 Hello everybody if it's Wednesday, it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly Joining me as always my one and only co-host. It's Tyler. What's up, brother? How you doing? Good to be here Good to have any we're talking stormcast tonight. And so we brought in two experts who are also fans of Powerpoint and Also love a deep dive into the golden boys. It's Mergonck and Paul from the Stormkeep Mergonck. How you doing tonight? I'm doing great Good to have you on Paul. How about yourself? Better than Mergonck, let's say So I am looking forward to this we are going to as I said deep dive on stormcast now We've had time to really ingest the whole book So, you know last time we did a four and a half hour review That was just the scrolls and stuff like that was really we tried to give some initial thoughts What was good what was bad, but I think combined between us easily we've all played Dozens and dozens of stormcast games. I know they've been the only thing I've been playing for the past six seven weeks And I'm sure it's true for a lot of other people here, too Have been given them the through the paces so now We're gonna have some informed thoughts about The army how it works strategies all sorts of stuff like that. I bet none of you have played castigators Yes, because the invocator comp would just seem way too good not to try I Have lined up against Castigators does that count because another person my club has also been playing their stormcast consistently So it's like we all can end up against each other So I play against castigators. How about that? They were on my table all right, so that I'm counting it at any rate So before we get all that going we're gonna get to the news But before that don't forget to hit like subscribe do all that fun stuff right up top hit that it really helps people find the Show so hit those little buttons. Click them. They're fun. Tyler. Let's talk news. What do we got? I give Tom a hard time for not being here Yes, I'm doing his doing his job this week. So Tom's life has taken a he's going through some changes. I'm sure he can share that in his own time But he'll be back. Don't worry. Yeah You're all the best my friends. Oh, yeah, oh, thanks. Go. Well All right rumor engine. It's a 40k thing or sigmar is getting really weird. It's first of all This is the sigmar. I want this is not the sigmar. I'm gonna get okay Uh Slide aside. Okay. I was just watching. I'm not all the way through it yet But over my lunch today over the past couple days. I've been watching Batman ninja, which was like a it was a it's a Animated Batman thing on HBO that was done completely by Japanese creators and it tells a story about Batman in the in the Like the Edo period I think I go to die. Yeah. Yeah, and it was fantastic. And anyways, this is the kind of thing I wanted my fantasy. Okay, if you've watched it, you know, I'm saying this is not out of character for fantasy If that's what you're going for so at any rate there. There it is But nonetheless, yes, it's a stupid 40k thing. So let's move on. No, obviously it's Ash and Skaven Everybody knows they're gonna say enough with this Just going straight missile launchers from here on out Yes, so at any rate, what else we got Tyler New war cry model. What was that guy storm born something like the slaughter born not storm It's pretty sweet He does look sweet This is the appropriate way that new elves should be really introduced into the world No problem there. So So is it is it the leader of the warband or is it just a dude? This is the question, right? We've gotten to like singular models Are we getting are these the leaders or is new does new war cry gonna have like an individual deathmatch mode, right? What what's going on, I don't know man, I suspect we're gonna know at least partially this Saturday is my answer He doesn't look that fancy, right? Like if somebody told me this is the leader I'd say well, how come he doesn't have like a whole bunch of cloaks or other gems hanging off him Like he just looks like a dude in the warband. Whereas the spider guy looks like yeah, that's the guy meeting them all in the battle He's all crazy and spidered up. He's got the theme nailed Mm-hmm. I mean, I'm okay with chaos just sometimes being like ravaging brutes, right? That's fun too, but I also like spider guy because I also like cast to sometimes be insane madness from the edge of Reality I think I think chaos is a big tent party is what I'm saying. It can handle all types of lunatics So that's fine But you know, we'll see I guess I'm I'm hoping that They I mean, I think we're gonna clearly get something pretty bold introduced first for work, right? So wouldn't surprise me if maybe it was Like hey, we're gonna use work right just like we did with chaos to explore weird chaos concepts to explore all sorts of weird Crap around the realms and have different ways to play and you know, you'll have champion on champion mode and whatever stuff like that Like sure wouldn't surprise me Do you guys think that because all the elves have this same hair color? It's some kind of a lure illusion to the realm of shadow. Am I reaching too far here that this confirms Malarian? They're all dark elves. Yeah, that's right. Yes It's been confirmed. It's just a matter of when we will see them. I Like her heads up all one. Yes agreed Malarian and dark elves confirmed So I'm I'm in with it. Yes, 100% Warhammer weekly exclusive. That's right. You heard it here first They they the autumn lotus the multi-part kits for the chaos warriors and knights are coming out in December They did announce that in one of the one of the articles recently. So yep, they're coming I mean a year two years off of when they should have been but they are happening at least so that's good The silhouette in front of me, but they had a few silhouettes for this Saturday one look like Sweets and then I remember I thought one might be like chaos chosen new chaos chosen or maybe on foot bearing guard Well, the guy on the right is the 40k model Because he's the custodies lieutenant. Yeah. Yeah, either that or there's also a black Templar guy That's in the same the old version of him is in the same pose. So it's either yes, then I saw the custodies lieutenant potato images well, so Yes, and But yeah, like the middle guy screams new ogre man-eaters that we've seemingly had some rumor engines of and then yeah Guy on the right or left it just feels like another new war cry dude, maybe or something with a giant axe so It's a big axe Just off chances anyone get to see the you know when they were previewing this or Putting up images of the preview they had cards with numbers on them and one of the numbers I think we saw was 12 which happens to be sigmar's number Okay, okay, and is that a new war cry thunder strike band or is this thunder strike wave to like luminous wave to Interesting That is so happy silver thinking but I like it It's probably gonna be a wave to but it's too soon for that I'd say maybe like March next year we might start hearing about it Yeah, I mean, I'm good. We were fine on like, you know, look I know we're doing a stormcast show and it's I'm good Let's never do an LRL or L2 again that close like that Let's we can just wait till the next time we roll over in addition and then add more stormcast like we're fine for the next three years Thank you. We got we got other stuff. I'm good. Let's let's get around to the Skaven Let's get them new visa chaos up where we got we got stuff. We got to get to so Could be both could be the rat cast thunder strike. I mean together look I'm already there I'm ahead of the curve so There again now you're talking my language. I would I would just hand my credit card over now That would be the end of that one and say just run this until it stops working. That's fine All right So yes, Saturday is the big preview show which they're doing it at 1 p.m. Which I'm not excited about because that'll make it 8 a.m. Here on the East Coast. It's too early. It's too early for me to get up and have to form coherent thoughts I'm not a fan We were spoiled by all those one o'clock shows got to eat lunch settle in and watch them disappoint you time and time again Yep, and yet here we are. All right. So, yeah, what else we got? Well, they put up a Black library submission article. I think that was today or yeah today Specifically for the mortal realms. Do you guys see that? I did not. Yeah, we did. Yes The calling for Don bringers focused Missions, you know in in line with the new narrative. So, yeah, anything about that? I'm gonna do a horror story and the hook is that it's really just about Luminas getting a third wave of models I could get some traction I can see that yeah, I mean, I think I like a lot I Need to actually go back and read some of these novels I've heard some good things about a number of them, but I just I gave up early on I think like a lot of us when they did that first edition came out Those are the novels. They were pretty rough to try to get through and never pick back up some of the better stuff Have you guys read much of the fiction? I just recall the axe blood and murder born fighting the golden god angel hero angels Alright, yeah, there was a lot of corn. Yeah, I think the mortal. I think the broken realm fiction is definitely better But across the books Compatible yeah, well, so I aside from crag knows that book was a little yeah, sure fair You know, I mean, I don't read Warhammer fiction. That's a well-known fact. So it's I'm good. I'm good. I got this I got the story. I see what was your on here When you look at War Scrolls, and there's like that little text between the name of the ability and never read it Just scan right over that I could they could sneak if some lorem texted on me. I'd never notice the difference Like I get it I get what's going on here. I'm fine. It's cool. Sure That's it Alright Awesome. Yeah, quick quick news not a lot of news, but I'm sure If this Saturday is good, which I mean between Age of Sigmar work or I in Underworlds I imagine they'll be a Saturday morning show. So we'll see We'll see who I can press gang into service for that one I got I got plans. So yeah, I know I've got I gotta find somebody And I suspect Tom is also off the the agenda. So we'll see who I can press gang into service But at any rate, let's go to pick of the week Murgonck, what would you like to share with everybody you start us off? Well, not to toot our horn, but on our channel podcast the storm keep we're actually doing a lists video pretty soon, I think This next week or this coming week and what we're doing that is in our discord. We're gathering up lists we're having People on our discord submit lists and then we vote on them and based on that We also put in our lists into the show and then we talk about each list Do a deep dive with different kinds of stormcast lists and what are its strengths where its weaknesses? What changes could you make what counterplay is there? What are the combos and so on? So that's pretty exciting I think people come up with some really fancy lists and it lets us, you know, really explore what's out there Outside the box of fear. Oh, hey, I'm gonna take six raptors and Thunderbolt Wally you or something Yeah, there's some interesting stuff in there. So that yeah, that would be my pick of the week Nice, that's basically the new smooth brain. It's four fulminators or 10 protectors probably more full fulminators and six long strikes of 3.0 That's like the new bar. I said the ladder I'd say long strikes form the backbone, which is weird because they're not even a battle line unit, but yeah No, they are gathered and trying out only we'll get into have been trying out other options to not play long strikes And it's it's difficult to circle back. Yeah. Yeah, it's so good. Yep Fortunately, I own zero so that's easily keeping me out of that that particular sand trap Paul. What would you like to share with everybody? Now I will clarify we did talk to these guys ahead of time and they said it was okay for us to plug our podcast So I don't feel bad about doing this not at all. I Really want to shout out our video that we did about tactics and strategy I feel like there's a dearth of content relating to this and the age of Sigmar community on YouTube And we wanted to just create a conversation even if it's just an introduction to it We talked about concepts like hammers and anvils. We talked about different strategies like an alpha strike versus a castle We talked about specific tips and tricks for deployment and things like that So if if you like talking strategy Maybe even you're like an expert player And maybe you just want to know the terms that other people are using for these kinds of things that you just intuitively know Check out our channel. It's episode 9. It's called tactics and terminology So definitely gonna want to give a shout out to that video. Very nice. It will be on there Expertly leaving your units off the board and not bringing them on in the correct rounds. That's uh, that's a hot tip It's key strat folks Okay That game at all. I've got like four points of that game that are just large permanently in my memory that Tyler my my simply I've got some simple advice for you. You ready? Yes, please Yeah, be better be better Get good, right? Okay, we can move on now. All right, what's your pick Tyler? What would you like to share with everybody? Oh? I mean not Further, you know inflate these fellas that we have on you guys are kicking ass with the channel It is really good like sincerely. Thank you. Every video has been amazing the level of depth they're getting in Yeah, it's Some of it reminds me some of the stuff that Tom's wanting to do forever in terms of pick your last video He's talking about never really got around to doing but I mean I can't talk I'm not really producing content other than helping out this fellow here But yeah, that that that last video was brilliant getting into some of the the weeds of tactics Yeah, good on you. Thanks for I know you're talking about bad reports, which is really cool Forward to seeing that so I know you guys got a patreon. They're gonna be doing which I probably need to Yeah, there you go. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah so I didn't want to shout out If white tech we haven't mentioned Dave in a long time on this show Obviously Dave has one of the true og Podcast in the entire Warhammer fantasy a OS community. He's been doing it for forever He had an awesome episode his latest one on all the lore So if you're interested in that storm cast attorney, you know, we were just talking about it It's gotten pretty interesting. I thought I read through the entire book You know all the lore and and Doug quite a bit of it Yeah, check that out if you want to learn more about the storm cast lore Yeah, the lore has definitely gotten a lot better since first edition I I was always attracted to the aesthetic like Roman gladiators with art techo wings I thought that was really cool I'm super stoked that we finally have a cherry that matches that but the lore was like Golden man smashes bloody axe boy and then just kind of do that for a few years But it's got a lot better since then in particular. I'm loving all the plot hooks. They've set up in the new battle tone I don't want to spoil anything if anybody hasn't ready yet. So yeah, it's it's vastly improved I'm not much of a lore guy, but it's a good read Awesome my pick of the week comes from the future Which is that if you we don't if you still after this show have not and and after going and watching this stuff on Stormkeep have not gotten enough storm cast Eternals content if you're like I need to mainline More of that sweet sigma lightning AOS coach has got your cover. He's doing a talking storm cast Eternals coming up. That's linked down below go and Go and check that out coach as always great great fantastic content. So All right gentlemen Let's turn to some hobby time Murgonck, what do you got? What you've been working on? You're paying up some storm cast. What are you doing? Yes, I am so other than waiting on my Three and I later boxes the ones with the Grand Hammer in them They're currently drying outside. So I didn't want to bring them into the room spells But I have primed my and you'll see the list tonight that I'm currently thinking of testing out But all the hero models of the Lord imperitence and everything it's I'm getting ready for Austin Which is I think November, Tonya right before Thanksgiving And yeah, so those models are currently on my table and they're currently outside because I don't want the room smelling of primer So makes sense. Let him de-gas outside. Good We'll talk about the Lord imperitence a little better or as I call him the Lord Emperor rat and sure Absolutely Put you on the spot my god, you still got a beautiful dragon that I might have sold you Get rid of it. You can you can be honest. I Did I wanted to repaint mine in a little bit and I Bought a new one and I think Chris, you know Chris Pratt Thank you plays LRL these days Parks and Rec Yeah, Star Lord is a well-known a OS player Big stormcast proponent Awesome, all right, Paul what's on your hobby desk there my man? What are you working on? I am clearing out the very small portion of my stormcast backlog that still exists I'm up to about 12,000 or 13,000 points painted and I want to get that finished before the end of the year before I buy a whole bunch of drakes and annihilators and Vigilars and vanquishers and all the ores and urrs that you can handle nice, right in particular right now I'm painting up a storm strike chariot. It's actually right behind me. Yeah It's uh, it's interesting contrast paints are definitely making it easy I'm not the greatest painter, but I feel like contrast paints with some media make it really easy to do nice blending transitions Fantastic, I love it. Yes getting models painted is always good And I like how much contrast have turned people onto to this kind of like painting with Translucency and getting that contrast fast and getting models on the table Best thing contrast did was convince people that they could paint they always could It just tricked everyone into figuring it out that they had it in that the real the real the real secret is in you the whole time All right The it was the friends we made along the way while we painted the figs tyler You don't paint I did I want to say I was buying on this guy paul I didn't had no clue who the heck he was and I did a deep dive This dude's a true Stormcast stan. I mean his instagram is just all stormcasts I'd go back years I was wondering if that was you who went through and liked every single photo on my instagram account I don't know man. I think you sold yourself short. I was really enjoying your paints game is Yeah, that's looking good And 12 000 points is impressive. That's like uh, that's that's a heck of a number. That is a heck of a number That is more than I have scathing and I have a lot of scathing But you've surpassed it. So there you go. I'm not even the top guy in our discord There's a few people that have more than me right now. It's pretty it's pretty nuts And yeah, it's an insane convergence. Yeah, it's incredible what people get up to uh, what's from cast really? It's inspiring. It's fantastic uh Tyler I got some games in yeah, so like all y'all have been testing out stormcast got a game in post-fac of ij and oh my god The power power is real and that army Yes, right three four one. Yes You can eat all the yeah, it's oh god. It's super efficient and very aggressive or very competitively pointed like Oof, they really wanted to push orange as I can tell and they're they're great army. I mean Oh, I think uh, I'm one of her friends steve Uh, touch it. I think he took it to uh, he'll be open. Yeah, and he did and he did beautifully. Well, I mean Uh, you know, I gave him some, you know last minute like hey run run bloodtooths They're they're good. They're good And then he was just cutting the legs off of gargoyle players. That was great Uh bloodtooths irons. I was playing iron sons, but bloodtooths as well I mean especially obviously now what we're doing pigs the the horrific things we're doing pigs At five hundred fifty points three hundred four six. So yeah irons. Yeah, sure Irons, so just I can't I mean like I told events when I started picking up the army I didn't want to play iron sons because everybody's playing iron sons But playing it now with the three for one and everything. Oh, it's just insane Like people can't you know, they can't tag one unit and Burn that one unit down. You're gonna get you know, you got two crushed together You're gonna hit get hit by the other one's gonna come in with the counter just It just felt amazing finally got a win against soul blight that army has been a Nightmare to try to get a win against I think that might be right now the best book in the game that's soul blight book It's just so much is playable competitive variety is amazing in that book That's amazing because that's not what the initial take was the initial take was it seemed like a very balanced book But it turns out there's a lot of power Yeah, I think it's well, we're gonna talk soul blight here in a couple weeks and I think it's I do agree with you It's one of the best books in aos right now not because of just raw power. I mean, it's it's okay It's it performs decently well enough like I think it responds to good players. Well, I think you can lose easy with it too But I think it's deep right. That's that like much like a lot of what we're going to talk about today um The thing that has impressed me about soul blight is just how many different units have traction in different kinds of lists Right, how much different stuff you can do with the army and I think that's Strong, that's the that's that's the story there. So Good on seems like Go ahead All you call it seems like the book really came out at this perfect time where the designers were coming out Just off the tail end of second edition So they knew where to scale things back where they weren't too fun to play against But they were also had third edition in mind But they hadn't quite adopted the third edition Design paradigm where everything is toned down So it's got the best of both worlds and it's just looking through the book at first You're not that impressed because uh, you know, not the best stats Not the best points, but you put all these pieces together and it's just it's a great book without feeling impressive. Yeah. Yep agreed Uh for myself my hobby time. Oh, it's been busy busy busy But we're in the end game now folks Uh with a week and effectively a day Left until uh this tournament You know the display board's done obviously I shared those photos. I finished the last figure or what I thought was the last thing I have the bases. I've basically done all I need to do is is black rim the edges. So Uh a little bit of rim work to do And uh, and then I looked over And I realized That I had forgotten That the stupid lord imperitent comes with a stupid dog Yeah, the completely pointless little buddy that gives him two extra wounds, I guess and of course I'm not using the normal Uh bird dogs because it's rat cast and so I have this guy instead these rat dogs No, that's really good. And so I have a whole host of these rat dogs And uh, he's I