TheChirurgeon's Road Through 2026, Part 2: LVO Teams Tournament Prep

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of hobby and competitive progress through 2026. Last time around I was planning the year and the events I'd be attending, talking about my goals for 2026 and figuring out how I was going to handle it all. This time around I'm mostly doing prep for an upcoming event.

The LVO Teams Tournament

I attended three team events last year: GHAST, a 5-man teams event at a local store, the Ottawa Teams Event in June, and Challengers Cup in August, the latter two of which were 8-man events. I generally like team events - there's some wonderful camaraderie to be had hanging out with your team, planning strategy, and talking about how to take on other team compositions. It's also cool to have an idea going into a game that you aren't supposed to win, merely scrape out points, and that can be refreshing.

That said, what I don't love about teams is the logistics and planning, especially when it comes to trying to manage schedules and planning for eight grown-ass adults with their own lives and schedules. Last year I had to find last-minute fill-ins for both team events, and I had to find two fill-ins for each. That was an insane amount of stress and scrambling and I don't want to do it again. On top of that I end up being captain for these things and I'm really not that into pairings and matrix building for teams events. There's definitely some interesting work to do there but I often find that player skill ends up being a bigger factor and the stats work I've done on this suggests that Elo differential accounts for about 2-3 points of scoring differential in matchups. Pairings and matchups definitely matter, but they matter more when the differential in player skill is very small.

All of this is to say that I prefer 5-man teams events. They're easier to manage, take less time to run, and are easier to plan around when it comes to things like renting a car or booking a place to stay. They also tend to be more favorable to singles lists than 8-mans, where you're better off running a more balanced list than something that's heavy skew.

The List

Here's what I'm bringing:

My LVO TT List - Click to Expand

Rob's LVOTT list (2000 points)

Death Guard Strike Force (2000 points) Virulent Vectorium

CHARACTERS

Daemon Prince of Nurgle (215 points) • 1x Hellforged weapons 1x Infernal cannon • Enhancement: Revolting Regeneration

Lord of Contagion (130 points) • 1x Manreaper • Enhancement: Daemon Weapon of Nurgle

Lord of Virulence (100 points) • 1x Power fist 1x Twin plague spewer

Mortarion (380 points) • Warlord • 1x Lantern 1x Rotwind 1x Silence

OTHER DATASHEETS

Deathshroud Terminators (160 points) • 1x Deathshroud Champion • 1x Manreaper 1x Plaguespurt gauntlet • 2x Deathshroud Terminator • 2x Manreaper 2x Plaguespurt gauntlet

Deathshroud Terminators (160 points) • 1x Deathshroud Champion • 1x Manreaper 1x Plaguespurt gauntlet • 2x Deathshroud Terminator • 2x Manreaper 2x Plaguespurt gauntlet

Foetid Bloat-Drone (100 points) • 1x Fleshmower 1x Plague probe

Foetid Bloat-Drone with Heavy Blight Launcher (120 points) • 1x Heavy blight launcher 1x Plague probe

Foetid Bloat-Drone with Heavy Blight Launcher (120 points) • 1x Heavy blight launcher 1x Plague probe

Foetid Bloat-Drone with Heavy Blight Launcher (120 points) • 1x Heavy blight launcher 1x Plague probe

Myphitic Blight-haulers (100 points) • 1x Bile spurt 1x Gnashing maw 1x Missile launcher 1x Multi-melta

Myphitic Blight-haulers (100 points) • 1x Bile spurt 1x Gnashing maw 1x Missile launcher 1x Multi-melta

Poxwalkers (65 points) • 10x Poxwalker • 10x Improvised weapon

Poxwalkers (65 points) • 10x Poxwalker • 10x Improvised weapon

Poxwalkers (65 points) • 10x Poxwalker • 10x Improvised weapon

Exported with App Version: v1.45.0 (105), Data Version: v720

This is the same list I won an RTT with a few weeks ago. It's a good all-rounder list which can handle a wide variety of threats. It tends to prefer more open terrain but I have a good mix of anti-vehicle and anti-infantry threats, and it can handle most hordes as well as vehicle lists. Where it's going to struggle is likely into Admech and Astra Militarum, where the former just have too many units who are too good at immediately vaporizing vehicles and the latter often bring too many tanks which are too tough to crack. GSC may also be a challenge, as even though I'm good at kill them the ability to bring units back and focus down bigger threats will likely cause problems and there just aren't any good targets for Mortarion and the Daemon Prince to attack. Knights are also probably a mixed bag here and I don't think I want to be up against them if we can avoid it.

