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AoS 2 - Grand Host of Nagash Discussion


RuneBrush

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First Cohort is basically unplayable. You dont have enough characters to win any character-based missions, you dont have enough units to hold enough table space or objectives for the other kind of missions. You also don't have enough damage output to table people, and even if you did you wouldnt have enough damage output spread across the table to reliably kill enough of your opponents' models to get enough kill points to place anywhere in an event (if we're talking competitive play anyway)

Nagash does not have a good damage output. People constantly overestimate how much damage he deals. Nagash needs, at absolute minimum, 1 other spellcaster (preferably a Necro to bring VDM to up your damage output even more) and preferably 2 both to give him enough worthwhile things to cast and to hold objectives in some scenarios. You also need, at minimum, 2 large objective holding units (a common problem I see with Nagash lists is that they only include one big unit and then fill up on Dire Wolves). This doesn't leave you with an awful lot of list options but does make you make a lot of hard decisions. Nagash list building is very interesting, but it definitely does not include battalions. You simply dont have the points for them.

 

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@ianob one of the things that's really been on my mind since 2.0 dropped is the tension around unit size. In 1.0 we were definitely encouraged to take larger units for a bunch of reasons. I did a lot of math in one of the old threads about how much concentrated damage it would take to destroy various Death units in one go, and it was pretty clear that either minimum or maximum sized units were optimal to either maximize efficiency or maximize resilience and likelihood that a unit will stick around to be healed during your next hero phase.

Now with Inspiring Presence big units are even tougher to bust, but we have an additional major consideration: gravesite resurrection. With horde bonus units it's still clearly a good idea to go big, but what has your experience been like with other types of units? Do you have problems finding enough space in your gravesites to bring back a large unit of Grimghast Reapers or Dire Wolves?

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8 minutes ago, swarmofseals said:

@ianob one of the things that's really been on my mind since 2.0 dropped is the tension around unit size. In 1.0 we were definitely encouraged to take larger units for a bunch of reasons. I did a lot of math in one of the old threads about how much concentrated damage it would take to destroy various Death units in one go, and it was pretty clear that either minimum or maximum sized units were optimal to either maximize efficiency or maximize resilience and likelihood that a unit will stick around to be healed during your next hero phase.

Now with Inspiring Presence big units are even tougher to bust, but we have an additional major consideration: gravesite resurrection. With horde bonus units it's still clearly a good idea to go big, but what has your experience been like with other types of units? Do you have problems finding enough space in your gravesites to bring back a large unit of Grimghast Reapers or Dire Wolves?

I have literally never in either v1 or v2 not been able to find the space to put a unit of 40 skeletons,  30 Grave Guard, 15 black knights  or 30 Grimghasts (the large things I summon regularly). Not even once. I’m not saying it’s never going to happen, it clearly will at some point, but it is incredibly uncommon. Gravesites are either contested (or close enough toncontested that you wouldn’t fit a unit of 10 OR a unit of 30) or defended and usable. It has a lot to do with gravesite placement I think.

If it *is* a negative point worth considering, the Grave-space issue certainly doesn’t outweigh max unit size point reductions,drop efficiency, vanhels efficiency, larger units still  being on the table to invocation rather than needing to spend a command point to resummon, etc. 

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40 minutes ago, ianob said:

I have literally never in either v1 or v2 not been able to find the space to put a unit of 40 skeletons,  30 Grave Guard, 15 black knights  or 30 Grimghasts (the large things I summon regularly). Not even once. I’m not saying it’s never going to happen, it clearly will at some point, but it is incredibly uncommon. Gravesites are either contested (or close enough toncontested that you wouldn’t fit a unit of 10 OR a unit of 30) or defended and usable. It has a lot to do with gravesite placement I think.

If it *is* a negative point worth considering, the Grave-space issue certainly doesn’t outweigh max unit size point reductions,drop efficiency, vanhels efficiency, larger units still  being on the table to invocation rather than needing to spend a command point to resummon, etc. 

That's really helpful to know! Do you ever run 30 Dire Wolves?

