CJPT

As a counterpoint to this: Shadespire is much cheaper than its peers. If you think of it as occupying the same sort of space as X-Wing, Netrunner, or Magic, then it's an incredibly good deal. X-Wing also bundles cards with models, and you often need multiple copies of particular cards to run a competitive squad. That means buying multiple copies of models you don't necessarily want. Contrast with Shadespire, where the 'no more than 1 copy of a card in your deck' rule means that there's no pressure to ever buy an expansion twice. If you buy the core set and every Shadespire expansion, you have access to the full game for, as you say, €185. Doing the same with X-Wing costs five times more than that, easily. I should stress: I love X-Wing! But I was staggered by how much more generous Shadespire is. And it should go without saying that collectible card games are basically an infinite money sink. With the regards to the comparison to Warhammer - yes, getting fully into Shadespire means spending approximately the same as you'd spend on a 2000 point AoS army. The difference is that with Shadespire you can run every faction in their game to their fullest potential. A better comparison would be the cost of Shadespire and every expansion vs. the cost of building a 2000 point army for every faction in AoS.

I think this might be a hint to the identity of the Celestant-Prime. All we know is that the Prime contains the soul of an ancient king, and I always had a feeling it might not turn out to be somebody obvious (i.e, Karl Franz.) If Tyrion granted Sigmar the soul of an ancient elven king - Finubar, maybe - then he might be pretty pissed off that Sigmar chose to turn him into a weapon. This would fit with the line that follows this, too:

I can definitely see where you're coming from. I'm reserving judgement until we've seen the Skaven's objective cards - that's a huge difference-maker, here. The Reavers have very high scoring potential, even in bad matchups, and this more or less makes up for all of their other weaknesses. They're the least popular warband and yet end up doing pretty well in most tournaments on this basis. Movement, damage, inspire conditions etc are important, but for me point scoring potential is the thing that really makes a warband work. Not sure I agree that the Skaven inspire trigger is better than the Reaver one, incidentally. It's very chancy. You'll probably get one or two inspires relatively easy, but inspiring all 5 rats is going to take some work. You can also be completely screwed by a bad first hand/mulligan, and it limits your deck building options.

Reavers will be fine. Unless Krrk is amazing, Bloodreavers are stronger fighters out of the gate than Skaven are. Catching Spiteclaw will be much easier than catching the Warden, as Skaven can't block as much space, and any combo of Garrek/Karsus/Saek (or Saek+Targor/Arnulf) can kill him. Also, it'll be very easy to trigger the Reaver's inspire condition against Skaven - while they *can* bring fighters back, they'll want to do so sparingly because it eats into their actions and they don't get the same bonus out of it that the Guard do. I can imagine a scenario where a Skaven player is pushed into reviving Clanrats to stop the Reavers from inspiring, which means that the Reaver player is entirely directing the flow of the game. In fact, they'll probably indirectly help Bloodreavers in a tournament environment because they're another warband with access to Cleave right away (albeit on a crit.) They'll cause headaches for Stormcast and Orruks and maybe put a dent in some of the Reaver's hardest matchups. Also: it's premature to talk about power creep because the first eight Shadespire warbands were all designed together: it's one big set of cards, as evidenced by the numbers on each. We can't really get power creep until we're onto wave 2, and I imagine that's still months away.

Thought it might be worth pointing out that Neferata has featured pretty heavily in the recent books, as have her 'daughters' - elite vampire warrior women. That could easily be one of the new additions for Death, and it'd fit with the video.

I'm 99% sure that's just the Citadel Wood kit given a once-over with Nihilakh Oxide.

It’s intended to look like very hot iron - which is a theme of my AoS Khorne stuff more broadly. Here’s my Slaughterpriest: Mostly, though, it’s just something to help the weapons pop.

I haven't picked up the Sepulchral Guard yet, but here's everything I've done so far:

Played my first two matches with orruks yesterday against undead and managed to win both, though the first one was really close - essentially got taken to pieces on the first turn but pulled it back on chunky objective cards in the final round. That win reinforced my decision to go with none of the Hold objectives, however, as I won on the basis of having loads of smaller 'punch a few guys'-style objectives while my opponent struggled to reach objective markers that I'd hid at the back of the field. Good Scrap and Conquest were the game-winners there. Cards I'm definitely going to add are Confusion, Healing Potion, and Containment I think.