so I have to finish him up Um, but we're in the we're in the end game it's like maybe a day and I'll have the army all done and uh Then I still have everything else I've got to do to prepare for the tournament including Getting all the new making a new carrying case just for this stupid army and getting a book together and taking photos of everything and Uh all of that so it's going to still be a busy week, but I think we'll make it Is this a different display board than that really elaborate one you had for the high elves last week? No, that's that's the board for them because it's a it's a teams tournament So it's with tom and he's running settlers game So the story is we're defending the city in haish. So All right, uh, so Uh, that is our hobby time Uh, okay So with that Uh, we're not going to do anything in the way of events this week because we got a lot to talk about here Gentlemen, are you ready to deep dive on storm cast? Let's get to it. That's all we do. All right, then let us do some storm cast deep dive So we bring up our Presentation here. There we go Uh, all right. I'm just going to jump right here storm cast 3.0 by the numbers No, my supposition has always been that storm cast are a great starting army, but there's a challenge Rules wise, they're a good starting army, right? They're relatively straightforward They the way they play is very new player friendly The problem is it's got an overwhelming amount of choice And you know, I had I got a game this weekend and my buddy who's playing storm cast brought his storm cast over and he was just like i'm overwhelmed and so like We did a team game and the nature of how he set up meant that he was he had set up within range of The soul like grave lord players ability to just take his zombies and throw 60 zombies at him turn around like turn one and autopile into him like run six get set up within 16 inches because the nature of the angled setup, right And he didn't realize that that was a thing zombies could do. He thought he looked at the zombies he said other four inch move and then At the then the soul by grave lords player went first All of a sudden his entire line was swamped with zombies who were double piling in because of van hells And he was going to lose his raptors and everything, right? And I said, all right stop Rirac like we're going back, you know, and the the sbg player was cool with it because he was like that shouldn't happen Like you should, you know, like I I should have been more clear that this was something my people could do, right? But the point was as he was looking through his you know, so we were talking about the army because he's been playing him And I've been playing him. He's like i'm just overwhelmed because there's so much there And I don't know like he didn't know what to pick, right? I mean he has six raptors Okay, let me say that he's cottoned on to that Okay, and he he was rolling six raptors But you know, he still was like just okay, so which ones do I use for my battle line? He's been trying different battle lines, right? Uh, what does he do as far as other shooting units? What does he do as far as chaff like just all these different questions? And and when you look at the numbers it is a crazy amount of choice in this book 75 war scrolls Two of them are just singletons of normal units, right? So that that is to say I'm only getting like there are 77 entries, but I'm only counting 75 If just so I don't get um, actually because two of those are just uh, you know single fulminator and single um storm drake guard 39 leaders Six different battle line Take that ko Uh 15 different battle line if Okay, eight sub factions four behemoths Seven monsters So that is to say only four of the seven monsters are behemoths One artillery and 11 units with basically no role of any kind Okay Like who aren't leaders or any other otherwise anything at most they're just a single right, right So these lucky 11 are Okay, it's a lot of the sacrosanct stuff So like you know a lot of the sacrosanct stuff has no way to go battle line if Um things like underworld war bands underworlds war bands. Yep to the two underworlds war bands the chariot It's three now Oh three. Yeah, you're right. I'm sorry. Yes. You're absolutely right. Um, but yeah stuff like that is is is what usually makes up Is what makes up most of the no role of any kind So this is just a lot, right? So before we get into anything else, I just want to say have all of you and I'll open this up to the floor Have any of you found it overwhelming just how much there is here with this book Yeah, I have a little bit, you know, particularly with the usual Trying to figure out lists that take the fill out the gas a little bit as opposed to just run to A list of things that are relatively straightforward and you see the synergies see the combos I can understand why gardus fulminators protectors long strikes You go down the list relic tour castellate like we've got quite a few things that are obviously quite good and quite good in combination Got a number of things that are In that b tier a tier and trying to figure them out like that's second tier Cascators vigilores judicators on the shooting fronts, etc Judicators with thunderbolt crossbows are actually really efficient as you guys did a great job of pointing out Yeah, it was you guys and in from just play and I can't remember if tom dave and vent caught it on their shows But props to in and you at least i'm catching the thunderbolt crossbows But yeah, I've definitely found it a little challenging to try to figure out the mid shelf type list The top tier list I find relatively straightforward, but we do have it appears quite a few options on the top shelf as well Yeah, and I'll say definitely we were talking about this beforehand, but it's also a very modular book Right, there's not a lot of natural leading through like with doc. It's like you make a choice You like snakes and suddenly everything's decided for you, right? It's like, okay. I take this I take this I take this I take this Um, we're gank. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but yeah, go ahead No, that's totally fine. I was gonna say like yeah I think that's part of the reason we sort of wanted to do that battle term review with a straight up tier list Right off the bat And it's a tier list that'll you know keep getting updated as the points change and FAQs come out and other armies come out and You know as the meta changes Um, but it was essentially a way to solve that analysis paralysis So if you're a new stormcast player and you're like where I have $200 or whatever, where do I spend my money? You know, you can you can make something of an informed decision as to what kind of List you want to make or what kind of units you want? Yeah, a lot of the feedback we've gotten is just people saying thanks. I had no idea where to start This has been really useful There's just too much going on and there's too many numbers and and you know You've compiled it all in a really convenient way Funny story. We actually just updated the tier list that we put out initially because the FAQ changed quite a few things and Um, we just also we kind of slept on one or two models here or there Nothing like major like how a lot of people slept on the torl on that was we knew that was good But some things are are updated a bit. Uh, we instead of being on here I was going to be recording that tonight, but That's change, I suppose So that should be going up in the next couple days But yeah, there's a slide in there that has just a summary every unit ranked by tier About half the book is playable Like over 50 of the book is is either c or higher Which in my mind makes it playable enough to be, you know, you might not make a full list out of every c tier unit But you might include one or two here or there and uh, most of the bad units are like heroes We just have too many hero war scrolls. So if you if you start picking away at the book It feels overwhelming at first, but then you kind of narrow it down to Pick some hammers you pick some animals you pick some support heroes and you're good to go It's hard to make a mistake at that point. Yeah I I agree a lot of the I think this is a highly highly playable book The challenge as you said is there's a lot of dead hero war scrolls like let's be honest with ourselves, right? Like they've they've just they've overprinted stormcast heroes. We have primary as lieutenant syndrome here 100 percent, right? So oh, yeah, absolutely. They could just cut some of them straight up Like why is the night quest door in the book? Why does he still exist as a playable war scroll in this game? He was a silver tower model. Just leave him in there. He doesn't he doesn't need to be in the battle tone I I would go the opposite direction and say how about we just make him a valid war scroll and like actually give him some Purpose in the army like just be a sure kick butt individual dude Who's like like because individual contributor heroes can work right like that is a thing that can exist Um and and have a place in an army But they've got to like earn their keep with some kind of either deployment shenanigan or Or you know special trick or both, right? I'm thinking of somebody like sigval, right? Sigval doesn't have any real synergy with the rest of the army and he doesn't need it. He's his own he's his own perfect Uh, man, probably one of the few good scrolls in that entire book Right, I mean, I'd love it if every war scroll was good, but then what would people complain about? So it's gonna have that both storm cast and non storm cast gotta complain about something That's good. I'd actually say it not even not even sigval because he's you know, like a main character in that book I'd say the grim rap berserker like look how well they designed that war scroll for a fighting single hero And none of her fighting heroes want to be do anything like that. It's just it's just strange Yeah, so uh, I repeat again. We we got good goddess. Let's get good night quest or we can do it We've seen it we've seen them go on the journey it can happen So so we have the technology. That's right. That's right All right, let's do some overview here We're just gonna I just want to this slide just a little bit of a prompt because I want to talk for a moment about play styles and strategies And so in my mind, there's sort of four dominant play styles that come to mind right now Uh, that is to say mixed arms. We've talked already about a bit about that You just kind of mentioned it paul right you pick an anvil pick a hammer you pick a couple leaders Did you go right? Yeah, okay a little power projection. You're good you go Then you've got a couple different skew types. So you've got shoot cast Which is still doable, although I think less good now, but still doable. You've got hammer heavy Um, you can tilt this army to just be overwhelming numbers of hammers and threats to your enemy like stuff that are that are Very very scary very mobile and very destructive when they hit We've mentioned things like fulminators, but it's not listed. It's not certainly not limited to only that like this can be a four hammer army Uh, and then I've just got oops all dragons, uh, which thank god. They're not out yet Let's just as I've said many times. Let's just raise the points on those at the same time that we release them Good to go like Square easy. So I think with some testing that that one in particular I don't think people understand what's coming one day to come out. Yeah, yeah, you guys I enjoyed the little commentary murgock. You guys were talking about a test you did against sons of bayamats And you know, you thought it might be good, but it was way worse You know, that is way better than you even you expected. Yes, uh, that double more lune breath is it's going to ruin people It's going to be like those tower guy spikes when they were doing 12 more loons by rolling two sixes, but somehow better That was interesting So did I miss anything on my play styles list paul? What do you think did I did I cover the four dominant play styles here? What else didn't I cover? I would just categorize them differently. I think uh, you can definitely have an all melee stormcast army I don't think that's very good. Just because we don't fight first. We're not the fastest army We don't have like crazy mobility tricks like we can translocate we can deep strike But nine inch charges aren't aren't the best And not of course excludes dragons which have the mobility that we need so that's a whole different thing So you heard this thing called cogs cogs solves all your problems, man Yeah, every roll If we had wizards that had any bonuses to cast that would be great. Oh, don't worry about that. The math's perfect It's gonna start right Yeah, just spend 500 points on a star tree. It's only 500. Yeah uh, so I would I would more classify it as uh Like you can definitely do shoot cast that's certainly an archetype I think it struggles with objective play But if I mean if you table your opponent you you have all the objectives inherently So that doesn't matter. Uh, but I think I think I would just classify them more as like castles or alpha strikes rather than How you do it because you can have a shoot cast alpha strike and you can have a shoot cast castle And those are two completely different lists Sure, uh, similarly with the mixed arms and the hammer heavy as you've defined them here Uh, and drakes even are an incredibly versatile unit. I found them Spamming them is fun, right? It's always fun to spam a powerful unit But I also like just slotting them in one or two squads to round out a list Sometimes you need something fast that can pin. Sometimes you need an anvil that can just Shoot right across the board and take a bunch of damage Sometimes you want to bring a squad of six and double tap their breath and then stack all the buffs on them and say Hey, good luck with this one. See how you deal with it There's there's a lot of variety in how you combine the different units I think the four categories you have are pretty good I just uh, like I said to classify it more anvils and or sorry alpha strikes and castles instead Okay, I like that. There's also there's also like that spread style that you've you guys have probably seen that one list The guy had like five night judicators. Yes, that I would call that like a That's definitely more of like a shoot cast that doesn't fall into your traditional castle or Or alpha strike because it could it can go second It doesn't need to have a defensive formation. It can kind of place spread out That's not in my opinion. It's not the best way to play storm cast I feel like night judicators are inefficient shooting They're pretty good at what they do and I think you could definitely catch people off guard Especially if they castle up and you just drop five d3 mortal wounds on their whole army That's you can't recover from that if you're not prepared for it So it's definitely another way to play it though. Yeah You do have to watch out this army does have quite a bit of like ability to summon the akira blasts from the heavens So yeah, it can be uh, it can be a challenge Uh under strategies. I have you know, like sort of components mortal wounds attrition mobile threats and board presence like that is to say Uh, and I certainly think the these are sub parts of kind of the the way above right? These are like the sub elements of kind of how you're choosing to put pressure and and actually achieve victory sub formats of the play style as it were right and Two things about that one I think that it's interesting because you when you said well shoe cast has this objective challenge and you know melee heavy has this challenge and so on and so forth And potentially oops all dragons will be corrected if they like Actually fix the points right then it wouldn't you'd be low on bodies where you should be and stuff like that but Mixed arms really does feel like the best play mode of this is is my take. I mean, am I wrong? Doesn't it feel like the way this army is is responds the best and gives you sort of the best chance of achieving victory Is in some kind of mixed arms method Definitely I'll let you take this one. Yeah, it's definitely the way to go And that's always been the way to go with storm cast even back in You know 2016 people are running those night azurus lists that drop retributors directly into combat no charge rule required Even back then I think a mix of shooting in melee is preferable But especially as the game has evolved you see mechanics like fighting first You see mechanics like every army can teleport and charge now That's not a special thing that storm cast do anymore and it's just gotten worse at it over the years We used to have so many more ways to teleport directly into combat or get three inch charges Or get plus nine inches to our charges and they stripped all that back And now we still have this really good shooting and we got to use it If you can reach out across the board with long strikes, for example Because we're talking about them a lot and just pick something and say that thing you take it off the table Every turn you can do that. That's an incredible for tactics and strategy. That's an amazing ability to have Not a lot of armies can do that. I I'll play uh my fire slayers And they just can't do that or the orc heart card don't have that capacity They have to do it from much closer and they're a lot less efficient at it Yeah, so that's if you make storm cast uh a good mix of anvils hammers both shooting in melee and then some Disposable screens it that's I think that's the ideal way to play storm cast It just gives you the most tactical flexibility. So if you're trying to go 5o at a gt That's generally what you should do. You shouldn't play heavy skew lists and rely that on getting good matchups Yeah, I agree Completely agree, which is good by the way for the again for the what I would call the core army of the game, right? Let's just it's sort of the you know, it is meant to be an intro army. It's meant to be sort of a central force and I like the idea that that would be Played best in a varied way, right with a mix of units and roles that are you know, like warhammer You know like what the game is It certainly encourages buying a whole bunch of different models. Yes. Yes. That is side. Look, that's that's a that's a french benefit right there for them so, um, okay So Go ahead. Go on. Yeah. Yeah. When I was curious to get your fellow's view on is the classic storm key versus Scions of the storm debate. So if anybody doesn't know, of course So keep is this more attrition Castle type army the core benefit is it runs one and two for objectives that are Holy within or partially within your own territory you count For each redeemer model it counts as three for contesting and controlling objectives And then by about around three you apply that to all objectives on the table There's some more benefits, but that's the main one and of course science is the classic You know, you can deploy up to half of your army off the board except unless the scenario says otherwise And so what do you what do you guys think? Maybe we're gonna start with you Of course, they're they're quite different And in sort of what they're doing, but do you think all is equal again from a Trying to do as well as you can at tournament standpoint. Are you guys leaning one way or another? I think I definitely lean more science than storm keep. I think the great thing about storm keep is Just the fact that you get coalition units from cities and the I guess the redeemer spam But my problem is redeemers are at their core an anvil unit. They're not meant to do damage I'm not saying you can't increase their damage output by any means It's just that they're not they're either meant to screen are things that actually do damage or they're meant to You know absorb a charge and then you know stay in place stay alive on objectives Um and the problem with coalition units is while it does let us take cities sigma units There aren't that many units you actually want to take because Their stats just aren't that good and efficient compared to our own And when you're playing a storm cast army, you really want those efficient stats Uh, the science thing the problem is like sorry another problem The benefit is it gives you a lot a lot of technical flexibility The ability to just deploy things off the board and be like you cannot touch this or you have 30 sentinels I do not care. You cannot touch them. All right is really really strong Yeah, we especially because our best shooters like we keep circling back to raptors. They're incredibly fragile, right? Yeah, we started 12 in that unit, right? I mean, that's nothing. Yeah, literally. That's nothing. Yeah Yeah, 12 wounds on a four upset. That's nothing. I mean, but you say hey, you can't touch this until I Let you and that's great, right Paul go ahead if you shirt first you don't have to care how good the enemy shooting is Hmm So we we actually did a whole video about uh, every Noteworthy maybe we missed a couple but we most noteworthy allies and coalition units that you could bring in And the list is pretty sparse Even the war machines you might think those might be cool But just the way the war skulls are worded and the rules for third edition They don't seem to gel very well and the redeemer bonus is Not great it kicks in in round three and usually like if you're not going first in round three That bonus really doesn't matter Whoever typically you know who's going to win at the bottom of two and then the turn roll for three determines the game Most of the time So having an ability that kicks in at round three is pretty disappointing on your own objectives It's a useful thing to have if you're playing defensively your opponent can't just run up with You know 60 skeletons and say hey, that's my objective now even though you're sitting on it So I like that but I just like being able to protect fragile units or deep strike charges with tempest lords all that stuff Another issue with storm keeps is you can't play annihilators and storm keeps like at all If you're not using signs of the storm you shouldn't be using annihilators And the main reason to play storm keeps as far as we could tell Maybe this is a bit of a spoiler for later in the video But the main reason to play storm keeps is so you can use a frost phoenix and take an artifact on it And that's a very very strong ability Is it strong enough to justify losing scions though? I don't know that's tough. So I think it's overwhelmingly Signs of the storm is better just because the bonuses and storm keeps aren't that good The shield of civilization ability is underwhelming the damage from it is it's like nothing Even if you take staunch defender Still like nothing like a three up to do d3 with a re-roll is who cares Yeah, storm keeps are disappointing. Maybe if don't bring your crusades come out and they get a new book That might swing things in the other direction, but I don't know protecting raptors is so important right now Yeah, for me, I I think both are Viable, but there's a challenge to the storm keep and I actually think it's I would frame it slightly differently and that it's redeemer units are Good like they're really good units like pound for pound if you compared their stat line versus points and what they sort of can Achieve and stuff like that, especially with that bonus against most other books. You'd be like, yeah, this is a good unit Right like undoubtedly these are good units. I mean we're going to talk about them later Well, except vanquishers. I'm just going to put that out there. Sure. Yeah, no, uh, totally fair and agreed Um, when I'm thinking of like your main three sort of redeemers here that is to say, you know, liby sec and vindictors and When I think about those three the the actual challenge to me is just Yeah, sure, you can invest to make them offensive, but they are I agree. There are more animals And the problem is they're not it's all in the mobility Right like in an army that already You have to think a lot about mobility because you you know, once you take away your teleport or you're sorry your ambush your deep strike, right? Then you've got to teleport. Maybe you've got to But that's basically it Right and you there is mobile stuff in this book. Certainly. There's highly mobile stuff in this book But the more you invest into dudes that can just walk five inches Right and that's it and they can only anvil and they're not going to push anybody off a point The harder it gets for them to win. That's one of the challenges, right? Like it's it their problem to me is not that they can't kill. It's that they're not they don't have the speed Right, you don't have the positioning. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right, right Where they need to be like by the time they like I'm not sure I agree paul with the take that you always know in round three I I'll say that like sure 50% of the games and like that But I mean if you're in like a tight tournament game like you're round four and five in a tournament You you may not know by three, right? Those might go to four and five, right? It's not a hundred percent. But yeah The closer games with more even opponents will go longer But the problem is is that by that point it's too late They can't push to get onto the objective to actually get what they need to get Right, if you've got a few of them left five of them left that might not be enough 15 isn't necessarily enough to get it away from your opponent Right, and if your opponent knows that's coming they can see that turn coming and just thin out those units real fast It's not that hard Right, I just want to add But sorry, uh, yeah, I just want to add because we're in gore right now One of the main things that's going on is top of three when that ability kicks in If you take the turn hoping to take the objective by walking onto it Your opponent can say oh you have 10 vindictors or 15 vindictors near that one I'll just remove it And now you have this incredibly slow unit that is stuck on one side of the board near no objective Right, and now you're just wondering what to do. So You know if you could take objectives with that ability round one That would be a phenomenal ability because you could use all our really good teleports are You know trans location and our vexel or you could use those immediately and try to seal objectives And that would be a cool distinct playstyle that stormcast have never had We've never been the aggressively gopher objective army So that would have been a nice thing to have but because the redeemers are so slow It just takes way too long to get up there Um, maybe if you had like a block of 15 vindictors with vandals pushing up the middle give them a bunch of save bonuses And it just starts to get so expensive. It's it's really inefficient And uh, there is some cheeky stuff you can do if you have the call for aid Holy command you can you know bank that until round three or four You can have a relic to trans locate himself on an empty objective Um or close enough to an objective that's contested Use call for aid to bring back one of your liberator units and then hope for a nine inch charge Pretty niche, but Yeah, that's that storm keeps in a nutshell is it's pretty niche and it's really painful that we We're named after such a fairly weak sub faction What are you gonna do sure it's a good name regardless Uh, yeah, so I think both are playable But I think if you're going stormkeep you have to have you got to really think very deeply about your list And by the way, I totally agree on the annihilator point like those are it's just those are nothing outside of a outside of the science So that's an excellent point and and annihilators are Good, uh, okay Uh All right, whoops, okay outstanding questions. Here we go All right, so let's talk about some some fixed items Cycle of the storm was cleaned up. I know it wasn't in the way that you you gentlemen were hoping It was in the way. I always expected. There was no way it was ever going to be anything good Uh, it was always going to be the exact same crap. It was before And it's unfortunate And I mean it should have just been cut is my honest answer and replace it with a real ability Just make them or condoms two cast just do that 100 cut that ability Give them two cast or just like arcadems have a built-in plus one to cast for their one spell I don't care. You can do different things like I don't want to I'm not going to like die on the hill of a solution But there are five different abilities, right? We could sit here right now and say that would be better than ridiculous cycle the storm Which is like I hope whatever special abilities are written I mentally quadrant them Okay, and the x y axis x is complexity and y is value right so Your kind of Perfect ability that you want to write as a game designer is low complexity high value Right, that's the perfect quadrant. That's the golden quadrant when it's like great people will want to use this They will understand how to use this. It's not complicated. They'll get it perfect quadrant, right? your worst quadrant Is high complexity low value and like if that would be the dictionary definition of cycle the storm The fact that needed this ridiculous FAQ to clean it up is proof in the pudding of that It stings that it's worse than it was in second edition because in second edition you could use it to avoid instant kill effects like the The mighty lord of corn and the gash and things like that. You can't even do that anymore No, it's it's just one wound if you're gonna die anyway It's it's the most insulting ability I've ever seen that takes up really sting. Yeah a block of text like this Yeah, it really stings when you think of how much they removed from that war scroll to simplify it And then they kept that one out of everything that they had right right absolutely I know you're a big defender of the mortal wound crystal bomb drop thing Uh mergonc, but which I always hated by the way. I hate all of those things I anytime lumenath have that too all of those amazing should be jettison. They're terrible I hate them. You're wrong. They are so sad to cool So super tactical to forget it until you're like, oh, jeez. Oh, hold on. I've got this thing Can we back up the most common way? I've heard that ability used is hold on. Can we back up? I forgot this. Do you mind? Yes That is the sentence that might as well be like to invoke this ability You must say one phase later. Hold on Can we go back? Yeah, we got to go back to who has the biggest mustache those kinds of rules All right, like because it's just silly, but anyways, I don't mind that they got rid of that. They should have killed cycle Okay Command trait master the celestial menagerie was cleaned up restricted to only behemoths Good change. It was silly that your entire army could be neg one to wound in combat And it only made dracothean guard even better go Can I just say yeah, so I don't like the behemoth thing because And I would say that for I think absolutely think that it needed to change because I think having an entire army of storm drake guard Who are already pretty oppressive as they are? um And you'll find out why I guess in december if they don't change the points was silly I just think this Punishes monsters like the tolerant because they're not behemoths. I think this should have been hero monsters Just hero monsters also would have been a good fix. I would have totally supported that by the way Why isn't the toral on a behemoth? It doesn't have a damage table. I mean I get that there are okay You can have a behemoth. That's all I can take off. Sure But like It's a big model. This just feels silly Um, I'm not whatever whatever I your fix is better. I like that margonc. I really do. I think that's a better fix um, look, I think we Let me ask the question like this Out of all of the Allegiance ability stuff Okay, like you understand what I'm saying. Yeah, everything in that part of the book R command traits The worst part Yes No, the battle tactics are worse. Oh battle tactics. Yes. I don't consider those fair I wasn't thinking of those but because I just hate those like I hate hell and all things montague but Uh, let me I just put aside grand strategies and battle tactics, which shouldn't even be in this book Of the enhancement section. There you go. I'll say it more properly. Are they the worst? Yes I would say so. Yes. I think most of the time whenever paul and I sit down to make a storm cast list We end up using master of magic or high priest. Yeah, I think all the storm cast traits just They're either extremely niche or just downright garbage. Yeah, just not worth using and they have so much potential to like uh Broken realms marathi it had this battalion that made paladins count as redeemers for the purposes of Basically, what's the shield of civilization ability now? Why does the starch defender do that make paladins count as redeemers? Boom all this potential just opened up with that one little thing Yep, but it's like they went out of their way to make really weak abilities because they were worried about it stacking. I guess It's disappointing. It is it truly is. I think that The command trait section I look at it every time and I'm I get sad Here's a question for you guys are there other rules that mention behemots off the top of my head I can't think of an allegiance ability that specifically only activates on behemots or battle line or some leader role like that's all pitch Yeah, the army construction role as opposed to the keyword type. Yeah, it's really weird I can't think of anything else, but I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge just pretty close to it Yeah, I can't I can't do anything. I have a feeling maybe early, you know first edition Maybe we had some of that But that's just yeah, I kind of I mean this feels like a patch this feels like a oh, no We made them too good patch it to only affect the small thing and let's stop the let's stop the panic Maybe they will go back to it. Maybe they'll revisit it But I think it was just like okay people have just a star drink. That's it. You got to take a star drink to be able to use this right Yeah, I mean the advantage I suppose right is that Because it's only fixed in an FAQ you can just change it again, right? It's not like in the printing you can just keep changing FAQs until you get it right And if you don't believe me go look at sylvaneth woods. You can change them like 50 times They could add behemoth to the church conness and the toralon They could change it to hero monster If their goal was to just make it not work on drakes There was a lot of other ways to do that And it definitely felt like this FAQ was rushed out the door Like they're tripping over themselves scrambling to push it through the door to get it out as quick as possible and they did Uh, I don't know. That's how it feels. It could be totally shocking given how much time we had of that Between when stormcasts were released, then you had the book a month and a half later Then you had the FAQ four weeks after that So it's only been two months, you know, yeah Uh, all right So trans location, uh, no move afterward now fine good like okay like, you know, I I get it and I'm fine with it. I understand there are other abilities that you can still that do still allow movement after some form of teleport in the game Um, but I'm fine with this change Uh, mergonck, you want to defend this when you were a big stand for leaving this in here? Yes, now Before you know chat explodes. I want to say it is a really really strong ability. Yes, okay No doubt about it. Like it is unlike anything that's been seen in the game It feels like you're breaking a cardinal rule like make committing a sin Um, I just want to say it's there's three things about the effect. It is the effect itself It is how the effect scales and it is how reliable that effect is And the thing is when we write core rules for a game The entire point is to be able to break them with certain units and that feels cool. That feels unique Yep, and this ability itself. I'm just talking about the effect Was a cool and unique ability that no one has that was very thematic to storm cast a bunch of elite knights making surgical strikes across the board That being said It was extremely reliable. It went very reliably, especially with the high priest trade And it was extremely scalable so you could you don't translocate stronger guard You could translocate 15 protectors four fulminators and do just crazy things across the board And it meant the opponent was never safe with their movement. They were always on A one-drop Sure Yeah, most people don't carefully, you know think that much about their movement every single turn, you know They think of maybe one or two deep striking units that can come in I think there were ways to Sort of keep this in but nerf the things that surround it. So move translocations base value to a five up So the relic only gets it off half the time Second make it so the maximum combined wound characteristic you can ever translocate is 15 wounds So once you start reinforcing things You literally can't translocate them or if it's like a big thing like a star drake storm drake guard Cairn Cronus cares. I whatever whatever you have you can't translocate them And I think that would have been fine Because what removing this does is it removes a lot of lines of play storm cast enough firmly in the we are a castle army We want to be able we are slow. We will move slowly up the board We will shoot you and make you come to us and when you come to us our elite knights with the Glaives or hammers or whatever have you they'll hit you And and it sort of took and it took a book that was already pretty straightforward and made it even more Straightforward I guess I don't want to use the word bland because I think this book is good and it has some flavor to it but I think the effect itself was never that strong I think the reliability and scalability of it was and we could have addressed that but I can totally see why they're removed I mean it's just far easier to do, you know, you don't have to keep all these things in track It doesn't create all that noise. So I understand that sure It's all good points It's a very well stated point that you should think about all three of those things because that is the constellation of what makes something Quote-unquote too good, right as I've said many times, right? Like to go back to the amulet of destiny discussion You look at the amulet of destiny on a mega garden You're like problem you look at the amulet of destiny on a four wound goblin shaman. You're like not a problem right so There there are that you can't read just the words of the ability itself and infer too good or too bad So, yeah, I yeah the point about setting a wound cap Limitation, I really like that margonc That's a nice nuance that you're right would have left some Play on the table for a number of more play on the table for a number of units whereas, yeah You know, you're if you're looking at a night excelsior paladin heavy list right now You're in a very different world if you're not able to translocate five Tributors and then move after and then they can redeploy as well when you move after of course I mean that was one of the counter plays of course with translocation is that all I made the point about one drop because That in some instance took took that away where you're putting, you know Four fulminators or 10 15 protectors in front of your opponent's tire army. Yeah, and they're not having a good time Nobody's having and nobody should be having a good time in that situation Yeah, and my basic argument was that if you scale that down and make it less powerful people have tools Like we've always had screens in this game I mean if you've been playing since second edition You know what secular and evocator gap bombs are you should know how to use screens by now right And being able to do redeploy and unleash hell in addition to screening is makes it so Translocating minimum squads and moving afterwards is not that not that impressive in my opinion Yeah, no, I really like that idea. Yeah Translocate is still like incredibly strong. Oh, yeah No in a vacuum moving a four inch paladin unit after Translocating probably wasn't that broken but when you combine it in an army like stormcast Which has incredibly powerful shooting and anti magic capabilities The combination of all those things ended up being a little too strong The best solution I heard, you know back when I was huffing copium about translocation The best solution I heard was don't allow it to be used on any unit that's reinforced Is it really that broken if two fulminators charge you? Is it that broken if one dragon charges you like probably not it's probably okay. Um, yeah I've moved past it. I played translocation the way it is now for years And I had great success with it. It's it's unfortunate that The rest of the stormcast army is so slow without it like night around or does nothing now, which is a big bummer Gav's gone too. Yeah, real. Uh, yeah Yeah, it felt like it felt like they made this translocation change In in accordance to all the other changes they made to our mobility, which was already not good. So without it We're gonna shoot you. I hope you have fun playing against shooting because that's all stormcast do now Sure, it's it's gonna be a core backbone of a lot of the army right to compensate for the mobility challenge Oh, you guys are gonna get so sick of raptors every list is gonna happen Or raptors or crossbows both are very good. Yeah, I don't even know if it'll just be limited to those But yes, uh, there'll be a lot like you're gonna see those plenty. That's for sure. No disagreement on that I'm just not sure it'll end there. It would be my only statement Um, okay outstanding issues. So I know you gentlemen had had some raise some stuff that's still outstanding So mergoncker paul take this as you will but a couple items that you thought are still outstanding Oh, and then the address of timing cleanup that was going but any outstanding issues You all think that are still you'd like to see addressed in maybe uh, the winter f aq Sure, how much time you guys got We can go real deep on these rules lawyer issues. Um So one of them is that when I was talking about the cycle the storm thing I always said that it wasn't necessarily an issue with cycle the storm There is just a a hole in the core rules where the core rules don't understand how to handle overkill damage It's just a matter of definition. The rules need to be cleaned up Um, just like a minor like everybody knows how the game should work, right? But just clean up the rules. You shouldn't have broken rules. It's it's like a clerical thing they need to fix um, then specifically the storm cast there's We've got a laundry list one of them is a bastion's ability to use a command anywhere Versus the holy command saying they can only be used in a certain way. Which one wins their contradictory effects I don't know it's hard to say so an official f aq on that would be good Uh, the toralon has an ability that activates after it finishes a normal move And nobody knows for sure if it is supposed to be a buff that lasts on the units And then they can move away and do their own thing or if it activates an aura around the toralon That gives plus one hit to everything around it. Nobody knows the the wording is totally ambiguous Uh, there's pros and cons to each one if you if it's an aura around the toralon You can set up some really janky stuff with science of the storm But if it's an aura if it's an effect that goes on units and they keep it You can buff an entire army with plus one hit and then have it move out for a turn and everything has all I'm tack Which by the way is how I'm reading it like to me that's how I read it to you Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of abilities in the game that are consistent with that Usually they'll say while they remain within range or something like that toralon doesn't say that So that's my justification. I usually talk to my opponents before the game just to make sure they're okay with that So I have a similar problem with astrea because I have the similar problem astrea She has a spell that's worded like that where it says units within range get a minus one to hit And I'm thinking is this a pulse or is this I can cast this move astrea up and suddenly everything within six is in Minus one to hit. Yeah, despite how much I talk about rules I don't like arguing about rules with people face to face. I hate it. It's like the worst thing in the world I just want to play the game I hope I want to make sure we're both on the same page like it's like back in the days of open play How you have to have a discussion with your opponent to figure out how you're going to play the game I just want to play the game I don't want to have like a one-hour conversation about the game we're about to play that Probably will only last about an hour So what else is there the lord imperitent has some weird rules lawyering stuff going on I'm pretty sure the way everybody plays it is that you're allowed to put the lord imperitent down Through scions and then use his ability to put another unit down seven inches away with scions It's a really weird rules lawyer thing, but it is technically there. They should clean it up Just a clarification of the good Like the achiller it's pretty relevant But the vanguard raptors and the lord achiller are both missing the vanguard keyword So as it stands the achiller cannot use the free command on himself or a vanguard raptor unit Which is weird Very weird, especially because they just gave him grift charger. You think they'd also give him vanguard at the same time What else call for aid references a unit of five models It probably should reference a unit that is not reinforced because referencing a unit of five models is not Technically possible when the unit dies it has one model left. Yeah, right the left. Sure So that should be cleaned up the drake scale armor like we talked about just put out an official thing So people stop arguing about it. Yeah, how the drake scale armor interacts with D three or d six or d random damage, right? Exactly. Yeah No, the tempest lords have an ability to reroll one dice when charging And the core rules define a dice roll of 2d6 as a single roll of two dice So if you reroll one dice using the tempest roll tempest lord's ability Can you reroll a whole charge roll afterwards using a command point? Little weird things like that