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19 minutes ago, swarmofseals said:

That's really helpful to know! Do you ever run 30 Dire Wolves?

I don’t. I’m not sure under what circumstances that would be a good idea! 15 Black Knights was... challenging with their 1” Melee, thankfully now we have better hammers.

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5 minutes ago, ianob said:

I don’t. I’m not sure under what circumstances that would be a good idea! 15 Black Knights was... challenging with their 1” Melee, thankfully now we have better hammers.

It's pretty much peak defensive efficiency, used entirely for board control and not for damage. It's easy to string back to a corpse cart, too. It takes an average of 144/108/86.4/72 damage from rend 0/1/2/mw to destroy the unit, so it can hold back all but the punchiest units for multiple turns. In 1.0 it was one of the few units that could actually reliably stand to shooting from something like Aetherstrike Force. It was also much more resilient against a Gaunt Summoner than skeleton blobs. 

Basically, the way I see it most Legions lists are going to have a couple of key units that the opponent is really going to want to kill for tactical reasons -- stuff like Arkhan, the general, etc. as well as things that the opponent will need to clear in order to have a good shot at taking objectives from us (basically all of our big units). All of these targets require the opponent to concentrate their firepower, as spreading that firepower out plays right into our healing. A unit of dogs that huge can cover so much space and requires so much attention in order to take out that it can really dictate your opponent's early turns. If they ignore it then you get board control and rack up VPs, and if they focus it it ensures your other key units survive much longer than they otherwise would. And if you actually can fit such a unit into a gravesite to resummon it... well that's just demoralizing. 

The main problem of course is that it totally lacks punch and is thus not very useful when your opponent is faster, playing first, or playing some sort of null deployment list that allows them to set up on top of objectives. 

Whether or not such a unit will be useful depends a lot on the metagame, I think.

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2 hours ago, ianob said:

..lots of text.... Nagash list building is very interesting, but it definitely does not include battalions. You simply dont have the points for them.

 

It's an f-ing challenge that's what it is! 1200 points for heroes and 3 battlelines is a big challenge for me.

For instance Nagash+necro+VL=1040 points, picking 2x40 skellies or 40/30 skells/GGs leave you with 1610 or 1750..

All in all it just feels super tight. Would you for instance ever run a skeleton squad as sub 40?

[EDIT]: Maybe we should just make a list, what is core in a death list running Nagash, with the current available missions in mind.

Actually... this does kind of fit... I think I'll just have to accept I can't run 120 skellies, 30 reapers and multiples heroes next to nagash...

Allegiance: Grand Host of Nagash
Mortal Realm: Shyish

Leaders
Nagash Supreme Lord Of The Undead (800)
- General
- Lores of the Dead Spell 1: Overwhelming Dread (Deathmages)
- Lores of the Dead Spell 2: Fading Vigour (Deathmages)
- Lores of the Dead Spell 3: Spectral Grasp (Deathmages)
Necromancer (110)
- Lore of the Deathmages: Decrepify
Vampire Lord (140)
- Mount: Flying Horror
- Artefact: Ossific Diadem 
- Lore of the Vampires: Vile Transference/pinions?

Battleline
40 x Skeleton Warriors (280)
- Ancient Blades
40 x Skeleton Warriors (280)
- Ancient Blades
5 x Dire Wolves (60)

Units
20 x Grimghast Reapers (280)

Total: 1950 / 2000
Extra Command Points: 1
Allies: 0 / 400
Wounds: 136
 

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I’ve got a list that I personally feel is the best 2k Nagash list you can run (dependant on what missions your event is running of course), I’ll be talking about it on the podcast this week. Your list is also pretty great and is probably the best I’ve seen posted on this forum so far.

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Was thinking of something like this.

Nagash

2 Morghast Archai

30 Skeletons

5 Grave Guard

10 Skeletons

 

Necromancer

6 Spirit Hosts

 

Umbral Spellportal

 

Not particularly mobile, and I'm not sure about bringing in the Portal. Spirits are the suicide unit, Skeletons for Objectives, Nagash and Morghasts to center with the Spellportal when big N is in position.

