Belathor

So this specifically came up with the sylvaneth warsong revenant. Contention 1 was that the aos app warscroll is not correct and the broken realms kragnos is the correct one but regardless. On the warscroll it says the revenant knows all sylvaneth spell lore spells. If taken in cities of sigmar can it cast those spells? This has some weird implications like the spell lores now say "Sylvaneth wizards and unique unites only." and warsong rev is a sylvaneth wizard but in cities of sigmar. The lumineth spell lore also says "Teclis etc only" well teclis in settlers gain is teclis only and can he therefore cast those spells? Is a spell lore only available to your allegiance even if you know those spells?

Presented like this I agree with you. In general it is terrible to have fun at the expense of others and when its put in a black and white argument it’s easy to say it’s awful. But this is a large grey area when it hits the reality of the situation. Because this isn’t joe the normal guy, this is the dude who’s there for 40-50 hours a week and doesn’t work there. This isn’t something that just hobby stores have to deal with this archetype is something bars without bouncers deal with, restaurants, stores. A lot of this archetype of guy shows up. Not that this is necessary to the argument here but in general these are the guys that pseudo harass female workers. As in they never stop talking to them keeping them from doing their jobs. They tend to be socially awkward and find a captive audience is the easiest to get to listen. Coming with them being socially awkward they can’t tell when people don’t want to talk to them and don’t have boundaries. I’ll explain more later. And this is more anecdotal and if this were court this part would get thrown out, they tend to be the guys that wind up with restraining orders for various reasons. Every hobby shop I’ve been to has this guy. Now the question becomes what do you do? (For context here midway through the journey of building this community I took a job to build the community of games at my flgs and I had to deal with these problems because it wasn’t just him, we had three of these guys.) 1. you can ignore them. 2. you can ban them. 3. you can Include them under strict regulation. Aka Fun at expense of others. 1. ignoring them. This was my initial response. I thought this would work just fine they’re going to do their thing and a full store is better than an empty store and they could socialize and hopefully overtime social pressure would make them better and make them more or less “normal” hard to define but you know what I mean. I was very wrong. Every day my discord, text messages and people walking up to me complaining about these guys. “They stink, they don’t leave me alone, they’re touching my stuff.” The less agreeable customers start yelling at them and causing conflict. Which i’ve explained why arguing is bad specifically for growing a community. Your female workers start quitting because its no longer a safe work environment when they have effectively a stalker right there in the store before and after their shift. This is where the inclusivity argument leads in reality. 2. We ban them. Its such a tempting lever to pull. But I always thought back to that shop owner. Banning competitive decks started with bad offenders like this “guy” but once that cork is unplugged it becomes easier to ban those who aren’t as problematic. This is a common human nature thing and I didn’t want to open that pandora’s box. 3. Strict regulation. You make rules written for them because they’re realistically the only reason we need basic rules because they’re the ones breaking the unspoken ones. One of two things happen. They shape up and join society and integrate well which One of these “Guys” did. Once he actually got included in a group over a year we saw the dramatic change as he became like those around them. Or they don’t, like the one from my story, and eventually they leave or if they’re mentally unstable like he was stalk a guy who worked at a store for dating a girl that he was interested in and Threatened to kill him. Which because most of these guys are unstable is a good reason to pull the ban lever early but then you’d never have jake who went from truly awful to a cool guy to be around. if you have another solution I just didn’t see i’d be happy to hear it. I wish I could’ve given you a short response but this is such a grey area it’s hard to wrap it up in 3 sentences. I wish it were that easy. And I know I framed my decision as the only right one but thats because its what I was faced with and it seemed to be the only right decision. If you have experience with this I’d be happy to hear more of it as I deal with it in my current job too.