On that note, the rest of my team give us a pretty balanced comp. Our team besides me is:

Thomas "Goatboy" Reidy (World Eaters) - Goatboy is more or less playing an Eightbound-heavy Berzerker Warband. He's got a good melee punch and a balanced approach that runs two Forgefiends.
David Miracle (Tzeentch Daemons) - Davis' running Scintillating Legion, and has been since GHAST. It's a good time to be a long-time Legion player, since they recently got a huge buff.
Chris Johnson (Astra Militarum) - Chris is running a shitload of Dorns and Rough Riders and his list looks fun as hell.
KC (Ultramarines) - One last gasp of the 4-wound Victrix Honour Guard. KC's got our marines list, running a melee-heavy Ultras list.

What a great group of guys - some of my favorite people to play with in the area. I'm looking forward to this event more than usual - I haven't ever played at a Las Vegas Open despite having been at the event a few times now; I've mostly gone for other things, a mix of business development and influencer program stuff, so it'll be good to finally go and actually play. The LVO Teams tournament has a lot more going on per round than most, since it has different mission and deployment layouts to consider, and while that makes for some interesting thought exercises, my plan is to just go out and win games. I'm personally hoping we can finish 3-2 as a team. That's the goal.

If you want to follow along with the event, the top tables will be streamed on The Frontline Gaming YouTube channel. I have no idea if we'll be on there but it's almost certainly going to be worth following if you like watching streamed games.

Hobby Progress

I've been frantically painting everything but my army, working on other secret embargo stuff. Which is normally fine, except that I do need to paint things for this event. I only have twenty painted Poxwalkers and using Cultists for the third squad is workable but not something I should really be doing. Plus I already have a ton of unpainted Poxwalker models around here so I don't have any excuse.

I already had five of these painted and started, though as a result they had a lot of dust on them. This is generally why I keep a bottle of compressed air around to dust off minis I have to dig up and paint after a long time. The other five I can source from a Combat Patrol box I bought two years ago - I think I picked it up just for the Biologus Putrifier so I'd have two and ended up keeping the rest.

As of this writing I still have eight left to finish but they'll go pretty fast. Poxwalkers don't take a lot of time; you can get a lot of mileage out of painting them flesh colored and then using different washes and contrast paints over that to create interesting new skin tones. Purple wash on Kislev Flesh gets you some particularly interesting results.

The other thing I've been doing is fixing my Bloat-Drones and Blight-Haulers. Over time the little spikes have snapped off these and when it happens they get lost 100% of the time. I generally just kind of let it go when that happens but I've gotten kind of sick of looking at them missing multiple spikes so it was time to fix things. I raided my bits box and I had a few extra engines and spike bits I could use for this:

The process here is pretty simple: Clip off the spike, drill a tiny hole in the bottom of it, drill a tiny hole in the part of the trim where the old spike was, then pin this spike there using super glue and a small metal rod.

Once that's done I just go back in and paint it with Balthasar Gold, Nihilakh Oxide wash, and then some edge highlights with Retributor Armour to match the rest of the contraption. Hopefully they stay on this time.

It's a lot of work for a little thing but the end result looks great and I can at least look at what I've done and go "yeah, I put in the effort to keep the army looking nice." And I'll fully admit that I mostly did this because my buddy Max mentioned that he can't stand it when he's paint judging and he sees busted models that no one made an attempt to fix. So this one's for you, Max.

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