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@ianob I promise I'll stop picking your brain... soon. Thoughts on Vhordrai? In 1.0 he seemed to me to be better than a VLoZD in pretty much anything except maybe Legion of Blood with his generally better offense and only marginally increased cost. His breath weapon seems even more special in 2.0 with it being generally harder to snipe support heroes (not for us as we don't really shoot anyway, but it seems logical that "Look Out Sir" will lead to more people taking fragile support heroes in general), and the VLoZD looks relatively worse now that there is a greater cost associated with using his command ability (which is pretty much required for him to get even close to V on offense). That said, some of the new artefacts are very powerful on a VLoZD... but unless you are taking a battalion (and I'm not sure if any of the Death battalions are playable really) that means you aren't taking Lens of Refraction.

So all that leads me to think that the Vhordrai vs VLoZD comparison generally favors Vhordrai, but I'm not sure that either one is a good choice competitively. With grimghasts providing a great hammer along with the possibility of allied myrmourns or bladegheists, are there even more efficient choices for a hammer? But none are as mobile as Vhordrai, and none feature that breath weapon which just can't be matched by anything else in Death. 

What do you think, and what does your experience tell you?

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@swarmofseals I was never a fan of Vhordrai in 1.0 for the same reason I’m not a fan of him in 2.0; no artifact, as you mention. I don’t believe the builds that run multiple zombie Dragons and Vhordrai etc to be tier 1, and none of my builds that use a VLoZD want Vhordrai because I want the VLoZD to run Lens, or Doppelcloak, etc, which pushes them above Vhordrai in terms of board presence generally.

I guess to answer your question more accurately though I’d need to know in which army you’re debating either of the two. Vhordrai definitely does some powerful stuff and is significantly better than an unnamed VLoZD for the points, its just the lack of artifact that I don’t like.

As far as Vhordrai goes with Nagash, I don’t believe that build to be tier 1 viable; it has problems in too many missions, not enough units on the board and you give up too much to squeeze the prince into the list. My round 3 opponent was running Nagash/Vhordrai at the weekend and he was seriously disadvantaged from the outset of the game against my build I think, and he agreed that Vhordrai didn’t seem great anymore (and he played him in v1 more than I did - he’s a good player)

So I guess in summary my answer is “it depends” with a healthy dose of “I’m still not sure what builds Vhordrai actually fits in”. If his command ability could target himself, it would be a whole different ball game!

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9 hours ago, ianob said:

@swarmofseals I was never a fan of Vhordrai in 1.0 for the same reason I’m not a fan of him in 2.0; no artifact, as you mention. I don’t believe the builds that run multiple zombie Dragons and Vhordrai etc to be tier 1, and none of my builds that use a VLoZD want Vhordrai because I want the VLoZD to run Lens, or Doppelcloak, etc, which pushes them above Vhordrai in terms of board presence generally.

I guess to answer your question more accurately though I’d need to know in which army you’re debating either of the two. Vhordrai definitely does some powerful stuff and is significantly better than an unnamed VLoZD for the points, its just the lack of artifact that I don’t like.

As far as Vhordrai goes with Nagash, I don’t believe that build to be tier 1 viable; it has problems in too many missions, not enough units on the board and you give up too much to squeeze the prince into the list. My round 3 opponent was running Nagash/Vhordrai at the weekend and he was seriously disadvantaged from the outset of the game against my build I think, and he agreed that Vhordrai didn’t seem great anymore (and he played him in v1 more than I did - he’s a good player)

So I guess in summary my answer is “it depends” with a healthy dose of “I’m still not sure what builds Vhordrai actually fits in”. If his command ability could target himself, it would be a whole different ball game!

I'm definitely not considering using V in a Nagash list, I completely agree that such a choice would be crippling. I also agree re: double dragon lists (although fwiw I'd consider tier 2 to be perfectly playable, but I'm not sure such a list is even tier 2. It is probably at least tier 3 though, which I'd consider playable under special circumstances). 

