 It's Wednesday, it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly. Joining me, as always, hopefully everybody can hear me okay. I changed the setup around a night. It looks like it's working okay on my end. Hopefully it is. We'll find out if not. I can fix it, but hopefully it's working. Joining me, as always, is my own Shadow Twin. It's Tom. What's up? Hello friends. Also joining us this week, I'm so glad to have them back on the show. Mr. AOS coach, Anthony, what's up brother? G'day, g'day, g'day. I am pumped to be back twice in one year. Holy shit. Anthony, I'd have you on every week, but you know, I think your schedule might not allow that. But you can, anytime you want to replace Tom, you know you're more than welcome. It's fine. Look, I've just replaced my version of Tom with Clint, but I don't know if I'm going to be absorbed into your conglomerate just yet, but it's good to be back at least by, not by default, by you having to record in my house. So that was truly an honor. I haven't cleaned my house since you're recording in my studio. You may want to get to that at some point. Your wife might become a bit challenged. It's like that Simpsons episode where Bart gets the spit on his hand from that girl you really liked and he just protects it. He doesn't want anyone. He doesn't want to wash their hands. That's basically my house. Gotcha. That's totally fair. And I understand. Coach, truly the only thing I'm sad about is that I'm not coming back there in like two months to hang out with you again. So there we go. All right. And tonight we are going to be talking Marathi, of course. But first up, we're going to do some news because there's a lot of it. It's a busy news week. Tuck in folks. This is going to be a long show. I hope everybody's ready to go. Here we go. All right, Tom, let's begin with the news. Vampirates. Well, yes. The rumor engine is up. It's up on the screen there. Yep. So, so what is your guess? I don't know, man. It's a very worn looking thing. That's what I'll say. Like that's a real messed up thing. One of its little, it's got a little bent twisted nail through it. Right? Obviously. It's got a little twin tines. I legitimately have no idea what this is. I don't know. I can't, I'm not even sure I could formulate a potential guess. I'm curious what the audience thinks it is other than Vampirates because as we all know it's of course a Vampirates. But if it weren't to be Vampirates, then the question is, what is it? Anthony, have you got any guesses as to what this strange twin tined weapon is? Are we talking about the rumor mill? Or are we talking about the three-day-to-go count? Sorry, my internet played up a little bit just when we started talking about it. You're okay. The rumor engine in this case, the little double tine thing. Yeah, I think Vampirates clearly is what the internet wants, so it must be Vampirates. Of course. But whether it is the new Dark Elf equivalent of Maliketh, I was confused between Malarian and Maliketh. It was Maliketh. It's now Malarian. Right. Yeah, I would get confused between the two. That's to me probably the thing. But who knows? Could be Underworld. Could be 40K. Who knows? But either way, this is just walking in Eddie and say it is Vampirates for 100. There you go. You know what's funny? I was looking at Warboss Kurgan's site today, which if people aren't aware of, Warboss Kurgan keeps an excellent record of all of the rumor engine pictures, and then he puts the real image of the mini next to it once we know what it is. Right? And it's this huge, beautiful running blog. The Warboss does a fantastic job. And in light of this, I was actually thinking today, like, what haven't we solved? What's out there? There are things from April and March of this year that have not yet been revealed that we don't know what minis they belong to. They are so far behind. Like it's evident and obvious that we are so far behind on releases. It is crazy how many unsolved rumor engines there are. And you know, a couple of people have mentioned it looks like a Skaven Poki stick because it is very rough shot and it is like it has little tines like a little Skaven Poki stick. And let me tell you what, I'm here for it. I'm going to go ahead and say it's not Vampirates. It is in fact Skaven. This is just the proof that my prediction in the future of Broken Realms episode was absolutely correct and we are getting the reformatted Skaven release for AOS 3.0. All hail our new rat overlords. The verminous horde rises again with beautiful new sculpts. I can't wait. So let it be written. So let it be done. That could be a next story arc. We had the Nighthawk coming out of the storm vaults and we had them versus storm cast. It is now rats taking over and infesting the entire mortal realm, bringing everyone back together. I'm lock it in again, 100 points lock it in. There you go. That's it. That's it. We've got it. All right. So cool. What else we got? Yeah. So I mean a new white dwarf is coming and the teaser for this trailer showed up in my basement this weekend. Spiders are coming. Yes. Tom is pointing to the fact that he has an infestation right now of tiny little baby spiders in his house. It's gross. But yes. So if you see one on my face, that's what's going on. Sure. If it just one like falls into the shot, yeah. If that sort of nightmare fuel happens, yeah. You should be... There's 20 of them up near my light. When I picked up my headphones today, there was a web with six baby spiders on my headphones. This is nightmare fuel, Tom. Please stop. So at any rate, yes. In celebration of that next month, we are getting the spider fang, clearly they're getting the treatment just as the squigs did before, the squigs and the trolls, trogoths I should say, before them. Boy, we're really taking some plow and some extra work into that Gits book, huh? I'll tell you what. You know what that means, don't you? That book is not getting