The War Altar: ETC Defensive/Hammer combi list

You're captain of the Irish ETC team, it's a young team with hardly any history. This is a good thing as much a bad thing, you have little history to instill pride in the team, but you also have the opportunity to set the scene, a clean sheet of sorts.

So you'll have a decision to make bringing an Irish team (led by two previous ETC veterans in the form of Vice Captain Paul Quigley and Captain Richard Flood) to Switzerland in 2011. What do you want the composition of your team to be?

As regards the players on the team, the Irish team is chosen from the best and most dedicated players in the country, primarily using the rankings from Rankings HQ. With this calibre of player at his disposition, most of whom play more than one army, the captain has a lot of freedom to choose what kind of team he wants to field.

What does that mean though? What kind of team? Codex Space Marines or Codex Blood Angels? No that's not quite what it is. This has been discussed extensively by many in other blogs (check out Darragh Cullen's blog for example). Should a captain take intentionally defensive lists? If so how many? Hammer lists? Shooty lists? Assaulty lists? Or just let the best players take the list they want to take and would normally do well with.

Last year the team had a diverse selection, Imperial Guard, Orks, Witch Hunters, Eldar, Space Marines, Blood Angels, Tyranids, Chaos Space Marines, Dark Angels, Dark Eldar. So it was more of a case of players taking what they wanted and doing well with it rather than the captain imposing any kind of selection rules. The team however did communicate regularly with each other about improving each others lists and a lot of list discussion took place before the tournament (particularly regarding a certain Chaos Space Marines list) and this was quite important.

So this year the captain has a lot to consider. I'm here to present a list I think could fit into an ETC squad. It's cheeky and would require good target priority from its general but I think it presents a lot of unique applications on the ETC scene and would like to see what our readers think.

The Librarian, with gate, the cheekiest of gypsie moves, take a unit with him if he wants and Null Zone, for rerolling successful invulnerable saves within 24”, good for when forcing enemy bikes/jetbikes to take dangerous terrain checks due to the Thunderfire Cannons. Also good for taking out Thunderwolves in combat or with shooting. Where does he go? In a raider with a hammer unit. Extends his bubble slightly for Null Zone and the psychic hood and gives him a comfortable warm home for the game if you want him to stay safe.

The hammer units, nothing ground breaking here, two 5 man thunder hammer/storm shield terminator units in Land Raiders. Nice counter attack for facing certain lists (Ork nobs, nids with list of MCs, Wolves). Couple of God Hammer pattern Land Raiders goes down easy with any player but like I say. Nothing ground breaking here.

Next up, the troops. The two sniper scout squads hug some ruins which have been bolstered and stay put, capturing a couple of objectives.

The three 5 man squads are obvious enough suicide units, scout moving up into the opponents face and crippling some lists (double hammers) right off the bat, heavy mech lists will not like these units obviously enough. And if you don't get first turn simply outflank and salt to taste.

The Storms have multi meltas, just to make sure the enemy can't ignore them and they have a good chance of getting the job done.

My opinions are well known on the Thunderfires and how awesome they are so I won't go into that here but I think they mess up some opponents quite extensively.

I don't envisage this list making it to ETC, I do however think it achieves what I want it to and that is to make you think about the possibilities that the ETC opens up when allowing you to think outside the box when list building.

You'd rarely see Thunderfire Cannons around but guess what I came up against last year at ETC? Bingo. ETC allows less typically competitive units to see the light of day on the chance that you can mess your opponent country up with your funky unit selection.