I gotta be honest. Hard disagree. nothing breeds toxicity like toxic people. Competitive play has nothing to do with it. If you’ve been to age of sigmar tournament there certainly are those toxic guys but its usually filled with lovely people who play a tight game. That’s typically what the top tables are. you’re running into a section I ultimately took out of here called “The Fun Police”. It’s ok to hold these events. It’s ok to hold narrative day. It’s ok to have big smash collab games. What’s not ok is someone coming up to you and being extremely excited about a strong combo they found in their book really wanting to run it and the fun police flip on their sirens and say “Why don’t you play something objectively worse be cause its fun. Don’t you want to have fun?” i’m not calling you on this but I dealt with this for YEARS. And the real toxicity breed from the fun police because you’d run something even just a little strong or use a little bs rule from your book and they’d get extremely salty saying “This isn’t fun you should be running something bad! Because its fun!” the fun police are actually why I wrote this article in the first place. They were my biggest adversaries in trying to build my community. We’d have an escalation league “Lets do a big narrative league! It’ll be 16 weeks and we start at 250 points!” Aight cool i warned them everyone drops out after 5 weeks. Narrative thing happens, starts with 16 players, they all ask when they can play 2k games. The runner says 3 months from now. A week later they have 3 players. And then I have to deal with them flipping on their sirens and pulling over everyone they can to tell them they aren’t having fun correctly. just let people play the game they want to play. I’ve played 50 competitive games in the past 4 weeks and they’ve all been a great time because I’m having a great time and it tends to be infectious. Hell at nashcon Jacob berry won best sport playing morathi gotrek. And I played against him, he almost tabled me and we had a great game and hugged it out after. in the end toxic people breed toxicity. Don’t be the fun police. Don’t enforce the law on what people should think is fun this is a surefire way to being the toxic one yourself and falling dangerously in the same category as that same magic store owner who banned competitive decks on the same intentions. If the reputation sticks its a solid way to kill your store.