updated for at least another year. Sure. It also probably means that Gits will probably only have a really minor role in broken realms. Maybe Skragrod and the actual Goblins, but it probably means that we're not going to get much love. So if it gets player, lower those expectations, broken realms, Skragrod is probably not coming. I mean, here's the reality, all of that would be in broken realms if it was coming in broken realms. Right. Sure. It is the exact type of thing that would show up in broken realms. And White Wolf has a lesser lead time than the books do. Right. Right. Right. That's exactly right. So, yay. That's fine. Look, I'm excited for it. The reality is the two that they've already done are pretty fantastic. The squig one was amazing. The Troll one, the amount of stuff they packed into the Trogoth one to actually make that a competitive force is shocking. Here's magic resistance and offense and defense and everything you need. And Battalions, it was just like, take all the stuff. Here's everything. I don't disagree with that. My biggest fear is that I don't know if these War Scrolls can be redeemed. You're saying the Spider Fang War Scrolls. Right. I mean, the Arachnirarchs are great. Man, drop those another 50 points and throw a battle line on them. You have a force. You're talking on the basic Arachnirarch, like the Skitter Strand? Yes. But you're not taking... Here's the problem though. But you're not taking objectives or holding objectives, rather. Because at the end of the day, the problem with Spider Fang is that their main troop, which is a bunch of Cav, on five pluses that hit on the fives. So it's just like, there's a War Scroll problem here. And so I'm like, I love the army. I would love to bust out my Skitter Strand or my Spiders, my Spider Fang. But I just like, there's fundamental problems that need War Scroll rewrites. We'll see. Again, who knows what they could do in the article, but it's exciting that at least we're taking a swing at it. That's better than not. Hey, I've waited five years and they're finally doing something with the Spider Spiders. Sure. Absolutely. I don't hate that. I'm glad that they've actually taken initiative. Absolutely. That's what I'll say. I don't know anyone that has as large of a collection as me outside of Paul. Right. Of course. Paul being the preeminent Spider Fang collector in the world. Right. Right. I have a lot of Spider Fang. I literally have 80 Spiders. Plus the ones in your roof. Exactly. Yeah. Get them down here and you can have an extra unit. Not talking about the 30 or so around my lamp, but like 80 or so of the Spider Riders. At least I may have, I think I broke 100. I'll have to double check, but like, so I'm ready. Don't get me wrong. I just, I don't know. We'll see. We'll tell. All right. What else we got? Oh, Anthony, hold up before I leave that. Anthony, I know you're a Gets fan in general and any thoughts from you on the Spider Fang? Yeah. I mean, I've had some pretty cool list discussions already with the squigs and the Trogs so far. And I know in, you know, various WhatsApp and Discord, you know, we've all speculated over the last couple of days since the news broke, like what would that look like? I wouldn't feel right if Spider Fang didn't get a little boost considering we've kind of given love to everyone else. And I think people are excited to see what is coming, whether it's going to be like back in Aegis Sigma one before we got the Goonspite gifts. We did have some competitive build for spiders and it really kind of focused on that mortal wound output, getting it down to like fours or five. So, you know, will there be some deep striking from terrain where we see some alternative kits where people are potentially mish-mashing, maybe, you know, we did see a narrative version. I think Ben Johnson had written some stuff in a white dwarf that while he's not legal, we did see some kit bashing with the Gobba Pelusa in conjunction with squigs. So, I don't know, my mind is open. I'm hoping that there's something that's exciting. But I do feel what Tom said is that from a competitive match play objective scoring, I think they're going to be a lot harder to handle then. And look what they've done with squigs, you know, I'm excited to see the potential. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Yeah, I mean, there's options there. You can write, like when you're talking about the difference between what you can do in a sub-faction and even a few battalions, it's shocking what you can actually get in there. So, yeah, who knows. I'm open to it. Like, I'm prepped. I can do this. So, if they drop something hot, I'm in. But I don't know. We'll see. All right. I don't think, I think people who play spiders are going to bring them back or they're going to be already playing them. I don't know if these rules are going to get people to run out and go by a spider army. Sure. I think we saw that with squigs, but with probably spiders, probably not. Right, right, right. I mean, but again, we could be completely wrong. Like, they could make it so that a bunch of the non-mounted spiders gain battle line status, meaning that there's no limit on them. Like, if it replaced the hemoth, like, you could easily see a world where people are running those Azure battle line units. The War Party spider could count all the goblins on top of it. So, it could be like 10 dudes, right? Because there's like eight goblins on top of it, right? Yeah. There are exactly eight. Yeah, yeah. There are eight dudes. If the shaman could count as, like, so it would be nine. It would count as nine models for the War Party arachnarch. But if the shaman, it counts as 10. Sure. I'm just saying, like, there could be fun, crazy things you could do with it, right? Yeah. Which would be hilarious. It'd feel like you're stealing other people's, like, design space. But you know what? For the spiders, I will take it. There's