oggurt_da_bog_zombie

Hoping to resurrect 😆🧛‍♂️ this thread to discuss Nagash in Soulblight. @Neil Arthur Hotep, your original post has been super helpful figuring this all out. I've been thinking about a Soulblight Gravelords w/ Nagash list, and looking for some advice as a new-to-Nagash player. I'm thinking about Legion of Blood which I fully realize might not be the best sub-faction choice, but anyway... Allegiance: Soulblight Gravelords - Lineage: Legion of Blood - Mortal Realm: Ghur - Grand Strategy: Prized Sorcery - Triumphs: Leaders Nagash, Supreme Lord of the Undead (970) Neferata, Mortarch of Blood (365) - Lore of the Vampires: Vile Transference Wight King on Skeletal Steed (130) - General - Command Trait: Aura of Dark Majesty - Artefact: Soulbound Garments Battleline 20 x Grave Guard (280)* - Wight Blades & Crypt Shields - Reinforced x 1 5 x Black Knights (120)* 10 x Deathrattle Skeletons (85)* Core Battalions *Hunters of the Heartlands Total: 1950 / 2000 Reinforced Units: 1 / 4 Allies: 0 / 400 Wounds: 75 Drops: 6 Here's my thinking. I want to run Nef which is maybe overkill, but her CA and Spell are spectacular, gives me a monster, and a pretty darn good melee threat on a 16" move. Her special ability that can slay a Hero is pretty good although obviously pretty rare to pull-off. Then I want to run a Wight King w/ Steed as General to get Grave Guard as battle line, and LoB command trait and artefact makes him pretty tough and hard to kill. He'd be on a 2+ base save with -1 to hit in melee. Could also run the oubliette or the ring of dominion but just seems better to make him tough. However, now I barely have any points for battle line. The 20 man Grave Guard seems obvious, but I guess I could split them across two units to meet battle line requirements and still have some points left over for other stuff. The Black Knights are serving a simple purpose, fill a battle line slot as a highly mobile screen that can die and come back and screen again, thats it. It is a lot to pay for a simple mobile screen, so dropping these for maybe another unit of Deathrattle might give me more room for an endless spell or something. So I have 50 points left over for an endless spell. Cogs are an option, Palisade is an option to protect from shooting, or maybe the Gravetide for another damage oriented spell. If I change up my battleline, I could try to fit in a spell portal instead, but I think the spell portal was nerfed lately and maybe not a required take anymore. Last, thinking Hunters of the Heartlands for my battle line is a good idea to make them a bit more smash proof, but could argue to drop that and just run this as a single drop battle regiment, to get the first turn to buff up, move my Black Knight screen into position, and start blasting. I'd probably start with at least the Deathrattle and/or Grave Guard in a grave site to bring them onto the battlefield later where they can be useful. The 4" move trying to creep them forward from a deployment zone, usually just ends up with them being blasted by a spell or shooting before they can do anything useful. Thoughts? I've thought about going Kastelai, dropping Nef, and just going for Blood Knights but... I can't find any! (I do have 5 already, but fitting them into this list is basically impossible unless I want to drop the Grave Guard/Wight King combo and I'd rather have the bodies).

I'm having a ton of trouble playing a shooting heavy Seraphon - Thunder Lizards monster list, just getting slaughtered before I can even get to any of their units. I suspect the play experience is similar to Lumineth -- a crazy hero phase then a ton of shooting -- although I haven't actually played a Lumineth list yet. The best ideas I've had so far have involved getting units to move across the board quick and act as screens, which is not easy for Soulblight. I think gravesites and movement shenanigans are key. I tried putting my GG in a gravesite and waiting until one of the big shooty lizards was nearby, then popped up but my GG got shot off the board after failing a 9" charge, re-rolling the charge via Forward to Victory, then failing again. Relying on 9" charge after popping out of a gravesite is a long shot... I've had some luck just throwing my VLoZD w/ Amethystine Pinions 20" across the board right into the shootiest units which is somewhat successful, but it puts the VLoZD at high risk for an early death. To deal with the risk of losing my key units like VLoZD or Blood Knights early, I'm actually running a unit of Black Knights in an attempt to move 12" then get the auto 6" charge (from their hornblower ability) into a shooting unit to act as a cheap screen, die, then come back at half strength the next turn to ideally do it again. If I ran Vyrkos I'd probably do a similar thing with Dire Wolves, but I'm running Legion of Blood so Black Knights fill a Battleline slot which is great. Not really useful unless you are running Neferata, but one of the nice things is Nef casting Dark Mist -- ignore rend when making saves -- on a Wight King w/ Steed general that has aura of dark majesty -- subtracting one to hit but melee only -- on a 3+ save makes him tank pretty well if he can make it across the table and into a shooting unit, keeping them tied up for awhile. I might switch to trying Aristocracy of Blood to get some re-rolls for charging but its wholly within only 12", which means I'd have to keep my battleline (GG,Skellies,Black Knights) and/or Blood Knights close. I'm even running a Prismatic Palisade which is helpful if only to annoy the opponent into having to move around it to shoot. The above is working... sort of... I feel like my strategy against shooting heavy lists is getting better but I'm sure others here have better ideas than I do. The problem with the above is it sorta takes my whole army to tie up shooting units, so I don't have anything left to actually do damage, cap objectives, etc.

