What I Brought to Turnipcon 4

The call is coming from inside the shell.

Honestly, I loved Turnipcon 3 with all my little heart but this was such a massively marked improvement. The venue was tSN arena up in Nottingham just 15 minutes walk from the train and coach stations, next to some great lunch spots (A strong recommendation for GB Cafe, a greasy spoon with great malay and japanese food), at least twice as many tables as Turnipcon 3 and a tonne more players (I think we reached about 44).

The List

• Toff
  • Whelps (BP)
  • Bastards (CCW)
• Toady
  • Snail Knight (CCW)
• Toady
  • Snail Knight (CCW)

Speedpainted the day before while cat sitting.

So after Probby’s performance at the last turnipcon I was trying to narrow down a cavalry list that plays well into Slugs Lament and Leech Lovers. We nerf Grog shooting and can Mucous Manoeuvre to instagib their 6 panic reinforcements and against leech lovers, we’re relying on our improved Vulnerability save (particularly on our Snail Knights), to give them less opportunity to sustain in combat and auto win melee engagements.

In terms of actual list composition, we have:

• Black powder Whelps for 18” move-shoot-move and objective control.
• CCW Bastards for Anti-Monster and BLC autogibs.
• 2 x Snail Knight for anti-medium (chaff/whelps/snobs) and enabling two Mucous Manoeuvres.

Testing

I didn’t get in as much testing as I wanted to with this list, I focused primarily on Slugs and Lovers getting in a few games a piece against both of them. The Good news, -1 to hit, +1 save and fearless is real. The Bad news, this disappears the second you have to move a unit. So the common pattern of events is you move a unit, it gets hit as hard as possible by the opponent, you try to clean up whatever unit charged/shot, repeat. You end up trading back and forth until there’s so few units on the board that you can talk out the game.

There’s a couple ways out of this trap. You can try to out activate your opponent by self ordering snobs to take 0 inch advances before ordering any of your followers, but good players will probably be wise to this and you’ll end up at square one. You can send in the the snails first to soak the hits on a 3+, which is generally the best move in most scenarios. Or you can Mucous Manoeuvre turn 1 and commit to the trade war, but I think that probably requires a pretty skew list of 1 BP/MIS Snail Knight and 3 CCW Bastards (Move & Shoot the Snail Knight to powder token someone, trade bastards until the end of time).

Now I’m generally of the opinion that Stump Guns are BadTM, but boy does Round Shot kill things with good saves. Luckily snail knights are always -1 to hit which means that stump guns generally have to spike two sixes to kill (foreshadowing).

Now let’s talk about the 0” Movement. It sucks. If you want to bring anything like a balanced list you need to take two snail nights to get at least 2 turns of 18” movement. I think the intention is to stall out the game for the first couple turns, whittling down the opponent before you commit to your big charging turn, but I don’t think that’s a sound game plan. There’s too many things in the game that can take good shots on your non-snail followers or hunt your snobs for headless chicken. I found myself using both my Mucous Manoeuvres by Round 3. Getting in and moshpitting as hard as possible and letting whelps take 18” move-shoot-move to grab objectives or snipe Snobs. There are games where you wish you had a third Manoeuvre, but it felt like a lot of the times I was wishing for it was when people were taking 10” retreats from me and I was already ahead.

Event Rules

So we’re up for a tight 5 game event with the army that goes to round 5, a challenge already. Ahead of time we knew the first to scenarios: Crossing the Dredge and Trouble in the Fog. With the 3 games in the afternoon being randomly assigned.

Scoring was as follows: 3 Points for a win, 1 for a draw, 1 for a loss and 1 additional point for each Toff-Off won.

Additionally secondaries had changed from turnipcon 3, now at the start of the game you rolled for two of the following:

• Pick a follower unit you control. If they are alive at the end of the game, gain 1 point.
• Pick a snob you control. If they ever enter your opponents half of the table, gain 1 point.
• You charged an enemy and the enemy failed their panic test, gain 1 point.
• Fighting words! If you declare a Toff Off you gain 1 point.
• If you force an enemy to lose at least one model to Impassable Terrain, gain 1 point.
• If your army has touched every piece of Dangerous Terrain on the board, you gain 1 point.

Each of these had a max of 1 point per game, so you would cap out at 2 points of secondaries per game. Putting a perfect run at 30 points (outside of respawning Toff shenanigans).

