An Introduction

Hello all of you out there
Im Voidraven5829, feel free to drop the formal numbers and thank you for taking the time out of your day to visit my page.

Some things you should know about this blog:
Everything I post here will be about my experience in the game of Warhammer 40,000 and my journey to becoming a better player, painter, and builder.
I will probably add links to various forums and YouTube channels to drive some points home or make for an introduction to that particular post, so there's your warning for that.
Some topics I'll be posting about include, but are not limited to:
Tactics
Pictures of and they stories behind some of my favorite models that I have built
Personal fluff about my armies
Army lists I have tried or will be trying out
Battle reports
Some interesting combos I have found
And the psychology of playing the game

On top of this, I hope your comments will help me become a better player, blogger, and more i haven't even thought up yet.

Without further ado: just who the hell
am I and why am I setting this whole thing up?
(TL:DR at bottom)
Well, I started playing towards the end of 5th edition, right around the time the then new Dark Eldar codex came out. I had a fairly large Kabal, but just couldn't come up with decent stories for them, there just wasn't enough information about them (that I could find) for me to feel I could justify writing about them. I felt that I could be possibly breaking some of the unwritten rules of writing by doing so.
Seeing my delima, my best friend in the game (and also roommate at the time), General Baites, asked me how I felt about serving the Ruinous Powers and fielding a Chaos Space Marine army, because there is SO much history on them that it would be almost impossible to not find something that I would find awesome about them. I thought about it, and took him up on the offer to take his marines off his hands. From there, I discovered 1d4chan.org, one of my favorite tools for this game, I found loads of tips, tricks and tactics for anyone starting any army in the game and started reading it day and night to sate my hunger for more knowledge about my army, and my future opponents' armies.

I bought and built a few boxes of models and started playing my new Chaos army around the gaming club. And I couldn't stop winning. Tau, Blood Angels, Space Wolves, and the odd Imperial Guard army felt the cold sting of death as I wrecked them time and again with Nurgle bikers, Obliterators, and a tooled out Chaos Lord of Nurgle. Then I met my friend, I'll call him Crispy Crusader.
I met Crispy one night after work, I had gotten off of delivering pizza fort he night just in time to swing by the shop and see how some games were going. Crispy was watching a game of Warmachine and I had never seen his face before, so I asked who he was, what he played and all that, not expecting the response i got: "oh I play black templars... I have about 4000+ points worth of them and I just moved out here"
In the back of my mind, The gods started speaking to me, telling me that this guy was more than a one-off chance encounter.
We got to talking and before we knew it the shop had closed an hour and a half ago as we were just standing outside trading stories and speaking of our great deeds on the field of battle. Ww checked the time, laughed, exchanged phone numbers and carried on. About a week later we had our first game.
Without going into detail (I have forgotten many of them), I'll just say He crushed me and shattered my invincible streak and left my army a devastated wreck.
I had made some bone-headed mistakes and derped when i should've herped.
"Eh, I was distracted and he caught me off guard." I told myself. We met up the next week and played again. And he crushed me... Again. And again. And AGAIN. This process repeated until I had a consecutive losing streak of 34 games. All in the span of November of last year to March of this year.
I didn't understand, was it me playing a bad list?
Was he really just THAT good?
Frustrated and beaten I started listening to a YouTube channel by Fritz40k. This guy has helped me loads. Fritz breaks down specific ideas in a single tactic and speaks of them in ways it would've taken me years to grasp fully.
So i changed my tactics up a bit. I threw out my havocs with Autocannons in favor of ork Lootas; they have the same gun, and my havocs couldn't hit anything worth a damn anyway so why not?
And then i started experimenting with the psychic phase. Mainly, summoning Daemons. This ork/daemon/marine combo almost worked a couple times.
This one game I had summoned two bloodthirsters early on in the game and was wrecking face but lost because I forgot my tactical objectives until the last turn of the game.
Whoops.
So i redoubled my self-learning experience, watched battle reports from miniwargaming.com, studied them, started playing small games by myself on a whiteboard and so on.
And then i found the Renegades and Heretics. These guys, the evil Imperial Guard, have broken open my strategy box and has given me all the options I have ever wanted: sentinels for 20 points each? And artillery piece that drops 4(!) blasts a turn that can be taken in groups? I was sold.
Crispy and I played a game a few months ago, agreeing to not be alone with eachother on the table and others from the group joined in the fight. My set of 4 Thudd guns dropped 16 blasts on Crispy's stergard and caused 36 hits, 20 wounds, and 7 of them unsaved.
I had actually gotten somewhere.
We still tied the game, but i could feel I was getting close to avenging myself from November.
To this day, we haven't played again but I look forward to finally beating him...

TL;DR
Okay, so that's pretty long, so let me sum up:
I play chaos marines (Iron Warriors), daemons, renegades, and am starting my ork army up fairly well. I have learned a lot in the past year and am readt for more and believe I can help others in the way forums, blogs, and YouTube has helped me become a better player.

Thank you for reading this, and I hope this is the start of a friendship that will help eachother get better!