Now that things have started to open back up I’m seeing lots of people ask how to grow their community. So this is something I’ve actually done in the absolute worst time to do this outside of a pandemic. Disclaimer: we’re not here to talk about the beer company disease. I’m just here to give facts on how i grew my community. We all know how to do this safely at this point its not a conversation needed here. How to grow a community from people with 0 interest in the game. I played a ton of fantasy back in 7th and 8th edition and toward the end times I got a good friend of mine into the game. He loved his new nagash model and I loved shooting it with 3 dwarf cannons and 2 bolt throwers because I was a savage like that but we really didn’t love the game. The text book we had to lug around the expansion books the cost of an army was high. You’ve seen the youtube videos this isn’t a post about why 8th wasn’t great. But the moment aos released… 4 page rulebook… you can see every units abilities for free? Sold done. The only arguments I had was that the game had no points and that made things wonky. But we played. Every week. We were at that store and I’m going to make this sound way more dramatic than it really was but we got a TON of hate. “Kids game, circle bases” was notably what we got from our previous friends who we played 8th with all the time now were pushing us as outsiders. It was ok honestly we were having a great time. this brings me to tip one. Play the game at your store and have a good time In the beginning everyone was coming up and being negative to us as we were just playing the game and having fun. Laughing about the crazy abilities aos had at the time, we named our characters it was great. When people came up to us hating on the game they just looked like dicks. It’s the same thing club promoters do. If you’re having a good time others want to come have a good time and Age of Sigmar is their way to do it. You need exactly 1 friend committed to this with you. Thats it. Everyone i’ve talked to whos done something similar started with one friend going with them every week. It’s all it really takes. That’s on you to find your brother or sister in arms. DO NOT ARGUE I don’t know how to scream this loud enough. Don’t you dare argue over rules while you are playing the game. The battle tech community failed at my store because of this. It isn’t because of the game they showed us how to play it was fun. But they constantly argued and loudly. People actively avoided them. Discuss rules issues don’t argue them just chill out its fine. Believe me you think aos has weird rules now lemme tell ya about first edition and I’m not just talking about daisy chains. So I went through this I know theres some times where its hard. But trust me you raging over a game is the easiest way to set back months of good will. Second Tip This is a longterm investment. You won’t see a result 3 weeks from now. Its low and slow baby like any good soup. We went from 0 interest until 1st edition. Picked up 2 consistent players. Second half of first 6 players. 2nd edition 20 players before pandemic? 40-50 consistent players. You had to be there the day they put up leagues or tournaments because they filled in an hour. I can’t take credit for building all of it, but I will take credit for pushing the first domino. Really all that first push took was having fun and teaching anyone who asked how to play the game. That easy. Don’t start with escalation leagues or path to glory Look most of the new players coming into the game come from video games. They’re coming from league they’re coming from world of warcraft they see path to glory as “not the real game”. They don’t care. They should play one or two games at 1k then maybe 1 at 1.5 then we’re at full speed with 2k. Most of this crowd hates tutorials and putting them in a league thats a 6 week tutorial effectively is a huge ask. Video games can barely ask for 15 minutes how are you about to ask for 6 weeks? Just don’t treat new players like children they’re adults its a game full of stem majors they barely paid attention to their degree and code like geniuses just through figuring it out and searching up a lot of forums. they can figure out aos. In my experience just do league tournaments or one day events. Do 5 weeks MAX you will get a massive drop out rate at 6. I don’t know why but thats the cut off. 4 is ideal. It should be 2k every game or if you are doing escalation 1k 1.5 2k 2k 2k. Any time I ran an escalation league everyone just asked for more 2k games. You could honestly do them all at 2k games. Cost of entry to these I have to give credit to the shop owner for this it was genius. Cost is 2 paint pots. You go buy two paint pots and thats your cost to join the league. Also there are winners to the league. You win store credit. Points determined at the end painted army with effort counted. If i’m Going to start talking like some pseudo marketing major who has no idea really what he’s talking about “This encouraged investment and commitment to the product for those who participated.” little tangent on what I mean by “they don’t care” So I’m going to explain path to glory from something recent in world of warcraft “thorghast.” Those who don’t play might say “whats that” those who played this expansion just groaned. Thorgast is like bringing diablo into wow. Sounds sick. Your character gets a bunch of little cool and overpowered abilities as you go through it. Wow this sounds great! You’re forced to do it every week it takes like 3-4 hours and its extremely tedious and feels dull after like one run and you have to do two. Thats how to take something fun and make it god awful. Thats what path to glory and 1k games are when you make new players play it forcing them into it. They just want to play the game and thats the quickest way for them to lose interest. Whats the most effective way to teach someone the game Doubles games with experienced players. 1k to each player you put the new player in your corner hopefully you know a little about their army, and you just help them play it giving little ideas. Thats it. They have full agency, the game looks like a full game and they can ask for advice. This is the absolute best way to teach someone the game. You can also do this as a 2v1 with your buddy. We’ve done this multiple times its great fun. If you can’t do that run a simple 1k game is great. You can do just warscrolls then full rules then 2k. Don’t make the lists for them unless they ask. Let them choose. Its the difference between ordering a hamburger at a restaurant and making it yourself. If the waiter suggest you the hamburger and you order it and its good, its relatively unremarkable. If you say to a new player “hey run archaon with a chaos lord” and it works they don’t care. But if you make a worse hamburger at home but it looks nice and tastes good you’re as the kids say “pogged out of your gourd” extremely excited about it even though you yourself read morathis warscroll and also noticed she’s strong its still you the new player who made the decision. The Toxic Folk This is subjective but this happened to us so I figure I’ll tell the story. Everyone has that guy thats at the game store too much. He doesn’t work there but he’s there for over 40 hours a week. We had this guy. And he liked aos but decided he’d never bother buying an army book. You can imagine how difficult the game was to play against him when he’d netlist deepkin and the only page he had printed out for their rules was “high tide”. How do you deal with this guy? Use him! He’s great everyone wants to dislike “That Guy” any time a new player experiences that and then plays a game against you its like night and day. They actually love the game more now that they’re accepted into your “club” of good players. Also note toxicity is subjective don’t go around trying to ban guys because they’re annoying it should be extreme cases these guys get banned. Just chill its ok to have negative influenced on your community. How much fun is it to talk about that “one guy or girl” you work with? Its loads of fun. Now you should make rules against this guy. If he’s not using a book make a rule that says “you have to have an army book to play the army” which is the same reason we have signs on pools that say “if you can’t swim you will drown”. Theres always a guy who makes that obvious rule and sign exist. For the record our guy did get banned . But only because he decided to threaten and stalk a man who also frequented the store. But it wasn’t until he did this did we actually push for a ban. I get it it’s the time to cancel people but you should be very cautious banning people. It needs to be something everyone and i mean everyone can hear the story and go “oh yeah makes sense”. If you get a reputation for banning people over a game you might cause your store to die. This has also happened to a store I went to as a kid that was known for banning competitive magic players. They thought playing decks from tournaments wasn’t good for new players.” Once the reputation stuck the store was pretty much empty within 4 months. Turns out empty stores are worse for new players. Conclusion If you have a good time playing the game and people are walking through the store and seeing you have fun they’ll eventually join you. It just takes time to build the snowball. You should let it grow as organically as possible don’t force it to happen. But if you can do this successfully it can be incredibly rewarding. Two big takeaways. Consistency, play on a day every week who cares what day play on that day and time. And have good optics, have fun enjoy the game paint your minis don’t argue. This is not just the same strategy for how to grow a game but for how clubs grow, how streamers grow you name it.

