Iron Hands: How Not To Play Them

Don't mind the red solo cup... I was proxying in Drop Pods...

Don't play Purge missions if at all possible. Iron Hands may be more durable than some other marines MSU armies... but it wasn't enough.

So anybody who thinks Orks can't be played effectively haven't met my friend. He plays orks, always has, and always will! Yesterday we played a 2500 point game, in which I brought my Fist of Medusa detachment with as many tricks as I could muster. He brought a double-CAD with a formation, which consisted of a nasty number of Nobz in Mega Armor, a massive Bike Squad, a Stompa, and lots of Painboyz.

You know what kills my Iron Hands quite efficiently? Lots of Str 8 or higher. Most of his Mega Nobz had Powerklawz, which was a hard counter to my FNP rolls. He also took lots of high-strength shooting with his Stompa, which spat out S10 Massive pie plates that would decimate entire units wholesale as they exited their pods.

I usually play my Iron Hands with a single Deathstar of some kind. It usually involves a Captain with the Gorgon's chain, a command squad with an apothecary and special weapons, and in this case also a Chaplain with the Tempered Helm (pseudo-preferred enemy to the shooting attacks of the unit). Unfortunately, I used a drop pod as the transport for the unit. This means that where I dropped them, they had to hoof it from then on. This didn't work out so well. I tried to killbox his trucks with meganobz by blocking them in a tight street with drop pods. It was not terribly successful... my dice rolling was pretty abysmal and my scatters took my pods off on tangents. But I still got them in there, I just made a pretty big mistake. I had hoped on effective shooting being able to kill the orks well enough that they would be unable to effectively charge... and I hoped wrong.

Powerklaws made short work of any unit they charged. Even my poor Centurions holed up in some ruins.

I'm going to be making some big changes to my list. We'll see what I can come up with to make this less of a one-trick pony.