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MAGE Con Spring 09 Coverage Update

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Just got back.... the bandwidth in the building was sucked up by all the computer games at the LAN party there, so doing anything on the internet was pretty much impossible. Expect a full writeup, complete with pictures, in the next couple of days or so while I recover!

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MAGE Con Spring 09 Live Coverage! - Day 1

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Here we are at MAGE Con Spring 09.... I will updating this as the day progresses...

Things are pretty quiet now, but here is small teaser of what is to come... super heavies galore!




Update 1: Robert Ridsal showed up with this AMAZING Gargant... completely scratched built! The details on the model is insane, and I will be taking some close ups of it later tonight.

I also got in a game vs. Dennis and his Hrud (using the IG rules). We played a Spearhead mission with 2 objectives, in which I won 1-0. Had Dennis not rolled abysmially, he would have blown me off the table. Score one for the World Eators!
World Eators surround an objective in a swirlling maelstrom of gore!

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On the Workbench

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The Horde is coming!

This is what having a lot of free time will net you and getting a shitton of AoBR Orks for cheap will get you. All 86 of these guys have custom bases carved out of cork (to do this, I had to remove the slotta base slots... royal pain in the ass!), as all of them have the barrels of their sluggas bored out.

These guys will paint up pretty fast though... more updates to come!

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Team Paper St. Products @ Adepticon '09

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Bart, Dennis, Chip & Brent rally around their banner!

Now that the dust has settled and cleared from Adepticon, the reports are slowly filtering in through the interweb. Paper St. Products (known around here as the Sioux City guys) was one of the local(ish) group fortunate enough to attend. Bart, the de facto leader of the crew, has graciously given me permission to post his report/impressions here.

Bart's Report:

I had to paint frantically from last Friday night until the Wed night before we left.
We even had Bertie helping with Simon's Ultramarines since I was using them in the Team tournament.

Thursday we left around 9:30 and had a decent ride to Lombard, Illinois, just west of Chicago.

First thing we did was visit the Chicago battle bunker. They had the war of the ring book, and a lot of pre-release models on display. We got our picture taken with the giant space marine and shopped for a while, but honestly the GW workers were condescending dicks. It was like being talked to by some over energy-drinked male cheerleader. Further proof that independents do a better job than GW does at most things.

We went and checked into the hotel, which was ridiculously overpriced. We painted some figures and Brent and I had a few super-heavy fights on the bed of Nurgle Baneblade vs. Brass Scorpion so we could polish up on the super heavy rules.

Friday morning was event check in time. The line was huge but it went fast and we got a decent bag of free stuff, including some figures, a sprue of zombies, two Black Library books, a bunch of Gale Force Nine stuff, etc etc etc. The highlight was a bag of bits from the Warstore with a coupon for an additional 5% off an order.

Friday: Brent and I played in the Gladiator tournament. My first opponent was a demon army centered on Fateweaver and the named Forge World Bloodthirster. Needless to say I was out gunned a bit by the 888 point killing machine. I did take out Fateweaver on the first turn it appeared. Unfortunately the mission was controlling the center and there was a 888 point demon standing there so I lost, but just barely.

Next game was against imperial guard with a Warhound Titan and a small Inquisition allied contingent.

He won the roll to go first and killed over half my army in his first shooting phase.
Half by blowing up my brass scorpion, which subsequently exploded in a 3d6 (SEVENTEEN!) inch radius explosion of str 9 AP 2. Then the Warhound and its four str D pieplates cleaned up most of the rest. What little survived was mopped up by Col. Shaffer’s Last Chancers deep striking in with guardsmen (who are Bs 4 and come in groups of 8) melta-gunners. So yes I lost that one really, really badly.

Game three was against a teenage kid who had all flying Eldar. The mission was that we got a free vortex grenade and that went very badly for him. I threw it at one of his wave serpents then it randomly bounced around in his army killing a lot of stuff. He was basically a noob, he didn't know he couldn't assault after getting out of a wave serpent that had moved. I wiped him out.