I have been on the grind with aos games lately trying to complete 100 games with the same army really trying to develop a new cities list and master it. Right now I’m at 25 games in 2 weeks. If you’re in any of the tts discords you probably have seen me grinding out games. I’ve began to notice something that about once to twice a game most players including me fail a battle-tactic that they shouldn’t have just because they didn’t understand one simple thing. I don’t want to admit how many games it took for me to realize this. The battle tactic is not your plan for the turn. What do I mean by that? I was in quite a competitive and close game with this great skaven player. We’re on shifting objectives its turn three he gets priority this turn is critical to swing the game. One objective i completely control. The middle I have 25 ironbreakers left alive on and staring them down with a clean line of fire down that fatal funnel? 6 stotmfriends. And the third a phoenix and 6 freeguild guard. And staring them down 40 beady little eyes of 20 clanrats close enough to move all 20 on without even having to charge the phoenix. The plan is simple. Kill the ironbreakers swarm objective 3. What battle tactic would you choose here? Conquer ok that was easy. But in the moment is it so easy to pick objective 3? You’re so focused on what your plan is when you realize you can easily swarm it you put it out of your mind and are lazer focused on the middle. The middle has a chance of failure. Objective 3 that you can out body does not. So inevitably i rolled hot and only lost 3 ironbreakers against It seems so obvious from here but i swear this happens every single game. Objectives will be open they’ll have a teleport and conquer available and even use conquer but pick the one they have to kill stuff off of or they’ll pick broken ranks on a 30 man unit of irondrakes or ironbreakers when they don’t even have something in combat with it because that is the plan for the turn. When thinking about your turn first think “what is the easiest battle tactic to score” it should take almost no effort on your part. In my experience until turn 4-5 theres always one easy one. Then think of your plan. Not plan first battle tactic second. A tip on broken ranks: Be patient. As the game goes on eventually a battleline will be low. Just wait until its your turn and a battle line has 3 models left and then use it not on my 20 block of phoenix guard that are fully buffed up. Even if you can get your entire army with gotrek into them you will bounce. They will live wait until the next turn where they’re severely weakened Oh one more thing. Read what they do. Ferocious advance requires you to be within 3” of everyone who ran. Is it cant be a line of monsters it has to be a triangle of monsters a ^ whatever you call that symbol formation. Today on the team tournament someone screwed that up turn one and lost 3 points. Also savage spear head requires you to be wholly within their territory at the end of the turn. A shocking amount deepstrike within and charge out Of the territory. I definitely have never done this and totally did not lose a game by this getting called out on it. Nope it was a uh… friend… I swear! Hope this helps

Tournament kit sold

Does anyone have the new points list?

Do they still have a shooting attack? I haven’t had a chance to look yet what’d they change

I think the problem here if I’m understanding this right is trying to use vindictors as a way to deal with archaon and stone horns. They’re battleline and they’re harder to kill battle line making it tough to give up broken ranks. They aren’t a lean green mean killing machine. They’re glorified chaff. Find something else in the book to deal with those and let the vindictors support them or slow down the enemy from getting to them

I mean the dragons not important you can run archaon for similar energy. I wouldn’t recommend people dropping 600 on that resin hunk the size of a cat. But you can make similar lists. also a lot of T.o.s if you bought the dragon just let you run it because they know you spent so much on it. I’d say its not competitive but this guy came 14th or so so he did pretty good

I don’t know if it was -6 to cast exactly but those tzeench players wanted to rip their hair out. I got an earful every time I walked past his table.