more of a justification for the big spider with actually 10 guys to count as 10 guys than there is for one single giant, like, little mancrusha to count as 10 guys. I mean, you make a great point. Yeah, like, there's 10 dudes there. You'd be like, this thing counts as 10 guys because there's 10 guys here. Look, here's the 10. I'll point them out. And I'd be like, yeah, that checks out. The math works there. So, I mean, you know, I don't know, man. I'm just saying it's a great point. All I want to say is I want to see some spiders explode into more spiders. Nothing is more scarier than a big spider turning into a lot of small spiders from eggs and stuff. So let me put a whole bunch of spiders on the table that work for free. Well, what else is this? If you've ever painted the Arachnorock model, you know that there are baby spiders crawling out of the torso of the big spider. So, like, it is already modeled on the Arachnorock. There you go. Make it happen. Just make it happen, G-dubs. All right. I mean, it's already to print and shipped. So whatever is done. Just add an FAQ Arata. I hope to be forgot. There you go. OK. What's our next item? No, I'm going to keep talking about spiders. So the Sons of Bahamut FAQ. How about you talk about that, Vince? Yes, Sons of Bahamut FAQ dropped today. It was great. Everything that the Sons wanted was there. So yes, your guy actually counts as a wizard. And yes, you can walk over top of Endless Spells. It does point out that there are Endless Spells and judgments of corn and prayers of whatever and blah, blah, blah. They have to, like, list all the prayer type things out, all the Endless Prayers, because they all have their own names. And so, like, here's what's actually what that implies. Here's the stupid world we live in now, since they didn't think of a name for all these Endless Prayers. Army X comes out, OK, which whatever it is. Imagine some future army, Army X. And they get Endless Prayers. They get their own form of prayer. For the first month until the FAQ update, the Giants can technically not walk over those, OK? Because they're not in the list of things that Long Shanks applies to. Now, obviously, anybody with common sense in their head is going to go, well, of course, we're just waiting on the FAQ update. Of course, you can walk over the top of that. Nobody's actually going to be that much of a jerk. But my point is, is that it wouldn't have been easier if we had just called them all Endless Prayers or something and then could have just said they can walk over Endless Spells and Prayers, and then that would have been future-proofed? Just a thought. So do you know what the best part about it is, and it dawned on me, just as you said that? I'm ready. They can't step over the IDENF boat. No, it's more than four inches tall. All either side of it. Correct. It doesn't matter. If at any point on the terrain is more than four inches tall, you cannot Long Shanks over it. Look. It has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with that. It's not terrain. It's an aetheric vortex. It's their terrain is in their keyword. The boat has terrain in the keyword. It doesn't matter. The boat is taller than four inches. Yes, I'm 1,000% sure of it. It does not matter, Tom. The boat is more than four inches tall. All current on offer terrain from GW with the exception of the basic Azurite ruins, the one that isn't level stacked, is more than four inches tall. So it just doesn't work. So Long Shanks applies to basically 0% of the current kits sold by GW, OK? There you go. Now, at any rate, neither here nor there. The point is. I was making a point about the aetheric vortex. No, I mean, it's still terrain. Makes me even more sad. Sure. It doesn't matter. They ruled it. You can walk over on this post. Which is really good. It means you can't trap a giant in shackles or something dumb like that, as we all knew that was going to be the case. So all great. All the rulings, basically, you can kick objectives out of your zone and change their points value. That came down on the side of the Giants, which I was surprised about. So something like Battle for the Pass, you can just boot that objective right on out of your zone, turn one, and the enemy does not have a four point objective. Take that. Crazy good. That one really surprised me. That one really surprised me. I thought we wouldn't keep that. I thought it was a nice little trick we would have for a month or so, but that we would end up getting an FAQ saying that the original points value for the marker wouldn't change if it was moved. But to our surprise, we get to move it around. So I think the stops of cracking eaters, whether it's the mercenary or within sums, is just exponentially increased. I completely agreed. His like kick ability just got so powerful now that that got solidified into the rules. There's a lot of scenarios, by the way, that function like that, where the scoring is based on its current location and kicking it around even a small number of inches dramatically changes the nature of the game. I would point out that something like knife to the heart is now like just that's a that is a giant almost auto win scenario as they just kick their objective either backwards and sit one guy on it while the rest of their army literally charges forward, or they just kick it forward with them and they just march like in a take or drive you march 105 wounds straight up to their objective and just toe in. Like unless they can completely keep you off where you can't pile in or anything by the fact by that by the bottom of two, because otherwise it'll tick over to three and you'll just win. Cause you'll have 105 models on theirs. And there's like their whole army could be sitting there not outnumber you. And you're doing that with like a couple of bases. Right? So at any rate, yeah, good stuff. Now, unfortunately, we also got the most insane potential ruling in this FAQ in