#193: CANCON Game 2 - Ironsunz Vs. Idoneth Deepkin

Going into my second game of CanCon, sitting pretty on a big win against Sylvaneth, I found myself playing a fellow Queenslander, Jack! He was rocking the Idoneth Deepkin, so both armies were going to be battling it out in the activation wars.

Deepkin is an army I've faced a lot, playing against Luke McFadden's army, and so I was pretty relaxed going into this game. I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to do if I was going to pull out a win, and I knew exactly what could go horribly wrong if I played a sloppy game.

The Sylvaneth allies were a nice touch, giving Jack an avenue to drop a woods and start summoning Dryads. I knew I needed to shut this down, and either zone out the woods or kill those two characters before they could have a significant impact on objectives. 

The scenario was Startstrike, which is my worst nightmare against Deepkin. Typically, the first couple of turns are cagey, as both players see where the objectives land, and then turn three onward, all hell breaks loose. Unfortunately for me, turn three also happens to be a great time in the game for Idoneth...

We both had pretty defensive deployments. I was confident that he wasn't going to just frisbee his Eels across the table, but I was mildly concerned about the Morrsarr Guard in reserve sweeping on and blowing away a juicy target. I used my 10-man Ard Boy unit and my three foot heroes to make sure there were no windows in my back lines to creep on, while the 5-man Ard Boy units held down each flank, giving my army some breathing room against any surprise assaults from unexpected quarters.

Turn one was a bit of a non-event, with the only event of significance being the placement of the Wyldwood in the middle of the table, with a unit of Dryads emerging from deep within the trees. My Ard Boys on the flanks shuffled out of the deployment zone to push enemy reserves even further up the board, but there really wasn't any big plays. Both armies were biding their time. 

Jack won priority going into turn two, and handed it to me, setting himself up for a potential double turn going into High Tide. Fortune favours the bold, and in an attempt to force Jack to extend into the middle of the table, I managed to Hand of Gork the 10-man unit of Boys onto the freshly arrived objective that was left of centre in the middle of the board. Having 10 bodies, plenty of wounds and a decent save, the Ard Boys put pressure on the Deepkin to commit enough power and bodies to take that objective back as soon as possible, all while my Gruntas and Krusha looked on from easy charge distance. 

At the bottom of turn two, Jack's reserves ripped onto the left flank and slammed into the Ard Boy screen, deleting the entire unit with no damage in return and without having to use their zaps! If I lost priority going into turn three, my nearby pigs were in for a world of pain... Now that he had played his hand, however, I could relax my screens and start making more aggressive moves. 

In the middle of the board, Dryads and the Eidolon moved in to stack the objective with eleven models. Not content to let the gold be snatched away from them without a proper brawl, my Ard Boys made full use of the Ironsunz command ability from the Maw Krusha to make an out of sequence charge and launch themselves into the unsuspecting Dryads. The orruks started swinging and managed to deny the objective, chopping some limbs off but taking a few casualties in return. I was very careful to leave the Eidolon out of combat. I wanted no part of that! 

This is when disaster struck! My worst fear became reality when Jack won the double turn going into the third, and I braced myself for the coming onslaught! The Eidolon was gifted Mystic Shield, which added to his Ethereal Amulet in making him VERY hard to kill. Free from combat, he leapt over the top of my Ard Boys to try and block the avenue, isolating them from the rest of my army, but thankfully for me, failed a 5" charge with a re-roll. Lucky! The Thralls joined the fight on the centre objectives, adding their two-handed blades to the conflict, and adding another heap of bodies to the mix. 

The Morrsarr Guard, fresh from their kill of the Ard Boys, charged the rear of my Gore-Gruntas and wrapped up a Warchanter in the mix. The Megaboss on Maw-Krusha, not content to watch his orruk comrades be murdered, made another out of sequence charge and smashed into the flank of the Eels, wiping one out from impact hits. The zaps and the round of attacks from the Eels weren't nearly as impactful as either of us were expecting, and in return, the Gruntas and Maw-Krusha wiped the unit out completely! 

The brawl on the middle objective was not going my way. The Ard Boys were holding their own in a fight, but they'd lost control of the objective. 

Despite the success of repelling the Morrsarr assault on the left, things weren't so good on the right flank. The other unit of Morrsarr had also committed to combat and unleashed their full power upon the other unit of Gore-Gruntas, killing four outright and wounding a fifth. I chose to use a command point to keep them around, as I really couldn't afford to lose too many more bodies. 