So I actually have written an entire guide that echos this sentiment. I actually think its my best work i’ll talk about it at the end of this. reading these responses I was very confused. I thought I had covered all of this. Then I realized. I copy and pasted the first draft and not the real article I wrote. Which means This is just raw info and all my context I edited in got taken out. Woops lol. So this is how it’s supposed to open ”I post an absolute ton of lists on here and I commonly say “they’re like grandmas cookin. You might have the ingredients but you can’t make her cookies quite like she can.” Well with this we’re going to try and understand grandma’s cooking and not feel lost and confused when we look at an event winning list and possibly make our own cookies. We’re going to do this by looking at the ultimate grandma’s cooking list, a beast of chaos list. If you just scroll down and read it and try and comprehend whats going on its going to seem like a complete mess. But when you understand these concepts it will all make sense to you.” so the intent of this post is really to comprehend army lists that win tournaments and maybe write your own. So when a new player reads this my intent is they’re already looking up army lists. So I actually have cultivated a community at my local area. I’ve been playing aos since its release with another friend. We dropped those 40 pound backpacks of fantasy books we lugged to tournaments in a heartbeat. slowly and steadily with a massive explosion at the launch of 2 we grew a massive community that eclipsed our 40k community in my area. New players nowadays are coming from video games like league of legends, and world of warcraft or magic. The first thing you do in those games is google a guide. So when they play aos the first thing they do is google a guide. It’s quite hilarious because I constantly saw new plays turn up with stuff like eels and 6 terrorgheists etc etc and just have 0 idea what they’re doing. So most of what I have done for the past 3 years has been teaching these guys how to run the army they picked up. The worst was always those who picked up sylvaneth and did not realize it wasn’t basically a run forward and smash face army. thats actually why I wrote a “how to choose an army to start competing” guide on r/warhammercompetitive. If you want to read it u/manqobadad I’d post it here but Tga posts full text on reddit links and its quite lengthy. I’m a bit worried posting it here as I’m quite critical of armies and I know people on this forum are a bit split on competitive and just enjoy the way their army looks. You can let me know what you think

I half agree half disagree let me explain. so when talking about op stuff I think I bring up both in the post. I kinda just assume it in level 1. I was posting this in r/warhammercompetitive and most of them understand if its op like a gotrek or morathi you probably just take it. But I don’t like fully saying always take whats op because while something like the ginger midget and snake lady may be op, your opponent also will have the most practice against it if we assume higher tables. at nashcon my gotrek got completely outplayed by a gargant player who just played keep away. And I was running him in hammerhall with +3 to run and charge I even flipped my cogs trying to get him into combat and he always kept me at arm and clubs length. Until turn three where sure I killed all his baby gargants and half of a big one, but they all charged me at the same time on the vice. Completely decimating my army. Sure gotrek was finally in combat but he couldn’t chew through the other 2 gargants before he’d win on points. but thats just against me nurgle players talk about how 20 marauders buffed up can charge gotrek and one shot him and how a great unclean one can outgrind morathi in combat and typically end the fight taking 0 damage. Also bonesplittaz say “whats the math to do 35 wounds on a 2+ save? 225 wounds? I got that many dice.” Thats a big reason why that guy went 5-0 at nashcon. lumineth players only took teclis until they realized he was a bait and not very good archaon tzeench players already have looked for alternatives taking more advantage of their board control. i’m not saying don’t run the op stuff you absolutely should I’m a cities player thats why I bring up irondrakes even though I personally think they’re a bit of a bait because they’re too expensive. They need the drake the runelord the longbeards and the bridge. And after all that they’re fragile. So I don’t love them but that doesn’t mean they aren’t a threat. run the op stuff just understand there’s a lot of guys bringing counters just for you. As the two tzeench players who went up against the khorne dragon player rocking a -6 to cast package in his army learned.

