I hate to admit it, but I’ve spent most of the spring so far in a little bit of a hobby and gaming slump.

Not because I’m upset with the state of Kill Team, mind you. To be honest, I’m pretty pleased with the larger meta for the most part. Aside from a few exceptions, most of the teams are in the Goldilocks zone of balance, which is a very exciting time to play the game. If I could, I’d be playing more!

But there’s the rub: “If I could.” The first few months of my year were extraordinarily busy. Between juggling the demands of a hectic work life and trying my best to be a good dad and dutiful husband, my energy has been wiped. I’ve gotten some hobby stuff done that I’m proud of for sure (getting featured on WarCom with my Prince Yriel was, and still is, awesome), but there’s been many times where I just don’t really have the bandwidth to paint. So, I play some video games and do my best to not think at all.

Credit: Dan "Swiftblade" Richardson

Compounding this, my last tournament outing at Clutch City didn’t quite go as well as I’d liked. I went from a really strong 6-3 showing at LVO last year to a 2-3 record at Clutch with the very same team, Nemesis Claw, and that stung a bit. Losing sucks, but what really got under my skin was the feeling that those losses came because I made mistakes that I know not to make. I don’t like getting salty with my opponent when I lose, but with myself? Oh I can get real annoyed with that guy.

Someone wiser than me long ago said the best way to break out of a slump is to switch things up a bit, rather than just keeping with the same thing, and with my schedule returning to something approaching normal I decided to sign up for a one-day tournament with a very different team than I’m used to, with about two weeks to assemble, paint, and practice with.

Credit: Games Workshop

I caught the bug; the Kill Team bugs to be specific. It’s Vespid time.

Painting Vespids, Paw Patrol, and a Practice Game

There’s nothing like an impending deadline to really get you to paint with purpose.

One of the reasons I ended up giving Vespid a try was that the team seemed simple enough to paint to get me out of a hobby funk. The last team I’d gotten fully painted was Canoptek Circle, and that was all the way back in fall 2025. I missed the satisfaction of getting a whole team painted and putting it on the table, and came up with a paint scheme in my head that would marry looking good with painting quickly.

The plan was to lean hard into contrast paints and drybrushing on the main body and wings to get the job done fast, with a more traditional paint on the armor and weapons, since they’re flatter and wont take as well to the contrast. I didn’t want to go too deep down into the rabbit hole of highlighting, I’m on a pretty strict timetable here, but if I love the team I can always go back and touch them up.

Painting the main body, I used Asurmen Blue contrast over a zenithal prime, followed by drybrushing Two Thin Coats Gigawatt Blue. It’s a little messier than if I painted it traditionally, but way, way faster, which is the goal here. For the wings, I used a trick I’d done before with some Tyranids I’ve painted and applied a coat of Doomfire Magenta contrast paint, then a drybrush of increasingly bright yellows and touching it up with a very thinned down coat of Doomfire Magenta again. This is super easy, and really makes the miniature stand out.

Credit: Dan "Swiftblade" Richardson

After hemming and hawing over what T’au Sept to pick, I decided to go with Farsight. The red complimented the light blue Vespid Carapace, and also Commander Farsight uses a sword, which is very cool and worthy of respect. Getting all of it painted in time was much more of a buzzer-beater than I intended it to be, my poor son got sick which meant sacrificing hobby time to sit on the couch with him and watch a whole lot of Paw Patrol. I ended up putting finishing touches on bases the night before the event, but I’m pleased with how the team looked for the short time I had to get all eleven models painted.

A quick parenting aside: no one warned me about how much Paw Patrol I would have to watch as a parent. I have watched so much Paw Patrol. If you don’t want to read about my thoughts on Paw Patrol, you can skip this part and go right into my practice game. If you’d like to stare into the void of parenting madness with me, go ahead and click to expand this next part.

[expand title= "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Write About Paw Patrol"]

Credit: Nickelodeon

My son is one year old, and Paw Patrol is his favorite show. I don’t have any idea why it’s his favorite, or how he even came to watch it the first time. But it captures his attention like no other show. Mrs. Rachel, Bluey, all of the other kiddo staples can’t hold a candle to these damn dogs. But, he dances at the theme song, which is adorable, so we’ve planted our family banner on Paw Patrol.

We try to limit screen time for the kiddo, but if he isn’t feeling well he can have extra TV time as a treat. Unfortunately, he also started going to daycare this year, which means he hasn’t felt well in basically three months now. I knew he would be sick more because of daycare, but it turns out I wasn’t prepared for “more” to mean “literally all of the time for months”. Which means my wife and I, too, have been sick with daycare disease for months. I’ve forgotten what it was like to not have a sniffle. I wonder if those times ever existed at all.