This is basically the perfect philosophy.

Was fixed recently, so likely update your data in the next few days (fix might already be live too) and you'll get the fixed version.

This sounds... interesting. Link? How would this work exactly?

I'm planning on running an incredibly similar list as you, and am pretty excited about it but I'm weeks/months away from actually being able to try it out. List in spoiler tag, and since our lists are so similar, I'll put basically my reasoning for this list below: Some key notes. First I think in your list you could run "Warlord" instead of "Command Entourage" to benefit from both "Magnificent" and "Strategists". Next, you have three artefacts I think, and I'm not sure thats "legal". Assuming that's just a mistake/typo, I'm wondering what your plan is with Arcane Tome? Is it really for those extra casts? I've sorta thought about this but I think the utility from the other artefacts is a bit more reliable. For my list, I decided to give my first artefact to the Wight King on Steed, and went with the Oubliette Arcana. I have a feeling that since I'll likely be moving the Wight King around a lot, having him be able to potentially negate a nearby spell could be useful. Second Artefact is pretty simple, give soulbound garments to the VLoZD because I want to keep him around as long as possible for obvious reasons. For spell lores, the best spells seem to be on the warscrolls, so I'm really just planning on casting those and am not thinking about the lore spells much. I haven't decided what to give Neferata and it probably won't matter much anyway, I'm going to use her warscroll spell and then probably just Mystic Shield or something anyway. Although it might be fun to give her a deathmage lore spell, in addition to Decrepify on my Necromancer. Since I'm definitely going to try the mini-bravery bomb with Black Knights + Wight King w/ Steed (and took Soul Crushing Contempt on him, as he's my general for obvious Grave Guard Battleline), maybe somebody in my list should have Spirit Gale for an opportunistic zap, but it seems pretty situational and its probably just better to take Amethystine Pinions. For the Grave Guard battleline, I'm going with the 2H weapons because I want those guys to hit as hard as possible. My death rattle skellies are the tarpit. Obviously, Black Knights are mostly a battleline tax but I think they serve a few uses: the bravery bomb, ramming into things very early on in the game, and likely dying early so they make a good endless legions candidate. Obviously Blood Knights seem to be the favored hammer here, but I'm interested in swapping them out for a few games with the Crimson Court instead. I'd like to try using the Crimson Court because Duvalle has a great spell (Fiendish Lure) that I think would be great for basically setting a target for the Grave Guard or Black Knights, he gets to take a spell lore (so could put something like Spirit Gale on him), and I think the court would make a great screen/protector unit for my Necromancer who I have a feeling is going to be hard to keep alive and easy pickings for my enemies! And they are only 5 more points than Blood Knights so its an easy swap. Last, what I'm most bummed about is I can't fit the Horrorghast in, I just need 5 (or 10 with Crimson Court) less points to fit it in my list, so as of right now I'm just taking the gravetide instead. Heres to hoping Black Knights or something get a points reduction so I can fit it in! Since you mentioned the Coven Throne, one other list I'm thinking about is just getting rid of the Wight King and Grave Guard, putting Aura of Dark Majesty and Soulbound Garments on the VLoZD and making him my general, running an all deathrattle skeleton battleline, and fitting in the Coven Throne. Can post that list if you're interested but its pretty different than the above!

This is super interesting, thanks for the write-up/research! I'm working on a 2k Legion of Blood list which the main focus is to run both Neferata and VLoZD, so the key here is a lot of my points for the army are already spent on just two models! One thing I'm considering is running a Wight King w/ Steed general to get a unit of 20 2h graveguard as battle-line, a unit of 20 skellies as second battleline, and I'm considering taking a unit of black knights to check-off the last battle-line requirement. Fully realize black knights are not very good, been reading this forum post and tons of others on the topic, but given your research, it seems like in the context of my list running 5 or even 10 black knights might be worth it. I realize Blood Knights are better, but I still need to fulfill battleline, and I think I can fit in a unit of 5 BKs in addition to some Black Knights anyway. Thinking of an example, instead of taking more graveguard or skellies as battleline, a unit of 10 black knights paired with a the wight king w/ steed general -- taking the soul-crushing contempt command trait -- makes a potentially decent chaff / screen clearer from both a fair amount of mobile damage and bravery shenanigans. Could drop this to 5 black knights but they do have 2" range, so that along with them being a bigger unit to resurrect, could be at least serviceable instead of them being a total tax on the list. And this gives the black knights & wight king a bit of a functional purpose, and lets Nef and VLoZD focus on other things and not dealing with chaff/screens. Seems like my idea could be viable. Put an example of this list in the spoiler tag below, but I'm still working on fine tuning so not really "done" yet, probably needs an endless spell, some artifact tweaking, sorting out the core battalions so I can take two artifacts and get a unifed deployment, etc.