enormous edit: I realized my first post of this was the first draft and not the actual article I’ve submitted. Here’s it fixed. i’ve been posting a lot of articles to warhammercompetitive as “manqobadad” figured it was time to share them with you guys I post an absolute ton of lists on here and I commonly say “they’re like grandmas cookin. You might have the ingredients but you can’t make her cookies quite like she can.” Well with this we’re going to try and understand grandma’s cooking and not feel lost and confused when we look at an event winning list and possibly make our own cookies. We’re going to do this by looking at the ultimate grandma’s cooking list, a beast of chaos list. If you just scroll down and read it and try and comprehend whats going on its going to seem like a complete mess. But when you understand these concepts it will all make sense to you. Building up the levels We all had to learn to paint. If you’re like me it probably started with a much too thick layer of primer from a rattle can with some slopped on base coats finished with a big glug of liquid skill nulin oil. Well now I’m a commission painter who specializes in finishing armies quickly. It used to take me hours to even do just that back in the day but now I achieve a much higher level quicker because of the levels of techniques and skill We all have built over the years. Making an army list is kinda like that. It starts sloppy and basic and grows into this refined process. But just like looking at a golden demon winning painted mini it can be almost impossible to visualize how it got there. Much can be the same for army lists. At lots of tournaments I go to I see people on low tables to mid tables running lists I’ve seen win tournaments. These lists in the right hands go 5-0 but with someone who doesn’t fully comprehend it the list goes 2-3. Its all about understanding why the list is great, Level 0: Your Army 101 The layers to this delicious cake begin. Level 0 would be understanding what your book does. So in the case of Ironjawz you’d understand your army hits things in the face like a wrecking ball made of cabbage when they’re all buffed up. Easy enough. Something like beasts of chaos would be understanding your army is entirely chaff right down to your heroes. And it wouldn’t be playing seraphon and using your weedy little infantry skinks trying to make a hard hitting melee army. Level 1: Three Threats Theory So when you are making your lists you want to make sure you have three big threats someone has to deal with. Unless its archaon if you have only one big threat for someone to deal with, it can be shut down fairly easily by numerous amounts of sources throughout the various books. By simply running three threats you force your opponent to make a decision while you have to do absolutely nothing. This can be as easy as just a megagargant per threat in sons. Or in cities it can be 30 iron drakes 30 ironbreakers with a cohort of casters and a frost phoenix with tome in hallowheart. My 30 iron drakes buffed up will do big damage, my ironbreakers with 4 casters behind them will do a lot of mortal wounds and be an absolute boulder on an objective being hard to move and my phoenix can threaten the back line and scoring by being a hard to kill monster. I’m forcing my opponent to make a decision on what to deal with. It doesn’t always have to be damage or tankiness. It can also look like in khorne a package that really shuts down casters. At nashcon I frequently saw tzeench players wanting to complain to the first person who’d listen about this guy’s khorne list with that cat sized dragon that was giving -6 for them to cast. But we want our three threats to do one thing extremely well. You can also have minor threats that live rent free in your opponents mind like deep strikers but those aren’t included in our three threats. Those are more level 5. Level 2: The Missions. This one is easy most missions in AoS are hold one hold two hold more. You want to design your lists to hold two efficiently and battle over more. Look at your player packs and have a plan for the games you’ll play, what are you going to do if you’re K.O. and you get the vice? What are you going to do on the one with 6 objectives that stack huge points over the game? Sometimes its an easy answer sometimes its not. Level 3: What battle tactics can I achieve? Here we have finally reached the secret sauce to winning games in AoS. What is my plan for battle tactics every turn? Are you taking 3 monsters for the savage advance for that extra point? How are you going to score spearhead where you put two units in their deployment? Do you have enough damage to use bring it down and kill the battle line? Do you have ways to slay the warlord? You need to understand what the tactics are and how can you achieve them easily. If you think simply in this way and play every game to score 5 battle tactics you will win more games. Level 4: what battle tactics am I giving up? So I will use an army I’d never recommend anyone to play, beasts of chaos. They have a serious advantage right now because they have cheap bodies and serious mobility with some good control options with a shaggoth casting hailstorm halving movement and a demon prince halving charges. Whilst they can’t kill anything even if they try, they can put up walls of chaff and slow you down. But you have to think about this, if you just took 80 ungors and shoved them forward and have a 5 wound hero as your general, you easily just gave your opponent 2 free battle tactics slay the warlord and line breaker. Lets say you take 3 ghorgons and run them next to each other so you can get your free point with ferocious advance? That’s great but you just gave your opponent bring it down, and 3 points if they kill them one at a time. So by simply writing your list this way you have given your opponent 3 easy to achieve battle tactics and 3 points for having easy to kill monsters. Even if your opponent is playing at level 0 he’s going to see the play and beat you. Because the strategy you have to work hard to achieve he just gets for free because of you. So how do you build against this? Well in a list like beasts your general could be a dragon ogre shaggoth. Now he’s a very hard to kill piece and a monster so he can help score monstrous takeover. Instead of running weak battle line you could run two units of dragon ogors to push foreward and if you wanted to a cheap unit of gors but all they do is sit in the backfield. If this were Ironjawz we could take Brutes over ardboys to make them tougher. Cities running ironbreakers. So now if you want to achieve kill the battle line you have to kill 30 wounds of tough dragon ogors or ironbreakers. We have now without trying made a hard decision on our opponent by taking away two easy options. We can then buy chaff that aren’t battle line