Convergence at Lock and Load

I played Convergence at Lock and Load this year. This was the result of luck, friendship, hard work and sleep deprivation. I need to start by giving a shout out to 2 of my awesome friends for helping prepare models, develop paint schemes, stay up late with me and cheer me on during games. Steve and Travis, my experience at Lock and Load this year was due to your friendship, thank you.

Buddies that helped me prepare my army. Steve (left), Travis (right)

Preparation
Once I got Steve and Travis to agree to help me prepare the models for the events, I went into planning mode. I brought a lot of my paints -- a mixture of Games Workshop and Privateer Press -- 2 exacto-blades, mounting putty, 30 small bases (painted ahead of time), 18 medium bases (painted ahead of time), 10 large bases (painted ahead of time), my dremel, 3 sets of pinning rods, 2 sets of clippers, a bottle of gale force 9 glue acccelerator, and a set of files. I had also mailed 2 cans of black GW primer a few weeks before. I love how cleanly it covers models--which I am very picky about, especially if I'm going to use a dry brushing scheme.

Paint Scheme
My paint scheme came from an old paint scheme I had tried on Necrons awhile back. I never finished the army because I just couldn't get back into the game. Sorry GW... just can't stand your rules anymore, even though the most recent edition does seem improved.

Over brush base brass - Balthasar Gold
Dry brush gold leaving lots of shading - Gehenna's Gold
Dry brush edges - Golden Griffon
Wash - Sepia

Base silver areas - Leadbelcher/Iron Breaker
Black Wash - Thamar Black + Sepia Wash + Water

Super Water Down Blue Wash for small recesses - Temple Guard Blue
Couple coats on blue coils - Temple Guard Blue

This gets you to where my models are now. I'm going to improve them further with a lot more work on the lighting effects, cleaning up some of the mistakes and missed areas. Also, some of the silver needs a solid highlight.

What the field of battle looked like when all was said and done... 10 hours later, 7 AM Friday morning and only 2 hours before I needed to be at Iron Arena giving me roughly 1 and a half hours of sleep.
I played Axis and Forge Master at the Iron Gauntlet Qualifier going 2-2. I had originally planned on doing a couple different list configurations, though running out of time and energy restricted my lists down to only one angel unit instead of the three.

The lists:
Forge Master Syntherion +6
-Monitor 8
-Monitor 8
-Inverter 8
-Cipher 9
-Galvanizer 3
-Mitigator 4
-Mitigator 4
-Diffuser 3
Clockwork Angels 3
Reflex Servitors 2
Reflex Servitors 2
Attunement Servitors 2

Axis +6
-Monitor 8 (had nothing else)
-Inverter 8
-Inverter 8
-Cipher 9
-Mitigator 4
-Mitigator 4
-Galvanizer 3
-Galvanizer 3
Clockwork Angels 3
Reflex Servitors 2
Reflex Servitors 2
Attunement Servitors 2

Iron Gauntlet

Iron Gauntlet is a really interesting format. I know I've heard lots of pros and cons about the possibility of the format impacting the game. So, I really wanted to see what kind of lists were going to be there and bring something crazy all my own!

I was super excited we had finished the project and I was going to play my first game of Convergence with the actual models. Before Lock and Load, I had created a pretty snazzy proxy army with Photoshopped cards and print out units and jacks to get a feel for the faction. I could only play Forgefather since he was the only fully spoiled caster but I took what I could get.

My first opponent was Anthony Wang, a great guy from my gaming area, though he usually plays in stores roughly an hour north of me. He brought out Mohsar while I brought out Forgefather. Didn't want to lose my first game by having no clue what I was doing!

Trying to recall every detail just won't happen in any of these game due to my lack of sleep. The quick skinny of this game was the Monitors made quick work of the shifting stones. My Inverter survived a Warpwolf stalker charge causing Lightning Strike to not work allowing me to eat his stalker. Angels, who were preyed, just ran back to my side of the board to effectively take prey out of the game. Meanwhile, my little ball mines chased the Bloodtrackers around the table.