I played a bunch of games with the Reavers yesterday, and, happily, won more than I lost. Here's a few quick thoughts. These all concern the Reavers vs. Liberators matchup, incidentally, but I imagine that's what most people are playing at the moment so hopefully it's helpful! The Reaver Inspired state is very easy to achieve - for better or worse! You need to have a plan for achieving it from the very beginning of the game. The best case scenario is losing Arnulf and Targor in return for any Stormcast character, but your opponent is likely to know this and won't target the 'chumps'. In that case, the likelihood is that you'll lose somebody good and one of those two. I'd MUCH rather lose Karsus than Saek or Garrek, so bear in that in mind. Avoid splitting your attacks between different Stormcast *at all costs*. The more defensive dice they get to roll, the more likely they are to get Inspired. Kill one and ignore the others. I've had a lot of success when I've managed to kill Obryn or Severin early and left Angharad for last. Garrek and Saek have reliable attacks without support. The other three do not. If you want to do damage with Karsus, Arnulf or Targor, you need to set up support. The problem with this is that Arnulf and Targor can be killed in one hit by any Stormcast and Karsus, Saek, Arnulf and Targor can be killed in one hit by both Severin and Obryn. So your plan might be to charge with Targor, then charge with Saek and pull off an attack with support. However, what will probably happen is that Targor charges in, doesn't do any damage, dies, and then Saek has no support - the whole 'horde or dudes attacking one at a time' problem. In this scenario, you need to charge with a 4-wound character first. This can either be Garrek or Saek/Karsus with the +1 wound upgrade. Then, as long as the Stormcast aren't sitting on a surprise +1 damage upgrade of their own, your guy will *probably* survive it and set up a combo attack on the following activation. Useful ploys that let you set up supported attacks without going through include Sidestep, Blood Rain, and Insensate, all because they let you either move out of sequence OR mitigate that nasty Stormcast damage with varying degrees of reliability. The other key thing is to try and isolate enemies, as Stormcast are really hard to damage when they're supporting each other. Inspired Saek is pretty good either way, mind. There are quite a few Garrek-specific upgrades in the extra cards set but it's a pretty big risk to include more than one or two of them in your deck, in my opinion. If he dies those cards are useless, and your opponent will be gunning for him - particularly because 'kill the enemy leader' is a pretty common objective archetype.

Just checking in - packing for the event now. Do you need those spare objective markers? I've got them if so!

Quick question for @Chris Tomlin - I've just discovered that Pink Horrors should be on 32mm bases. Mine must have been old kits, because they came with 25mm rounds. I'm a pretty casual player so I'd never noticed. I've got a to-do list ahead of Saturday as it is, so would it be acceptable for me to use some 25mm-to-32mm adapters? If not, I'll scramble to get the models rebased.

I don't think so - people tend to use 25/32mm bases in my experience. I have some custom ones for my army, but I'm also getting the special edition of the GHB 2017 that comes with cardboard tokens including objective markers. You'd be welcome to borrow those, and they're official.

I'll have generic spares if you do end up needing them!

Just wanted to say thanks for the hard work setting this up. It's my first big Age of Sigmar event and the excitement has just started to set in. Time to get cracking on that last-minute painting sprint.

Three! Matt Sheret and Kieron are true hipsterhammer - I'm just tagging along. Also: script download link isn't working for me. Anybody else having that problem?

Good point! I had it backwards.

One small silver lining to the Stormcast set: it's another way to patch up the issue that the Start Collecting Stormcast box comes with three Retributors. The SC box and this box combined gives you a Celestant, Questor, five Retributors, six Prosecutors and eight Liberators - add one of those £10 snapfit Liberator boxes and you're edging up on 1000 points for £100.

Everything from the typeface to the clouds in the background to the gold font fits with Steamhead Duardin. Which means it's probably going to be something we totally weren't expecting. (Or Steamhead Duardin.)

Price matters here, as that's 31 models to Silver Tower's 50. If they provide enough extra rules to allow for exotic adversaries and so on, I think the game sounds pretty promising. But I'd want to see it cost less than £95.

You're probably right. But they've shown very little of the contents of that box as it is, so you never know.

Totally wild guess: a token or piece of plastic pack-in scenery for the new Warhammer Quest.

"YOU! YES, YOU! Do you wish to ride... THIS MAJESTIC CHICKEN?????????" Living around Stormcast has to be a bit much, sometimes.

Here's a pic.