like warhounds and ungor raiders to get in the way without giving up any points. Level 5: What will cause my opponent to make decisions? I’ve mentioned it a few times but lets really get into the importance of decision making. The fewer choices you have to make the more clear your head is for planning out future turns. The more decisions you have to make the more likely you are to make a bad decision. To put all of this into one neatly wrapped observation. Say we are beast of chaos and we take two cheap monsters say cockatrices or if we’re living city hydras and we plan to deepstrike them on the back of the board to our opponents deployment zone turn 3 to score spearhead for 3 points. Our opponent now can deal with them with a lot of firepower but then that firepower is not going to the main objectives. So he may score a point for killing them but we deny him two points for not being able to take an objective this turn. Now this is bad because whats a hydra going to do afterwords the answer is nothing they suck but heres how you can do something like that. This more commonly is used in deepstrike in general. If they know you have 3 annihilators in the sky or 9 stormfiends that can pop up you force your opponent to spread out and zone them off. So them zoning your army makes the rest of what they do inefficient. If you’re going to play like this it helps to have a plan to exploit that. Level 6: What do I have to be worried about in the current meta and whats my answer for it? Be extremely careful with this one. This is the one where you’ll start losing games by outplaying yourself. If you were to look at my meta review and say “lumineth wind spirits are a huge deal how do I deal with this?” And you make this whole package based on catching them and doesn’t do much else then you never play against a lumineth wind spirits player... It can be difficult. You’ll beat 90% of players who aren’t thinking about anything above just by considering them. Here make sure you have answers but things that would also be good against other armies. Gotrek is a serious issue. So you play nurgle and take the sloppity bilepiper and when that ginger missile rockets into a group of plaguebearers you remove everything within 2 of him. And now because he can’t pile in close because of the piper he is effectively pinned there til the piper dies or another unit comes and kills the bearers. Its not a big commitment to take that piece and not allowing pile ins is strong just in general but it is also an answer to a deadly character. An example against this would be khorne taking a package to give -6 to cast every turn and contest every roll. This is amazing against tzeench lumineth hallowheart and any list that relies on little buffs from casts, but what happens if you go against a sons player? What about fyreslayers? Dok? Idoneth? It becomes a bit muddy. Now this is fine to take because in the current meta at a tournament you probably are going to run into a lot of tzeench lumineth and hallowheart players so its not necessarily a bad thing but something to consider. Putting it all together Ok so thats the five levels of what goes into list building and I want to show you a list by @eat_bray_love that when you first look at it looks completely nonsensical, but when you understand these concepts it makes it so much easier to understand you can actually comprehend what you are reading. Allegiance: Beasts of Chaos - Mortal Realm: Ghur - Grand Strategy: - Triumphs: LEADERS Grashrak Fellhoof (150) - Lore of the Twisted Wilds: Tendrils of Atrophy Dragon Ogor Shaggoth (185) - General - Command Trait: Master of Magic - Artefact: Amulet of Destiny - Lore of Dark Storms: Hailstorm Tzaangor Shaman of Beasts of Chaos (135) - Lore of the Twisted Wilds: Tendrils of Atrophy Slaves to Darkness Daemon Prince (210) - Axe - Mark of Chaos: Khorne - Allies UNITS 6 x Dragon Ogors (300) 3 x Dragon Ogors (150) 10 x Ungors (70) - Mauls & Half-Shields 6 x Tzaangor Enlightened on Disc of Beasts of Chaos (360) 10 x Ungor Raiders (90) 10 x Chaos Warhounds (80) 5 x Centigors (90) 3 x Tzaangor Enlightened on Disc of Beasts of Chaos (180) 2 battle regiments this is a 2 drop list Level 0: this list understands its a bunch of chaff Level 1: the three threats are shaggoth demon prince pairing with their cc, 6 dragon ogors and their ability to hold an objective, 6 enlightened for their combat ability and we can deep strike them and force our opponent to play scared Level 2: this list can easily hold two objectives and battle over the third by blocking you turn one in your deployment with warhounds moving 21”. If that unit is double debuffed by the demon prince and the hailstorm a 3 inch charge becomes a 12 inch charge. If anything moves within 9” of the warhounds you can redeploy 1” and turn it into a 16” charge from 4” away pinning a unit and putting you ahead basic objectives for a turn. Level 3: through deepstrike this list can achieve spearhead. Monstrous takeover is freely available. Your chaff will die allowing the opening of conquer and you can do it with a monster. You have so many units ferocious advance is easy. Really the only thing you have to do is find 1 battle tactic throughout the game. Level 4: we made our general and battleline tanky so its hard to give up those, we have enough units on the board to zone deep strikes and make savage spearhead hard to achieve. I went over most of it in the level 4 post. Level 5: Our opponent if they’re a long time player will be terrified of the enlightened and might play scared vs them. Most players will want to smash the herd stone and may all in a monster to do so you can use that to your advantage by leaving it open. I can go on for quite a while here. Level 6: The shaggoth with hailstorm and the demon prince can both shut down the move of a unit like gotrek and morathi severely hurting their ability to get into combat. This isn’t hyper specific and is also great vs things like mortek guard and ironbreakers who wont be able to move onto an objective turn one and because theyre up front most of the time getting slowed means the rest of the units in the deathstar don’t have fly so they’re shut down too. Conclusion When you’re making your list keep this cake concept in mind and slowly add your layers to what you’re comfortable with and as you grow you’ll see yourself perform much better just by understanding these concepts before you even get to the table. Here is the podcast of aos coach and eat_bray_love talking about this list and it finally clicked for me to where I can give a perfect example of what I’ve been trying to talk about when it comes to list building. We all are lucky this guy just plays beasts. If he played a real army he’d be going 5-0 almost every tournament. As always if you have any questions feel free to post them below. https://youtu.be/PU1-7dYWCgw