I don't really love the VLoZD as a lens caddy mostly because it creates a bit of a role clash. A big advantage of the VLoZD is in its ability to get around the board relatively quickly and hit vulnerable targets, but if he's carrying the lens then you can't really afford to move him away (at least in the matchups where the lens matters). His base size is nice for creating a bigger bubble, but his points cost is just so high that you really don't want him to get stuck babysitting. Now if you aren't bringing lens then yeah, he looks a lot better. Doppel, Gryph Feather Charm, Dimensional Blade, etc. all are really tasty on a VLoZD. 

One thing to consider that I don't see discussed a lot is the Coven Throne. It doesn't do anything spectacularly well, but it does have a couple of attractive qualities:

  • Arguably the best defensive general/caddy choice because she has a lot of wounds but still benefits from cover and "Look Out, Sir!". Large base size is also relevant for support artefacts/command abilities and ability to reach multiple gravesites.
  • Can potentially provide some board control by forcing retreats with Beguile (this is a niche point I know)
  • Good Deathly Invocation
  • Potentially very powerful command ability
  • Single reroll looks to be much more powerful now, at least in some builds. If you are running cogs, for example, Coven Throne has an 86.2% chance of casting it without any bonuses at all, 92.2% with +1 to cast and 97.2% chance with +2 to cast. 
     

Prince V also gets particularly stupid with Quickblood and Tactical Insight: 19.551 rend 2 damage and 10.7 rend 1 damage on average. So if you are taking a Coven Throne as your general/artefact caddy, then V might fit in well as a hammer. 

 

Still though, I think your (almost) final point is very valid -- even with all of this, I have no idea what builds V might actually fit in. If there is an alpha strike list out there, I could see V being a part of it. I have no idea if such a thing would be good though. 

It seems to me that competitive AOS games are likely to fall into one of three different dynamics:

  1. Your opponent is playing a list with a primary focus on destroying your army. In this case you want to either be able to destroy them before they destroy you, or be quick enough to get onto the objectives and defensively sound enough to hold on long enough to win on VP.
  2. Your opponent is playing a defensive list with a primary focus on scoring. In this case you either need to get to the objectives first or you need to have enough offensive punch to push the defensive army off.
  3. Your opponent is playing a summoning list that is intended to snowball on you. In this case you either need to either leverage your initial advantage on the table to cripple your opponent or you need to be fast and defensive enough to hold off the avalanche while scoring.

Legions of Nagash are pretty well suited to fight the defensive game, but there are some opponents who can also play a defensive game but get on the objectives faster (Sylvaneth for sure, maybe Fyreslayers). So we either are going to concede a bad matchup against those kinds of lists or we need to include enough offense to push back these lists. Grimghasts and allied Nighthaunt hammers are very nice, shiny new tools but I'm not totally sold on them as being good enough.

Think about it this way -- if an opponent's army is designed to be able to plausibly withstand an assault from, say, a Daughters of Khaine army or an Idoneth army (or something more gimmicky like a double Dragonlord Host if that becomes a thing), are we really going to get anywhere with Grimghasts and the like? It seems to me that the answer to this question is no. So we're likely going to need something that can either deal much more concentrated damage or can pick off lynchpin support heroes if we want to overcome that kind of defense.

The question then becomes, "if we spend points on that kind of offense, will we still be able to field a strong enough defense to deal with scenario 1?" I certainly can't claim to answer that one.

To sum up specifically around the question of whether Vhordrai has a role to play in a competitive list:

  • If you are playing a primarily offensive army with the goal of destroying or crippling the enemy, then Vhordrai is almost certainly worth considering. I'm not sure such a strategy is T1/T2 for LoN though.
  • If you are playing a primarily defensive army, you either have to concede having a poor matchup against defensive armies that are also faster or you have to have enough pressure to push them back and give you the initiative. If you are looking to do the latter, Vhordrai is almost certainly worth considering. But can you do the latter without irreparably harming your matchup against opponents that are either trying to destroy you or snowball you? That is the question I think.
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Big post there so I’ll just reply quickly:

Dont think of the lens as something you need to cover your army with. My current Nagash list has a Vampire with a Lens; he takes objectives in PoAP and Dualty. He doesn’t caddy it for the army any more than he uses it selfishly; it’s a tool. In the current Wizardy meta, a hero with mortal spell near immunity is very valuable hence putting it on a dragon is very valuable (and I recommend considering it). Very much an “actual gameplay vs theorycraft” point to be made here - missions often don’t allow your heroes to ball up with auras.