At the end of Jack's turn three, things were a bit all over the shop. Both our home objectives had landed relatively central on the board (mine in the woods beside the Shaman, and Jack's behind his home Shipwreck by the Treelord. Even with it being High Tide, I needed to pull out something special to stay in this fight. I was losing bodies fast, and even though my Shaman was successfully shutting down the Dryad summons, there were still plenty of Aelves on the table! 

I wasted no time in formulating a couple of kunnin' plans! The first was to buff up the two surviving Gruntas from the right flank, and pluck them out of combat with a Hand of Gork. I dropped them deep in Jack's deployment, hoping to make my 8" charge (thanks to the Ironjawz +1" to charges) into the Tidecaster. If I could kill her (which two angry pig-riders shouldn't struggle too hard with on the charge), I'd have two pigs to one Treelord and snatch the objective!

But alas, my dice had other plans...  The charge failed and the kunnin' strategy wasn't as brutal as I would have liked.

Elsewhere on the table, however, pieces were in motion!

A plan was forming in my mind. A trick well known to Ironjawz players was about to be put into play. A trick that would completely bypass High Tide. In my hero phase, both my Gore-Gruntas and Megaboss on Maw-Krusha used their Mighty Destroyer (in the case of the Pigs, for free thanks to Ironfist) to charge the Eidolon. I completely forgot my impact hits, but that wasn't my priority. I had no intention of laying a finger on the Aspect of the Sea. I had other quarry. 

In my movement phase, both the pigs and the cabbage dragon retreated toward their actual targets. For the Gruntas, this was the Thralls that were currently giving my Ard Boys what for on the centre objective. For my Maw-Krusha, this was the Morrsarr Guard threatening my home objective and my Shaman. All I had to do was sit just outside of 3" of each of these units and wait for the perfect time to strike. 

Because both units had made a charge earlier in the phase, both were eligible to pile in and attack in the combat phase, so thanks to some cheeky hero phase charges and subsequent retreats, they could sit safely out of combat, bypassing the activation wars altogether (take THAT, High Tide!) and then pile in at their leisure to give some skulls a good ol' crumping. This is exactly what happened. 

The Gore-Gruntas made their presence felt, trampling Thralls beneath their trotters and reclaiming the objective by a hair. The Maw-Krusha wasn't playing games either...

He'd retreated over to the right flank, and with Violent Fury in full effect, and an extra attack from Strength From Victory, he butchered the entire unit of Eels in a single activation! My perfectly laid plan had paid off! And victory was in sight, but far from safe in my hands. 

By the dying light of turn five, there was not much left on the board! Turns four and five were spent trading individual bodies in two of the tightest turns of Warhammer I've ever played. Every movement was crucial, and every death costly. There were I had my home objective firmly held down with the right-hand screening unit of Boys that had spent the entire game running along to try and be relevant. But the two other objectives were changing hands at every opportunity. 

It was an absolute knife edge game of precision play from both myself and Jack in the end, but when the dust settled, the Ironjawz scraped the tightest of victories! 

This was an unbelievable game, and was unquestionably my favourite match of the weekend. Jack is an absolute champion and we were both playing an incredibly tight game from start to finish. He easily earned my primary favourite game vote. There were a couple of micro mistakes in each of our strategies, but I would have been perfectly content if I'd lost this game. It came down to single dice rolls multiple times throughout the game. The Eidolon failing his charge was a big tipping point, and my 'MD-retreat-pile in' move at the bottom of turn three saved me from complete obliteration!

Sitting on 38 out of 40 battle points after two games, I was headed for the top tables. But the air was getting pretty thin up there, and there are no easy games in the top bracket! 

Check in soon for Game Three! 

Gabe  

#140: Tale of Four Gamers - 1000 Point Mark

Well, it's been another frantic month of painting for myself and my three adversaries, with some stunning results! After last month's "First 500", two of the participants have changed armies completely, but not wasted any time in making up for the lost time. So without too much more waffling on, here are the four armies at the end of month two!

Gabriel:

I'll get mine out of the way first.

Now, the first thing you're probably noticing is that my army is not quite 1000 points yet... Far from it, in fact. I only managed to hit 700 points fully painted this month, with another twenty Ard Boys on the painting desk to fill out the unit to thirty. I did, however, add a Warchanter and three Gore-Gruntas to the army!

I actually really enjoyed painting the Gruntas. They're probably my favourite models from the range so far, mostly because they offer a little variety in textures and colours that the armour-clad infantry just don't have. They also have nice big armour panels to allow me to practice more freehand and get those tags and strips down to a fine art. The two "rank and file" piggies are also awaiting their shoulder pads, complete with weathering and freehand, but... well... it was a slow month on the Ironjawz front. What this means is, I've got a LOT to paint next month to keep the pace! 

