Night haunt 1k list for random doubles

[grimgold]

Hey all, new member, and just wanted to say what a breath of fresh air this place is compared to other boards. So I have a 1k random doubles tournament coming up this weekend, and I'm running nighthaunt. The list I was thinking of running is:

• Knight of shrouds on ethereal steed
• GoS
• Spirit Torment
• 20 man Chainrasp Horde
• 5 man Hex wraith
• 8 woman unit of Myrmourn Banshees
• 8 Man unit of Glaive Wraith stalkers w/drummer
• My sideboard consist of a 3 man unit of spirit hosts, a lord executioner, and a Tomb Banshee (though I'm open to other suggested substitutions). 

My idea is since it's random doubles is to be fairly self reliant, since I won't know who I'll be partnered with. The main thrust of the army will be to steam roll opponents with a buffed chainrasp horde, use the Myrmourn banshees +2 to dispels and the GoS to manage my opponents wizards. The glaive wraiths and the hexwraiths will be deployed to the underworld for some backline harassment. I'm iffy about the glaive wraith stalkers, they seem like a master of none unit. I like that they are slippery (being able to fall back and charge in the same round), but their placement in the army is more about the problems I have with spirit hosts, namely they are harder to regenerate, and I've always had bad luck with fishing for sixes.

The part I'm on the fence about is what artifact and what command trait to take. My initial thought is the beacon of nagitar special lantern, to get 1d6+3 back for each spectral lure, but that seems to be putting a lot of eggs in a single  spell per round. For command trait I was thinking Cloaked in shadow for the KoS, making him a very hard target for ranged. My GoS lore would be spectral tether since keeping my heroes alive is important to the overall strategy. Another idea would be to take the tome of midnight on the KoS to get another wizard, and taking Reaping scythe as his lore to buff the sword of stolen hours. Another idea is instead of taking Cloaked in shadow take ruler of the spirit hosts to get an uncounterable way to return some models, and maybe replace the glaive wraith stalkers with the spirit hosts. 

Thanks in advance for the feedback!

[Tropical Ghost General]

Hey Welcome to the fold.

So I run midnight tome as wizards are really vital in the current edition. Also I run ruler of the spirit hosts, as it gives a guaranteed bringing back models.

Glaivewraiths aren't great unfortunately, you are spot on by saying they are master of none. As I've said on lots of other threads and will continue to say, we are a horde army, that is an alpha strike army and plays the attrition game. We aren't the best at attrition either, which is a shame. So if you can take maximum size units, as smaller units will die quickly and there is no way of bringing them back once the unit is wiped out. Also, you want to limit the amount of drops that you have, in a comp scene at 1k-2k you want to aim for 3-4 really, trouble is we need heroes to support our units, so getting that low drop count is hard. Our best unit at the moment is grimghasts, they are gross and can mince through anything. You could probably swap out the hexwraiths & the glaivewraiths for 20 grims. The heroes you have a great and pretty much an auto-include. You might find that the myrmourns die quickly so protect them well and use the torment to heal them each battleshock phase.

The thing to worth bearing in mind with doubles, even with a partner that you know what they are taking, is that you are better to create a self functioning force that doesn't focus on doing everything. Currently I think the list is trying to do much, so try and slim it down and bulk out those key units.

Let us know how the tournament goes.

[grimgold]

Thanks for the advice, I'll put the grimghast reapers on wishlist, seems like a great unit for when I beef this up to a 2k points list. I'm sadly a slow painter so getting twenty of them ready by saturday would be a bit of a grind. As a more budget/time friendly option, would replacing the hexwraiths and glaive wraiths with a six man unit of spirit hosts fair better than my original list? That would seem to make the best use of Master of the spirit hosts, restoring between 3 and 9 wounds per use, and leave me with 40 points to bank some command points or grab a cheap endless spell.

As a side question are any of the 40 point endless spells worth taking?

[Tropical Ghost General]

Yeah, you can run 6 SHs, they will act as a great tarpit unit and definitely benefit from the reviving better as well. You'll need 50pts for a CP, so the 40pts might be better off spent on endless spells, pendulum is 40pts and great at taking off a chuck of mortal wounds in one fell swoop. Geminids is also good at 40pts. Or you can take both shackles and quicksilver swords. The shackles you can cast on near your myrmourn in your hero phase, they can eat it in the same hero phase, then heal them up and they'll be on +1 attack then. The swords is great against anything with the Chaos keyword as it's 5+ rather than 6+ for mortal wounds, it's also lots of fun rolling 12 dice.

[grimgold]

Thank you for the advice, Building the 3 spirit hosts now (they are as much of a pain as I remember).  I did have one follow up question, you mentioned having a low number of drops is better, is that because larger units do better, or is that because there is some advantage to having fewer drops?

Nighthaunt1k_RandomDoubles.pdf

[Scurvydog]

19 hours ago, grimgold said:

Thank you for the advice, Building the 3 spirit hosts now (they are as much of a pain as I remember).  I did have one follow up question, you mentioned having a low number of drops is better, is that because larger units do better, or is that because there is some advantage to having fewer drops?

Nighthaunt1k_RandomDoubles.pdf

Low drops as in few units, as the one who deploys the entire army first can decide between turn 1 or two to get that tactical advantage. As per the rules for battalions found in the various battletomes you can deploy an entire battalion as a single "drop", so if you could fit your entire army into 1 battalion you are almost guaranteed to decide on turn 1 or 2 (of course unless your opponent does the same and rolled first deployment).

 

As for the list itself I can mostly speak from my own experience of course, but it seems to me you have a fair bit of redundancy and lack some hammer to your anvil. Both rasps and hosts are kind of anvil units. You also have 3 units in total who can dispel which will more likely be used very rarely.