a long time, in a long time, in a long time. So I don't even know where to begin to explain this, but I feel it's my duty to all of you out there to explain this nonsense. So here we go. Tuck in folks and try to stay with me. Okay. In the rules for mightier makes rightier, the evolution of the ogre rules where that makes your little giants count as 10 and your big giants count as 20. There is a designer note. We all saw it. And there was a lot of argument amongst the giant community as to what exactly it meant. And paraphrasing the designer's note said something to the effect of in a scenario that uses alternative capturing rules, you can choose to use these rather than the capturing rules. And so there was kind of discussions about what that meant and how we all interpreted it to mean was like, was not how it came down. I'm not even gonna talk about what we thought it meant because here's how it came down. What it came down as is that the sons of behemoth player can in scenarios with alternative objective taking rules. So this would be places of arcane power where you have to be a hero and move onto it where this is better part of valor where you have to be battle line or take and hold. I think it's one out of the core book that's like this. Okay. All of these have some rule like a specific unit type has to walk onto it and stand there. And that's how you take, right? Like a hero or a battle line or whatever. Or whatever. So now what you can do is the giant player can just say, no, I am the captain now. Look at me, look at me. I am the captain, okay? And you can just tow up to the objective and go, we're not using your rules anymore. Whatever it says in the scenario, that's not true. I know you've got a hero standing there and I know you thought you took the objective, you didn't. I'm switching the rules. The rules are now no longer, it's a hero has to stand on this thing. I'm using the standard objective scenario rules. And now I'm 10 guys and you're one hero, I win. Cause now I'm using the standard objective rules. Okay. So I just take this from you and you can march all the heroes on here you want. You can march all day long. I'm still owning this one, cause I'm 10 guys, right? Cause I've changed the rules. Cause I've changed the rules, right? Now this gets a lot worse, okay? And I don't really want to get lost in like the weird legal minutia of this. But the issue is there's nothing that caveats, like it says for the purposes of determining control of objectives, okay? But there's not actually a sort of, there's not actually a trigger in the game properly of exactly how that happens. Like we know when control is sort of checked but certain things seem to have alternative control mechanisms. And so you can invoke this rule anytime you want, seemingly. You don't have to actually be near it. Like you don't have to be near the objective and it doesn't have to be your turn. And so like there's some real weird legal rambling you can do here where this is, this is not going to be easy to explain, okay? But here we go. I'll take a shot at it. By raw, this seems to be correct. You move your hero onto the objective, trying to satisfy the move onto the objective criteria. I say, I'm not anywhere near that objective but I go, no, I'm switching that objective to mightier makes right here. That's now a normal objective. I don't have to be near it to do that. I just have to say that's the rules I wanna use for that objective. Okay, so now your movement did nothing, okay? Then when it comes to the end of the round where we're gonna actually check who controls the objective, I'm gonna say, nope, I'm switching back. Now we're gonna use the hero rule again, okay? And since you didn't move onto it during the move phase or why? Right, you didn't move onto it during the move phase, so hence- Let me say it this way. You didn't claim it when you moved onto it. Correct, hence you don't control it now even though you're standing there. Right, so look, that's the worst interpretation of this ever. It's gamey as all get out. If anyone did this, I would spit in their face across the table. Like that would be the honest response. Okay. It's just silly. I'm beginning to like this army the more that you talk. Right, exactly. Yes, as Alex said, the trigger is when it's contested, but when it's contested is like, that's not, when is that, right? So at any rate- Because there's no status checking. It's not like there's a point in the game where we go, this is how you, this is the moment in the game where all objective determination is made, right? It says like at the end of this round, the battle plan checks, each scenario is checking at certain times as triggered there. There's not a game state we can appeal up to, right? But I've switched the rules and I've said I'm gonna use my timing and then I've switched back because I can keep doing it anytime, right? And you're saying that your timing, your use of the rules prevents their claiming. Correct, I can hold them to zero points on every objective forever, regardless of whether or not I could, you could table me at the top of one and I could still say you score zero points for the rest of this game. Cause I'll just keep switching the objectives on you. I don't need to be present with models to do that. Don't you love the world we're in now? So at any rate, look, it's stupid. Okay, it's stupid. I'm not trying to defend any of this at all. Okay, here's the correction. Here's here's the correction. You ready? Why did you have to ruin our toys, Vince? Erase this FAQ immediately in the winter FAQ and then erase the designer's commentary out of the book itself. And let's just be ogres, okay? Let's just be big ogres where we're like 10 and 20. That's how we all thought this worked. And it's fine. Like it's fine. The world worked fine like that. But now you've ruined it. You've ruined all. It just doesn't need to be like that. Now again, the way