As for army changes, grapeshot range increased to 18”, Grogs went to 1 attack, dangerous terrain was unchanged and leech lovers could no longer “do the broken thing with regaining Wounds on their own. But I don’t know the rules enough to explain it. There’s a sensible interpretation and a bonkers one, take the sensible route.” as Ben put it (🤷‍♀️).

The Games

Game 1 - Fungivorous Herd on Crossing the Dredge

Poor Snope, drowned in the mud. What would the Snaple Snates say?

First game was against a new player with herd. Unfortunately not a lot to say on this game, we sandbagged round 1, took good charges with Mucous Manoeuvre round 2 (Also managed to lose my toff to dangerous terrain) and by round 3 there was only really a small token force and the herd. Whelps cleaned up the objectives and snail knights steamrolled the rest.

I was however a little underwhelmed with Mucous Manoeuvre, I had this nagging feeling that I probably could have made all these charges with cavalry on their normal movement.

Win.

Game 2 - Brotherhood of Greed on Lost in the Fog

First of amazing army, instead of a banner there was a Menu for Restorante Giuseppe, everyone had hand modelled chef hats on top of their helmets and were done up in gorgeous clean Green white and red.

The snobs had Bulbous (+2 vulnerability), Vegetable Bloom (Skirmish) and Root Sight (Ignores Dangeorus Terrain). And the list was CCW Fodder, Stump Gun, BP Bastards, BP Chaff.

Preliminary bombardment put my snail knight on 2 wounds from the get go which was incredibly spooky. His chaff reserve moved away from my bastards and I ended up having to commit to Mucous Manoeuvre turn 1.

We wiped the chaff and lost the two wound snail to bastards, the ccw fodder block got slowly whittled down by whelps as they took midfield. I played pretty sloppily and left myself open to a potential loss from headless chicken, which ended up becoming my immediate priority, whelps got to do a lot of toff sniping after I lost my Toff to a Toff off. The remaining snail crunched through the CCW fodder since they had skirmish and eventually chewed up the Toff ending the game at round 3.

Dinner at Giuseppe’s

All in all an outstanding game, a tonne of back and forth and close to the end. I don’t know why his chef’s hat kept rustling though.

Win.

Game 3 - Knights of Shellwood on Save the Bacon

A beautiful day for the Snirror Match. My opponent’s list was 2 Snail Knights, CCW Bastards, BP Bastards.

Save the bacon is always an absolute clusterfuck. Honestly I don’t have anything intelligent to say, it was total carnage, Mucous Manoeuvre turn 1. Spiked a lot of rolls and just went as killy as possible. This was the most back and forth trade game I’ve had and I probably only won it because the bastards were on BP against a lot of -1 to hit targets.

Truly glorious Snarnage.

Win.

Game 4 - Feast of Charybdis on Thin Ice

I was riding high on my 3-0, matchups were random so there was a real possibility of me going 5-0.

That all stopped when the crab arrived. Or in fact didn’t arrive. I lost a snail to dangerous terrain round 1, in a five game event it’s bound to happen at least once, that’s turnip baby.

My second snail got caught out of position by CCW bastards and got chewed up. And my remaining whelps despite putting in a valiant effort of grabbing objectives in the early game didn’t get me enough points to still win, we talked it out and I took the L before the Crab even hit the table.

Loss.

Game 5 - Procession of Woe on Grave Matters

I absolutely fumbled the bag on this one, I won the roll to choose attackers or defenders and I thought “Man snails can really tank some hits” so I took defenders. This was entirely on me, I had only half read the rules for the scenario. My poor snail and Toff died of a million cuts before the rest of my army came on. Luckily some greedy panic stacking on my opponents part let me instagib full health bastards and full health fodder. Letting me snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Win.

4-1 with 21 Points

This put us in tied 3rd, or tied 9th. The winner had 23 points, 2nd was a three way tie on 22 and third was 21 with a 4 way tie. Extremely close all round.

I think I did a bad job trying for secondaries in general though. There were a few games that I missed maxing them out even though they would have been trivial. I scored 14 points on W/L/D, 1 point on winning toff-offs and 6 points on secondaries.

Winning felt worth a lot more this time around and secondaries didn’t have quite as much points inflation for normal gameplay as the last turnipcon. But random pairings and capping out on 2 points of secondaries per game led to a lot of ties.

What Went Well?