 

In 1k armies I am not sure about endless spells, but as it is doubles then perhaps it can do some damage, the upside is it is reliable in its movement, but that is sort of also the downside. With clever movement the opponent(s) should not be hit more than once with this and then it will just fade into the horizon slowly, on average dealing 3 mortal wounds for 40 points. That is just my experience though, maybe you can trick them to hit multiple units and roll some 6's and win the game with it!

 

 

 

 

[grimgold]

I need to be fully painted for prize support, and I'm not sure I could get  20 grimghast reapers ready by saturday to the quality I like without a deathmarch.  As I expand to 2k I'll certainly grab 20 of them, but I'm a little nervous to go all in on them with the rumors of a nerf coming. The banshees are a calculated risk, with KoS and dispelling a spell (and what army won't have at least one spell to eat), that's 24 attacks at 4+/3+, rerolling ones to hit, +1 to wound, with a -2 rend and a d3 damage per successful wound. So if I can get them to the enemy, they should be fairly dangerous, but at 8 wounds I'll have to be clever and more than a little lucky to get their full effect. I'm actually going to run shademist on my KoS to help with that, which should help with archers a bit, but won't do much for mortal wounds. However as a good fraction of mortal wounds come from spells, having three dispels should help as well.  I have resigned myself to the fact that they could get merc'd first round, but the silver lining is that any attacks put into my banshees are attacks that aren't going after my heroes, who could also get merc'd first round.

[Drofnum]

I'm not helpful but are you by chance in Utah?  Sounds a lot like the event i'm going to on Saturday as well.

[grimgold]

lol guilty as charged

 

[grimgold]

Ok just got back won second place, had a blast.

Round 1 Me and Flesh eater courts vs idoneth deepkin and sacrosanct chamber Mission: Better part of valor

Certified spicy, lost this one on a last turn priority roll, when we had win ties.  My favorite battle of the night, because it went down to the wire. idoneth burns their right most objective objective first turn so they have 2 on their side. My initial plan was to hold three, burn them on the last round. The FEC have one objective and I'm holding two, things were looking good, and then High tide comes and the idoneth player brings in their entire army to hit the FEC, he drops three CP on god only knows what and gives three units +3 attacks, and makes every charge. He then proceeds to almost table the FEC with eels while the sacroscant chamber camps on their two objectives. He burns the objective the FEC had. He gets chewed in the process, leaving me and the sacrosanct  chamber to fight over the last four.  Backed by my leaders, My spirit host proceed to beat the snot out of the 10 sequiturs guarding their middle objective, and finish the tabling of the Idoneth. I continue to hold our left with the chainwrasp horde and What's left of the FEC move to the middle to hold it so I can take on the stormcast. I finish the sequeitors, but am not in range to burn the objective, and he has his HQ on it. So the game literally hinges on who gets priority and gets to burn objectives first. Priority roll goes out, and I roll a 2 and he gets a four. We lose by two points.

Two ways I could have pulled this out had I thought of them at the time, I could have burned the objective on the left, gotten three tuns worth of babysitting points, and pulled the chainwrasp horde to the middle with a CP on the next turn to contest their objective.  Shakier but still possible I could have retreated the spirit hosts thru the sequitors onto the objective, and fought them on the objective so when they lost I could have burned it immediately. that would have given up a turn of my attacks, so I might not have finished them.

Round 2 me and glotkin w/ GUO and a few chaos warriors vs tomb kings and Tzangors. Mission: Reloaction orb.

Not much to say about this one, we got first turn, camped the middle and played a mean game of keep away, while the orb stayed near the middle. Saltiest moment was when they threw everything at the spirit hosts, killed four bases, and then I returned three the next round, and then three the round after that to bring them to full strength. Most amazing moment was my knight of shrouds, surrounded on all sides and down to two wounds, got away with some help from the GUO, healed from a failed morale check and spirit tether and then killed their last leader with an artifact on a 3" consolidation a turn later. We couldn't lose priority roles for some reason, and they sneaked the orb once, so final score was 4 v3, with 11 models out of their 87 left on the board. The Tzangor caster did steal fleshy abundance, which was used with much amusement on the tomb kings skeletons.  With lots of units and second turn throughout the whole game this was their game to lose, and a combination of bad rolls and how weak the tomb kings are snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Round 3 me and Blades of khorne vs 2 x seraphon mission: shifting objectives.

Even less to say here,  The plan was dead simple from the word go, advance forward, sit on all three objectives and take all comers, which is exactly what happened. We got first turn took the middle, they tried several times to get us off the objectives, got rebuked all but one of them (a tide of skinks ran from blood warriors onto the objective), final score was 14 to 4. They were focused on summoning and teleportation, neither of which really helped them. I think they would have been better off casting spells and inflicting more mortal wounds, because by the time they got enough summon points to summon some threats, it didn't matter. The only time they could have gotten us was when a 40 man unit of blow pipe skinks got teleported behind us, but a quick charge with the skull cannon and a next turn summon the the chainwrasp horde  kept them out of scoring distance.

MVP: spirit hosts, I could have built a salt mine with these guys, their damage was ok, but their staying power was beyond phenomenal. These guys could camp an objective like they were a park ranger. 

Worst unit: Myrmourn banshees, failed to even dispel a single spell with a +2 and six attempts. An opponent barely got off an arcane armor, I literally had to roll a five on two dice to dispel it, and yep they failed it.  They literally lost a fight against a stormcast HQ they were supposed to be assassinating, despite having more wounds, more attacks, better rend, and multi damage. My luck with them was terrible, and the only thing they did was pull units from the front lines to come roflstomp them.

More thoughts as they come.