The New Ones Always Go First

Our escalation league is still going strong with last week marking the 600 point mark. It was nice to finally play a standard game finally. Kill Teams are fun, but everyone was itching to bring out the heavy firepower. I haven't played an unpainted model in our "official" games yet, but I wanted to try out the storm raven so bad I decided the his to my points for the day were worth it.

Having just build my storm raven I was itching to give it a go and went with the following.

Librarian - Blood lance, Str 10
5 man Assault Squad - no upgrades (x2)
Land Speeder - Muti Melta / Heavy Flamer
Storm Raven - Hurricane Bolters, Assault Cannon, Heavy Bolter

Since the games were so small we played on 4x4 tables with 3 objectives spread diagonally. In an effort to get everyone into the tournament mindset, kill points were also in effect.

I ended up playing against Kung Fu Joe and his Sisters of Battle. He was running two large squads of battle sisters along with Repentias and a squad of 2 penitent engines lead by a Palatine. We started with table quarters for deployment and he went first, moving his engines and repentias toward my storm raven sitting on the back of the table. He rolled well for his extra movement but I still felt secure that I could take down his heavy hitters and get away.
When it came to be my turn I opted to sit still and show my opponent the full fury of the Blood Angels gunship!
Boy was I wrong! After four blood strike missiles, four assault cannon shots, and three heavy bolter shots at his AV 11 walkers all I had to show for it was one explodes result and a shaken walker that ran up to punch my ship right out of the sky on the next turn! They don't get used much but boy those penitent engines are fast!

Lucky for me, my Librarian jumped out of the ship as it exploded and punched his walker right back! If not, I think I would have been hard pressed to deal with it for the remainder of the game.

My assault squads deep struck out of his troops line of site and managed to make a combined charge clearing out one objective as the rest of my force moved to take the midfield uncontested and the game ended up being a solid victory for me but I think the real moral of the story is this.

When you have that super shiny new toy you want to try out for the first time, it's going to miss a lot and get blown up in the most embarrassing possible way!