Competitively Humble Beginning

Greetings everyone, and welcome to the first post of many.  My name is Ian Dudek and I am team captain of Team Bad Decisions, my teammates are Marcus Baxley, Nick Mills, and Ken Summers.  We primarily compete for the Adepticon 40k team tournament painting and theme categories.  Since the team was created we have won Best Hybrid, Best Xenos, and Best Display.  If you don't remember us from Adepticon last year we were the team who constructed a coffin that Khorne himself would be proud of.

I am a competitive player, more like an ex-competitive player; which is complicated.  Let me give you a short history of some of my experiences.  a long time ago in 1983 my mother just... wait, we should probably start a little more recent and relevant than that awkward moment.  I have been around the competitive scene since 2004 winning many small tournaments and placing anywhere from the middle of large tournaments to winning Best Faction in GTs.  I have attended many years at Adepticon in hopes to win a competitive award.  My teams have always placed well scoring in the top 30 to top 20 overall almost every year.  One year my Adepticon team imploded upon itself, it was the closest we ever came to winning overall but attitudes towards a team member really drained what ambitions I had at Adepticon.  Think about it, your team had a single high loss vs the champions of that adepticon and nothing else but monster wins each game going into the final table.  Every player was unwilling to play with a teammate and effectivly went into the final game frustrated at each other.  This is a person that everyone drove 3+ hours in the same car just to a really awkward ride back home. After that Adepticon I started drinking more at Adepticon and slowly got myself kicked off the team I started.  Thus, my life as a hobby avenger was born; when life gives you competitive lemons you give that lemon to Marcus who will turn it into art, ask Nick to build you a display for said lemon art, and pull your hair out because Adepticon is a week away and we must crush the competition with the best lemon anyone has ever seen!

Anyways so I was kicked off the team I started and Adepticon was coming up.  I am still highly competitive so what is the best way to be competitive without needing to win a game or be sober for?  I ask you, the person still reading this far into a crazy long post.  You guessed it, retreat into the mountains master kungfu and fight crime.  Wait, that was plan B, plan A is competing in painting/theme to give us the best chances to win Best Faction.  I decided to put together another team, a team where every player could get drunk before game 2, where the hardest part of the day was moving from table to table without breaking any models, and purposely bring below average armies to get crushed.  A utopia of fun where rolling does not matter and you forgot what turn it was because shots seemed like a better idea at the time.


Our Last three Adepticons:

Team Bad Decisions 2014: My painting skills at the time were crap so I had to reach out to the craziest and best modeler I knew which is Marcus Baxley.  My brilliant and lazy plan was to have Marcus just add new models onto his already existing extravagant Ork army and we would win best Xenos for sure.  Did I mention Marcus is loco?  He said he did not want to use any of his painted models because he could do better.  He singlehandedly built two Ork armies and converted two guard armies using all Grots, Squigs, and looted tanks.  Operation: Be Lazy At War Gaming was a success and we took home Best Hybrid.  Everyone celebrated donated any winnings to Marcus for next year and went our separate ways.

Team Bad Decisions 2015: The second year we were trying to make plans on what we wanted to bring and I have never seen Marcus so wound up about destroying the status quo.  Eldar was and still is the best army in 40k and Marcus wanted to bring a bad Eldar army;  probably knowing that everyone would crush us off the table.  The words he constantly threw around "People are going to lose their minds when they see these models".  Once again Marcus crushed out some models and sure enough, we only won a single game with Eldar.  Sometimes I wonder how does one lose with Eldar and the answer is to allow Team Bad Decisions to write an army list for you but I digress.  An army display was always lacking and our new teammate Nick really stepped up to the plate and fabricated an Arc like from Indiana Jones.  Nick built a solid heavy display that would have everyone wondering what was in the box.  At the end of the tournament even with so many Eldar teams, we took home Best Xenos.

Team Bad Decisions 2016: As a team we decided to go with Khorne Daemon Kin.  Winning the last few years felt a little hollow and team morale appeared to be low.  I discovered Marcus loved building but did not care to paint, Nick wanted to build a coffin and fill it with skulls blood and a coliseum, the rest of the team wanted to contribute this year as well.  I wanted to help creatively but I was more known to organize the team set everything up and fill up my body with the appropriate amount of alcohol each game at Adepticon.  Marcus has been teaching me how to paint for a long time and demon skin was the one thing that seemed to stick.  I ended up volunteering to paint all the models with skin and Marcus said he would touch up anything that was not up to snuff.  With Marcus having my back I felt I could take on the challenge.  In the middle of delegating tasks, one teammate dropped off our team.  I figured as long as we had Marcus, Nick, and myself we could really find anyone to join last minute to help out.

So the plan was to have everyone create a list of models they wanted for the tournament.  Each player would then order the models and send it to Marcus to build/convert anything Marcus wants for your unit you would have to purchase.  Eventually, we found ourselves buying and buying more and more models with a junkyard of bits.  Let me tell you when you make plans with Marcus there are no plans.  He is the master of chaos, at the beginning of the purchasing and planning phase Marcus will frequently get a new idea for models and we would be back to purchasing bits/models for a bit longer. As more and more models kept getting ordered more and more models kept coming out.  What once seemed like a small project turned into painting eighty models of skin and armor just to find out a majority of them ended up being blood tithe models.

The tournament came to an end and we won Best Display.

In a nutshell, Team Bad Decisions strives to lose games of 40k, build insane models, paint to a higher standard, fabricate crazy displays, and hopefully inspire the Warhammer community.  I want our team to inspire players to believe that seeing awesome converted models is way cooler than winning a few games.

If you are interested in our work in progress pictures with some behind the scenes pictures of our previous years you have come to the right place.  We will also be sure to share some spoilers of our new Adepticon army throughout the year, although we like to keep things secret so expect a trickle and not a flood of information about Adepticon 2017 and yes we are already working on it.

Welcome to Team Bad Decisions!