got to be cleaned up Um, I'm pretty sure the answer is no to that one But pretty sure but some people have argued it. So I'd rather just see it in a document So I don't have to argue about it ever again. Yeah And then there's what I like to call the uh gorgon to change where I was pretty sure they North evocators on purpose like they took away the two inch reach because evocators are basically carrying our book They're one of the units that were carrying our book for like three years But after seeing the gorgon to minus two ren Change i'm not so sure anymore Did they just did you just forget about them does our grand staves the grand staves? Oh, yeah Yes, the grand staves. I think our stuff there. I like they should be too I mean if you're gonna give gorgon to minus two ren might as well go back to that right? Yeah, drake's foreign temple are three up save same thing used to have a three up all the time now It's a four up Is that intentional? Is it a mistake? Who knows? Um, I wasn't even contesting it until they changed gorgon to this like when we're gank was saying It's really odd Um Yeah prosecutor primes can't gets extra tax with their special weapons Which has been the way that the game has worked for the last five years And now people are ripping the arms off their models in order to swap out the weapons Don't like that. Yeah, I noticed you guys called that one out I I did I did go back and check some of the other units and they do still have quite a few Instances the majority of instances where it's the old way, you know, like secular prime you can still do Whatever grand hammer on the prime and he gets three attacks instead of two, but yeah, you're right They did do that for prosecutors. I mean clearly It'd be too strong Yeah, it's broken man. It's just those prosecutors are gonna run away with the game I mean, this feels like a thing that just needs to be I I I hope you guys are gonna submit a full write-up into the uh Into the FAQ email I already did I love it. I love it because I agree with you most of this stuff. It's not like things that are going to end friendships or stop games It's just annoying, right? It's just verbiage cleanup that needs to happen. That's what that's what a lot of this is Right, we can all intuit kind of what we think the right answer is in most of these places because it's fairly clear But that's okay Why not then just clean it up so we don't even have to have the discussion, right? It just makes their life easier. So if this were 40k and not aos To's would be non-stop complaining about this stuff and it would get changed in a heartbeat, but a just sigma seems to have a More laissez-faire attitude towards the rules people know how it works. Don't worry about it It doesn't have to be cleaned up in the rules. The players know better. It's a it's a strange mentality Yeah All right, good stuff So hopefully we'll see that in the winter FAQ that'll also bring the dragons up to 325. Uh, all right, so Let's get into some deep dive here on the units gentlemen Stand out units. I'm starting with the heroes Here's my list of heroes that can go in nearly every list What I mean by that is just like all of these are valid. They have uses It doesn't mean that you're always gonna doesn't mean you always put what I have here Obviously, you don't put nine or ten heroes in every list Okay Lucky to get past four these days. Yes The point was more that just like I could see you having a good argument for all of these guys having a place in a list Fair Right, like they can all carry some kind of weight. So this is my list Relic sir like the lord relic sir. Obviously, uh, everybody's favorite general these days Probably the least controversial item on here, but I am open to push back on all of these by the way a discussion I mean This dude's ridiculous right now. He is the go-to general or at least showing up Give him high priest and a mirror shield and he becomes pretty invulnerable to most anything because he's pretty easy to screen And so nobody can touch him outside of very long-reaching magic Uh, like you got to watch out for kairos, obviously, but other than that, it's he's pretty safe Uh, the lord castellant on demand plus one to save is always good night vexelor Love this dude. I like him with the meteoric standard. This guy's aces. I'm all about him Uh, yandrasta in the celestine prime Good mobility solid utility nitro conus Good rend Good power piece Good with uh with the regular knights extremely mobile Crandis the big boy dragon powerful caster. We mentioned having casters with bonuses Crandis shows up with plus three to cast right, which is not nothing. That's for sure Uh, gardus Powerful ward save in a bubble obviously hallowed knights only Um, so you like you'd be he can show up in any list But you'd only do it when you're running hallowed knights because otherwise nobody's really getting that bonus And then lord arcane i'm on torlon slash eventus, you know on demand plus one to hit on a pretty tough caster frame So that's my list First all any of those you disagree with or don't think should make it on the like i'm calling this the a list or whatever as it were I would not take the first night. I would not take the night vexelor on this list personally I knew you were gonna hate on the vaccine You need like five of him for him to be on this list because then you can deal guaranteed five d three mortal wounds and ruin someone's day Probably not gonna go more than Two three at a gte, but hey, that's a that's a fun list to play I'll take the second one. Okay, uh, and this is because we've just We've been doing to your list of videos I'll take indrasta and the reason I think that is because when I first saw her, you know, I was amazed I was like, oh, she's great And maybe because I was just so thirsty for stormcast units after three years that I was just like, oh, we got a new prime I think her issue is she is a bit all over the place She doesn't know what her there's no identity to her. She doesn't know what she wants to be doing on the battle Yeah, the substance prime is easy. It's like he's a big hammer He just comes down and he ruins your opponent's day if they don't deal with him Right indrasta is a hero where you're spending 320 points All her abilities that were all over on the celestial prime that acted as support abilities for your stormcast units are now on her in a way She has to survive. So you want to keep her alive. You want to keep her kicking for those five rounds But she's a 320 point beat stick. She has a good shooting attack. She has a good melee attack She has a ward save so and she moves fast But she never really gets to do those things because if you over commit her you will most likely lose her sure So how so how do you best utilize those 320 points without feeling like you're wasting them or not? Utilizing them fully and I think that's her main issue. I think that brings her down It's fair. I get that because it's most like I've I've played with her a lot and I like her But I'll say that like I always so the ability I cut is I just don't read the the return or redeemer every unit around The return a model. Well, no, yeah return a month. Yeah, and the thing is it doesn't return Like yeah, I think that's the best deal Yeah, I think that's her. Yeah, it is but the problem is she she's fast So fast that she wants to be keeping up with dracox and the other mobile things in your army But she's meant to support things that aren't that mobile It's it's weird and this is what i'm saying My the way I found to use her where I've gotten the best use out of her is by I don't disagree That's her best ability. She can pop annihilators back in you and stuff like that's awesome, right? It's great. It's great ability Don't care Like if it happens I to me it's it's sprinkles on the ice cream. I didn't show up here for that, right like So if she happens to be near there great fantastic I'm getting this cool ability to restore units, right? But I don't have her player like that to me her use is she's everywhere. I want her to be Right and that she is so fast. She is relatively tough. She can pin really really well Um and hold right and she can generally attrition her way through You know decent units now, obviously not hardcore anvils, but decent units. She can she can threaten, right? she's also always threatening little heroes and To return to the night vexel or by the by uh, I love this guy. Okay. I I stand this guy so hard Let me tell you why this is 120 points okay And the vexel or for me I have a 12 inch Ruler out of work right, you know you bought the work right box to get that little 12 inch ruler, you know what I'm saying Yes, like clear Yes, and I just I flip that in my fingers Okay, like I'm two-faced with a coin And then when it comes time to my hero phase I just take that and I grab it by the sixth inch line And I take it and I put it down over their army and I just spin it around And I'm like all of this all of this is getting mortal wounds and it just feels great It feels great Right, and it'll often be then like I spread it out and then depending on where Whoever happens to catch the wounds if I can catch a hero out with three wounds then they're catching you and draw a spear Right like that sort of working in combination or they're catching a spit from a fulminator or whatever You know, they're catching the fulminator spit or something like that, right? You're doing a one-two punch basically Yeah, we're because it's often something I don't want to put Like again, I In a world where you've got six raptors and there's a five wound utility hero you need to kill Which by the way, there's lots of five wound utility heroes you need to kill in this game, right? You like yeah, you could use your six raptors. That's generally going to be overkill You could try to split your shots, but then you always run the risk, right? That you don't actually you go into two things and don't do any of the damage you need or this frees it up to say Raptors handle the thing you need to be handling and then I've got this other play to handle the utility hero right now In addition for the night vexelor, let me just say That dude throws his bombs and then I just teleport him anywhere He is the bravest guy in my army. Okay, I'll throw that bad boy Anywhere, but he tries to be somewhere on cover. I had him in a fight This weekend he was surrounded by zombies and belladama vulga the the The vampire mistress there. He was sitting on terrain And he just sat there and tanked them For like three rounds never died game ended. He was still alive right just sat there untouchable Because he's still a ridiculous hero on a three up save that if he stands on cover in all out defenses Can go to a two up very easily and has a relatively high bravery and could just sit there and heal himself every round Right and that's what he did He would just like get a couple of couple wounds to go through He'd heal himself And he would just he just sat there and held on a bunch of stuff until the opponent realized it was a trap and left Just left just walked away And my guy was just like well, I win this fight I am still here now. Did he do much? No No But I love that he's that he is as tough as he is and as That once I pop off his thing I can just throw him anywhere and he's just a little threat All stormcast heroes are at least a little bit of a threat now since they got their damage upgraded to Right if they get in a fight with a similar five wound hero Like if they just go in somewhere and get in a similar five wound hero like I'll throw him It's hard to screen him out off of a translocate I'll translocate that dude all over the place because people can often screen but he's 140 mil base It's easy to just translocate it but he comes with his own built-in re-roll charge Because of his banner And I'll just take a roll at it like let's go. I'm gonna duel your guy And it's risky. Yes. He's only four because he's four attacks three three snag one two damage There's a lot of little five wound heroes that he'll just mess up, especially if he just bombed him earlier in the round So I don't disagree. I don't disagree that this guy. Yeah I'm sure my thing is always you could pay five points more and get a knight in kantoor who comes in the spell scroll And he's a wizard. It's just a matter of opportunity cost I didn't think about what I'm cutting to take him and I can't think of ever cutting the encounter over here or something Yeah, we need we need the encounter on this list. Yeah, I'll tell you that's I get it I get it. I have it. I have a sort of unyielding belief that magic is garbage Uh, yeah, me too. That's why I bring the spell scrolls So I just like If against armies that rely on magic Having the scroll to shut down the turn one portal into x because that's what they're going to be doing is good I do not disagree with that at all. Okay The rest of the time From that point on that hero does nothing Whereas with the vexelor, I'm like, I'm gonna get you like I'm gonna get mileage out of this guy I don't need to protect him. I can be crazy with him Like I don't disagree with you that shutting down the the the portal into hand of dust or portal into kairos's gift of change Or you know, all that crap is good. It is. It's super good right, it is But The problem is a regular stupid caster that's like, okay I I guess this think and mystic shield every round. Hopefully Because that's what you're doing. That's their spell every round from then on, right? That or celestial blades. Yeah, sure Like I so yeah, sure. Maybe maybe you'll cast that two out of the five rounds I guess, you know on numbers between when you're successful against the number and when they don't unbind you Uh, even with an average army to me I'm getting I'm getting every round of quality out of that vexelor and I'm getting Let's call it two rounds out of the incantor. That's my trick That's that's my argument But they're enough but I do agree the incantor should be on this list You're right because that dispel scroll is super good. Like it is. Um, it just is She's been the bubble the number one bubble piece for me So relic tour castellants are always in consideration relic tour is usually always in the list lord lord impuritan is another one He's not necessarily in every list because he has a signs of the storm, particularly with annihilators oriented You know build but but he's one that's probably an enough list that he belongs on this list, too I think you made a pretty interesting case for the vexelor events. I liked your point about the ability to tap multiple pieces To get them down an average of two mortal wounds, particularly five wound heroes and then finish them off with raptors more reliability in terms of splitting shots As opposed to maybe you don't do what you need to do if you haven't pinged off a wound two or three Yeah, I think that's a pretty good point Uh, lord salsna and star drake is another one that stood out to me. I'm really curious to hear your guys opinions on that piece So again, he's probably and he's not every list clearly, but I don't know if you have him later on been somewhere Uh, I'm he is sir not appearing in this list I do agree on the lord imperitent Because the ability to go to a seven inch drop and by the way the one free command point a turn like let's not underrate that Uh, I get used out of that all the time even if it's just to make himself run six Right, like it just often ends up being a thing There's almost always something to use a command point on and having 10 free command points in a game Hey, turns out pretty good Like I I know I'm breaking new ground here that 10 free command points is is a good ability, right But between that and the seven inch charge like yeah, I mean it's solid annihilators on sevens are a completely different game It's a completely different game And parented is is straight up necessary to play annihilators Like there's no other Viable way to play them and there's such a strong unit that they just go together They're both strong. They they fit in the same list. Yep Now I think uh, the only other thing I'm curious as to your takes the cellist in on star drake Yeah, uh, I'll take this if you don't mind working. Go ahead. Go ahead. Absolutely Celestin on star drake was much better when he also gave all the star The all the storm drakes in the army minus one to wound and and without that You're looking at a really expensive single anvil Well, you have to dedicate a lot of resources to you have to give them You know light of the young stars for minus one hit you have to give them a castellan You have to give them celestial blades to make them do any meaningful damage You got to pump all these buffs into him and then you can still just just die to bad dice rolls Because you got to give him the amulet too, right? So he can't reroll saves Yeah, anyone or mirror shields Mirror shield i'm not a big fan of on him because he's he's such an aggressive anvil that you will be within nine inches Mirror shield isn't immunity of shooting. It's you just can't be targeted unless you're within nine So people will just walk up to 8.9 inches and shoot you right in the face Because you want to be that aggressive with him You want to be up in the enemy's face taking as much damage as possible so that your your other units that can't take damage Are are able to get in relatively unscathed So I had star drake listed very highly in our initial review and that was pretty much consistent Even though he's not this huge damage monster that everybody wanted him to be because you see a big dragon You're like, oh, I can't wait to see how much damage that thing does and And you look at the war scroll and it's a little disappointing but uh right before They changed celestial, uh menagerie. I still had him rated very highly, but that change makes him just a lot harder to fit in lists Yeah, yeah, my honest answer is I think at this point I'd pay the extra hundred and just take corondas I'd take carousel One of the big dragons Let me say that way sure because there's like I think both are defensible But I would just take one of the big dragons for the extra hundred Yeah, if you're gonna dump that many points in support You might as well get a better hero out of it and 100 points for carousel If your baseline is a star drake for 500 and then 100 points more and you upgrade it to carousel That's a good. That's a good use of points And you know carousel and corondas don't require all that other nonsense. You just said Right, like don't require it, but it sure is fun. Sure Um, like the they are more independent actors in what they can accomplish as far as removing pieces and so on and so forth Which is nice Carousel is the one I was a little surprised like my feeling on the early commentary in the community was pretty down on carousel And I thought he stood out to me as a potentially undervalued gem We did that too We thought corondas was better and it turns out carousel is actually much better because he has two gallmeras is equipped in each hand Exactly. Yeah, and he's so that makes You know, so that makes it I think corondas is a little is a little overcasted. I think And this this is just my speculation I think their costs had that minus one to wound trade Bit thing baked into it the first version of celestial menagerie And I think without it now that you have to take a 500 point tax in the form of a star drake I think it didn't afford to come down I think the point's gonna afford to come down a little because they are unique units So you're talking about no wards no artifacts no command traits, right? So they're 18 wound models on a three upset which in the current damage scale of age of sigmar is not a hard target to kill I Sure No, I know obviously if you invest a lot into you know, if you run up against the right army Who who can you know poop mortal wounds all over you? Yes, they die Yeah, like that Against a lot of armies that don't have that capability there. They might as well be Immortus the forever dragon, right? Because I mean just like They they are very safe stackable as these big giant three up heroes, right? So I don't want to get down on too bad Yeah, but it's like basically the same as a star drake. You have to invest in them to make them good in a way in some ways Well, uh, yeah, good points fall on the star drake. So we can't obviously spend a lot of time on the slide But we can't move on with that at least mentioning prime time I've been he's my boy my favorite model in the game. It was my favorite war scroll He was always the piece like, you know, it was like a johnny type issue tape in 2019 2018 You'd make him work most people thought he was crap and loved him got a lot of good use of that in tournaments I've been trying him guys and it's just not been working Like yeah, I've called your point, you know On the one hand there's arguments some of these games are going longer rounds four and five in some ways I think do matter more more often than 2.0 But at the same time you do still have a lot of games that are going to be over round three And ideally he's coming in round three and the game's already decided at that point I think he has some interesting synergy with the round three mechanic in terms of he's a auto charge It's a little unfortunate now that we have to do that in advance. You can't actually try to roll the charge See if you hit it and then save the celestial ory a benefit but The mechanic where you can see where you know what objective is going to get burned and then he comes into play Accordingly that's interesting on paper But I haven't really found enough games where I can hold them off to round three Like I'm in situations where I've got to bring a man to that might be also because I've been playing list Again, are not I'm letting off the gas a little bit into my mother pieces Maybe I need to Push the pedal down a little bit more in my solicit prime list because he appears to be letting off the gas You know quite a bit. What are you guys overall? I don't know if you've tested him What are your overall impressions of him so far? Yeah What's a love him Let's let's talk about this lesson prime because I like talking about him He's he's my favorite storm cast model still to this day. Love is great. Uh, so New thing in third edition if he's in reserve at the top of round four, he's dead So you have to deploy him ideally round three or he's dead Round two you can bring him in and he gets some bonus attacks Um, yeah, if you want to play solicit prime Yeah, there's the argument is that the book overrides the war scroll Well, the war scroll doesn't say he's allowed to stay past his normal limit the rules just kill any model That's not deployed solicit prime can stay in reserve and get bonus attacks But then he just dies So his rule doesn't isn't in conflict. It's it's one of the outstanding issues Hopefully they resolve it because it it felt so good like from a narrative perspective to have solicit prime Just waiting for that right moment to come in at the last second and save the day And he just doesn't do that anymore. So he's he's uh You're playing one or two rounds down 300 points and then he comes in and hopefully he's worth it at that point So you need a list with him that's going to play very defensively and hold out long enough for him So you have to play I