Last game was a demon army with a lot of nurgle and slaanesh, also three demon princes with mark of nurgle, and a lot of flamers of tzeetnch. (they shoot a template that is no armor or cover save). This game was close for a while then went bad and he mostly wiped me out.

I was 1-3 but it was fun. If I was gonna play again next year it'd be better to actually read the scenarios ahead of time and have a better super heavy than a brass scorpion. We got Adepticon poker chips for use as objectives, it was these little extras that added a lot to the weekend. Two undefeated guys next to me argued so much that eventually the judges all just sat down and refereed their game. The prize was a Reaver titan from Forge world.

Demons , imperial marines and chaos marines were very common, and this theme carried all weekend. A lot of people drink right at the tables while playing all day.

Many of the team had set up their display bases for the team tournament by this time so that was a cool thing to check out. a lot of them had lights and music.

We had very little time after the event as the team tournament kicked off at 7:00 AM. Brent came up to the hotel room carrying an armload of Tyranid stuff he bought dirt cheap, including some Forge World upgraded Carnifexes. Apparently the bits trading included a lot of sweet deals, but I didn’t go this night.

Saturday

I woke up Saturday morning coughing up blood, a theme that kept going through Saturday and Sunday... :^(

There was a lot of awesome team themes and displays. Ours was not as bad as a few others. Our flag was small and weak, but I liked it. (There were some pretty cool team flags, see pictures)

First game was Chip and I against "Chaos party of four" Chaos, Slaanesh and Tzeentch. We did ok but in the end we lost. They had actually play tested and coordinated their forces.

Next was Brent and I vs. Deathwing. They had four units of Termies, two Land Raider Crusaders, and two dreadnoughts. There army was beautiful to look at, see pictures.

We beat them pretty badly.

Next was Dennis and I against Orks and tau. The Orks were the best Ork army I have ever had the pleasure to play against. We lost but at this point we didn’t care much.

Next was Dennis and I again vs. team COBRA. They had a display board that looked like Cobra from GI-Joe’s base and it pulled into four pieces, each with a force led by one of the Cobra command characters, we had Cobra Commander and Dr. Mindbender in our game. Chip and Brent played against Serpentor, I didn't see the other character.

Our game was a draw.

This night I did check out the bits swap area…. I got an original Greater Demon of Khorne, Fabius Bile, 6 Nurgle marines, 6 old riders of chaos for 40K(most on this list won't recognize them) and a lot of other stuff for 25 bucks.

Then I ended up buying a World Eaters Forge World Dreadnaught with two sets of both side arms and a bag of random dread bits, (4-5 arms and some Juggernaught heads ) for 45 dollars.

I also got a tech marine with Thunderfire cannon for my son for his marine army for 20 bucks.

Sunday

The fantasy team tournament was Sunday morning and Dennis and I attended with our Skaven and Night Goblin team.

Our first game we got creamed by Dark Elves and Undead. Again, it seemed like they had play tested and such…. their army was ok and themed nicely.

Next was an Empire and Dwarf team. We beat them and had a great game. The guy had cool samurai Dwarf conversion.

In between here there was a big break to look at the armies. The Fantasy team event didn’t seem to draw the same amount of effort from most as the 40k one, but there was still a lot to look at. There was a few highly questionable teams such as Skaven and Lizardmen, Goblins and Brettonians, etc.

Our last game was against High Elves and Dark Elves. It was a close game that we ended up losing and we downgraded them quite a bit on their retarded theme. Essentially we thought that some of the other themes were just thrown together or played by little kids, that why they made no sense, but these guys actually had theirs based the same and tried to explain it with some lame story but I told the guy right to his face it was BS.

They were nice guys and had a nice looking army.

Overall Impressions

Overall I'd say the biggest letdown was feeling like crap all weekend and the underwhelming terrain, esp. since they bragged up all this new terrain. In their defense though, when you have 200 tables in the main hall alone to make terrain for, it is a big job. Also there was Reaver Titans galore on the tables so most terrain is irrelevant to them anyways.