I did it is like this most extreme, insane, legal, stupid interpretation that's dumb and gamey and I'm not recommending and it shouldn't be there. But I shouldn't be able to draw that and seemingly still be okay under Raw, right? And if somebody looked at me and went, that's nuts and nonsense, right? I'd be like, yeah, yeah it is. Like that just shouldn't be in the game. Even trying to explain, like take the simplest version of this, where I can just switch the objective taking mechanic, right? Let's get rid of all that gamey crap I just discussed. And let's just talk about switching the objective. You walk on with it. I have to start every game of places of arcane power now and explain that you're walking on with heroes means nothing. I'm going to walk up and automatically take the objective from you every time. You will never hold it. No, that's not true. They'd have to have 21 people on that objective space. Yes, unless I'm playing takers, in which case I hope you have 31 people on that objective. Or I happen to move three babies up there, in which case in takers, I'm counting as 45 models. I will just take every objective from you. I own places of arcane power forever. Like you don't, I am the captain now. That's it, look at me. Look at me, okay? Like- You're getting me excited about this army then. Yeah, I understand, okay? But the fact that I would have to explain that is just like, how weird and unintuitive is that? Like, no, no, I know it says, I know you thought we were playing the scenario, but we're not. I'm changing the rules. But so, so, and to answer, the answer Alex's statement, no, they don't use their rules, they use the scenario rules unless you change the scenario rules. And the key is that the allegiance ability doesn't change their claiming rules. It changes the scenario itself. Correct. And that's the key, is that your rules interact with the scenario that now the other player has to play by. Right. And look, I get it with this confusion because this is all over the place. This was hours of discussion as to how the heck this is even supposed to work. And I'll be completely honest with you, I'm not even like, I'm not even positive that I have this all correct. Because it's nonsense. And I've spent like six hours today or like discussing this, right? This should just be erased. Stop this. You made a mistake. Get rid of it. Okay, Anthony, go. It's the starting part to the, it's the starting part to it that makes it an issue. It's, cause when you look at the bottom part of the FAQ, it does say, I could, I can choose to control it one way or another, but it's right at the start where it's basically, that really needs to be tightened up. I think all we're about to see every tournament organizer set up a house rule that it only impacts the Gargant Player. The Gargant Player can choose how they score the objective. It doesn't impact. I mean, look, as a Gargant Player, I don't want to do that. And I won't do that. I don't want that negative play experience. I don't want to win on a, I've got your moment. But that's not why I come into this game. So hopefully Gargant Players don't use that. And tournament organizers look into that and clear this up while we get another FAQ on an FAQ. What you need is you just need to create a half page laminated handout. No, I'm just gonna print a picture of the meme from the movie of the guy saying, I am the captain now. And I'm going to hand him that laminated card whenever I change the objective. I'll be like, there you go. And that's it. That's my explanation. At any rate. Yes, it's silly. Otherwise, honestly, beautiful, thank you. Or we could just print out the FAQ, put it in a little envelope that just basically says you cannot win and then hand it to our opponent on certain scenarios, like places of arcane power. You might as well concede, here's a $5 voucher to go buy yourself a drink. Right. You're maximum, like at the start of the game, I'll explain what I'm gonna do and then say, so your maximum score in this game is zero. I'm gonna go get a sandwich. Tell me what you do. It's irrelevant. Bye. If I get one point, the game ends. Correct. The game ends, because your cap at this is zero. So actually tournament organizers, sort this out, get it cleaned up. Yeah, I agree with Ghostmutter, by the way, with just much like terrain placement and meeting engagements, let's pretend it doesn't exist. Which, yes, I agree. I like this idea. Yeah. A meme, a giant, like a mega-gargant, with Vince's face over the top of it, that says I am the captain now. Sure, sure, absolutely. All right, so anyway, enough of that nonsense. It was otherwise, I mean, like, I hate that this silly discussion dominated the FAQ, because it really was great, right? Like, we did get all of the things we were hoping for. They answered everything the right way. The rest was very clear, like, I, you know, just there's one three-foot-long proud nail sticking out that's gonna hook you. But other than that, it really was great. It's so amazing, it's so amazing. So that happened, other news. So there's a preview show coming this weekend. Yes, yes, and we know it's got AOS in it, and I'm gonna hold my, I'm gonna keep my powder dry for a moment. Anthony, you haven't got to talk much, because I had to go on a rant there. What are you excited about in the preview show? What are you hoping to see? I don't know, I don't know. I mean, I don't know what you're gonna say, Vince, but I know that we saw the Games Workshop website recently come up telling people what they can expect at the store, and we did see a slanish gold coin in the three images. So whether we see, look, one of the things that I noticed in Shadow and Pain that I'm sure other people noticed was that the mortal hero just wasn't as good as the snake lady. So does that mean that we've got mortal slanish coming? Does it mean we can hybrid that box and make it a cult of slanish? I don't know. But for me, I'm just, look, I got what I wanted this year, which was Gargant. I'm just hoping other people who get what they want. For me, I'm done for the year. I'm happy. I got Blood Ball 3 coming. I got Gargant. I could not ask for anything else this year. Totally fair. Tom? Do you have any of the images? I don't. I don't have any of the five, four, three images. I'm sorry. Okay, that's fine. I am so excited. I sent my wife away this weekend. Okay. Okay. We're gonna, so after the show ends at 6.45, Vince and I are gonna do a show. No, it ends, it doesn't end at 6.45. It starts at 1.45 and goes till like 3.15 GMT. So it'll be like 8.45 to 9, or 10 o'clock our time. I don't think so. I know so. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, anyways, yes, we're gonna do a show afterwards. Obviously. As I sent my wife away. Okay, very good. I mean, what I think is this, I think that we have a box of Nergal versus Lanesh coming. I think it is, I actually am gonna go out on a limb here and say, I think it's both new model sets, some new model sets. Well, so you're not just assuming, everybody's been assuming that Decay is just Death Guard because we know Death Guard are coming in December for 40K. You're actually hoping for new AOS Nergal as well. I am, I am. So like, it'll probably be something generic actually. So like, so here's what I would say. It's most likely a demon versus demon box. Okay, okay. So like the, what was the box came for? Brathen Rapture. Like odds are it's that. I don't think that's what it is. Okay. I'm going against the odds and I'm gonna say, I think it's actually a Nergal mortals, Rotbringers versus Heeden Knights. Okay. And I think that we're gonna see some Blight Kings, I don't know, maybe some Pusk Oils and like a new hero maybe for Rotbringers, maybe a new unit, but I'm just, but probably just a new foot hero because of reasons or maybe a new Harbinger of Decay. I could see them do that. Because that model needs updated. And then I think it'll debut the new slanesh Heeden Knights models. Yeah. All right, here's my thoughts. One, we've seen a lot of images of the various pirate stuff, very piratey looking things. Right. Oh, wait, can I finish? Yeah, sure. You're going right where I was gonna go, which is, and this is the other half of it, is that the other alternative is that it's the rest of the drowned Nergal force. Yeah, correct. That's exactly right. That the whole Vampirates thing could turn out to be a lot of like zombie pirates and death pirates or Nergal pirates or something in that regard, right? Like some form of like Rot and Zombie Decay pirate type of thing. And we could get that for AOS as well. That like Decay could have a double meaning. It could be Death Guard and a new thing like that for AOS. There's been a lot of Rotten ship looking, piratey looking Rotten zombie type stuff in the rumor engine. So it's not outside of the realm of possibility, okay? Right. Yeah, go ahead. I was gonna say, we did see when we got Magikin of Nergal, 40K had gotten there. They got some like new models and a new range. Was it the November? And I think we got Nergal around January or December. So with that terrain piece, I can see that. I can see some type of benefit to AOS in Nergal. Yeah, and the, first of all, the little slice images we've gotten, right? Do not all seem to be fitting into just mortal slanesh or Death Guard, right? The two sort of main things. The image today. One is very clearly Slave to Darkness. Well, yeah, the one from yesterday looked very much like a little Slave to Darkness guy with weird fingernails though. Like a really weird rotten hand. Like a mute, like a, like a Forsaken style mutated hand. Yeah, yeah. But you saw the same scaled cloak that is on the current cast wearers, the new Sculpt cast wearers. And you saw the little tassel hanging from the weapon that's on the chaos. We also had lots of signifiers like his belt dagger was the same chaos belt dagger they often have stuff like that, yeah. Today was just straight up a boat. It was like a Viking-ish looking boat with a shield and like boat pieces. Yeah. But there was more to today and I'll give a shout out to my club mates, Lord of Ruins here who are mentioning that you can see in the bottom corner of it is the Admech symbol, but it's actually a modified version of an Admech symbol. So we would have been discussing is it a cultist or a heretic version of Admech for 40K? That was one that we kind of picked up. That'd be cool. That could be neat. So I mean like the point is that we're definitely, it's definitely hammer time. Oh, oh, here comes the hammer because get out your hammer pants. It's time to, it's time to get into the leather, daddies. Like this is our mortal slanesh. That's it, lock it in. Like there's no way. We didn't get the word decadence. We didn't have this coin. We didn't get a lord of pain that's buffing mortal heat knights not to get a mortal slanesh release, right? I mean, come on, come on. Also Dark Mechanic would be cool if that was also like a reference to decay, of like the decay of machines and stuff. So that'd be really neat. Dark Mechanic has been this thing that I know a lot of people have wanted for a long time in the 40K world. So pretty awesome. Dark Mechanic would be sweet. So this is gonna be a super exciting show. Very stoked for it. Yes, stop, it's leather daddy time. That's right, absolutely. So get ready, strap on your best chaps. Don't bother to put on any pants. You're ready to go for slanesh. There you go, okay? All right. What's next, Tom? Man, I've never been so happy to be wrong. Oh, about the battle for us boxes? There was a thread on the Facebook page, like the AOS Facebook page and it's like, are we in a battle for us box this year? And like, the third post down was me and I said, no, we are not. And then two hours later, this was like two hours. That prediction did not hold up. Nope, nope, didn't have much self-life. I was the same, Tom. Tom, I was convinced a hundred percent that there was no battle for us boxes because we were getting these little mini boxes with broken realms. I thought if we get one more broken realms book this year, that would be potentially another four to eight additional kits. I was like, no, that's our version of the battle for us box, more small ones as opposed to a big one. I was wrong, a hundred percent wrong. So we've got four, four, count them, four AOS battle for us boxes. 