Battle at Lund Team Tournament Game 2: Cyphon vs Axis

I played the second game against Tobias Ollson with Convergence. I had a bit of a practice against convergence recently, and I am always using Cyphon as the drop here.

He chose Axis. His list:

Axis
- 2 Conservators
- 2 Inverters
- Corollary, Diffuser, Cipher
TEP
3 Attunement (flare), 9 Elimination (sniper), 3 Accretion (repair) servitors
Optifex

Unfortunately, he got the first turn. Mainly this is bad as it makes my ambushers appear later - even though I still prefer to keep them ambushing, to keep TEP more honest.

I deploy almost totally symmetrically. This scenario is so dead that it's going to be an attrition game, so I feel no need to skew. The asymmetrical choices are: which side to put the Subduer and which side to put the Overlords. Both go left: subduer because more heavies are there, Overlords because TEP isn't there.

He runs up. I understand that losses to shooting on the way in are inevitable, and so don't hold back too much either (alexia and one of the wreckers on the right side are outside of TEP's threat range).

Axis shows why TEP is in every list. The right side benders are almost all gone. Elimination servitors also kill quite a few benders from the left side. Alexia collected a ton of corpses.

Since his heavies are still far away, I can't feat yet. I kill a lot of servitors with my overlords, and I use the newly created risen to jam the heavies. I use the ambushing slavers as a distraction on the left side. I also move my heavies aggressively forward. I understand that he outthreatens me with charges because of the feat, and so I move in with my own heavies. If he wants to kill them, then he will have to trample, which means that he greatly reduces the effectiveness of his alpha. I make one big mistake in this turn, too - I forget to allocate focus to my monstrosities to prepare them for the action in my next turn.

He feats of course. He clears the landing spots (although some had been left open, near the left wrecker - also my mistake), and then tramples forward. He takes out the brain on the left wrecker, removes the subduer, but doesn't take out the right wrecker. The far right wrecker takes a hit from TEP and moves over. Basically, my losses could have been less if I had properly covered the landing spots near the left-most wrecker with drudges. One of the conservators is occupied with my slavers, as I had hoped.

My feat turn comes, and I remove TEP and the right-most invertor. I made a huge mistake in planning here. Basically, I wanted to opent the scoring, and so went to the flag. However, after removing the TEP I moved the wrecker closest to Cyphon in a wrong position. I killed the Invertor with just three attacks, and it would have been better to spend the remaining atacks to damage the Conservator.

Tobias sees an assassination angle, and so instead of chewing throught the attrition game with my ARM20 heavies he just tramples the conservator over my agitator and kills Cyphon.

Lessons learned:
1. With the style of jamming of this Cyphon list, it is important to remember to cover trample landing spots, preferably with something that has high defense (like an overlord - to prevent them being easily shot off).
2. Always keep assassination angles in mind in this kind of a grind.