Escalation League week 1

So, Crispy and I have joined a league. First game is this Saturday starting all the way at 500 points. He's using this as an excuse to play with units he hasn't before, and I'm building up my Orks for this. Deep down though, I feel the both of us have needed someone fresh to play, and boy does this little group have that.
I found a meetup group in my area, the first meeting was last month. Crispy, myself, and one other kid, just starting out in the game, were the only ones that showed up.
We sat and talked and made sure none of us were serial killers. Having established that, we broke into 2v2 teams and broke out the models.
Our leader, Papabear, has been teaching his 9 year old son how to play and openly admitted to being out of practice. He's gonna be running his Tau, so he shouldn't have too much difficulty getting back into the swing of things.
The other kid, who's name escapes me, plays'Crons. But before you rage, he also has made his army out of legos, so he has a coolness factor to tone down the emotions.
I feel this is going to be a grwat experience, having never before been in a league, and having very little experience in games smaller than the 1000 point mark, means the first few rounds will certainly be a challenge for me.
Papabear, upon gawking at my unpainted models, has issued a decree that all models must have at least 3 colors of paint to them to be eligible for play... Naturally, this has been a bit of a hurdle as I've had very little experience in that, I spend my hobby time building my models and thinking about their stories, not their color schemes, so it's been a nice addition to the hobby to be thinking of what color goes where. Luckily, I got some great tips from Deadbolt, who sold me quite a bit of his Orks for a very decent price.
Another feature of our league, though still up for debate, is the warlord traits. The idea is that each player's warlord is the same character throughout the campaign unless they permanently die (upon losing their last wound, roll a d6, on a 5 or 6 they are gone and cannot be used anymore). The benefit of this, is that the players get to pick, not roll, our warlord traits. This, and going with the theme of having a recurring character, means that the trait will stay with that character until death, so armies can be planned accordingly.
I have gone through many drafts of my list, and my warlord trait choices and have decided on where to go. Since I haven't had any gameplay experience as or even against Orks, I have found gauging the power of units to be pretty hard, so here's hoping things go well. I've spent a lot of time on dakkadakka.com hoping for advice and have gotten some decent feedback, and as always, Crispy and now Deadbolt, have offered much as well, which means I now hope that I don't get paired with Crispy in the first round. with him knowing my whole strategy, it would be quite an uphill fight.
Anyway, that's it for this post, I'll be back with more, stay tuned.