40K got six, but that's okay. I'm not jealous or anything, it's fine. I mean, they did have a new addition this year. Sure, no, it really, it's literally fine because like two of them are just space marine stuff. So they basically got four. So the, we're not sure on the timing of the cost as to when they're coming out or how much they're gonna cost, bet more expensive, okay? So let's talk the retail cost of these things. Like if you just total up the retail cost of everything in the boxes, what do you get to? I'm gonna talk in USD because that's the stuff I'm familiar with. But obviously this is gonna vary based on your local currency. So in USD, so in the United States, these boxes were traditionally priced about $175 in previous years when they've come out. Okay? I think they will be more this year. My guess is they'll be probably like 210, 215, maybe 225. That's where I think they'll end up. We'll see. No. I mean, they would have to be, in order to be the right approximate value, they would have to be a 240. Well, I'm not sure, like we'll see. Like there's different percentages they could be here of how this works out, okay? Right. But normally they're at the 35% mark. Like that's a very common- Which is lower than 240. Yeah, they're 35% off, which would be, you know, which is more than $90 off being the point. Like, cause they vary between 30 and 35% in savings, historically, okay? So let's just use the low end of that and say 30%. So let's do the cost. Ogres, 308 US in retail. That's an estimation number because I'm counting half a giant box, okay? Right, right. In which, you know, you can't actually buy, but if you take half the giant box cost, it's 308. Now, shout out to Azir Weekly, who talked about how there's this weird giant who just keeps following other armies around for no reason and no one knows who he is or why he's there. And the Ogres were reporting that, yeah, we happened to pass two near to an work wall and he stopped following the iron jaws and started following us, which I thought was a great reference to the previous iron jaws box that had a giant shoved in it for no visible reason. So, okay, whatever, cool, it's fine. I guess if you've got this many extra giants sitting around GW, why the heck were they out of stock for so long and why are they repackaged in a two for 125 kit? I've got words, I've got words, okay? Anyways, 308. Zinch is the highest cost one at 312 retail. It's got the big Lord of Change in it, which is awesome, but it's also got a bunch of Arcanites in it, which is not as awesome. Yes, yes. We don't know what Zenge is going. Surely we're going to see a Zenge mortal book as opposed to a more change host book. Yeah, so the KO box is 308 and the Gits, them Gits, them Gits is 290, they're the cheapest one. Important point about the Gits book, there is in fact 15 hoppers or bounders in the box on the count and in the picture, it's wrong. It says 22 and only has 14 guys in the picture. They've answered 5 million Facebook comments saying, no, there's 15, obviously there's 15. Do you people know how we do business? It's on sprues, guys. They come in sprues, we can't just snip one out. That's not how this works. Like we just screwed up the picture. So like, but just what they had to deal with here because they took the wrong picture and printed the wrong box. You know that came in and they were like, oh no, oh, oh beans. I was gonna ask you if you got the squeak discount by someone clipping off one of your squeaks from that battle box. Right, I was gonna ask it but you acknowledged it before I got there. Yeah, yeah. Somebody asked what is the, what's the factors of the price increase you're considering? Just that these are actually higher, these have more in them. There's just more value. There's just more value. There's just more figs in the box. I mean, that's basically it. In previous years, these things totaled to like 250 ish to 260 or 265 is kind of the range they fell in for like, if you totaled up the retail of all of them, this year there's more stuff. So I'm assuming they're gonna have a higher cost. I mean, that would be, that would tend to make sense. They'll probably have their percentage the same, but. They're putting more in boxes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there you go. So, yeah, that was a very funny, very funny, I pity the poor Facebook person. As has been pointed out when they started answering the question, they were like, oh, he hopped off right before the picture was taken, ha ha, and they had little like funny comments. And then like as the thread kept going and everybody asked the same question after a while they were just like, no, there's 15, no, there's 15, no, there's 15, they were just like clearly done. So, Anthony, what about any of these, any of these catching your eye? So the eye and jaws one, I think definitely, oh, it's a lot of jaw. Sorry. I'm actually interested in daughters of Cain, ironically enough. So for me, I was hoping for a daughter's one. So there's nothing. The shadow and pain probably gets me more. The squig goblet, sorry, the squig trogoth one is always an interesting one. I would love to know the rationale on why they keep putting squigs and trogs together. Give me squigs and grots, give me trogs and grots. I don't understand that logic, but I think they all call the zench one as well. If they do give a nice little boost to the mortal, will be