None of the armies you mentioned are close to as defensive as LoN. The only one that really does come close is Hammers of Sigmar Cleansing Phalanx (which you’ll see a lot of starting in the next week or so) when they hit their command ability 5+. Nothing comes close to rezzing whole units or 15+ models a turn per unit, combined with death debuffs on top, 4+ ethereals, and deathless minions. Our longevity is insane. We also get on objectives faster than many armies (thanks to 8” Grimghasts, and gravesites) 

As far as higky defensive armies go; yes, we can absolutely blow through them. Weight of attacks is a thing. Dispelling buffs is a thing. Sniping support heroes is a thing. Having more models than them is a thing. Nagash is good at killing high armour targets. We have the tools to deal with all of this stuff as much as anyone does. Defensive armies pay a price in offence and low offence armies have a bad time vs us.

Notably there are reasons why I run Skellies and Grims plus VHD in every Nagash list beyond simply model count. Those units have savage damage output for their points, and whilst low damage output armies can win games they don’t win events due to KO tiebreakers. I’ve tables everything I’ve played so far including other Death with 8 gravesites, Nurgle, and Stormcast; so i don’t see this being a common issue.

I think your competitive categorisation is too narrow. Middling players may make armies that fit into those niches, good players run armies that will do more than one of those whilst also having mission-winning setups, models, etc. Again theorycraft va real games I think. 

Sorry I can’t reply in a more structured way, I’m on a phone and that reply is too long for me to multiquote well plus I have RSI and a baby climbing on me :)

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20 minutes ago, ianob said:

Sorry I can’t reply in a more structured way, I’m on a phone and that reply is too long for me to multiquote well plus I have RSI and a baby climbing on me :)

No problem, I'm following you just fine. There's a lot to respond to, but just to start I want to be clear -- when you say a "Nagash list" do you mean Legions in general, a list specifically featuring Nagash, or a Grand Host list? My post was meant to be pretty general and covers any Legions of Nagash army -- I only posted it in this specific thread because it's the one we were discussing in already. I do think it's kinda weird that there are four different threads for Legions of Nagash XD.

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18 minutes ago, swarmofseals said:

No problem, I'm following you just fine. There's a lot to respond to, but just to start I want to be clear -- when you say a "Nagash list" do you mean Legions in general, a list specifically featuring Nagash, or a Grand Host list? My post was meant to be pretty general and covers any Legions of Nagash army -- I only posted it in this specific thread because it's the one we were discussing in already. I do think it's kinda weird that there are four different threads for Legions of Nagash XD.

Yeah maybe having less topics would be a good idea.. But you gotta box it all some way :)

I think the discussion started with a list with Nagash in it and how tight it is to fit anything in such a list (or was that another thread? mobile phones are terrible for this hehe). 

Vhordrai and Nagash in one list is way to heavy on points you can't fit decent battlelines in it and it leaves little room for enough necros. 

Vhordrai and arkhan on the otherhand does leave more room. Reason I switch to arkhan is that I get your 3 army type comment, but isn't all those plusses to cast a strong suite of death and something that should definitely be abused?

And after that summonable unit summoning and thus dance macab is the nuts. I'm rambling a bit but my point is, you want to get off dance macab on a big block of summonable units and destroy anything that's on your objective.. So in the end the list always sums up to : strong caster(s) , multiple heroes, big blobs, enough heroes for summonable unit abusal. So you are always ending up with an attrition list because that short sum of strengths suits attrition! 

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Ive made a list i think would work fine in AoS v2 . I would love to here some opinions about it! And any good tips on how to play Death overall, always seems, for me, hard to bet Stormcast! Probably just me how’s playing it wrong! But anyway here’s the list!

