Sunshark bombers. However I couldn't do this and also hide from the Crisis Suits. I was resigned to the fact that if I went first I would have a chance to move stuff into terrain and hide and I could probably play for 5 points, however if I went second I was probably going to get tabled very quickly. I lost the roll off (and most of my army) when Jack went first and aggressively pushed the battlesuit brick, planes and commanders into firing lanes, and i lost a lot of my trading pieces to this. I was able to swing back and kill a few small units of kroot, a plane, most of a hammerhead and a commander, but after a second shooting phase I was mostly tabled and unable to score primary. I made a few attempts at denying the T'au some points, and did take some primary away from them, however it wasn’t enough to secure any meaningful points. 1-19 Loss for the Drukhari.

Round 6: vs. England (Chaos Knights)

My run of being auto paired at the end of the process continued as I played the Big knight + 10 war dogs list from England. As we’re now only playing the 5 objective missions my opponent was forced to send knights centrally to hold the objective in the middle and this opened up opportunities for me to try and trade down on them. I felt confident, because of the big knight, that if I could kill enough of the small ones I could make a play to score a few points, we were projecting 5 out of the mission and I was told on turn 3 that it really needed to be an 8 or a 9. My hellions and bloodbrides removed two knights on their own on turn 1 and my archon removed a third. I was pretty happy with this and confident that if I was able to do this again on the second turn my opponent would run out of steam. I lost the hellions, archon, bloodbrides and some incubi in retaliation but was able to pick up a further two knights in the second turn, as well as removing all of the knights capable of getting to the center on my opponent's third turn.

After trading knights back and forth I was able to push my remaining units into the middle of the board, ready to attack my opponents home primary on my turn 4 and 5, by this point there were only 2 small knights as well as the big boy remaining - once my ObSec was turned off the only way to hold primary was to actually kill these knights. A unit of four incubi was able to take out the War Dog Executioner on his backfield and then miraculously rolled a 1 for Retrieve Nephilim Data on the final turn to let me finish that objective. The game ended with my opponent having only the big knight in the centre and with me holding all of the other objectives, despite this, my secondaries were average and my opponent scored very well. This game ended in a 10-10 Draw for both players.

 

Round 7: vs. Poland (Chaos Knights)

As the US had lost to Poland in round 6, this was the championship game. Both teams knew it and it was super exciting playing for the win in the inaugural WTC! I was paired into Chaos Knights again and despite not really liking the matchup I felt confident that I had some play into it after drawing the previous round. Once again we were expecting about 5 points from the matchup, however knowing that Poland only needed a draw to win the event and we needed to win, we knew that pushing was likely going to be required. This list had all small knights and summoning; no big knight this time.

The game played out very similarly to the previous one, however there were a number of times where knights lived on one or two wounds, giving my opponent additional primary points when I was trying to remove them from objectives. Unfortunately by turn 3 my opponent had racked up 2 12 point primary turns and i’d only managed to kill one knight at this stage, despite there being 4 or 5 on the board with less than 4 wounds - when you have so many small knights it’s really easy to recycle them and move the wounded ones away to not give bring it down. In my third turn I had setup to charge and kill 3 of the wounded knights and unfortunately failed all of the dread tests. One unit still managed to get into combat and killed the knight I had charged, but the other 2 failed their charges. To add insult to injury I lost one grotesque out of a unit that failed a dread test charge, proceeded to fail morale and the remaining 2 grotesques ran! At this point the game was looking like it would be close to a zero, however I was able to finish off a number of the wounded knights, played for a 12 primary in the last turn, secured a third RND and propped my score up enough to secure a 4-16 loss for the Drukhari.

 

Final Thoughts

In hindsight I think we made a pretty bad meta call with the list, we felt like it would scrap with melee armies a lot better than it did, and when things went badly they tended to go catastrophically, you can’t scrap for points when your opponent picks a light table and they table your army. There were a number of places in pairings where we felt the list was useful, however it was more often a liability in the tougher rounds, which led it to be left until the end to play whatever was left and it was my job to try and scrap for points - sometimes successfully, other times not so much.

Regardless, I really enjoyed playing this list at the WTC, as I’ve been playing DE for the better part of the last year and a half. I felt like the faction mastery I had was pretty on point and I was able to score points in games other players may not have been able to. This was a theme for Team Australia this year, we all played factions we were really familiar with and had played for a long time, rather than chopping and changing to what we felt were the 8 best individual lists. I had 7 great games against great opponents and I can't wait to come back and do it all again next year!

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.

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