All of this is to say I’ve watched enough Paw Patrol to have opinions about Paw Patrol, a sentence I had hoped I would never have to write in my life. I have favorite Paw Patrol Pups, I’ve organized them from best to worst. I feel a twinge of annoyance when we get a crappy puppy combo in an episode, and whisper “hell yeah” when we get a banger team for the rescue. I’m going to share my list, from best to worst, of the main Paw Patrol pups, as a way to exorcise my mind of this madness, lest it fester and twist me up even further.

Without further ado, Swiftblade’s definitive list of Paw Patrol Pups from best to worst:

Marshall- Firefighter Pup, the coolest by default. Also very clumsy, which is relatable, as I too move like a newborn giraffe.
Rocky- Fixes stuff, takes out the garbage, and looks like a mutt. This is clearly a Puppy that celebrates the common man. He will do the Tim Allen grunt one day, I just know it.
Sky- Though the jets and helicopters she flies makes me worried about her potential ties to the puppy military industrial complex, as the only girl dog it’s an act of misogyny to not put her in the top 3.
Rubble- Big Dawg.
Zuma- The water dog? What does Zuma even do here? He’s just there. He barely even gets picked. I don’t even know what kind of dog he is. A black lab? Dude needs to go rethink his puppy life.
Chase- ACAB applies to Cop Dog. Clearly a Narc, too enthusiastic when he says “Sir!” to Rider, who is a child. Also gets picked the most. A bootlicker who gets rewarded for sucking up.

[/expand]

In the middle of this painting and Paw Patrol frenzy, I did manage to get a practice game in with my good buddy and frequent sparring partner Andrew. He would be trying Deathwatch for the first time that game, which meant that I was coming off playing mostly elite teams to play a midrange team, while he want from playing midrange to elite. It was good for both of us, as Andrew got to taste the power of what a Space Marine can do in Kill Team, while I got take a game to unlearn the bad habits I’d picked up from playing elites for so long.

Going into the game, I knew that Vespid were fast and their shooting was very deadly, which made me figure I could play more aggressively than I’m used to with my Nemesis Claw. If I lost a model, it would be fine, I’ve got plenty more where that came from and almost every model on Vespid is a real threat with their Neutron guns.

I failed to account for two things here that ultimately lost me the game, but both of those things can be attributed to poor positioning. First, while I did discover by moving up aggressively that yeah, Vespid shooting is no joke, I wasn’t cautious about denying Andrew double kills and gave up an easy charge for his Aegis early on, as he was able to scramble up a run and take down two Vespid Warriors really easily on TP 2 before blasting another with his pistol on the counteraction. I also didn’t consider enough during the game that Vespid are a true-blue 2 APL team, I have no way of boosting that at all. If I wasn’t careful to consider the mission enough with my deployment and operative placement, I was going to struggle to score at all, which happened to me with the crit op in this game. Though the game initially looked promising for me at the start, giving Andrew too many easy double kills and failing to be in the right place and the right time to score early meant that by the end of the game I was out of steam and couldn’t stop Andrew from scoring, and he ended up beating me.

Result, Loss: 12-18.

It was probably for the best that I got my teeth knocked in here, as I learned much more about the team by losing this game than I think I would’ve if I’d won it. Despite my threats in the past to smash his models with a hammer, any game against Andrew is a good game, especially when we can chat and catch up over a beer. Overall, I’m glad I managed to sneak this game in before the event.

March Madness

The Engage, Party, Repeat (EPR) folks are all based out of the College Station area, about a two hours drive north of where I live. Normally, I’d be hesitant to make a drive that long for just a one day event, but the EPR team have been very active in supporting the larger Texas Kill Team community, and my last game at Clutch was a great game against one of the EPR folks, Blake. Since they make the trek down to Houston pretty regularly, I decided to see what they were all about on their home turf and made the trek.

Fortunately, the drive was pretty smooth, and the event didn't start till 1PM, meaning I had plenty of time to help around the house in the morning before I hit the road. I’d end up coming home a little late, which I was a touch worried about considering I’d been up late in painting crunch time, but I would just need to be mindful of my time and not linger too long after the event was up.

Oh yeah, we're in Aggieland alright

The tournament wasn’t held in a game store. While I think there was one nearby, the event was instead held at a local brewery, Blackwater Draw, which was kinda fun. The beer was good, and we were off in a more private area of the brewery where the Kill Team folks mostly had the area to themselves without having to worry about other foot traffic. Though it wasn’t in College Station proper, the bar also had plenty of reminders that we were in Aggieland, so I got some laughs from sending my wife, a UT grad, anti-Longhorn stuff I found around the place. I don’t like Texas A&M, but I respect a good hater.

Once one o’clock rolled around, the EPR event organiser, Chase, gathered everyone up, went over the event schedule and rules real quick, and it was off to round one pairings.

Game One: Versus Tim’s Nemesis Claw

The crit op is Transmission, and we are playing on Volkus.