Liam:

Having started the challenge optimistically with Brayherd, Liam quickly realised that a horde army may not have been the wisest choice considering the time constraints. And so he made the bold move to go back to the drawing board, and start a brand new army from scratch. 

While it's undeniably character-heavy at this stage, considering the timeframe, I don't think anyone is holding that against him! Packing in two units of Blight Kings, this mortal Nurgle force is playing no games. A Rotbringer Sorcerer, Lord of Plagues and Gutrot Spume make a formidable bodyguard for Kazyk the Befouled...

...and some muscle was added to the list with this trio of Plague Ogres! Leaning heavily into some of the less common elements of Nurgle, I can't wait to see what Liam comes up with next month! It's sure to be suitably revolting.

Alistair:

Having also jumped ship for calmer seas, Al left Stormcast in his wake to work on a hyper-aggressive Idoneth army. With the intricate model range matching Al's impressive skills with the brush, it's no wonder that these have turned out incredibly. There are more eels than you can poke a harpoon at, and the shipwrecks have come up a treat. 

But without question, the Eidolon of Mathlaan is the centrepiece of his entire army. 

He's absolutely done the model justice, and it's going to look amazing leading the charge from the depths to pillage and raid the land of the dry. 

Blake:

Leading the challenge without question, Blake has added yet another amazing conversion to his Death army in the form of a towering Scarab Beetle, adorned with skulls and burdened with a Casket of Souls. 

In game, he's using it as a Mortis Engine, and no one is complaining. The model itself is both morbid and majestic, and fits the style of his army perfectly. He's also added two Dreadblade Harrows, heavily converted to fit the aesthetic, as well as another ten skeletons to give him his minimum requirements for battleline. 

The army of Death is growing at an alarming rate, and now that the armies are getting to the size where they can take to the battlefield, I dare say more than a few skulls will be claimed for Nagash yet.

I hope you enjoyed a peek at the armies as they prepare for war. Which is your favourite, and what two forces do you want to see face off first? 

Thanks for reading,

Gabriel

#127: Shooting from the hip...

With the impending flood (eh? EH?) of Deepkin onto the scene, their rules around shooting restrictions has stirred up a lot of conversation around the shooting phase. So, I wanted to throw my opinion into the mix, and see what you think. Before we look too closely at the current scene, however, we need to look back at the very short history of the game to understand how it got to where it is.

Since the dawn of Age of Sigmar, people have had their opinions on the shooting phase and its restrictions. It was a bit of a shock to the system, after coming from WHFB and 40K where you could hide heroes and characters within units, that in Age of Sigmar, you could target individual models and blast their faces off. For a lot of people, this was a big issue within the game, and many have tried to engineer rules to circumvent this.

In the first General's Handbook, there were some powerful shooting lists, sure. Free People and Dispossessed each had powerful gunline builds. Wanderers could pump out a horrendous amount of high-rend shooting, and of course, Kunnin' Rukk deserves a mention. While the game was still very much combat oriented, shooting lists did have some real success. And with those builds being on the scene, this left people with one of three options when it came to keeping their key combo pieces and characters alive.

1: Put enough damage and de-buffs on enemy shooting units to either eliminate or severely cripple the threat. This was naturally the best option, as prevention is better than a cure. If you're taking little to no damage at range, half the problem is already solved. However, many armies (Bloodbound, etc) simply don't have the tools to effectively do this in many situations.

2: Give your opponent no decent targets. This is a bit of a catch-twenty-two, as staying out of range or behind Line-of Sight blocking terrain means your opponent can't kill you, but it also means that your opponent is controlling the board, including when and where you can move.

3: Flood your opponent with targets. The principal behind this one is that if you give your opponent more juicy targets than they can possibly kill, they will focus on the wrong thing and leave important stuff completely unscathed. The more decisions you force your opponent to make, the more times they will get those decisions wrong. Now, this is probably the riskiest of the three, as it requires a certain degree of reckless bravado. There's a very good chance that your opponent WILL make the right decision and punish the two units that pose real threats. But for some armies, there is no other choice...

Everyone slowly learnt which of these three (or a variation or combination of them) was the best way forward. Kunnin' Rukk was incredibly popular, purely on the sheer volume of firepower it could put out, but it certainly had some bad matchups. Shooting armies were far from unbeatable, and if someone had a good list and some sound strategies, there was usually a path to victory to be found.

Then came 2017. This was a pretty big year for the game, and a terrifying one for the shooting phase, because of two Warscrolls.