The Adepticon staff was awesome. They spent a little too much time on the mic, but when you’re in a room with multiple 40k tournaments, WFB events, Warhammer Ancients events, etc. etc. all going there is a lot of announcements.

Overall my conservative estimate is that this was 1,000,000 times better than any GT or CotN we have been to. It proves yet again that the independent tournaments are doing a better job than GW. Actually some of the most annoying times at the event hall was when a GW rep was talking because they're so full of garbage and propaganda. If I heard one more GW rep blabbering about AP3 guns for IG Stormtroopers I was gonna puke. My prediction for that is that they pump up the AP 3 guns a ton and sell everybody the metal guys before releasing the plastic ones.

Gav Thorpe was there but I didn’t talk to him. Seemed like he sat there alone most of the time.
Gale force nine was there with everything they sold. The army transport guy was there and built a custom 40K scale ork spaceship that was on display all weekend. FFG was there with a big 40K role-play display, as well as pushing the new talisman.

There was a few other miscellaneous vendors with some good deals on used stuff and bulk pewter space ships and figures.

I'd consider Adepticon the Mecca of GW gaming (and it has nothing to do with how far we drove.)

The team displays were incredible. The sheer volume of GW events was insane, you could play 40K or WFB everyday, and it seemed like you could play Blood Bowl , LOTR, or Ancients everyday as well.

They said they had record attendance with around 1,000 people. IMO they could move to a cheaper hotel.


Thanks for the awesome writeup Bart... I'm still kicking myself in the nuts for not being able to go this year! When asked if he would make a return trip in 2010, Bart said that the wheels were already beginning to start spinning, so I would take that as a resounding yes!

You can check out Bart and Chip's photo dump of the event here!


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Podhammer is back!

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Yes! For those of who you don't know, Podhammer is a podcast about WFB run by a bunch of hilarious guys in Australia. Jeff Carroll, the mastermind behind the project, recent ran into some personal issues and everyone thought the show was placed into limbo indefinitely. However, some of his friends stepped up for Jeff personally and took over the reigns.

Podhammer is really great to listen to while you are painting/cleaning/whatever, and it always produces a ton of laughs... check out the latest and past episodes here!

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Major CU Departures: Cavel and possbily Kenton?

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The message boards were abuzz today about possibly 2 major departures next season. Unfortunately for the Bluejay faithful, Cavel Witter will not be with the team next season. I know a lot of fans were disappointed with him this past season (he was basically forced to play another posistion due to injuries on the team), but personally I was a huge fan of him... Cavel "turned it on" when it counted, most notably against SIU at home and then again at Missouri State. He was so clutch at the end of the game where free-throws counted.

Cavel had some of the fastest hands I have ever seen... it was awesome watching him warm up... he dribbled 2 balls in and out between his legs without even breaking a sweat. The best memory I will have of him is when he dropped a massive 42 points on Bradley last seaon... one of the best games I have ever seen. I for one will really miss him.

Best of luck to you wherever you end up Cavel!


As for Kenton, he isn't commenting on his future to the press, but rumors speculate that he can't stand P'Allen so much to the point that he doesn't want anything to do with the team. This would leave a HUGE gap for us sizewise and post depth. This compounds the potential loss of Coach Fish (our recruiting brainchild) to Northen Flordia.

The next few days will be very tense in the Bluejay Nation... Kenton please stay!

UPDATE: More information available here .

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South Park: Eat, Pray, Queef

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Wow... everytime I think they have pushed the envelope as far as they can, they push it even further! Laura and I laughed our asses off while watching this. Our favorite part had to be the congressional hearing (shown above).... I will never think of the "Road Warrior" the same way again. The episode concluded with a musical number that had Laura and I in tears!

This episode did raise the question in my mind is there such an double standard as the episode suggests? I actually drummed up enough courage (or some might say stupidity!) to ask Laura if she thought there was a double standard, and she replied no because after hanging out with me so long, farts no longer phase her!

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