Can’t think of a more fitting way to start this tournament than to go toe to toe with the team I’ve mained for most of my time playing Kill Team. I’ve never felt so judged by Warhammer models.

Tim is newer to Kill Team, he’s only been playing for a few months and this is his first event. It’s always nice to see new folks getting into the game and mustering the courage to go to events, especially when sometimes competitive circles can get a bad rap for being a very exclusionary crowd. It falls on me then to be as good of an opponent as I can here, as win or lose I’m going to be Tim’s first impression of what a tournament player is like.

I decided to go with Flank as my Tac Op and make it my Primary Op too. I don’t think I’m going to have a dominating presence over the Crit Op here, especially against Nemesis Claw, but I can fly all over the place and play Flank like the best of them. My plan here is to push the objectives on the flanks, and threaten the center objective from vantage to keep Tim honest. My home objective side is pretty open, and I’ve got that side pretty handily under control, and in TP one I carefully move up on the right flank so I stay out of range.

My initial gameplan ends up working out great for me, as by leveraging my mobility with fly and leaping from vantage to vantage, Tim ends up spreading pretty thin in order to try and catch me and deal with my operatives. When he does, most of the time he only gets to kill one operative before I can zap him with a neutron weapon and take him out in return. I do get in a little hot water in TP 3, when I push a little too forward and give Tim a double kill with his Screecher, but thanks to Sting I took a nice chunk out of the Screechers health pool on the way out and made him easy picking for cleanup. At the end of the game, Tim finally makes a push on my home objective to get some kills and score on his Tac Op, Dominate, but it's not enough to pin down the Vespid flying circus and I win by a healthy margin.

Result: Victory, 17-8

After the game, we chat for a bit about Nemesis Claw, and I give him some advice on some nasty tricks he can do with the team, without being too overbearing about it. I really got Tim’s attention by explaining charge hugging to keep his operatives safe. Tim is a longtime 40k player, and you can’t really do bully charges to keep a unit safe from shooting the same way you can in Kill Team. For Nemesis Claw, especially thanks to Chain Snares, charging an enemy operative and not fighting them is one of the best ways to keep your model safe, especially since the following activation you could fight, kill the enemy operative, charge another operative, and potentially even hide in combat a second time. Still, Tim played a pretty good game on what was a difficult matchup, and I think after a few more reps he’ll rock the house with my beloved Nemesis Claw.

Our game does go a little long though, and there isn’t any time to eat. The cliff bar, mini-donuts, and beer I ordered at the start of the round are going to have to do the lord's work and carry me through round 2.

Game Two: Versus Shreyash’s Brood Brothers

The Crit Op is Orb, and we are playing on Volkus.

I know this one’s going to be an uphill fight from the moment I see the pairing. Not only am I outnumbered on a team with limited tools to score double kills, but I’m outnumbered on Orb, a Crit Op that heavily favors getting last activation in a turning point. Winning this one is going to mean I’ve got to play a very cagey game, even moreso than usual, and try to chip away at his operatives as fast as I can to try and get a leg up. To this end, I decide to take Dominate, since I don’t want to risk putting myself too deep into his territory with Flank if he can just wait me out and kill whoever I send over to his side. I’m going to lay low, play it cool for the first half of the game, and then try and do as much damage as I can on the last two turning points.

Initially, this is working out pretty alright for me, but man there are just so many little Genestealer dorks to deal with, and he puts enough pressure on me to force me to engage at the end of the second turning point, which is earlier than I’d liked and gives him the opportunity to initiate the trading game in his favor. The good news is that by doing so, I kept Shreyash off of the Crit Op nearly the entire game, with the Orb only bouncing once to my home objective before I sent it back to the middle, where it stayed the rest of the match. The bad news is that the early aggression made it difficult for me to keep my own operatives alive long enough to score dominate, and I only end up scoring 4 on my Tac Op for the game while giving Shreyash way more kills than I wanted to.

It's a bloody game, a real knock down drag out fight, and it looks like I can still squeak out a win until his Commander manages to get into my home objective at the end of the game and cause trouble by getting two kills and picking up two tokens for Steal Intelligence. I’d managed to do a good job up until that point to keep him from grabbing tokens and running away with them, but he stays on top of holding the intelligence markers during the second and third turning points, so by holding two tokens at the end he manages a cool 3 point swing to earn 5 on his Tac Op.

When the dust settles, Shreyash has scored five on the Tac Op and Kill Op, so its looking like he will beat me by a few points as we are calculating the scores after the bonus from Primary Op scoring, but in a stroke of luck Shreyash had actually picked Crit Op as his primary, only giving him one extra point. WE do the math, check it twice, and realize that the game has ended in a tie.