Allegiance: Grand Host of Nagash
Mortal Realm: Shyish

Leaders
Vampire Lord (140)
- General
- Mount: Flying Horror
- Trait: Lord of Nagashizzar  
- Lore of the Vampires: Vile Transference
Mannfred Mortarch Of Night (420)
- Lore of the Dead: Amaranthine Orb (Vampires)
Necromancer (110)
- Artefact: Ossific Diadem  
- Lore of the Deathmages: Overwhelming Dread
Wight King with Baleful Tomb Blade(120)

Battleline
40 x Skeleton Warriors (280)
- Ancient Spears
20 x Chainrasp Horde (160)
20 x Grave Guard (320)
- Great Wight Blades

Units
20 x Grimghast Reapers (280)

Endless Spells
Chronomantic Cogs (60)

Total: 1890 / 2000
Extra Command Points: 2
Allies: 0 / 400
Wounds: 126
 

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On 7/18/2018 at 12:21 PM, ianob said:

In the current Wizardy meta, a hero with mortal spell near immunity is very valuable hence putting it on a dragon is very valuable (and I recommend considering it). Very much an “actual gameplay vs theorycraft” point to be made here - missions often don’t allow your heroes to ball up with auras.

None of the armies you mentioned are close to as defensive as LoN. Our longevity is insane. We also get on objectives faster than many armies (thanks to 8” Grimghasts, and gravesites) 

As far as higky defensive armies go; yes, we can absolutely blow through them. Weight of attacks is a thing. Dispelling buffs is a thing. Sniping support heroes is a thing. Having more models than them is a thing. Nagash is good at killing high armour targets. We have the tools to deal with all of this stuff as much as anyone does. Defensive armies pay a price in offence and low offence armies have a bad time vs us.

Notably there are reasons why I run Skellies and Grims plus VHD in every Nagash list...

I think your competitive categorisation is too narrow. Middling players may make armies that fit into those niches, good players run armies that will do more than one of those whilst also having mission-winning setups, models, etc. Again theorycraft va real games I think. 

 

I finally have a moment and wanted to respond to these point by point. I want to be clear that my post was specifically geared toward thinking about Prince Vhordrai and what place he might have in a Legions list, not geared towards discussing any possible permutation of Legions stuff and certainly not Nagash himself as I think we already agree that putting V and Nagash in the same list is a mistake. 

1. A totally fair point. I finally got my copy of the new GHB and I see what you mean about the specific battleplans. 

2+3. It's not a question of which army is more defensive. It's a question of whether you can dislodge a defensive army that can get to the objectives before you do. It's possible that these armies won't show up in the meta at all, but one has to at least consider the possibility of things like:

  • One drop Sylvaneth army that can basically guarantee the first turn (we will never be one drop) and drop their entire army on top of the objectives on turn 1. Clearly this doesn't apply to every battleplan, but there are plenty of battleplans where this approach will be very effective. Such an army can be built with an absolute buttload of dryads that are -1 to hit (-2 if their treelord stomps go off) with a 4+ (3+ in cover) save rerolling 1's, supported by behemoth wizards with crazy healing capabilities, and the ability to summon more dryads. Nagash is a real help here in that he can just eat those behemoths with Hand of Dust, but again I'm not really talking about Nagash lists.
  • A tunnel-based vulkite spam Fyreslayers list. I'm somewhat more dubious about this kind of list, but chugging through 90+ vulkites is not an easy task.  

The idea here being that having an offensive powerhouse unit that can concentrate damage in a small space and pick of key support heroes regardless of lens (like V can) could be very useful in these situations. Maybe I'm underestimating how much work skeletons and grimghasts can do.