would say a castle type formation if you're doing a really aggressive list Don't put solicit prime in there at all. Despite having gal maras. It hits like a wet noodle unless the house belongs to tax Yeah, my friends so-called friends have been calling him the stale orio cookie, which is very painful because of that wet noodle Uh, that's been happening way too often. I mean for god's sakes. Gal maras minister rend is not what it used to be in this game It's it's happened too much where I need him to come in and help like finish off You know one of those safe stacking three up heroes like just in the particular situation I need to come in he's that piece of my list, you know to tether with some long strikes or whatever and he can't get the job done And yeah, it's very frustrating. Yeah, it's really disappointing So there's there are still a few ways to use less than prime I don't think he's so strong that I would put him on the standout unit list personally But he's not bad by any means you can build a list around him in fact when murgank and I were talking about which list to send you guys for Upcoming parts of the show. I was torn between submitting a carouselist or a celestine prime list and I ended up going with Well, not the celestine prime list. So you guys can figure it out from there But no, it's the list I built takes advantage of the celestial vindicators and their ability to get a free Bless weapons, which doesn't require being on the table in order to get from a relic tur So if you can charge with the with the celestine prime you can guarantee a hit roll of six Which automatically procs an extra attack, which is a really good attack It's a rend three three damage attack and in addition to the auto hit So you can use that combination and then I piece together a few other things that would benefit a more defensive style So a good shooting course some screens and some storm drakes in order to round it out Give it some speed and durability So you can definitely still play celestine prime, especially because he can get storm hosts So if you uh, if you want to combo him in any storm host He can you can get tempest lords to re-roll a charge and then you can save his ability to get a guaranteed hit There's little things here and there. You just you have to play him defensively He's not a good offensive piece not in terms of like what he actually does He's very aggressive He he charges in and messes stuff up and drops meteors every turn But your overall approach to the battle has to be defensive You can't be going guns blazing around one with celestine prime in your list. Yeah, right. Yep All right Let's talk standout units non-heroes Right so units that are units that are a great place to start is how I have this phrase, right? So here's my list of stuff that I think generally meets the the bar of being a Component and I think we've talked about how this army is modular So you can shove these pieces together in lots of different ways Okay, here's my standouts. By the way, I've saw some people lamenting stuff that's on here. Don't worry There is a there's another slide after this of like the secret tech The things that I think may have some options in the right list made to express them And that's one of the benefits of this book as you mentioned at the top There's sort of this top tier that's like, oh, we can kind of shove these anywhere and they'll be good But there's also another tier that like if you build the right list This can be a powerful component of it, right? You I think you mentioned Paul that like there's these c and b units that in the right list They can express themselves in a good way, right? They can become Go greater than the sum of their parts as it were, right? Mm-hmm. All right. So my list is so liberators Secuitors vindictors, you know each has their own strength But if you're playing a stormkeep if that's what you want to do Like they can have powerful powerful objective control and sort of regenerative capabilities like if you have Pieces like indrasta or the new night of xlore or whatever just ways to bring them back or Call for aid and you know things like that, right? Uh Dracotheon guard like fulminators are a standout, but I mean That shouldn't say paint train. It should say pain train. I'm very angry at myself for that But I but it can be both those things are such a pain to paint. You aren't wrong Uh, all of mine are converted um Vandas hammer hands because I have like a dozen vandas hammer hands and none of the actual models So all my guys are even more complicated and annoying um Vanguard raptors we've talked about raptors Either build can't have value I'll say either weapon But in the end you're going to take the long strikes because of the 30 inch range and the rend in the current world now I saw you shake your head Paul I did But I want to say we're a meta shift away from the other guys being suddenly real hot I gotta disagree their their points. We'll talk about it. Yeah, we'll get into it There'll be time for argument. I I I know where you're coming from. We'll talk it through. Okay Annihilators I like both flavors honestly of annihilator. I think both have a use I think the grand hammer guys are obviously incredible in what they can do because they can just destroy things But I don't mind 40 point savings and a really really strong pinning unit that just running around on a two up Two up is a very rare save. It's quite an ability to just drop something in and hold something in place Storm drake guard dragons are good. Okay next And prosecutors with javelins survivable chap with a surprising board presence because they're they're wing to wing touch And their ability to spread out And plus they can absorb an unleash pretty jointly while still potentially surviving With with dudes that are now still stuck in combat with that shooting unit Actually holding it Which I find interesting Just that reliability of signs at the storm keep them off the board. They come in play some more. You need 3d6 charge Right hit that nine and soak up that unleash hell. Yeah, I've done that in some test games I mean, it's it's great. You know, it's just pretty reliable piece. Well and a lot of shooting units actually Won't kill them with their unleash on numbers Um sort of depends on what you're charging them into obviously, right? But because of the base three up save And so if you have even like one dude left and it rolls into their turn and in their turn They have to shoot that one prosecutor. That's incredible value. You just got right Even if you then failed the other charge or you couldn't get into them or whatever, right? Like there's op they they have sort of double options either Absorbing the unleash for a potential second charge or just stopping that unit from shooting something So Yeah, I had a night where I was thinking about like six prosecutors with javelins Like could that make that work? Would that be sufficient value in a list six of them in unit? But anyway, it's probably you probably just still do I'd love them a lot more and in this role By the way, if they were like 105 points or 100 points, which is probably where they should be They're a little expensive for what their capabilities are right now 115 is expensive chaff in the world, but that's fine uh, all right, so Is there any talk to me about this list? Murdonk And anything that I didn't put on this list that you would want to see in the standout unit category the non-hero space Hmm Russ cross book indicators that sure Russ belt blacksmith in the chat is arguing for Vigilors and I I I think vigilors are interesting, but I don't think they make this level But we I don't think so either. I think I think judicators with crossbows make this list Okay, I think walk us through the under I think they're definitely one of the more underrated units in our realm and For more details, I don't want to get into too much into the weeds, but we have the math on our channel But we did the math and their damage is actually pretty absurd for what they can do on average to a three-up save especially when you consider things like translocation and then thunderbolt molly and then yep Being able to do that like it's not just like a screen and moving unit Which is weird because you would expect the vanguard raptors of the hurricane crossbows to be better at them At that job, but no actually it's the opposite. It's vanguard raptors with hurricane Don't ever build those right now because they're really bad for their points But judicators with crossbows solid unit really solid unit We missed that I think in our first pass We did rank them beats here. So it's not like we slept on them. We just didn't realize they did We didn't realize they did 30 more damage than long strikes Which is nuts long strikes are insane and these guys do 30 more which is It's pretty good. Yeah Yeah, obviously at a certain save profile. Yeah, they're not going to do much against to up save but although Yeah, I mean, you don't you don't want to sleep on the on the minus two rent But yeah, like those yeah, you get 15 of them that minus two rent Those minus two rent tax can certainly add up and really contribute to top it off. Yeah, that's a good one Judicators I've been struggling with them. I know they're on the next slide lit Yeah, but maybe we can just wait to talk about them. So Paul the gunny That you think belong on this list I think both judicators are definitely worth a mention too. They're they're an alternative to long strike raptors Instead of having 12 wounds, you get 30 wounds instead of having six models You get 15 if you value a little bit less range The damage is almost the same like we did the math long strikes and judicators with bows do almost Exactly the same amount of damage. It's shockingly close like within 5% Yeah And if you you could even you know fish for a triumph if you go like 30 40 points under A lot of people are trying to get as close to 2k with those lists as possible So if you go 40 points under you can almost guarantee a triumph And bow judicators then scale past long strikes and how good they are So if you want to look at it as paying 40 points Most cases maybe 20 points because you're not going to get to 2k just to get an additional plus one to wound once per game Yeah, bow judicators are good I don't want anybody to sleep on them just because we're so hyped about long strikes and crossbows Bow judicators are a perfectly valid option The only problem with them Is you have to bring them in a squad of 15 to get the most out of thunderbolt bolly and that's 600 points in the list It's just it's hard to do that Yep And the range means you need to drop them somewhere where they're going to be valuable, right? Because your bow judicators aren't kicking 30 inches, which is sometimes matter Yeah, that extra six inches is why I prefer long strikes. There's some matchups where it's crucial Right, like you're playing against luminous sentinels. You have to have long strikes judicators with bows Don't cut it. Right. I think the other argument is 15 judicators have a really large footprint So when you consider two ranks or three ranks of those dudes, you end up being actually like more like 21 or 22 inches away not 24 Yeah Yeah, it's that. Yeah, I mean you're absolutely right. It's it's 15 40 mil bases, right? I mean, that's what we're talking about here. It's it's not nothing compared to six Right, it's pretty simple math the difference in footprint there. It's it's a good point They're a lot more durable though and you can't totally stop people from shooting your raptors Like you can get the drop on one or two shooting units, but if they have an all shooting list like if they're playing Uh, if you're playing a shoot cast list if you're playing against three foxes and 30 sentinels like the raptors will get shot Unless you use some secret spicy tech that we're going to talk about in this video with the palisade You guys got those images, right? Uh, I did I didn't put the images in here, but that's okay. We can explain Sure Yeah, so so judicators just having more wounds is a big benefit to them They're less likely to just take any kind of significant damage from I don't know a shark driving by and shooting its net at you and it just kills 80 to 160 points of raptors It would just tickle some judicators. So there's definitely a lot of value in that if you're playing against a lot of other shooting Long strikes have the range to deal with it, but judicators have the bodies and the wounds to deal with it. Yeah Yep Yeah, I've been struggling with it I mean a lot of the lists I've been playing my stormcast testing have been taking advantage of three plus monsters and the safe stacking You know the usual in the game right now and They're just not doing the work that I need those points and investing in the list to do from a range projection standpoint Whereas long strikes would you know because it just feels like so often against three plus save hero monsters Or units baron guard, etc. I'm just looking for mortals. I'm just trying to roll sixes, which against margonc I'm really good at with snakebots, but against everybody else not so good train vitality Yeah train vitality exactly But yeah, so that I was that was the piece I was struggling with with judicators Stormcast are are certainly an army that's focused on their units more than their heroes Our heroes are pretty much universally support. There is ways to make them Okay in combat, but they're they're mostly support pieces and our and our hammer units and our anbils are definitely all our units And that makes sense. We have so many different units if all the heroes were doing all the work You can just have a dead book I'd rather have dead heroes than dead units in a book sure And and as we said at the top most of the dead scrolls not all Not all but most of the dead scroll percentage if you were to just look at it It would be like it would be heroes would be filling a lot of that pie chart heroes and underworld war bands. Yeah, yeah Okay, let's talk about some secret tech units that can be great in some lists So here's my list. I'm interested in your thoughts Vanguard paladors Super mobile unit with decent damage on-demand teleport protectors slash the old school paladins, but you know, whatever slower moving but incredibly tough anvils that Can really do work in the grind So I mentioned like attrition is a potential strategy at the top and they can be a big part of an attrition strategy Castigators surprising shooting damage from a small unit with good rend That actually scales pretty well like when you look at cheap like cost Efficiency Judicators, I have here mortal wounds at range. What's not to love? But as you pointed out absolutely both both builds of judicators. I do stand for that storm strike chariot I actually have been super happy with the chariot So far and I've played it maybe three or four times been happy with it I'm gonna pull back our old buddy the knight of zeros I know everybody's still hurt about what the knight of zeros was But it is on demand plus one to hit on a pretty tough mobile cheap frame Bastion carthalos if you're in hammers of sigmar like that guy does have just a host of ridiculous abilities And the lord arcanum on grift charger cheap mobile caster with great utility and a good healing spell Can often be something that can keep up with Say like your fulminators or your you know, whatever your drake off and actually heal them, which is not terrible They don't they don't go down super fast that unit. And so actually healing on them can can be pretty potent So this is my list And I'm you know the the basic argument here is that there are lists that can make all of these work So thoughts Uh, we're gone. Let's start over here on you again. What do you think? Is there anything I didn't put on here? I mean this there's a lot of stuff. I'll I'll pick vanguard paladors. I think I don't doubt their Utility, I think it's a very unique thing that they do the fact that they can teleport out of combat and do that And be anywhere on the board is really decent My problem is we're in a meta where we're trying to kill gargants We're trying to pass dps checks sure And they don't do that and I think the problem is their points I think I do believe they are 215 for a unit of three and for five points more I can get myself 10 pastors and concussors sure and hammers a sigmar So at 185 195 Sure, but at 215 when I really start needing damage units because they're not like it's in a weird place They're not strictly anvil units. They're sort of like mobile light hammers. Let's call them more smaller. I'm okay with that I like that definition. Yeah, right, but Ultimately, we want to be as efficient as possible because we're already such an elite army And when I can spend five points more for concussors that have drake breath that have minus two ran that have, you know, two damage or You know, like a crossbow attack like I can't see myself ever picking That that's my main issue with Right, uh, so I was trying out a vanguard list three by five vanguard hunters six long strikes six paladors prime Relic tour somebody else maybe a castellan dorn and cantor, you know, like that's my it's my favorite chamber I was like, let's try this out. Let's throw something up I was doing a deep I was going off against a dps check soul blight Great vanguard list with a ton of zombies and blood knights and manfred and it's like I'm staring at a board rather than long strikes I don't have a way to do meaningful damage Exactly. Yeah, I where am I going to put my paladors that they're going to get me decent probability of decent value return and it's There was not much on the board that I was looking at so they didn't yeah I think that's a great point overall just in terms of yeah We'll get into more with list building and the list you guys put together But yeah, like what kind of list we need to be looking at with storm cast Where are we how we winning games and then the flip side? How are you beating storm cast? But yeah Yeah, just to defend him for a moment. I completely agree with everything you said we're gone Like as as far as the dps check world My argument is when I look at three of them I can see lists where You have like it's take your standard mixed arms list and I drop something to get three of these guys in Because of the because they are a As you said, they're a mobile light hammer You got a little bit of range damage a little bit of melee damage, but that teleports gold, right? They're very existence to just be around the outside They're not going to be the potent threat, right? Like yes, people could target them and probably remove them But that's let's face it. That's not where your opponent's power projection is going. Let's be honest, right? That's not priority but because they got to deal with your other things that are coming up the board to actually put the pain on and They're the fact that they can just teleport when you have a unit that can always teleport And always just be wherever it needs to be It by its existence it forces your opponent to play differently Right like they have to keep all of their objectives So much more under their Vision control and on some like multiples of these six objective missions are pretty popular in tournaments right the sort of three on each side kind of missions And it just means that they have to suddenly pay a lot more attention to their home objectives and be a lot more careful about how they venture away from them and I really value that because when I like One of the things I value in a good list is when it forces my opponent to make choices They wouldn't otherwise want to make Right and making them play differently with their pieces simply by my thing existing like I did nothing Right. I've done zero actions. I literally put them on the board I put some value into that. So although I agree. They're not going to pass the dps check totally on board with that Right and like giants giants cool beans. That's why you take fulminators and long strikes and whatever, you know, okay great but to me The idea of three of them I think can have some value as like a spicy unit, you know, they're not they're they're not a full meal They're they're a nice side Right, that's a difference between five vanguard hunters doing a similar of the role at 125 versus whatever paladors are which is certainly more than 25 I think it's mainly a points issue in my opinion. I don't think they're useless I just I just think 215 is a little too high considering concussors are just five points more that's fair by the way that my issue with the Vanguard hunters like the foot dudes is that I also like having a lot of mobility on the base dude Because sometimes you don't need to teleport sometimes you just need to walk and they can't walk as fast Also, their teleport is not as good and pinned to a single model And there are things in this game that remove single models So somebody picks off your astral compass guide how you have a slow walking unit that does nothing Vanguard hunters also can't retreat with their teleport, which is a huge deal. Uh, no Yes, yeah That's again the paladors people do catch them if they live just leave Right, they just they just walk away or float away as it were for for me the issue with paladors isn't necessarily their points I think they could be that point value like they feel like a 200 point unit They but the problem is they don't do what a 200 point unit should be doing And it's not necessarily a dps check to kill gargants I think it's a it's a dps check to kill really anything like a squad of 10 models on an objective Should be killed by a 200 point unit of paladors charging into them The paladors problem is that they have this great teleport, but they have no follow-up They don't have a built-in reroll on the charge. They don't get a bonus to the charge So you're you're kind of just spending more resources to do Probably not enough damage to clear off an objective Which is really disappointing like if they had a plus three to charge after after they teleport that would make them With their points, but they just they don't they're like they can teleport and that's it Who's leaving objectives wide open these days? Um, not many people I don't know and a lot of lists it just happens Especially if you have shooting that removes whatever the limited thing as they had on that objective because they can't afford to camp their whole army there Right, and that's my point. They work in concert with something like oh, there's the back line your whole army's in between us I wrapped her down the only thing you've got on that thing now. It's my objective Well, unfortunately shooting comes after movement. That's the downside there sure if you could do it all in the same turn it would be beautiful But yeah, you're not wrong about the timing of it, right? But like you remove it Again once it's removed that objective is open You can simply go to it on the double You make them now read like now they got to pull stuff back. This is my argument, right? Now, what if I could what if I could sell you this? What if uh pallidors cost 110 points and they were called prosecutors and they had a much more reliable charge It's basically the same unit, but better at what the pallidors are supposed to look You know, I stand prosecutors over these guys. They made it onto my first list Okay, so like, you know, there's no disagreement here. I love me some prosecutors. Okay What if you could have six prosecutors for the same price as three pallidors? Uh, sure. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. I understand what you're saying Uh, I I am a believer in in the existence of teleport, but I get it your mileage may vary And by the Robert McMillan said they're a straight the storm keep guys are showing as impressive Vince's lists are often a directed odds from the opinions they express on their show I don't know about that. I've watched you guys's show Like we have like 80% overlap on our stuff here Right and we can spend four hours arguing about 20 which is great. That's the whole fun of it, right? Like where would the world be if we all agreed? That's the fun Everybody wanted a deep dive on vanguard pallidors, right? That's why they're tuning in. That's that's exactly it The number of people who are standing pallidors in our chat right now is high by the way, so So apparently yes, people are here for this content. This is the content people wanted All right. So so protectors. Let's talk about protectors People were really down on protectors. I was really down on protectors after the translocation change because four inch move is awful But in fact, it caused us to just double down on what protectors were already good at and now instead of putting 15 Protectors in a list some crazy people in our discord have been putting 30 Protectors in a list because good luck pushing through that many two upsaves. It's so they're still insanely good I I would even put them on the previous list. I wouldn't count these guys as secret tech It's not a secret how good protectors are The only downside with protectors is their speed, right? You got to work around that So you need some kind of shooting to force the enemy to come to you Or get really lucky at rolling nine inch charges And the other thing is that they their damage is really tied into unleash that hatred because star soul maces getting double attacks Is just insane damage everything just dies when you get attacked by 15 protectors But the problem is that they could be roared which means you need hunters Which means you're not playing a one drop list And they need a plus one hit buff at the same time Which means you because unleash that hatred is a command at the start of the combat phase So you need to get you can't use all that attack You have to use a toral on buff or vigilors or a knight azuros or something along those lines So it's it's tough to work all those pieces in together And when you start putting all those pieces together, you still have to deal with their speed So you have to play a very particular kind of a play style and a particular list But man protectors are scary I wish I could say the same about retributors and decimeters Uh decimeters in particular are just protectors with a three up save instead Why use that? I don't see a reason for it right and uh retributors are are good But they're just so slow and they don't have the two up save right so i'm i'm I wish I had this beautiful list with indrasta reviving I think like 10 retributors Two squads of five retributors per turn and I loved playing that with the the version of cycle storm that we thought we were getting Instead of the one we actually got and that was a lot of fun You you save the unit from dying and then you just start reviving retributor after retributor It's a nice world that we almost lived in almost I was just gonna say yeah, man, I mean Yeah, I see what you're saying about palette particularly retributors like they still have really good math like in terms of Oh, yeah, just what they're doing like my friend He's got the spreadsheet that goes through basically every unit in the game and they're one of the most efficient I mean they're right up but like right next to my letters with grand hammers Oh, I I give you're saying but like on all us equal I think there are still a great like units a really compelling units Well to me it goes protectors a like i'm not trying to speak in your tier list I'm just like giving them a general grade right protect because like I don't i'm not voting anything s a is my top right so protectors a maybe be b plus oh my god retributors solid b decimators c-minus Yes, you have decimators see me after class you copied someone Yeah, it's just like I don't know what the point of them is that's the challenge, right? I don't know what they're meant to do I didn't realize until today I didn't do the math that Basically you just take retributors if you're interested like you look at the ideal situation with decimators Which is 37 36 attacks twos and twos minus two run one day and you're like, oh my god That's amazing But then you look at retributors and retributors basically have the same math They just do more They do more they they have more General utility with the mortal wounds that they can do so yeah, they have better spread You know, they have better coverage with what they can do. Yeah, absolutely Yeah, I mean against any and and the multi damage is also More highly valuable against anything that isn't What coalesced I guess so again, it's the only time that you're like, oh then their math falls behind right but just Punching through with multi damage is generally more highly valuable Just because the nature of how multi damage attacks work Vis-a-vis structure just yeah, just dice rolls in general It's better to have like, you know two really good attacks go through than four really bad attacks Right, just because sometimes you get unlucky and it's better to have a good dice get through even when you're unlucky, right? My next big will be I agree with your knight azeros pick. Thank you. Thank you I And because I it's good that you listed it in secret tech because I would call this niche tech, but I think Yeah, those can overlap I think it's the one of the only units that can keep up with our dracox As a support hero because most of our support heroes are foot sloggers Yep, you give this bad boy an arcane tome and he becomes a source of all-out attack and a plus one save By a mystic shield on your dracox and that leaves them for all-out defense So you're talking about dracox on a one-up save with a plus one to hit and that is not a bad ability at all Now you now you're where my head's at this is a she's such a good She's such a good arcane tome recipient, right because she's already fast. She's already pretty tough She's got a nice piece of utility one 20. I think yes. She's 120. Exactly. That's why I like her like obviously the the flying Heroes, right? That's the value because she's got that 12 inch move and you ain't taking the judicator for it because they What we don't want to talk about that guy like obviously that guy's trash. So Uh, yeah, I'm in there. I'm in there. Yep. I like this one We recently uh recorded an updated tier list like I said and we bumped the azurus from f to d for our ranking That means he's like he's okay. He's got a very specific purpose maybe points of the issue Maybe the purpose is just really niche For us f is like just you're not going to play this unit So the azurus is not as bad as the far striders. Let's say You can you can bring him to a list I I would I would go slightly higher than that but we can we can agree to disagree on that one That being said it's still a tough inclusion like to be honest with itself That's why it is a niche tech right because he is really marginalized by the toralon of all things Giving us some kids a whole army. Yeah, the toralon of all things comes out of nowhere and just saves this army from Being incredibly inefficient Yeah, the the I look I I stand the regular toralon now given I pooped on eventus Which I'm not I think we were all too mean to eventus in our first review. We were yeah But that's that's that's just look you don't get everything perfect the first time through But I was a stand for the regular toralon initially And I do think as I that's why they both made it on the other list like that plus one to hit is just It's real good I wish he had other abilities on his war scroll. That would be great. Would it be neat? Yeah, but you know it turns out bubble plus one to hit pretty decent on a big face. It's weird. I don't know Uh, I'm just excited that that model that that model is now like has a purpose in a lot of lists because the toralon has always been My favorite stormcast monster like just look wise. I think it actually looks awesome. Um, finally seen plenty Yeah, I know a lot of people don't like the look of it. I think it looks sweet as So, um, yeah, so to everybody who doesn't like that that model. That's what I say Uh, okay Cool Uh stand out the rest Uh All right, let's talk about just this is the rest of the stuff So anyway, we skipped over we skipped over bastion. We gotta talk bastion. All right. Go ahead. Talk bastion Go ahead. I'll take it take it away. I'm gonna get some uh, we gotta gotta get you guys views on this fellow Okay, what do you think about him? Tyler? What do you think about bastion so far? He's He's so intriguing because he's such a I find him a compelling johnny piece You know, he's one of those pieces. We're like, all right. I'm gonna figure this guy out Not many people if you like people might be sleeping on him. He's doing so much though He's across ours like orthogonal orthogonal purposes. Sometimes he feels like with this war scroll Kind of have a similar vibe with indrasta in some ways So I haven't looked at him closely, but I certainly what I have I haven't figured him out yet They I like some of the abilities that he has No, he can do some damage He has the Benefits against high wound characteristic models, which is intriguing try to pop off some sixes You know the obvious example of a mega gargant you're rolling 35 dice And you're looking for sixes each six doing a mortal wound A redeploy piece is intriguing particularly with signs in the storm You know, that's an opportunity where you could Have have a have a nice play against your opponent. Yeah, mr. Guck Um, I just want to quickly point this out. I and we had this discussion on our discord I think there's one of those things they need to clear up Because people have argued that his redeploy doesn't actually let you do signs of the storm because signs of the storm says during deployment And this happens before the first turn begins at the start of the battle room So you cannot like do the old switcheroo from in and out of science I mean, it's still good because You're talking about units that are slow that are already on the board and you can just you know At the least guarantee he redeploy somewhere else Like if you deploy him on the right flank and your opponent goes, oh, I'm not going to deploy anything near him You can just go boop. I'm going to just deploy him Counting a deployment now. He's in your face or he has to be But I don't think he actually moves things in and out of science Yeah, I fight like my niche. I don't know if you guys said this as well But when I first looked at him like hello distraction carnifix I can you can buff him up He's got rules that can potentially make him difficult to kill. He can be a real nuisance That part on the board. Yeah, I mean if you're in for up territory, which is where he lives You're a tough piece to kill like that's if he like kills a model. He yeah, he oh for heals to full. Yeah, it's really good Yeah, he's a good tank I don't think he's meant to go up against necessarily hero monsters because you're talking about minus two ren pre which Like we discussed, you know, even minus three doesn't feel enough these days sometimes. Yeah So It's it's a very meta call I think he's great into gargants Like I think that's not much of a pain because you get that underboard ability and then with wrappers you can do a lot of fun stuff Um, I think his value goes up as the meta changes Like if we enter we leave gur and suddenly instead of monsters It's units with 10 or more models that are gaining quite benefits. Then yeah, he becomes really good That's kind of how I was envisioning using him. Yeah in terms of the distraction piece like yeah, he's yeah Yeah, he's threatening a flank. He's threatening where people have a non-reinforced unit or you know, name those various situations Yeah, he's not going after those big centerpieces centerpiece models. Yep Yeah, but I don't know Paul. Yeah any thoughts on him. Yeah, he's he's an interesting It's definitely an interesting character because like you guys were saying Andrasta is very durable and a lot of people like her for her Durability, she's really good at going and fighting like oh, there's Marathi's a big snake thing I'm going to go fight that reduce it to its bottom rank and with the three up four up AOD find us an hour you can take that snake for the whole game, right? Bastion kind of falls into the same category. He's not as fast as Andrasta and he's not that good at fighting monsters Like she is but he just spends all day fighting hordes because fully healing on that model is is insane. So right now If you're fighting hordes, he's great If you're fighting large single target models, he's great because of his is I think it's called the thunderborn ability on the board Yeah, and uh, as long as hammers of sigmar are good and that just depends on how good dracots are So as long as dracots are good bastion will be good because they just go really well together. Yeah Yeah, I mean he is an expensive piece for a dude walking around. He's got a six inch move So he's got he's got a little spring in his step. Let's give him some credit Right. He's he's a little bit faster than your normal storm cast, but sure He's slow comparatively for a 300 point model, right? So I mean that's if there's gonna if we're gonna paint the downside That's it Right. It's 300 points on a six inch move. That's that's always a tough He's not so good that you stick them in every hammers of sigmar list I think there's there's like the best version of hammers of sigmar probably wouldn't use him Just because he is so expensive and you could bring something a little more efficient than that But if you use him, you're not going to be disappointed. He's he's good He doesn't have the same drawbacks that similar pointed models like celestine prime and andrasta have Andrasta's kind of all over the place for melee damage isn't as strong bastion doesn't have that problem He knows exactly what he's doing in melee Celestine prime has to wait a few turns bastion doesn't have to wait a few turns He just he does something immediately before the game even starts. He's doing stuff And he's saving command points every turn. He's blasting stuff every turn So yeah, those three kind of form an interesting uh triad And of them I would say bastion is probably the best one Overall, it's a bummer. You can't use him in other uh storm hosts like even just giving him celestine celestial vindicators free uh Bless weapons would have been really good. But yeah, if hammers is good bastion is good If you want to play bastion go for it. He's great. Yeah Also, he's like way bigger than you think like have you seen the model size comparison of him like he's so big He's about the size of a car in effects. So that's an Right Had him in a game today actually ash with gorilla miniatures. Yeah and got a got a good sense of it But yeah, a lot of what you guys saying was how I was thinking. Yeah, where because he's expensive He's tanky your opponent may have to put more into him than they would like And it's you know, it's kind of like a shooting unit where you place A shooting unit not on an objective, you know somewhere with long range that your opponent doesn't want to have to spend resources To go into killing that unit because and then that takes them away from objectives I could kind of see him potentially a piece like that He's he's on a flank they're having to put more into than they would like which then has these cascading consequences in the game That helps you, you know, get a better hopefully a better leg up in terms of objective scoring, etc The flank is the flank is the right place for him He can't compete for central objectives with other big monsters because he really does rely on his healing In order to stay alive. So flanks are the perfect place for him and his kit fits into it perfectly He can use commands anywhere Right, there's no there's no range restriction on that unlike the imperitence which has to be within a certain range Bastion is is killing one side of the table wiping out all those, you know Cavalry units that are trying to contest on flanks He's just mopping them up fully healing himself blasting stuff with meteors and issuing commands all at the same time Yeah, I agree. All right. Can I move on now? Tyler? Yes All right It's not happening. Okay, so Stand out the rest. This is just a quick discussion. So sub factions my answer is Anything except anvils of the helden hammer Could have play like you could construct a list around it There are standouts Disagreement there is that like any of them could be used The only bad ones are anvils and warbringers and warbringers isn't even that bad. It's just not good Right, but that's exactly how I would have phrased it Exactly Like yes, Paul did you just say warbringers is not that good? It's not it's just disappointing I wish there was a battle line option to go with it because most of the storm hosts are good because they either have Gardis in them or because they have a really good battle line choice, right? Yeah, that's just it between either that ability or what they're bringing in is battle line They all have some kind of play anvils is the one that's just like a total Miss which is not surprising. It's the standard curse of if you were too good in the last thing You will be crappy in this because that every time every time Play this game for 23 years. They over correct every time It is the constant in my life So never be too good in one book because the next book you're guaranteed to suck So, I mean just look at storm drakes. They were too good and they weren't even out yet That's exactly The uh, I had an anvil's list that I tracked all my tournament games for for a period of time And I went 43 and 2 with an anvil's list And now it's the worst list in the game sure There you go uh artifacts drake scale armor mirror shield and luckstone are kind of my three picks I mean, obviously you're going to go to universals a lot But those are three that have some kind of interesting stuff about them. I find the other six uninteresting Anything else on that list that you would do you would add? Agreed our offensive artifacts are garbage. Uh, and luckstone is a nice I mean the ones per game artifacts. I think of all those luckstone is definitely The nicest one our defensive artifacts are actually pretty good mirror shield is obviously the best one in this list Like being the only thing that denies luminous sentinels is just Amazing, right, right? Yeah We lean heavily on the universal artifacts in our army and if they ever change those it's it's going to be It could be really bad for us. Sure on the bright side. There are other armies in the same place. So, no Um, they should they should change the universal artifacts and make turn them into a list of like eight that are all Relatively interesting with different capabilities and put in one that makes you a priest just like the arcane tome There should be like the holy scripture that makes you a pre-generic priest. Yeah, like a rosary Sure. There you go. Yes, sacred rosary. I'll accept that the reliquary, right? We got 50 names. Whatever pick one The toralon also giving blessed weapons would would be the best thing ever. Yeah, yes It'd be amazing uh The Which is exactly who I want to turn into a priest. Yes Like I want to make that guy a priest so bad Uh, okay Uh, the command traits we already mentioned. They're all disappointing even Master Celestial Menagerie. It's it's okay They're all like at best Okay, like a four out of 10 that would be the highest I pretty much rank any of them You're just going to use the generic command traits like yep. They're super niche. They're not worth it Right. It's the biggest miss in this whole set Spells, um, lots of good spells not so many great casters, but I think you know Celestial Blades obviously stands out, but I think as as right Esri As I forgot my tea there as right. Hello. Yes As right. Halo Celestial Blades Thunder Shock and Starfall all at least serve, you know So my interesting spells you could you could choose Celestial Blades is the standout I will say I'm a lot less fond of as right. Halo this edition And that's because mystic shield just became so amazing this edition Sure It used to be the go-to spell for me in second edition because mystic shield is just a real one to say Which nobody cared about But this edition I'd rather just have a plus one to try to fish for sixes. Sure No, that's fair The the FAQ has made uh So many little changes to how we value command traits that I'm actually taking Blessing, I'm taking master of magic the universal trait to reroll spells alongside thunder shock on a lot of units within arcane tome Like just stacking all of these things together because thunder shock is a good effect The fact that you have to cast it and then do a three up sucks But what else are you going to take like none of the other command traits are any good? So right Right. So why not right? Yeah, exactly. Sometimes they have minus one to wound cool and and you know, I mean I've said it before on the shelf say it again Uh minus one to wound is one of the stronger debuffs you can throw around right because there's just There's no set way to counter that out and its mathematical effect is quite strong Uh on what it ends up doing to enemy attacks okay Prayers means translocation of less weapons. It's not bad two out of three ain't bad Anybody They're all good. I think they're all good. All right. Yeah fair enough. Yeah, I don't know a time when I take all three That was my challenge in making this I got a little bit of faith was a thing. I might Right. Yeah two relic gates. Yeah, two relicters one enhancement make it work Yeah, I guess I guess I'm not sure I wouldn't just take translocation and bless weapons on both of them Yeah, I mean like like seriously because then I can teleport from both or bless from both, right? And I'm like, I don't know which one I'm gonna want to do this from in any given round And those don't do I actually want so But yeah fair. I there's no bad prayers. I think that's a fair way to say it. Yep Because they removed them all from the book. Yeah, we still have so many bad prayers. Yes I on the celestial war bringers the sub action. I did try I've only tried it out one game, but I was intrigued by how good the reroll save hit and wound per phase and every turn felt just in terms of the cumulative value that I felt I was getting From that game. So I'm intrigued to try it out more Yeah I average it out to about two extra damage in the shooting phase two extra damage in the combat phase And and that's assuming the reroll works, right? There's value you can't really calculate from it, which is rerolling saves you that is only as good as the hero You're trying to save if you have a star drake. It's really good. If you have carazide. It's pretty good But also it depends on how much your enemy is putting into you It's really hard to judge it if you look at it as the only sub faction that boosts shooting in any particular way Then it's not bad Yeah, that's what I was noticing paul. Usually using it just long strikes prime You know heroes and shooting was what I was finding I was using on the most and it just added up where it meant I protect or didn't die it meant an extra long strike hit got through or or wound got through You know things like that and I just yeah I was surprised at how good it felt over a full game When you've got a unit of six guys making 12 shots off and on twos and twos Right every one that connects matters right And so re not to mention the fact that you could roll into a six But just like having that ability to pick one of your ones up which you're going to average to and turn it into a hit It's you know, it's pretty direct math and it's value Right, which is what you were saying paul right like it's in that regard. It's pretty easy to calculate Yeah, the save to me is just like it's the bonus right you're going to use it when you need it for that purpose Mount traits I think all the mount traits are at least somewhat interesting in certain cases. There's some there's some interesting stuff on that list Like they all have some kind of play. There are clearly standouts in the mount traits Um, but I think they all have some value between run in charge or a six inch violin or so on and so forth I wish it was run in charge. That would be great It's retreat in charge. Oh, you're right. