ITC Freakshow (Please Help)

So I'm going to largish ITC tournament at Gencon, but I'm running into a bit of a snag with my list.

Originally I planned to bring a Seer Council, a group of Corsair bikers (with a Prince and a Void Dreamer), and a Grotesquerie. The Void Dreamer was supposed to go with a 10 man grot unit and either Warp Tunnel or Warp Blink them forward to get into assault quicker.

With the new ITC changes, that's off the table, since Warp Tunnel won't work that way. (Warp Blink still would.)

Here are the options as I see them:

Option One: Leave the list unchanged. Gamble on getting Warp Blink. (Or Gate of Infinity on the prince) Maybe shave some points off the units to afford a Webway Portal on the Haemonculus.

Option Two: Drop the Corsair Void Dreamer entirely. Pick up either a Bastion or an Imperial Bunker with an escape hatch to get the grot bomb downfield faster.

Option Three: Quit trying to make the Grot Bomb work, and explore other options. Since the new FAQ puts Battle Brothers in each others transports back on the table, along with Jinking passengers firing at full BS and auras projecting out of vehicles, it might be best to find a different approach.

What do you guys think?

I'd suggest option one and were I you and playing AT FLG I would to demand to be able to select my powers then.

that said I was playing this way without freakshow tactics opting for webway trickery instead, so I'm biased in favor of the power of a shimmershield on a grotesque body in general. On the turn of the coin I explicitly adopted this style after the Battlebrothers in transports FAQ and there may be a better way?

I'd personally go with option 3, but if keeping the grot bomb, option 2. I'm a sucker for reliability.

Hmm...any recommendations?

Feelin a little high and dry here.

I'm leaning towards dropping one grot from the list to afford a WWP.  That way I can gamble on the 78.3% chance of getting Warp Blink or Gate of Infinity, but still have a WWP as an insurance policy.

I feel like that has more to do with the fact that it's a busy weekend, few people are pushing highly mobile grotesque stars at the moment, and those of us that do are building radically different approaches to using that star.

Were I to do freakshow tactics I would prefer 2 raider bound -3 Leadership bubbles rather than a single star. The star just doesn't die which makes it an excellent shield for highlighting entry/exit points for WWP Wraithguard, Hence my take on the star using Traveller of Forgotten Path down the page sitting at 100+ views and no comments.

AFAICT you are pioneering this particular variant on the freakshow path, and Pioneers are lonely.

That said I liked the 6_% you said earlier when you didn't take GoI into account, and I like this 78% even more. This sounds very promising especially with the WWP insurance.

Which squad would you be shrinking? My gut says 4>3 But I could also see 10>9.

Jimsolo wrote:

Feelin a little high and dry here.

I'm leaning towards dropping one grot from the list to afford a WWP.  That way I can gamble on the 78.3% chance of getting Warp Blink or Gate of Infinity, but still have a WWP as an insurance policy.

I like this option too. I doubt you will notice the difference between 9 and 10 grots. Bastion is cool but I just hate dropping pts on terrain for some reason. An autarch for reserve manip and a banshee mask would be great.

Jimsolo wrote:

Feelin a little high and dry here.

I'm leaning towards dropping one grot from the list to afford a WWP.  That way I can gamble on the 78.3% chance of getting Warp Blink or Gate of Infinity, but still have a WWP as an insurance policy.

I actually don't think this is a bad idea, but unless you're going something OTHER than a ML1 Prince and ML3 Void Dreamer, the percentage is actually around 58%. Since the mastery levels are on 2 different characters rolling on 2 different charts, the percentage chances aren't additive. Therefore the easiest way to determine your chance of getting AT LEAST 1 of the 2 powers is to determine your chance to get NEITHER of them, which is 41.665%.

Still, not a bad plan. I don't recall the exact rules for warp blink off the top of my head and I don't have my IA11 book handy, but gate of infinity will cause you to have to worry about scatter a bit more than your original plan. WWPs unfortunately don't stop this scatter because of the way they're worded. Trust me, I tried it within the ITC already, haha.

I'd be prepared to argue that absent the new GW FAQs (which specifically aren't applying) then WWP plus GOI work just fine. But that's something I'll ask the TO ahead of time.

My concern at this point is whether to drop the extra grot from the large or small squad, but I think I'll go with the large one. I'd like the smaller squad to still pack a punch, and a 4 man team lets me assign an IC over there on the off chance I get BOTH powers, or get one and still need to use the WWP for some reason.

Jimsolo wrote:

I'd be prepared to argue that absent the new GW FAQs (which specifically aren't applying) then WWP plus GOI work just fine.  But that's something I'll ask the TO ahead of time.

Yeah, I'd do that. I actually DID argue all of this beforehand for the LVO. I was originally planning on running 3 Haemonculi with WWPs from the detachment in the covens book as part of a "freakshow" list I was playing.

The wording of the WWP says they don't scatter "when arriving from deep strike reserve". An argument can be made that any time you deep strike a unit, such as the case of GOI, where you remove them from the table, they go into deep strike reserve while removed from the table. Because the basic rules for deep strike specifically say this is the case, that is the argument that I made.

But that wasn't accepted by the LVO, which is directly run by Frontline Gaming and the ITC. I've since asked several other ITC events, and the ITC itself further clarified their rules on what specific models allow you to stop scatter by deep strike in their house rules. Baharroth explicitely works to stop deep strike scatter, even for things like GOI, though he's a somewhat expensive option to do so. That's what I've had to use in ITC events if I wanted no-scatter GOI.

With the 'soft hands' Mishap table in this edition, scatter doesn't concern me a great deal anyway, to be honest.

It normally doesn't for me, either. However, with the large footprint and pricetag of 9 grots + 2 characters, it becomes at minimum a slightly more concerning issue.

Basically, the large footprint means they're more likely to mishap, and the large pricetag means you risk more if they do. It's a double-whammy.