4. Yeah, I run skellies and grims plus VHD in every list too, Nagash or no XD won't get any argument from me there....

5. I think maybe you are missing what I'm trying to articulate. It's not that an army fits into one of those niches itself, its that a particular dynamic is created by the relative composition of your list and your opponent's list. To use an analogy from Magic, one of the key skills in that game is to be able to recognize what your role is in a given matchup. If you are playing a midrange deck and your opponent is playing control, then you are in the aggro "role" for that game. Your opponent is highly favored in the long game, so you have to try to make sure that the game doesn't go long. Meanwhile, that same deck against a suicide aggro deck takes on the control role. They are going to be attacking you, and you have the stronger lategame so you are trying to make sure the game goes long. A more interesting example is in semi-mirror match between a creature based aggro deck and a burn based aggro deck. In such a matchup the burn deck will often end up taking on the control role, although it's possible that in certain combinations of opening hand either deck might end up in the control role vs the aggro role. 

Knowing what role you are in is absolutely critical in that if you judge incorrectly, you are likely to make play decisions that will drastically reduce your chance of winning even if they seem better at the time. If you are in a control role, trading resources for damage is a terrible idea, but trading resources for time is great. In the aggro role, the values are exactly the opposite. 

While I don't think things are quite this clear-cut in Warhammer, relative army composition in the context of a specific battleplan will still create role-based dynamics where either your role is to weather your opponent's attack long enough to win or your role is to push your opponent off the objectives. Other things like offensive vs. defensive efficiency and ranged firepower affect these dynamics as well, of course. 

Just to give some simple examples:

  1. You are playing against a Seraphon player with a very heavy investment in summoning, but your army is faster and you can reliably get an advantage in objectives on turn 1. Your opponent will likely put an extra 1000 points of models on the board in the next two turns. Consider two possibilities: your army is fast and deals a lot of damage, but is defensively inefficient OR your army is very defensively efficient and even 3000 points of Seraphon would likely take at least two turns to dislodge you. These two scenarios create vastly different role dynamics. In the first situation, you are highly incentivized to push forward and try to destroy or at least heavily limit the opponent's summoning as soon as possible. If you sit back and score while your opponent builds up, they will be able to overwhelm you quickly. In the other scenario, the onus is on your opponent to attack you as early as possible because if they wait until they have that extra advantage from the summoning, they will no longer have enough time left to realistically take back the advantage in VP. 
  2. Your opponent is playing a low-drops pure alpha strike list. No matter what you are playing (unless you have fewer drops and are also an alpha strike list), the game dynamic is going to put you on the defensive and you will likely win if you can weather your opponent's initial onslaught.
  3. A smaller scale example: you currently hold an advantage in terms of objectives. You are given the choice to attack in such a way that you sacrifice some models at the cost of causing damage to your opponent. Even if the attack is relatively efficient, it may be a mistake to do so simply because the onus is on your opponent to destroy you to get you off the objectives. Simply trading models with the opponent at this point is not good for you. 

I hope that makes sense.

 

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griping start //

Every time i look at grimghasts, I get bitter at how good grave guard aren't.  I simply do not have the funds for another us$150 unit, and even if I did, I really don't think grimghasts look good in such huge units.

And yet every time I look at their rules, 30 grimghasts jusy look more and more like the best unit available to the army by a country mile.  Not just grave guard, but morghasts (even in LoN!), vargheists, knights of all varieties...  nothing apart from maybe skittles seem to come close, and even then only because of battleline requirements.  Are grimghasts way too good, or are the bulk of our units just terrible?  Are we doomed to an entire year of wraiths dominating every legion list, only to watch GH2019 nerf them into oblivion with a 60 point price hike per batch just as I finally break down and buy them?

Bah.  I'm probably just grumpy that I don't have the funds for them right now.  At least, not all in one go.

That, and i just really want my wights to be good, and, whether in the compendium or the grand alliance or the legions book, whether it's 2016, 2017, or 2018 points values, they just keep falling short.  But to have to stand them next to 'the same unit, but better in basically every way, oh and they're more than a full command point cheaper to boot' is just... disheartening.

// griping over

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I hate power creep too.

I had my 30gg painted literally a couple of months ago. Now they’ll never see the table.

We can hope for ancost cut in 2019 but they’re not a popular unit, not a unit people will be vocal about, not “sexy”, and I alsocget the impression there are no playtester advocates for Death either, so they’ll probably be quietly relegated to “****** forever”. Sigh.

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