Result: Draw, 12-12

That was a tough match, and I’m very lucky that it ended up in a draw. Looking back, I think this is one of Vespid’s worst matchups; I really think that this team hates being outnumbered. It’s a great game for learning the matchup though, and looking back there's a few different choices I would’ve made to my gameplan here that I’ll keep in mind for future Brood Bros games. Most notably, I think this is a matchup where I need to take Frag Grenades, which opens up more opportunities to get double kills outside my Swarmguard and Skyblast.

I’ve got a slightly longer break going into round three which is enough time for a drink but not enough for food. I meander on over to the bar, grab another beer and catch up with Blake, my round five opponent from Clutch. He missed round one, but managed to arrive in time for round 2 with his Nemesis Claw in tow to play Tim. It sounds like poor Tim got beat pretty good, but Blake was also able to help give some pointers on how to play the team and it sounds like Tim learned a lot, which is nice.

We chat for a bit about how Vespid is going for me, and Blake’s thoughts on trying out Goremongers, before the final pairings are up. Due to another table also ending up in a draw, we have four players with a 1-0-1 record and only one with a 2-0. It’s anyone’s guess who would end up on top table for the last round, and when the dust settles it turns out that someone is me.

Game Three: Versus Jose’s Hearthkyn Salvagers

The Crit Op is Secure, and we are playing on Bheta-Decima. Due to event rules, both sides receive Light Barricades and Heavy Barricades as free equipment options.

I didn’t know this at the time, but it turns out playing Secure on Bheta-Decima is a real “Dothraki in an open field” scenario for Vespid. I’ve got plenty of vantage, long sight-ways for shooting, and I can zip all over the place without worrying about climbing, falling, or jumping whatsoever. On top of this, Secure is great for Vespid’s poor APL economy, since I just have to slap the point once and just prevent Jose from tapping to point later to steal it from me.

Walking up to the table though, I think Jose’s more aware of this than I am. Jose’s 2-0, and I know he’s played some excellent players at the event so far, which means he knows what he’s doing with his Salvagers, a team that I’m largely unfamiliar with. Jose is happy to go over them with me, which helps fill in the gaps in my knowledge from the vague rules info already rattling around in my head about the team.

I decided to go with Flank again as my Tac Op and deploy my bugs mostly on the board edges. Just like game one, I figure I can overwhelm these two sides of the board and lean on my mobility to play keep away with Jose while lining up deadly shots and scoring flank. I have some protection on the middle as well, but that’s mostly to try and keep Jose honest.

It looks pretty dire for me early on, as Jose is able to use his Jump Pack Warrior to great effect to get to the top gantry, take out my Skytorch, and score on Retrieval before zipping away the next turning point. Fortunately, he didn’t secure the point, so the next operative I send up is able to secure it for themselves. In doing so, I hand Jose an easy kill, as I totally underestimate just how dangerous the gun is on his Warrior.

After this though, Jose quickly runs into the mobility problem, and aside from a charge with his Dozr early on Jose can’t really push into my territory enough to pin me down. Meanwhile, I’m flying all over the place and causing problems left and right, and early shooting and Neutron tokens from the Skyblast make the walk to the middle objective basically impossible for Jose without either taking too much damage or losing a wounded operative all together. Jose’s Gunner is a problem, but my Shadestrain manages to injure him on TP 3 by tossing a grenade at the operative next to him in heavy cover, while killing his Lokatr to boot and making hiding on high vantage very easy.

The play that finally breaks Jose’s back is when his Jump Pack Warrior charges my Longsting on the high tower vantage to deny me points from flank and give him a chance to finally secure an objective, but he whiffs hard on the attack with no rerolls to fall back on while I spike on my roll thanks to Sting. When the Longsting activates next, he goes on conceal and kills the Jump Pack warrior in a fight, taking out the last operative Jose really has to take back control of the game, and I end up with a pretty one sided win to close out the event.

Result: Victory, 20-5

I chat with Jose a bit after the game, and it turns out he’s a local from Katy, which on the western side of Houston. He tells me that his local game store, The Forge, holds KT nights on Wednesdays, and I like the cut of Jose’s gib so I tell him I’ll make it out one day for some games.

Final Thoughts

In the end, my 2-0-1 record nabs me second place, only slightly behind Shreyash, who takes first place with a marginally better SoS than me. I win a Monument Hobbies paint set, get a cool trophy, and make my way back home very pleased with how the day went. Playing Vespid has been quite the departure from Nemesis Claw, as they’re polar opposite teams in many ways, but the change in teams is refreshing and makes me feel like I’m growing as a player. I think after this, I probably will stick with Vespid for a bit, touch up those highlights, and really dig my teeth into these bugs.

They're no Chaos Marines, but these Vespid are pretty neat I guess. For the Greater Good, and all that jazz.

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Tags: Kill Team | tournament report | Vespid | kt24