In the end I won when Mohsar failed to assassinate Forgefather due to his nice armor (20 at the time), high amount of hit boxes (also 20), and a 5 fury Mohsar not rolling what he needed to get the job done.

The next battle was vs. Jay from Chain Attack. At this point my lack of sleep, lack of experience fighting against eHaley and Jay's very solid job of using his units/spells/feat gave him a solid victory over me. This most likely knocked me out of contention due to my lack of army points and CPs earned.

Honestly I can't remember the rest of my games detail by detail. The most memorable of parts of my other games were...

• Picking Axis as my hardcore caster after having played only one game with him previously.
• Axis landing a counter charge with an Iron Aggressioned Inverter on a whip snapped Garryth  in hardcore knocking him down.
• Dying to a really bizarre pVyros list with tons of Griffons and a couple Aspises. Though I had the army handled well, my caster got too close to pVyros.
• Being the 2-1 pair down for Brandon (spell check?) during the hardcore tournament. 
• Three Ravagores shooting at Axis over and over while my jacks tried to get through the clog of infantry was brutal.

I went 2-2 in the Hardcore as well. 5 games total with Axis. By the end, I felt very successful.

Overall

I really appreciated everyone's nice comments at Lock and Load about the paint job and how impressed they were. Some people may have received very quick responses, but this was mainly due to me being exhausted and hungry. But everyone was heard and helped me get through the day!

Overall the faction is very much like spoilers hinted. Lots of machine qualities to their play style. Stats of things are crummy for the most part, but with a few well placed flares and beacons, things become incredibly fast and accurate.

Here are a couple quick synergies/combos I pulled off in games:

• Angels with Axis' feat quickly become speed 9 Pow 14 charge attacks with a flare Mat 8.
• Forge Master has some weird assassination vectors with his feat + beacon + magnetic hold allowing a Monitor to charge 11 inches, then boost a pow 13 another 13 inches. 
• Inverter knocking down someone with a Counter Charge. (Helps a lot if Iron Aggression is up)
• Synergized Forge Master for a pow 20 mat 12 attack
• 8 consecutive Counter Charges in response to enemy movements. (this included Reflex balls)
• Axis' feat to prevent a Bronzeback from Counter Charging, Attunement Servitor flaring eMorghoul, then pounding 5 transfers out of eMorghoul until he had done 72 damage in transfer to beasts (killing the Gladiator).
• Not really a synergy, but a Mitigator under Axis' feat moving 7 inches and killing 8 shield guarded models with puncture.

Forge Master Syntherion

Resourcefulness is amazing and Synergy is incredibly fun. I've never played a Synergy caster before, but he's efficient at it. Aside from that, Reconstruct is a good bait spell and Hot Shot is great to put on a Cipher vs. swarm armies. Forge Master really needs the arc node solos to take advantage of 1 of his best spells on the card-- Magnetic Hold. 8 Inch range is a death sentence unless you're catching an isolated unit.


Axis, the Harmonic Enforcer
Axis is very much the puzzle caster. Placement of your own models is massively important to line up proper Counter Charges and to not allow your opponent to clog them all up with 1 model with reach -- so layering your models is important. The 360 vision on the light jacks also makes Counter Charge super helpful. As of now, Axis is also the caster to play if you're going up against a super heavy terrain table or a heavy terrain causing caster/faction. Also, Counter Charging with your Inverters to knock down models on their turn is a lot of fun.

Overall I've played 21 games with Convergence and I have to say, without some more releases, there are some rough match ups (need more than Angels for infantry), but over all it's a blast to play. I am really enjoying how well they run the Warjacks -- the main reason I was so excited for the faction.

I look forward to spending a lot of time with the faction, but if you don't like synergistic mechanics, this is probably not the faction for you. It relies heavily on proper activation order, stacking buffs/debuffs and proper placement.