Game Knowledge

I really felt in the drivers seat this time. Snails really get to dictate the pace of play since you have a magic switch that says “I make every charge this turn”, but beyond that I felt like I knew my rules and threat ranges well for both my cult and almost all my opponent’s cults (and luckily when I did play off against brotherhood of greed all the mutations were explained to me).

Getting to offload all of that to the back of my head really let me focus on order of operations and the push and pull that turnip being an alternate activation game brings.

Around the start of game 3 I was really feeling my oats and felt like it was a very winnable tournament for me.

Defensible Terrain and 2+ saves

-1 to Hit and fearless is great. You don’t budge. Everything but grogs is going to have a hard time landing shots. 2+ saves however enter into the problematic zone in my opinion. I feel like snails probably need to be tweaked to 4+ base and get 3+ with the bonus. There’s just a lot of cults that don’t get to participate against snail knights.

Whelps in General

I said in November and I’ll say it again. Whelps are the best core unit in the game and I will keep taking at least one unit of them in every list I make.

What Didn’t Go Well?

Dangerous Terrain

The real downside of snail knights is not having access to ignoring dangerous terrain. I think is a bit of a tricky spot, we know that picking up your cool unit because you walked into a puddle feels bad, but we don’t really want every monster unit in turnip to have the crabs ability. We’ve seen previews that Probby is getting the ability to ignore one piece of dangerous terrain per round. I’m not sure that’s the right answer, I’d rather see cult specific units have different ways of dealing with it.

There’s two elegant solves for Shellwood that come to mind:

• Ignore Dangerous Terrain on Mucous Manoeuvre turns
• Make the snail knight a multi model unit (2 models with 2 wounds a piece)

Mucous Manoeuvre

This may be a controversial opinion but 18” of movement on cavalry for a max of two rounds is not that much in exchange for 0” on everything for the rest of the game.

I want to be clear, Shellwood is one of my favourite cults. I think it’s probably the biggest winner for me thematically, but I think it’s tradeoffs are too big.

Cavalry in any other cult has 12” base, so you’re only getting a 6” bonus. Yes, a free 6” before the 2d6” is great, but Turnip is usually a 3ft by 3ft or 4ft by 4ft board with no impassable terrain where cavalry are comfortable making 19” charges against the nearest target. There’s very few points in a game where an extra 6” on top of the 12” is really going to matter (How many 18” retreats have you seen that didn’t hit a board edge and stop?). Where bonus move speed really matters is infantry, it’s one of the reasons why CCW Fodder work so well in Probby.

Maybe Mucous Manoeuvre needs to apply to infantry as well but only give them 12 inches, this stops you getting pidgeon holed into a cavalry only list while avoiding giving infantry the ability to sweep the board. Or lean even harder into Shellwood being a setup and combo cult, maybe the Mucous Manoeuvre could cause them to lose their defensible terrain and save bonus in exchange for getting bonus attacks, innacuracy or even enemy vulnerability penalty on charges.

I have a slight preference for the latter since it feels the most “Knightly” to me, but I also expect that we won’t see any Shellwood changes in the near future, they only feel a little behind compared to some of the other cults which are in desperate need of a buff, and I think we all know that the next balance changes will probably be targeted at Leech lovers and Slugs Lament.

Ones To Watch

We’re expecting a v18 update soon and we pretty much know it will change Slugs Lament and Leech Lovers, so I’ll keep this short and sweet. I expect we will see some kind of crab changes too, possibly limiting them to one crab per army or increasing the distance it must be away from enemy units to make it a little easier to screen out.

Closing Thoughts

Damn what a great event. Everyone was an absolute delight and there were some real quality games with a lot of interaction and back and forth. Just absolutely wonderful to see so many people jamming games of turnip. I was a big fan of the scoring in this event it felt like the right mix between turnip’s relaxed vibe and the competitive aspect.

I do still have some concerns about random pairings instead of bracket based. I feel like I noticed a couple new players who had just had bad luck with their pairings and gone 0-5. I feel like some of this could be cushioned a bit by moving to a five round swiss so that you’re always playing someone with a similar running score.

And maybe if we cross our fingers and hope, there will eventually be a 2 day modified swiss event with 5 rounds of swiss followed by a single elimination top 8. 👀

All that said, another massively successful Turnipcon, these things just keep getting better and better. I can’t wait for the next one in november.

Thanks for reading! - Toff Club

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