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you Yes None of the mount traits are particularly good Especially because they're all locked behind keywords for some reason like what would it really be that powerful if a nitrocanus had a six inch Pylon or if a toralon could do the battle shock immunity thing. Yes, I don't know I want to strike six inch pylon from the game. So so yes on that way. It's a really the other one Yeah, it is a probability the draconith one where you on a you give up your rampage Then you roll a three up and then the unit can't benefit from inspiring presence That's not worth a mount trait in any army as far as I can tell it's really bad And it only works on the nitrocanus only one hero in the book can take it and it's super niche I well I hard disagree with that because I hate inspiring presence so much and yes I agree with you that it sucks. It can only be on that dude, but that dude is really good And like anything that shuts off battle shock immunity. I'm here for in a big way now If I was playing another army, I'd agree but stormcast just wipes stuff out when we attack so battle shock's not really our concern Fair point. I suppose Uh, I mean I think of like I don't know man. I think about like Now agreed part of this might be more Meta dependent and as we've talked about many times you don't see a lot of big units, right? Yeah But I think about like the nights the empty throne list I played at mash con that had this huge block of 20 chaos warriors That was getting buffed and stuff like that right now There's no even even these stormcast units that hit so hard wouldn't have picked that thing up in a round It's 40 wounds on a ridiculous save Right Have you seen grandhammers yet? I I understand. I know the math Yeah, but chaos just has a lot of safe stacking in built into their book I know what he's talking about that unit would be on three up period Even through all the red because there's like eight different sources of plus one to save in s2d. Yeah, okay, and he had all of Like all of them All right, and those chaos warriors if you've got like even the damage that's there against a three up save What you would end up doing is killing about It against a lot of the damaging units you'd end up picking up about 10 or 11 of them Okay, assuming you hit on sort of like with one of your pain trains, right that's not nothing But then they're just going to make it battle shock immune It's going to stick around and beat you on the objective still because there's still nine or ten guys All right, and you're like you're not that You're eight or something with your fulminators, right? But if you can then immediately go Okay, that unit's immune to battle shock when I hit if the draconis goes in and along, you know It makes them sorry. I'm immune to battle shock. I apologize vulnerable to battle shock other way around That unit just evaporates then They're gone. Sure if you roll a three plus if you have a nitro conus if it's in range to use a monstrous rampage Yeah, I mean I get like roar is good and roar is on the same things Yeah, but roar is good because it disables all that defense and all that attack Disabling inspiring presence is a very different effect I would have liked it better if it was this unit has to take battle shock tests like it must take battle shock tests There is nothing you can do to stop it because Oftentimes what I actually find is do you find up needing battle shock tests against a lot of the problematic horde units? Like if you go back to second edition, you know a bunch of scaven bunch of uh, which elves They're not relying on inspiring presence. Yeah before they before they fit fixed I guess in a way before they fixed horrors to basically not take battle shock until they lose like 30 wounds Yeah, this would have been useful But most people that sort of are weak to battle. Sorry most armies that are weak to battle shock Also have some sort of auto pass mechanic and if it got past that I would have valued it a lot more It's a good point. Yeah, that's an interesting point. Okay The other mouth traits aren't spectacular either like celestial instincts definitely stands out retreat and shoot or retreat and charge Are really good Kind of a bummer that it's not both It would have been really nice for star drakes to keep using rain of stars even after they retreat Agreed. I don't know why it wasn't just both. Yes Yes, agreed And then the default pick after the faq it seems now that the toralon can actually take a mount trait The default pick is going to be the scintillating trail, which is like a pseudo plus one cast It's not really a plus one cast it reduces enemy unbinding roles But none of the other traits are really good So you end up taking scintillating trail and then you think oh well I've got a pseudo plus one cast. Maybe I should take more wizards and it kind of creates this interesting dynamic Um event is can't take it which is a bummer. Uh, just more reason to take the regular toralon I will say this I don't know if you with this all this farm cast spells. I think go off on a five Except for chain lightning which goes off on six So our spells aren't hard to cast so having like that pseudo plus one to cast where You lower their unbind. It's actually not that that it's pretty useful. Right. Yeah. No, I'm with that I'm with that All right Uh, good lord. Okay Let's move quickly through our discussion items because I want to get to your lists. Yes, uh Questions yet to be answered You mentioned that you went a deep dive on this So allies and coalition. I think we already kind of answered this earlier in the show Is there anything that you think meets the the the standard here that you should be looking at? Two things battle mage is insane Battle mage from cities of sigmar Even if you're not playing storm keeps just bring it as an ally because none of its spells require any keywords You can use wild form to get plus to your run in charge and right now we're playing in ger So you get plus one to cast so that cast on a four on the dice, which is insane That's so easy and reliable. That's that's like rolling a two plus. I think yep. I could be wrong about that That's really good. Also battle mages for fuzz protection Storm cast don't have many ways to get the minus one hit effect And when you can take a big hammer unit and give it minus one hit all the time Fuzz protection is really good too. The second unit I would consider and it gets featured shortly in this video is a frost Fuzz on a seven or six. Do you know of hands? I don't recall Fuzz I believe uh fuzz on a six But I'll double check It's it's not as useful as wild form. Uh, but once we leave ger It's gonna be a serious contention So, yeah, five Five. Wow. Yeah, even better protection is five I do want to say wild form really is useful because if you notice the wording it is not only within 12 It is within 12 You could literally backline your battle mage and have him buff up a unit and a casting value of four given that he gets Plus one from being in ger. So it's really really useful. Yeah. Yep Uh, yeah, I Great pick and yeah, you said the frost phoenix is the other one, right? Yep, yep, it's huge minus one wound especially after the changes to menagerie That's a great effect. And when we go to lists, we'll see further why yep right on How much do the monsters matter? How much do you need it like everybody talks about you gotta have monsters you gotta have monsters How much do the monsters matter? In our tactics video, I think we answered this question pretty well There's a battle tactic that pretty much if you have a monster you get two victory points That alone is good enough to bring at least one monster and it can't be a month a hero You turn into a monster with metamorphosis because you have to pick it at the start of the hero phase So toralon big ups that that's another reason to bring a toralon because once per game He scores you two victory points at usually at the hardest part of the game where you oh, I can't score anything else Oh, okay. Here's two victory points right in addition to everything else. It's doing storm drake guard are good That's understating it. They're very good But you don't bring them because they're a monster that just happens to be a thing that they do right Yep fair. Okay What do you do about mortal wound spam? GARDUS GARDUS and that becomes a problem bring GARDUS easy answer He's he's the man that guy His value is increasing drops for stormcast. We're gonna go into your list So this might be a good precursor to think about it before we get on a specific list How do you think about your drops when you're uh, when you're building your list? Do you care? Do you not care? Or do you vary? You get sure Sure, uh, either you go for the one drop if you want to be really really aggressive If you want to you know Wild farm in steadfast march a squad of four fulminators at the same time that you deep strike in a bunch of annihilators And at the same time that you're translocating crossbows up You want to be super aggressive You want to make sure your opponent has a chance to move their army out yet? You go one drop Uh, the alternative would be you go as many drops as possible because you actually want to have more drops So you have more information so you can counter deploy You don't you want to know where your opponent is putting their key wizard So you can put your dispel scroll in range You want to know where their shooting is going so you can put your raptors either on the table or in reserve You want to you want all the information possible and more drops as a benefit to that And taking more drops also gives you access to more battalions like the warlord to get more Enhancements and you can take hunters of the heartland Because getting roared really sucks in this army when you can't get plus one hit and you're hitting on threes And you you don't have that many dice. Yeah, you get some bad rolls and then it all starts to fall apart So you either go really aggressive with one drop or you go as many drops as possible In fact, even adding units to your list sometimes just to have more drops Okay, I like it. All right Let's talk lists So let me go ahead and timestamp this boy. That's going to be a jump in the video. Uh, all right Okay, cool Lists so the first list I have up is uh, uh, saint Uh, Karzai. So paul, I think this one is yours and it says work in progress on it I kept your work in progress tag. Thank you where you sent it. So sorry everybody understands what's going on Uh, so these go ahead These are slides from our upcoming episode which we happen to be working on when we were contacted to come on here We're just like, oh, okay. Here's a screenshot. Okay. See you in like six hours And uh paul, was this your mid shelf or top shelf? This is the mid shelf list This is the one you want to play for fun. One thing storm casts have never had the chance to do Hopefully until now is they've never had the super kill monster list every time I looked at the star drake I thought why don't you do more damage? I just want to move you forward and run through the enemy army Like seems like everybody else has something that can do that Or at least for a while it was like that, you know, you got the iron jaws and the fire slayers It's one super kill unit just run through the army and this is my attempt to do that And I think it could actually work. Uh, so the core of the list is karazai. He's the general which makes storm drake battle line None of the command traits are good. So I don't really care about skipping a command trait Give right to a unique character doesn't matter You put your storm drake guard in hunters the heartland. They're monsters that can't be monstered That's great. And then you take every single support hero you can think of to make karazai great So you've got garden stalks a garden steel soul You drop him in wherever karazai is fighting now karazai has a five up or you take the lord castellant That's a plus one save from the lantern guaranteed can't be unbound And then you take an arcane tome on him to cast mystic shield sometimes and thundershock other times You take five liberated for battle line tax You take a battle mage to either give him minus one to hit or wild form Which you might not need because karazai is pretty fast already 14 inch fly move is pretty good Uh, you take lord relic turd give him exploding sixes and you take a knight in cantor to give him plus one wound And a dispel scroll to stop hand of dust And that's the list you you give karazai every single buff in the game that you can And you just run him into the enemy army and he hits like a beast It's insane if you ever fight a unit with 10 models karazai will just explode everything. He's his damage output is tremendous Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's Yeah, just like I highly encourage someone to run the stats hammer numbers on this dude Uh, like with you know, put don't don't put every buff here on Put half of these buffs on assume you get like half of them, right? Don't don't don't don't I never calc at the perfect I calc it like let's assume I can get the most Common buffs on remedy if it's cast I'll get one of the two cast or something like that And this dude hits like a mac truck just screaming in under this situation Yeah, and he gets stronger throughout the game as anytime he kills a hero plus one to all of his profiles Yes Now the secret sauce here isn't just that gardus is giving him a five up ward Gardus is also using his saintly assault to give him plus one to every single one of his attack profiles for one turn So suddenly you're swinging seven gall marazas on turn one at the opponent And then you're biting them and then you're whipping a tail And if that tail has anything with any amount of models nearby you can pour all those attacks into the hero So let's say you're fighting uh negash and he's got 10 skeletons beside him Well, now you have 10 tail attacks that go from the skeletons into negash, right? It's an incredible ability Yep, I love it. I love this list. This is fantastic. This is Paul. I want you to know this speaks to me deeply One I love hero hammer like I'm all I always this is what like original slanesh was exactly the the right thing to Tempt me in with its excess, right? Because you tell me there's a way to shove six heroes in a list and I'm like I'm listening That's what I'm here for. All right. I want my I want six heroes And then I love as a hardcore timmy a hardcore vowed and proud timmy Having one giant shiven dragon that's going to go forward and burn and ate the countryside Is pretty great. Oh boy. That's a magic reference right there. Yes. Yes indeed. I'm mixing all sorts of references. That's what it is Uh, so this is great, man. I love this. This is uh, this is really fun Do you think this is a three two pushing for one for one pushing five? Oh, or I have no idea I have I don't have care as I so I can't play test it unfortunately, but uh Yeah, that's a death star if you look at other death star lists like an archaon if this does a similar thing I think this does more damage than archaon Um similar durability, let's say between the five up board and the plus two to saves with mystic shield and lantern Plus four potentially if you do find a stour and all that defense Yeah, he's pretty durable and every time he kills a screening unit. He heals Yeah, I like it awesome Uh, all right before we go to the next list people are watching. Hey, I haven't said it for a little while You should hit the like button hit the like for giant angry flaming dragons If you want to see giant angry flaming dragons blow up the countryside then hit the like button It's fun and don't forget to subscribe. All right. Cool. Fantastic list, man This one when I read over him, I was like, this is my one right here So it's all down from here, but the elements are good, but this is my list. I should have put this last Because I love this Okay All right, the castle sample is number one hallow strike So this is hallowed knights science the storm who wants to take us through hallow strike I guess I will it's my last right So this this list is uh Is the third edition version of a list the one I mentioned earlier in the podcast that I had a really high win rate with That was anvil strike, which was 10 educators six raptors and then everything to support those two units and this is the third edition incarnation of it and what it gained And this edition is goddess who is a five-up ward on the whole army when you play a castle formation Everything has a five-up ward. So that 101 wound value that should say 151 wounds because he gives the army effectively 50 more wounds The knight and cantor stops spells So your long strikes are protected against uh techless against the gash against any kind of shenanigans like that the long strikes just Get value every turn every turn they take something key off the board once per turn They double tap to make sure of it The lord rellector with high priest you can give him the mirror shield instead of an arcane tome That's not necessary I like the arcane tome for additional value because I like casting celestial blades and getting an unbind It's got a toralon in there to make this up because you've got a lot of small units You want to buff all of them with all out attack at the same time toralon's really great for that And it's a monster. So it's two victory points every game Then it's got three liberator screens, which I did that on purpose I like having screens in this kind of setup Castles really want to make sure they have disposable cheap units that they can put in the way of the enemy army You have to lose something it might as well be a liberator Instead of something that's actually worthwhile And then the hammer unit. So we've got a shooting hammer in the long strikes And we've got a melee hammer Using glaives with protectors and now that can be swapped out I had this list originally built for translocation being able to move after it I felt like there was almost no downside to using protectors for this particular purpose They're too up-save is phenomenal. Their damage is phenomenal and they use only just the hatred But you can swap that out. You can do fulminators. You can do I've seen some people do variations of this list using a lord imperitent and Grand hammers. So there's there's some flexibility there But the core of the list is big shooting unit bunch of screens guard us everything after that can be modified So this was taken from Merganquist video was this from this was this was episode nine, right? Yeah, this was in our tactics video when we were explaining what a castle is How it works and how you deploy. Yeah. Yeah, so one of the benefits of getting rid of the protectors If you swap them up or something else is you don't have to take unleash that hatred Which means you can take a mirror shield somewhere in this list You can put that on the relic here and you can give the encanto or an arcane tome. So he cast two spells in turn Nice Nice Yeah, this is similar to list that I've been running Like the top end, you know top shelf type list I have not been using the tar along. What all is the tar along doing in this list? Giving everything all everything plus it's just all about the plus one ahead. It's also two victory points once per game It's also a fast flying three up five up wizard It's also got chain lightning because sometimes you need it to score battle tactics Sometimes doing damage in the hero phase is useful for not having to retreat Which is very useful if you combine the lord relic or lightning storm with the Chain lightning and then you also got the thunderbolt volley. You might not have to retreat Right if sometimes that that is enough to pull you out of a combat You don't want to be in 100% and how many times do you've been hung up? By one or two or something or models or whatever and it's just like gosh If only I could get rid of this in the hero phase with mortal wounds like hero phase mortal wounds Just having some amount on tap has just such a value to it, right? Especially in third edition where people are using heroic recovery to be even more annoying So that d3 might not be enough but 2d3 probably would be right that extra little bit from chain lightning really does help Yep I like it. I like it. Yeah, so this does still need to be updated. It was written before the FAQ So for example the arcanum doesn't have a mount trait You should probably give him scintillating trail with three wizards in the list just a heads up on that nice So how how strong so you you've gotten some games in with this list how Strong is this list in the in the meta? You know, are we talking about uh, you know proverbial s tier? Are we talking about an a tier how? Yeah It's really it's it's hard to play because it's not your typical move your units forward and fight for objectives in the middle The board you almost want to give up board position turn one and then you're playing from behind But you've got the power to overcome that It lacks mobility which is why I'm considering swapping the protectors for fulminators now One of the issues with castle lists of any kind is that if you don't have the speed to go out After your initial engagement you can fall behind on objectives But typically if you play this style correctly, there's nothing in the game You can't beat and that's a bold statement. I think maybe lumeneth might give you some trouble But if you play it correctly, you should be able to outrange their sentinels. You should be able to kill their foxes before taking any significant damage Um, yeah, it's a very powerful list. It's not easy to play and I don't recommend it for beginners If you're trying