Blood in Blood Out - Blood Angels vs the Imperium

Warhammer 40,000 – Weekly game night should be getting back on track with Fall right around the corner. I've been lucky enough to get a game in every week this summer and I've been enjoying tinkering with an Imperial Crusade list. Yes, I can hear your moans it consists of Astra Militarum: Catachans, Blood Angels and House Raven.

This week I faced off against a friend who is slowly building up his "Blood Angels" from Pre-Heresy armor kits which he's going to used to represent a border-line renegade force. It's going to be a really cool looking group once he's done but at the moment he was a little short for our 2000 point game. To fill in the points he borrowed some units he was considering purchasing to see how they would work. 

To keep things simple we decided to play Open War, The cards we flipped the long edge touching arrow deployment with two objectives because of the Twist card. First was the burn and pillage objective where you have to put 3 objectives in your deployment zone and the first player to destroy all their opponents markers wins. The second was a pure kill stuff objective where each unit is worth its power level in points with Characters, Monsters and Vehicles counting as double, it also had the stipulation that you could still win even is you have no units left at the end of Turn 5.  This should be interesting.

My list consisted of:

Astra Militarum Battalion:
2x Company Commanders
3x Infantry Squads w/ Morters
1x Ogryn BodyGuard

Blood Angel Battalion:
Captain with Jumpack
Librarian Dreadnought
3x Tactical Squad with Heavy Bolter

House Raven Super Heavy Detachment:
1x Knight Crusader
2x Armigers Helverins
2x Armiger Warglaives

His list consisted of a single battalion, with a jump pack captain, lieutenant, scout squad, two tactical squads, dreadnought, storm raven, large death company, several units of company vets with jump packs armed with combi-melta/melta-guns and storm shields, company champion, company ancient, deathstorm drop pod and a razorback. Overall a very in your face army.

After set-up he won the roll to go first and I failed to seize the initiative, he managed to squeeze his captain in on my crusader and get the death company right on top of my Armigers. After some really effective shooting he was able to take one of the Warglaives down to just two wounds. The Blood Angel Captain didn't hit as hard as my opponent was expecting and only put seven wounds on the Knight with his first swing. The knight followed up with some effective stomping and killed the captain. Using his fight one more time before I die stratagem put another 15 wounds on the knight effectively crippling it. 

The game went back and forth quite a bit with my opponent doing a good job focusing on killing knights since they're already high value in power level was made ridiculous by the objective. At about Mid-game it became obvious that even if I tabled my opponent there was no way to win on the first objective so I began focusing on burning