I did the math as is he takes 1 damage on average from a gotrek who rolls 2 6’s to hit. About to run the numbers on irondrakes don’t have high hopes for em. Edit: fully buffed max size irondrakes unit. Its 5. 5 damage on average to our fiery feather friend.

Ok i dug into it more. You were on the right track. The official Most annoying model with save stacking flamespyre phoenix in settlers gain with stone spirit armor. 3+ armor save 6+ generic priest ward save 4+ annointed, 5+ protection of teclis 5+ Salvation of Hysh 6+ Stone Spirit 6+ Luminark and some say he is still rolling to this day

Wait. Is there an item that gives us a 5+ after thats not a ward save? Then it could theoretically be, 3+ 6+ priest ward, 4+ 5+ 5+ 6+ And just be wasting your opponents time. They wont want to shoot it because of the damage reduction but how many dang dice you roll its cracking me up

Get this man out of here. He’s a genius!

So i figured this would be a fun time to post the “pain in the ass” olympics of the new save rules gold medal flamespyre and frost phoenix with their save easily being a 3+ 5+ amulet 4+ annointed 6+ luminark. also if you kill the flamespyre he comes back on a 4+ for good times silver terrorgheist this one is actually going to kill you while its unkillable with his 3+ save 5+ amulet 5+ unholy vitality and 6+ deathless courtier bronze verminlord warpseer and nagash cut the medal in half. While the verninlord is a healthy hollywood phone number with its 3 5 5 5 i think nagash getting his dumb deathless minion save after his 4+ is going to make me hand of dust. runner up firelsayers back to a 3+ 4+ 6+ and if you take a luminark 6+ but if anyone can get rerolling saves and all these saves they may take silver

Just put it on a fire phoenix for peak pain. Then run a hysh mage to add insult to injuruy. So even if they do manage to kill it on a 4+ you just bring him back fully healed

So uh… whos gonna be the first ****** to stick an amulet on a phoenix and just shove it in the opponents face? (for those who don’t know new faq specifies between ward save and dpr. So you can now stack everything but ward saves and the annointed save is not a ward. So a phoenix can have a 3+ 5+ 4+ save. If its near a luminark 3+ 5+ 4+ 6+. Just gotta find a way to get re rolling saves for peak obnoxious

How do you guys feel about two terrogheists vs terrorgheist and gargant?I play hammerhall and know how it hurts now that you cant pile in and attack twice with two units. Has anyone had success with the gargants?

So on launch we wont be able to see the warscrolls? If thats true theres no point in subscribing

I am here with a list I think is quite competitive and I think might be my nashcon list I am not sure yet. I am also here to stan gotrek in the current meta hammerhall Gotrek ghur battlemage runelord castellant celestial hurricanum with amulet 15 vindicators (new stormcast spear boys) 30 ironbreakers can alternatively be 6 demigryphs for offense but these are tankier 10 free guild guard x2 you can do dreadspears i only do this because all my models are dwarfs and its easy to make them sword and board so gotrek with the battle mage and the hammerhall spell can be at +3 to run and charge with flying so turn 1 he auto runs 6 moving 13” flying up the center of the board. he can kill archaon and nagash and really brawl morathi and all those lists shove those pieces to the center objective. It doesn’t matter he’s slow we just go duel them with our cheap mode who trades then we just beat their weaker army. I think daughters is the only hard matchup because bow snakes are scary then 2+ save vindicators who hit harder and cheaper than a block of greatswords easy pickup

I like them as like you said a little companion unit. One gyrocopter sitting with a frostfire phoenix or a big block of vindicators or ironbreakers makes it difficult to charge them with a tarpit because of how damage they will take coming in. Definitely decent