TheChirurgeon's Road Through 2026, Part 14: Post-Adepticon... Travel?

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of hobby and competitive progress through 2026. Last time around I was at Adepticon, just arriving and having drinks with the crew. I didn't have a ton to say in that update, partly because I've been busy painting embargo stuff and partly because I had been on vacation with my family before that. This time I'm talking about the event itself and also talking about a game I had time to play over the weekend.

Adepticon, Continued

Adepticon doesn't really get started until Thursday, by which point last week I'd already written and scheduled my update. Thursday morning is when things really happen, with the start of the various tournaments and the opening of the show floor. It bears noting that this was my first Adepticon, so I wasn't prepared for how much larger the event is than others I've been to. There were huge lines the day before for badges and a large line on Thursday to get into the show floor when the doors opened.

The booth setup here is pretty cool, though I'd say it's more like Comic Con than a trade show - the booths and reps here are selling to players, and most all of them have product on hand to sell. The hottest of these by far was Archon Studios' StarCraft booth, which was piled teen feet high with product when the floor opened and finished the show with almost nothing left. People were there constantly, and everyone I saw walking around was either carrying some StarCraft minis or talking about the game. If there was a winner at the show, it was them.

That said, there was plenty of other cool stuff there - The Trench Crusade booth was also constantly busy, and they got some great heat from the announcement of the Carcass Front expansion. I was also really impressed with Monster Fight Club's display (shown above), where they were showing off some of the insanely cool terrain they've been creating for the Cyberpunk minis game. The pre-painted MDF was insanely cool, and I was really impressed with the cityscape they were able to build with it.

I spent most of my time meeting with people, both at booths and behind the scenes, talking about what they were working on and how we could cover or support it. One of the fun things someone mentioned to me over the week was that it seemed like Archon were spending a lot of money with us given our coverage and I had to tell them that no, actually - Archon hasn't given us a dime. We cover the games we're excited about and which our readers want to read about. And right now everything we publish on StarCraft does really well, so we're incentivized to write more about it.

We end up hitting up the 3rd Street food court a few more times, including Thursday night for the special GW Influencers event, where they buy drinks for everyone. We've just come in off a number of big announcements during the day, including the upcoming 11th edition of Warhammer 40k. It's all everyone at the drinks event is talking about... except me, I'm too dumb to care about that shit. I end up sitting by Stu Black, and we talk about narrative play supplements and reminiscing over the old Codex: Cityfight from third edition. My favorite part was him recounting the way his local store use to do regular campaigns where they'd fight over the same territory over and over, take a final snapshot of the completed map, then print a new one and start over again, treating it like another chapter of one long story. Great stuff.

Adepticon is cool but I have to travel for other reasons on Sunday and I'm not playing in any events so I end up flying back early Friday morning so I can be home in time to spend more time with my family. On the whole it was a great event and cool to attend for the first time. I don't know if I'm going to go next year, but it's definitely going to be on my to do list.

Testing the New Defiler

I didn't have a ton of time to get in games between my trip back from Adepticon and my follow-up trip to New York, but fortunately I was able to get in a quick test game with the new Defiler rules against a local friend, Kingwood Greg (not Klobasnek). The Datasheet had already been released for the Defiler on WarCom, so I rolled up with a Soulforged Pact list designed to try out two of them and without telling Greg how many points they were. Greg was running his Flyblown Host Death Guard, with one PBC, two bloat-drones, two blight-haulers, and a ten-man Blightlords unit as the main beef.

These games are interesting - generally I'm trying to test out how things feel more than I'm trying to win or do anything. So on top of my two defilers, I also brought Kravek Morne attached to a unit of two Obliterators. To that point, Greg asked me what I wanted to play this game and I suggested he bring a list that wasn't super flush with anti-vehicle, but that definitely had some. The goal here is to test against an average list, or something closer to expectation in a given singles game. We played on layout 1, in part because I wanted to get a feel for how Defilers will move out of that big L-shape (it's kind of ideal for them), and because it's easy to put together.

Having 12" Movement and the ability to move through walls really supercharges the Defiler, who suddenly becomes an actual threat, especially on GW Layout 1 where the boxed-in parking lot is an ideal hiding space. The Defilers charged out early and made it a mission to kill the Blight-Haulers, succeeding but not managing to take down the Bloat-Drones or PBC. Defiler melee feels better but not amazing, and I think you really need those +2 attacks from the Soulforged detachment to avoid feeling awful when you actually start swinging. Having better scourge attacks also helps, and I don't think I'd ever take them without scourges. For this game, I ran them with autocannons, scourges, and Excruciator cannons. Those Excruciators did much more work than I was expecting.

Both Defilers were good at drawing fire but ultimately went down early as they took the brunt of it. But that left the Heldrake to kind of range around and attack Bloat-Drones, something he's very good at. The Heldrake would end up taking out both of them on rounds 2 and 3, respectively. I really wish that guy was like, 15 points cheaper. He's just so situational it's hard to justify him but suddenly getting +2 attacks in melee and being able to barrel into flying targets with 2+ dev wounds makes him stupid fun to play with. I really like my Iron Warriors Heldrake but I painted him ten years ago and he very much needs a lot of touch-up and shading I just didn't do at the time.

Where things got hairy was at midtable, where I managed to avoid dying to the combined Blightlords + Deathshroud unit attacks on my Defiler, who lived on 1 wound and fell back to safety. Greg was running the really fun trick of Lord of Contagion + the Enhancement to heal back up to full wounds at the end of every phase, making him kind of a chore to kill with smaller firepower, but ultimately I got there with the Forgefiends.

Soulforged Forgefiends just feel like cheating. They're so insanely good with +1 to wound and full re-rolls to hit, and they're ideal for killing Terminators. That made this a bad matchup for Greg, but he put up a good fight regardless. He definitely outdrew me early on Secondaries, and after both Defilers went down I wasn't in a good position to challenge the lower right objective, though I did get there with Kravek Morne and his Obliterators.

Final Score: 75-69, Win

The new Defiler rules feel much, much better to play with. I didn't even end up firing off their re-roll wounds mode and it's something I should have done. I'm not sure yet if I want to play them in Soulforged or Pactbound Zealots. Soulforged Forgefiends feel like cheating but Pactbounds feel almost as good, especially when you pair them with Helbrutes for the double 5+ crit effects. I'm going to give both a try at various points and see what I like more before I settle on a final build for my Iron Warriors.

Final Thoughts

That does it for this week. I don't know that I'll be able to get in any games over Easter weekend but if I do I'll certainly write about them. At the very least I'll have some time to sit down and paint again for next week, so look forward to some hobby progress as I spend some time working on new Iron Warriors and finishing my Red Corsairs obligations.

See you next week.

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