The first, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, was Skyfires. They were fast, they were lethal, they could hold their own in combat, they could be replenished with Fold Reality, their shooting was off the chain and they were CHEAP! "160pts per three" cheap... Even if you took Disciples of Tzeentch out of the equation, Skyfires changed the game from that point forward. All of a sudden, there was nowhere to sit out of range, there were not many places they couldn't seek out a hiding model, and if you flooded them with targets, they would make you pay a tremendous toll.

Most players (Tzeentch players included) accepted that they were criminally undercosted. You'd get the occasional person who would argue that they "weren't that bad", but when tournament lists started showing up at events with 24-27 Skyfires in the list, and blitzing their way to the podium, it was hard to give that argument any credit.

The second Warscroll that really highlighted the dangers of an over-the-top shooting phase was the Grundstok Thunderers of the Kharadron Overlords. I think this was a real shame, as the Thunderers were my favourite unit in the whole book. In an army of wealth-hungry mercenaries, these chaps were the best of the best, packing the most firepower and intricate weapons. The idea of gun-for-hire special forces was hugely appealing, but the whole concept was doomed by two things...

The Grundstok Mortar and Aether-Khemists.

What was meant to be a highly mobile dwarf army reverted to the most compact, basic combo; fit as many Grundstok Mortars into a Karak-Urbaz list and nuke your opponent off the board from 36" away.

Sounds like fun, right?

Action to prevent this was far swifter and more brutal than on Skyfires in GHB17. Where Skyfires got a slap on the wrist with a 40 point increase (still well worth it, in my opinion), Kharadron Overlords were absolutely punished. The Khemists went up in points by 40 points (appropriately so), their bonus didn't stack anymore, and the Thunderer Scroll was re-written, making the unit a husk of its former self. I know a lot of KO players were pretty upset by this, and I can understand, after they spent the last two months scraping together enough weapons to make a full unit (or three) of their weapon of choice. But in saying that, something had to be done.

The only other avenue I could see working for a toning back of the scroll would be to leave it as is, and make units five models. No more, no less. That way, you could still have those specialised units, without the ridiculousness. But you'd still have the issue of a gunline; it just means it's spread across more units. It would hugely scale down the efficiency of Khemists, as a Mortar unit would only ever be able to kick out ten shots a turn, but the games developers made a decision and I can understand why. As it is, you can make a legal, optimal unit straight out of the box without having to trade bits.

Since then, aside from armies like Nurgle, who have some great anti-shooting utility built into them, the biggest rule to affect shooting comes with the Idoneth Deepkin allegiance ability, which forces enemy units to shoot the nearest Idoneth unit, for better or worse. This is an incredibly strong ability, as it allows Idoneth to buff a unit up to absorb incoming fire, and protect literally every other unit in their army from harm in the shooting phase.

Now, it's too early to really judge the Deepkin book from a matched play perspective until we see the whole book, but it has certainly done one thing; respark the debate around shooting.

There are plenty of people, either on Facebook, on podcasts or on YouTube, who have called for the rules of shooting in 40k to be transferred over to Age of Sigmar, particularly, not being able to target heroes under 10 wounds unless they're the closest unit. And I can understand the appeal in this. Keeping your heroes alive for longer would be fantastic, and preventing your opponent from unleashing a veritable arsenal upon your humble Skink Priest would be a godsend.

And this is what I want to hit on. I think (and I stand firmly by this statement) that is probably the single worst rule to introduce to our beloved game.

While it might sound great on paper, and from the perspective of many armies, it's doesn't have much of an impact, it pushes certain armies into levels of obscene power that would inevitably destroy any sense of balance in the game.

All of a sudden, a council of Tzeentch wizards hiding behind screen upon screen of splitting Horrors have no risk of danger to themselves, in most cases, for the entire game. It's a brutal combat army that can chew through horrors by turn five and kill those wizards, let alone survive the arcane barrage all game. A Stormcast army's heroes handing out save bonuses can't be touched until you cut through sixty or more wounds of 2+ saves, re-rolling 1's. And then armies like Kharadron Overlords are essentially made borderline redundant.

I'm not saying I have the answer to find perfect balance, or that I know better. But one thing is for sure; introducing 40K shooting rules is not the answer.

I think Idoneth might be enough on their own to shift the power away from shooting armies, as I can see them being at events en masse, and being horrific matchups for certain armies (Barak Zilfin and Aetherstrike Force spring to mind). I don't think the sky is falling with the Deepkin allegiance ability, and I don't think it's made shooting units worthless, by any stretch! I think it will make players measure and calculate their game plan a bit more, which can only improve their play style. Adversity nurtures strategic and tactical growth. 

I am interested to see where they take the shooting phase in the near future. Will it be addressed or changed in the GHB18? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading,
Gabe