Battle at Lund: Team Tournament #1 (#495): Nemo3 vs Iron Mother

:: Prologue ::

Following the Swedish Masters on Friday I didn't know what to do on Saturday. I knew that I wanted something relaxed as Sunday held the Invitationals tournament (the X best players from the other tournaments that weekend would each get a spot), which in my eyes is in many ways biggest to win. In any case more or less everyone at the convention wanted to play a team tournament so I got together with two other guys to take on a real challenge: Each round we would roll a dice each. The one who scored the lowest would have to try and lose his game. By that we didn't mean killbox yourself or kill your own caster, but rather make crazy plays, go for stupidly bad assassinations etc. We didn't mind winning or losing, we just wanted to have a good time and would happily go to the beer bracket.

Because of this I chose to leave Sloan at home and go with Nemo3. I love to play Nemo3 and this was the perfect format to take him out for a spin again. Our first game saw us pair up against a trio of Danes. I was delighted to see that one of them was playing Convergence, and since I didn't have to try and lose my game (our Circle player lost that roll-off for this round) I really wanted to try out Nemo3 against the CoC. "Please give me the CoC, I really need the CoC!" Somehow that got me the Convergence matchup!

:: Lists ::

Cygnar:

Theme: Storm Division
(Nemo 3) Artificer General Nemo [+25], Bunker
- Storm Chaser Adept Caitlin Finch
- Squire [0]
- Firefly [8]
- Firefly [8]
- Firefly [8]
- Dynamo [18]
- Lancer [10]
Storm Lances (max) [20]
Storm Lances (min) [12]
Major Katherine Laddermore [8]
Journeyman Warcaster [0]
- Firefly [8]

Opponent:

Theme: Destruction Initiative
Iron Mother
- Prime Axiom
- 2x Assimilators
- 2x Mitigators
- Diffuser
- Corollary
Tons of bots

:: Pre-Battle Thoughts & Deployment ::

We were playing Entrenched and I got first turn. What is the game plan? Charge!! I wanted to respect Mother's threat ranges bottom of 1 and then simply take it from there. A viable approach is to give him semi-juicy targets and capitalize on greed. My feat is absolutely crazy in this matchup, virtually capable of killing all heavies and the Axiom if shield guards are dealt with, and the assassination potential is brutal. I have to beware of backlash plays and shield guards surviving for long. Lastly, Domination on key jacks like Lancer and Dynamo is an issue.

:: Game ::

I run stuff up and put up Arcane Shield on the big Lances, Electrify on the small ones. I take care to not have any jacks save for a Firefly in range of run + domination/backlash. I figured that if Mother wants to start getting aggressive bottom of 1 I can play from there.

Indeed Mother goes for the Firefly! A light vector runs up to arc Backlash. The Prime then follows up with a couple of attacks, doing 2-3 boxes to Nemo. All of this however leaves Mother on 0 camp, standing right next to an Assimilator...

Obviously, we cannot have that so the good ol' "let's-leap-off-of-a-friendly-model" trick came out in the shape of proxy bases. I did have quite a few direct attacks as well and Mother had 5 shield guards nearby. In any case I had such a huge volume of attacks I could get at her that it hardly mattered. 

The Lancer ran up, Nemo Force Hammered the Assimilator to KD Mother and from there it was a matter of feating and unleashing the lord of lightning. Before I had lept off of model at all, Mother was dead to direct attacks as all shield guards died to early D3 leap variants. 

Victory to the Swans!

:: Evaluation ::

Nemo is a caster you simply have to know to avoid shenanigans like this. DEF19 is legit in most matchups, doubly so with 5 Shield Guards and closer targets all over the place. However enter the Lancer + Force Hammer combination and everything changes.

Had I not had an opening I would've consolidated my position, withdrawn the backlash'd Firefly, healed Nemo back up and camped. I would set up to punish both a scenario push and a push towards my zone. Iron Mother feels very hard to play vs Nemo3 in my opinion and probably Axis as well. Lucant is probably a nightmare but absent him, the pairing struggles.

My teammates both won their games. Our Circle player left his caster on 1 box in front of shooters and Butcher1's spell range, with his Khador opponent having Eiryss1. However Eiryss was engaged and didn't want to tempt her luck against a MAT6 Stalker so despite trying to lose, the Khador assassination just wasn't there.