to get into stormcast don't play this list because it is not intuitive how good it is So i've been running uh relic tour and cantor castellans as the three heroes and essentially Yeah, it's like mirrored. It's the usual what you guys would expect Special blades mirrored shield, etc Tim Vindict or some like two by five liberators Maybe they have a sequiturs and then I kind of swapping in and out between sequiturs Just try them out and then the liberators and then it was six strikes and 10 protectors I think I had room for some ether wings in there as well to get the Translocation in the hero phase so you can get the plus one hits on the long strikes for the thunderbolt volley And then yeah doing the leash that hatred and thunderbolts and yeah, it's good Like it's the strongest. Oh and goddess course in hella knights. It's the strongest List that I've allowed myself to play in terms of like trying to figure out, you know that letting off the gas a little bit So I was hoping that maybe the 10 protectors Losing the translocation, you know have to move my tone this down meaningfully where it's not going to feel as oppressive, but I mean, I'm just like at least if that's the lens like, you know, trying to play something that's Strong can compete at tournaments, but it doesn't really feel oppressive doesn't feel like that top to your list I'm trying to yeah trying to gauge where you think that is right now This is this is more on the oppressive side. I wouldn't play this at friendly games I would take this if I wanted to go three and oh and an rtt Or go probably at least four one and a gt probably five. Oh This this list is very oppressive It's not fun to play against because you're just shooting your opponent off the board every turn You stop them from using magic. You stop them from mailing you It's just not fun to play against like only other shooting armies would have any amount of tactical enjoyment out of this And as soon as I found so it's been by far this kind of the the strikes guard us protectors I haven't tried fulminators. They were like the obvious like the more mobility I thought protectors a little more Slightly letting off the gas relative to the fulminators But still incredible value because they you can save stack plus four on there that we get through stack with guard us It's crazy, but yeah, it's felt by far That's that's what led me to try to figure out something other than long strikes And it hasn't been going all that well yet Um, I like I like to your guys break down of judicators like that does seem like an interesting one Oh, yeah, try crossbows the the range on it makes them a lot more fun to play against They do more damage, but they're also putting themselves in range of the enemy. So it feels more balanced Balanced in terms of like who's having fun, right? Like it's fun to have powerful shooting units But if they're doing it from across the board with no line of sight like 360 no scoping you that's not fun Um long long strikes are kind of borderline oppressive As long as luminous sentinels exist though, I don't know who's going to be complaining about long strikes. Sure Yeah Yeah, we yeah, we live in the world with the bogeyman. So the boba duke is just like, yeah, okay, whatever. All right uh Okay Drake off blizzard Mergonck, this is yours. Uh, this is your work in progress list here. Uh in hammers of sigmar Uh, I have been finding by the way that I I I end up in hammers a lot because one I favor fulminators and other drake Offs is And two because I actually like having a six up word basically all the time given the nature of that rule I find over the course of the game. It actually does do quite a lot of work Uh, and I think people right of like the six mortal wound nonsense, right? Because I make one the hero lives cool great Sorry, yeah, and you know, holy, holy. Yeah, holy with it. No, I agree holy within 12 is a huge amount of area It's more than people think it is, right, you know, you're talking about, you know, the pyre square thing It gets squared up. So it's really good Um, so this is a my list by the way, I should say paul is like the expert at list making i'm like Slightly blown. So my lists are a little more simple. I wanted something to make storm keeps. This is my mid shelf list, by the way Uh, I wanted to make storm keeps work Um, I noticed that you know, nobody's really making a lot of lists with them And the reason to take storm keep as we mentioned earlier is the anointed on pro start phoenix He's a coalition unit here so he can take arcane tome for flaming weapon Clearing up and goes off on a four it also By the by ends up giving him a mystic shield for free So he goes up on the three up save because the spell went off Sure He could also needs to obviously mystic shield himself and just go have fully two on him. So it's a versatile. Oh, yeah Yeah, it's a versatile. Yeah, exactly. And uh It turns his eight talent attacks from two damage to three damage So he becomes and with his wound or of minus one to wound for melee weapons He turns into this annoying thing that your opponent has a tough time killing To this thing they can't ignore because they he might hit them with the potential of 24 damage on the talents If he gets slain weapon because that's eight attacks eight times three Um, the rest of the list is pretty standard knight encounter. They deny spells relictor for blessed weapons in this case. Um The blessed weapons mostly go on your, uh, dracots Uh, in this case, I have two formators and victors for tempestors. I'm a bit tempestors. I think Uh, they're like a very unique unit in the sense that they are basically mobile judicators would have which have crossbow rend And then can go into melee and also find something The initial work Some sorry, man tempestors have is it are they like the thunderbolt crossbows judicators each six is out of two hits? No, uh, uh, yes. No, it's each hit is an additional hit. Yeah every hit doubles Every hit doubles. Sorry. That's that's what I mean. So that would not stack with blessed weapons No, that would not and the initial version of this only had lots of weapons for Two groups of two fulminators that I had instead of the tenders, but I found that a little too A little too highly tuned It's like you take start taking fulminators and tempestors and you know, the list becomes like really really pretty pretty good actually so my idea is to use at least one block for that uh shield of civilization and um The redeemer thing where they become 15 models or in this case 30 models at the start of three So protect your home objective, you know, just shoot them with judicators If anything comes close, just chew them with tempestors and judicators counter-target fulminators And as turn three switches on, you know, you slowly move the board and then start taking over And the entire time your castle is being protected by the anointed or frost art units So if anything comes close, there are no minus one to you and he's a fast hero He's a monster for battle tactics His damage can't be ignored if he's particularly if he casts uh flaming weapon on himself So, yeah, uh, this is pretty standard I also managed to put in an emerald ice warm in sense in the sense that if your opponent has some amount of Shooting three of indicators and judicators, you can sort of double activate that and then try and get value off of that So, yeah Maybe someday you'll be able to tell me why I did not unbind your uh dispel your emerald life swarm But uh, that's that's my third reference. So I'll stop now In a lot of area of grievances here, Tyler Oh my god The amount of water guard that came back. I don't blame you One more tank guard One more one model. We're gank. Okay, moving on This is uh, this is a great mid chef list. Yeah, because you've let off the gas a little bit I feel with tinge judicators. You got a nice mix. Yeah, it's it's really cool It's got a nice mix of everything, but it doesn't feel like I'm just hammering my opponent There's nothing they can do about it Um, which is also why I went for the steadfast march in order to get Fulminators or tempesters into combat if I need to be ideally you In a more tuned list, you'd probably want like Thunderbolt Wally and go go with the judicators inside Yeah, yeah Yeah, I will say I mean steadfast march does like if you're trying to deliver fulminators the advantage to steadfast march is that It will do that We are desperate for mobility So giving up a mortal wound breath attack in exchange for a naked d6 run That's a trade we're gonna make because we're just that desperate for mobility. Sure. Sure. Absolutely Well, I mean, you know if you happen to be having Annihilators and Lord imperitent, then it's a great use for the the auto run six for a free command point to just be like They dropped at seven and also you guys why don't you run six and now they're 16 threatening off the I gotta correct you there You can't run six and steadfast march in the same turn because a unit can only issue and receive one command So steadfast march happens at the start of the movement phase and you uh, you have to issue it to a unit And that unit cannot receive the right right. You're right. You're right. I wish we could man that that would be so good. You're absolutely right Uh, yeah, I was I was not uh, I wasn't thinking that through but no, you're absolutely right. Paul. Thank you for catching that Yes, good good catch. Yeah, because they are both movement phase. Yes Uh But yes, even the even on a straight d6 it still works right? Yes, it's it's doing work Uh going from 10 plus a charge to 13 plus a charge on average is still uh, actually not a bad benefit Okay Uh, let's see lastly I'm uh Annihilator Annihilation, let's just say that Annihilation agrande. There we go We're gawk. You're gonna kill me. Okay. I tell you what buddy You're bringing that you know how I am with pronunciations and this is what you're hitting me with That hurts Okay Uh, take me through this. This is Yeah, so I think this is this would be my little bit of a top shelf list and I think you will see Some version of this is this is something that's fairly obvious to people who are trying to build stormcast lists with the new models We all know how good annihilators of meteo or grandhammers are and this list plans to make use of them So you got your standard two heroes the relicter and the encanter Uh, and as we've seen they keep showing up at practically every list that stormcasts like to make The impertent because he pairs all of the annihilators vanguard raptors And then just some basic screening units and board presence units like prosecutors liberators and aether wings for the hero faced under both wally plus one to hit The idea with this list is extremely simple. Uh, you essentially Hammer them with vanguard raptors and each turn Sometimes two in a turn you drop your meteor a grand hammer seven inches away and you charge and delete whatever it is And the idea is like and we considered putting you know six Doing the annihilator group as a sort of one green of six and one unit of three But we discovered that six was almost always overkill Yeah, uh, where you ended up or doing so much extra damage that it was a waste of points And so it's better to do the one two punch where the raptors hit something and then the annihilators hit it And then that way you you delete one or two units a turn um In this case you're dropping the like I assume your goal is annihilators one annihilators on two and annihilators on three Yes, absolutely that way you're seven inch Each yes each turn. Yep, you have something to do each turn. Um, yeah, we prefer that strategy Guys check because of course with with six log strikes and three annihilators dropping in assuming you hit the seven every real charge. Have you checked the dps? Uh against Kraken or or yeah It kills a gargant it kills a gargant It kills our can with minus one hit and put and a two up save I think we assumed a two up save and minus one hit was active still kills our can on average Meteor grand hammers are insane damage like people do not understand you drop in three models They get a basically a two up to charge because it's a seven inch re-roll And then they charge in and deal 20 damage to a three up save They do insane damage and that's for 240 points Now they're limited because you can only drop in one per turn at that effect because each one after the first has to Be nine inches away But with this list You have a castle set up in the corner shooting out with long strikes every turn and as they're coming towards you You're just dropping nukes on them with these grand hammers every turn Right and those nukes like Vince mentioned how good the vexler was for its effect to do mortal wounds to other things That's a 10-inch effect for mortal wounds So you're going to be peppering mortal wounds on other units while this is happening So you're already doing the work for the other annihilators are about to land which makes this good in my opinion The general is the encounter we took lightning blast in this case because Well, like Paul said you're going to be deployed in a corner at the back to shooting with long strikes And lightning blast has like an unlimited range to just do d3 more wounds to something So that's that's just helpful Master of magic because in case I want to cast my six shield. I want to be able to re-roll it and Mirror shield to protect it Translocation isn't as important for this list. I mean it's good to be able to translocate your raptors But it's not something your entire strategy is going to depend on to where you need high priests Like the two up is I think is reliable like it's worth it to take that chance And we gave him the arcane tone with thundershock In case there's ever a scenario where we need to translocate himself and then cast thundershock on something Or in like that 18 inch bubble and then when you're annihilators land and they're hitting something And if they get hit by something that's next to them They might be on a minus when they wound which gives the annihilators a better chance The night's excelsior trade actually works out really well because annihilators natively wound on twos Well, the grand hammer wants to anyway So if they get the plus when they hit you're talking about twos and twos Which isn't going to happen a lot against Like a lot of the gargant lists or like a very single monster heavy focus lists But you know, you see iron jaws lists and they're trying to run a single mall crusher and two groups of six pigs and Hey, I want to hit pigs with twos and twos minus two rent three damage. That sounds great. That sounds wonderful Yeah How are you dealing with the like obviously so the picture that I didn't include and it was a good picture Showed just how much of the board can be blocked by palisade Like if you corner the raptors and you have the palisade like I mean it's It is an insane amount of the board that basically you're you're you're blocking off from my site How are you navigating it for your own? Unit shooting over it then are you putting it up defensively and then getting rid of it that kind of thing So I'll just quickly introduce this but I'll let paul take over the explanation because he's far better at doing this Techie stuff. This is a secret but a tech included because lumina foxes are a problem And It's to help raptors survive longer against that and potentially even melee alpha strikes that just want to reach out to the raptors And paul you want to take over the little like techie explanation? Yeah, sure Before we get super techie, let's talk about the prosecutors in this list Sure Because we went back and forth about whether to include more liberators or bring in some prosecutors all our battle lines lots Are filled so liberators don't have that additional value But this is a castle you do want screens and we felt that prosecutors in addition to just fitting the points well They can charge in alongside the grandhammers eat an unleashed hell from something that you actually care about eating the unleashed hell from With their 3d6 charge and then you don't care what they do That's all that's the only reason they existed to eat that unleashed hell And they're also just a screen they take up a fair amount of space about the same amount as five liberators So that extra utility instead of taking liberators in this case comes in handy because you are trying to do deep strike charges So that's exactly where you don't like this comes in Yeah, with their with their wing to wing spread on the three inches about it's almost 10 inches from side to side of the base Yeah, it's so it's it's pretty much like having a liberator squad in terms of zone denial Some opponents are going to get cheeky and run between your models, but we're looking to do about that So that so the palisade The palisade is a is a it's a little bit of spice here to deal specifically with two things in the meta right now that I can see One is very specific. It's the lumineff foxes The problem when you're playing storm cast against sentinels In particular the lumineff list that uses 30 sentinels and three foxes I find that to be Maybe the strongest list in the game right now at least from a storm cast perspective That's the one to beat because we can deal with the sentinels just fine We can drop in through scions and we can shoot them And if we catch them without a command point, they will die at a battle shock We can also translocate forward thunderbolt volley and then shoot them if we have a sufficiently far back deployment And we can do that against the techless version of the lumineff lists. It's fun to say But against the three fox version we immediately lose our raptors as soon as we make that maneuver So the palisade in this inclusion is to create a situation where you can thunderbolt volley to kill a fox And then palisade in front of your own raptors in a in a v formation kind of like this Or you have the 40 mil base at the back and then all the other guys standing in front And it creates what we like to call the john sena triangle where nothing can see you And it covers a huge amount of the board if you deploy it all the way at the back of the board And in particular if you put it next to a piece of cover it is almost impossible to see your raptors So you do give up their shooting that turn But you don't get shot you get another round of shooting because that in your turn you can reroll dispel it You can just teleport your guys away from it or you can just move away from it It's not that big right? Yeah, so This is in particular to deal with lumeneth foxes because they even with their 24 inch move They just won't have the ability to get all the way around Given how the angles work out and how much distance this takes up The other thing the palisade is in here to deal with you can move through in the spells But you can't move on and then the spell you can't finish a move and that includes charge moves So all these crazy iron jaws lists that are trying to do You know five different teleports and then moving in the hero phase and then charging you normally None of that works because you have a palisade in the way and they can't be in range to dispel it at the start of the Round one because you've cast it out of their range because you don't care how far back you play You know they're going to charge you so you sit at the back of the board in the corner Out of their dispel range they might teleport into range to dispel the next turn But that first turn they're not going to be in range to dispel it so it buys you an extra turn Which is beautiful and that's actually why we took master of magic in this list instead of high priest I would rather reroll the palisade and reroll a few other things with that Especially dispelling your own palisade. It comes in handy. Sure. Sure. Yeah Palisade still a five Yes, I believe yes, I believe it. Yep. It used to be a six in second and they made it easier So it's super easy to dispel right? But everyone every list except for seraphon will be out of range to dispel it if you do this correctly I'm hoping to feature this a version of this list. Maybe this exact list in our upcoming battle reports, which TBD when that happens But we definitely want to show this off because it is really techie, but it is really cool And I think it gives stormcast the extra edge they need in order to be Capable of beating everything in the meta Yeah, nice. I like it All right Tyler any final thoughts on this? Yeah, these are great lists guys. I really appreciate it There's like Tyler and I did not make any lists because I was like I saw these and I was like nah Now we're good Paul and regan got us covered Thank you. Thank you gentlemen so much for coming on tonight. Yeah, this has been an amazing show It really has a deep life. Yes a lot of good information like I I one of the things I'll say is that What I value in people who comment on the quality of stuff is when they display like a sort of deep critical thinking about it, right and don't just sort of fly off into into Into very half thought out responses And what I've noticed from you guys both in the show and on your channel is you've thought through all this stuff very deeply You guys are really excellent at not only thinking through the strategy the tactics But the critical thinking of how you're playing how your opponent's acting stuff like that And when you're expressing these opinions on units, even when we sometimes disagree, which again, we didn't screw on that much actually Uh, I love how well you thought it out and it's great. This is absolutely fantastic. I'd love to have you guys back on sometime Uh, maybe when stormcast 2 comes out or maybe before Sure, I just want to give a quick shout out to our other, uh, co-storm host jj He's not in the the chat with us today or sorry. He's not in the call with us today Uh, but he is very much a part of our our podcast He has a cool element of like this layman who doesn't know that much about the guy. I feel like I'm insulting him No, I feel bad. Uh, let's just say let's just say paul's paul's makes most experience It's made experience and new players and so the idea is to get perspectives from all three kinds of And players and has entry levels and stages ignore So like we get a wide variety of perspectives and like opinions on what they think is what each person thinks is good Yeah, I don't want to I don't want our show to just become like this is what all the top tournament players do Like I don't I want more than that I want people to just talk about playing stormcast or any army really eventually we might branch out into Into other factions, but yeah, I shout out to jj. You rock. Good luck on painting those six track offs this weekend That's a lot of drake offs. That's a lot of drake offs Yeah, all right. Good stuff. Well gentlemen, thank you so much for all of you out there who watched Thank you so much if you made it to the end uh, don't forget to uh Don't forget to hit that like button subscribe if you haven't already shared this around that helps other people Stormkeep listed in the description go check them out Their link is down there. Go give them a watch. He'll give them a sub as well Uh, gentlemen, absolute pleasure. Tyler. Thank you as always For all of you out there. Thank you so much as always We'll see you next wednesday Bye