WM/H: A Nice Change

D’you know what I find interesting?

Everyone who commented here said swapping factions might be worth a go. Everyone who commented on TWF took it as read that I’d be sticking with my Cryx and offered advice for such. I don’t know what, if anything, that signifies, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

However, given that I’ve had the drabs for eighteen out of the thirty months I’ve been doing this blog thing for, a change is probably a good as a rest. Most of the Cryx are now resident with Mr Bandwagon, and his Mercs and Skorne (formerly known as my Skorne) are now with me. This state of affairs will continue until Live And Let Fly in three months’ time, and if neither of us hates the way things have turned out, will become permanent.

Here are a few lists I’m considering trying out. Still quite fond of Morghoul,for playability reasons as well as for all this. I had conveniently forgotten that I got a load of Mark I cards with these originally, never had one for Hexeris and had been subsisting on printouts from the starter set for all my battle box stuff. Will have to look into that.

System: Hordes
Faction: Morghoul – Big Game Hunters
Casters: 1/1
Points: 35/35
Tiers: 4
Master Tormentor Morghoul (*7pts)
* Cyclops Brute (5pts)
* Cyclops Savage (5pts)
* Titan Gladiator (7pts)
* Titan Gladiator (7pts)
Cataphract Arcuarii (Leader and 3 Grunts) (6pts)
Cataphract Arcuarii (Leader and 3 Grunts) (6pts)
Paingiver Beast Handlers (Leader and 3 Grunts) (2pts)
Paingiver Beast Handlers (Leader and 3 Grunts) (2pts)
Bloodrunner Master Tormentor (2pts)

System: Hordes
Faction: Skorne
Casters: 1/1
Points: 35/35
Lord Tyrant Hexeris (*6pts)
* Cyclops Brute (5pts)
* Cyclops Savage (5pts)
* Titan Gladiator (8pts)
* Titan Gladiator (8pts)
Cataphract Arcuarii (Leader and 5 Grunts) (9pts)
Paingiver Beast Handlers (Leader and 3 Grunts) (2pts)
Agonizer (2pts)
Orin Midwinter, Rogue Inquisitor (2pts)

Still messing about with the Mercs; I have the bits for most of these lists, though, so I’m likely to give them a try. Why not?

Also, you’ll doubtless have noticed that there’s a second author ’round these parts. Y’see, I am disconcertingly busy at this time of year anyway, even when I’m not moving house, and I would ideally like to remain disconcertingly busy (because that tends to mean that life is being lived, rent is being paid and fun is being had) after I’ve moved. It’s all part of the ‘less blogging about things, more DOING THINGS’ endeavour, you see.

However, I do want to keep the blog active and regular, like the bowels of a healthy elephant, rather than scatty and infrequent as it was in the early days. Lexington, bless him, has very kindly (with the minimum of devious manipulations on my part, and a poke from a moderately sharp stick at worst) agreed to join me for the duration, and will be taking over every third post to transmit his deviant thoughts and fancies down your word-reading organs.

ACHTUNG! – IMPERIAL LITERATURE! (ALSO eBay!)

Well hi-di-hi there. Got me a couple of announcements to announce.

Firstly, if you happen to be after some Cryx, Necron, Lizardmen or Empire models, you can buy some of mine on eBay. Don’t panic, I’m not quitting any games, I’m just selling off some surplus-to-requirements material.

Secondly, if you happen to enjoy my battle reports, or if you happen to be interested in my fiction, I have a Direction for you to follow.

My battle reports, and any fan-fiction I happen to produce in the future, will be living on this community of writers and generally righteous folk. It is at present a small community, but that’s where you lot come in. Go. Read. Join. Comment. Write. Most of you write things, and most of you are quite good at it. Get over there. There’s a button on the right of this post that’ll take you straight to my profile there, and from there, finding content should be easy.

Go. Read. Enjoy.

The Magics I Will Not Be Gathering

I have something of a storied history with Magic, as you may already know if you’ve been hanging around here for a while. I played for a few increasingly depressing years in secondary school, and dropped out at around the same time that the competitive mentality had gripped our teenage-boy minds to the point where endless third turns and infinite quantities of tokens were the rule rather than the exception.

Last year I found out that those rotten bastards I used to play Mage with have started up with the Magic and the playing of the Magic again, and that they have wrapped their hands firmly around the reins to steer the Magic Wagon straight for Casualton (it’s in the County of Scrubshire, but on the edge, not in the middle by Loserborough or Nobber-upon-Rant).

And it’s been fun, so far, throwing down with these people, to the point where they bought me a shiny new deck (although it’s green/red, not really my thing, I still appreciate the effort) and where I’ve picked up some lovely full art lands and a life counter and deck boxes and oh fuck what am I doing?

Anyway, the latest oh fuck what am I doing news is this.

WFB – Full Of Lizard Mysteries

In the end, I managed about seven months.  I just know too many people who still play GW games, who can still walk into a GW branch and get their game on.  I want to be a part of that.  But I’m doing something a bit different this time.

My previous armies have all been a bit… samey.  Big trudgy grindy walls of melee stuff that has a minimal presence in shooting and overburdened magic that has to defend AND buff AND ‘shoot’ AND achieve board control/mobility.  This time I wanted an army that could do something competently in every phase of the game, and that was aesthetically and thematically different from my previous efforts.  I also wanted an army that could insure itself against some of the worst magical excesses of eighth edition WFB – the mad miscasts, the enormous doom spells and so on and so forth.

I was tempted by Tomb Kings for a bit, but they fall too much into that ‘crap without the spells going off’ bracket.  Regardless of how much fun they look, a Skeleton statline is still a Skeleton statline.  I contemplated Daemons but I’d like to keep my friends.  And then something happened, something which I did not expect…

… Storm of Magic makes me want to play WFB again.  It might be the objective-focused nature of the scenarios, the access to crazy monsters, the allies! the ability to fit my beloved Vampires into some other army that doesn’t share their limitations.  So I started thinking about things that I could ally with Vampires… and I came up with this piece of backgroundy-type stuff that I’ll be happy to share with you later… and then I scoured The Warhammer Forum and read a great many really fun-sounding battle reports…

… and then I remembered playing one army, just once, back in the days of fifth edition (to which I believe eighth owes much), and sort of… enjoying it.  And then there were loads of cheap fifth edition era models on eBay.  And the short version is I play Lizardmen now.

I do have a few tentative army lists sketched out, based on the experiences of others that I’ve read about, but before I really settle on ideas that want trying, I need to actually sit down and get to grips with WFB8 as a new system without inherited baggage from WFB7, and I’m hoping it’s been that long since I played that I can do that.  I think changing armies will help.  The Lizards certainly seem very different.

Wish me luck, folks.

Reinforcements!

A wee bit later than anticipated or ideal, but here they are: two more warlocks, two more beasts, and the much-needed Shifting Stones.  I also snuck in a Fate Deck so I can maybe try out the Goblins! characters in their native rules environment.

In other Druid news, I won a game with my Circle last night!  Took me long enough, and it was one of those 15 point games that I’d wanted to start with, but a win’s a win!  I’m beginning to wonder if the Units Make Me Play Like A Moose effect is actually due to the number of complex activations involved in a game.  I do very well in battle box games – four to six complex models, with some interactions at ‘squad’ level like fury management or focus allocation – but less well when I have multiple squads of complex models to deal with.  That might explain why my favourite units and solos are relatively simple ones like the Pistol Wraith – by keeping the individual activations simple, I can manage a greater number of them.  Large, complex units, like the Nyss with Valachev, overwhelm me by providing the mental-effort equivalent of another battlegroup to handle.