nice. I've got a lot of zench demons. I don't have a lot of zench mortal. So I think they're cool. I think they're interesting. Probably not for me, but shadow and pain probably is more for me. Sure. I was legit thinking about that ogre box because I have about a 2000 point ogre army, but it's not as big as I'd like it. And I like the fat boys on the ground, not the big monster trucks because I've got my sons for that kind of thing. And I was like, this would actually beef up my force by quite a bit. And I would just legitimately take the giant and put him just, he would just, I'd just make him into an extra giant for my son's army for when the sons of behemoth inevitably fall down enough points to where you can fit in an additional giant of an additional one or that's called future proofing, baby. So that's what I'm looking for. Yeah. Like, look, that's the inevitable future of the sons of behemoth is points adjustments down so we can fit in an extra singlet. Like I'm just telling you the way the world is here. Okay. Like these battle boxes, I always find myself six months later after Christmas wanting those battle force boxes. Like, ah, I wish I had grabbed them when I wanted them because of new year and new army, the meta, whether a new book drops. So I'm sure with some hindsight, I would definitely want to grab one of these four boxes. I don't know which one, but I think regardless, they're all good value. We just don't know it yet. And who knows what broken rules is gonna bring us. Yeah, that's a good point. Like almost anything is an interesting investment right now because we're at a point where you're almost always buying low and have the potential to just have your stocks shoot through the roof. Yes, as we're going to talk about today, when we get into broken realms, speaking of which, I think that's all our news. Let's get moving. Are we good? Any other things you want to say about the news? Okay, news over. I'm taking a timestamp of news over so I can start timestamping in the description for this. That's right. We're trying to be professional. Okay. Thumbnails and now timestamps. Holy shot. We've got merch. I told you that we were gonna get our stuff together this year. Now it took me a little while. Okay, that was more of a, it was a sort of New Year's resolution thing, but November, still in this year, we're coming through. Okay, so at any rate, yes, there will be timestamps. Let's talk pick of the week. Anthony, what would you like to share with everybody in the audience? It's a hard one. There's actually been a lot of cool stuff and I've been on holidays this week, which is why my background would look a little bit different to anyone who watches my channel. So I'm a little bit on holidays, which means I've been able to watch everyone else's content. So you mentioned Azir Weekly. For me, that Twitter handle has just been incredible. So if you're not following Azir Weekly on Facebook or on Twitter, I would definitely go follow them. You've got some really cool meme channels and you have some really great, interesting places to get funny, entertaining AOS. This, I always find Jonathan smart as well as funny. So for me, that was probably my biggest pick of the week. I do have some others, like we talked about Doug last week. Again, Doug, two plus five, just keeps knocking it out of the park. So from a law perspective and broken realms, Doug was huge for me to get across this before I had the book in my hand. Yeah, it's, I love it. Great pick. Tom? Thanks for stepping out of your lane, Anthony. No, what I'll say is like- Well, I held off, I held off the other ones. We had, I didn't actually, I purposely didn't say what you're gonna say now. So- No, no, you did. I was gonna say, you know, I picked it last week. I'm gonna pick Doug again because this content was so good this week. It's fine, we can all share in salutations for two plus tuffs, incredible coverage. Because what I'll say is, you know, realistically we are gonna talk lore tonight as well. We'll talk some of the narrative, but we're gonna talk about that after the rule. So we're gonna do this in reverse order because when we get to the narrative, we are gonna talk like just full spoilers about everything that happened. And so I wanna give people the chance to like jump off that train if they're not interested in watching the spoilers. Those will come last and we will warn. So if you're somebody who hasn't gotten your book yet, which I know a lot of people haven't and you're wanting to read, totally understand. But anyway, Doug does a great job of going through that. So no issue at all. Okay, my pick of the week is going to be about going back in time, which is our good friend Chuck, Strength Hammer, has a wonderful write-up in his blog on the history of Marathi and her time in the old world. Well and detailed for the, like Marathi is one of the most ever-present oldest figures in Warhammer. In the story of the world, she is extremely old. Like she has been around and seen the rise and fall of basically everything. There are a few beings more aged than her, okay? There are a few. They're just simply, what, Sigmar? No, Sigmar's younger than her. A lot younger than her, yeah. Lord Croke. Okay, Croke, yeah. Because he predates her. I don't say I'm trying to think of any others and I'm coming up shy, I'm sure there's a couple but she's one of the oldest. I mean, she's as old as any elf in existence. Yeah, sure. Who's still alive, yes. Yeah, yeah. Who isn't like, well, we'll talk later. In Marathi's belly. We'll talk later. Okay, but at any rate, if you want a great history of Marathi and everything that got her to this point, Chuck's write-up is fantastic. So I will link that blog post. It's awesome reading if you're looking for background on Marathi. Yeah, Croke is the only figure I can think of. So there you go, because everybody else is dead. Cinderfall says Croke is literally it. So I'm back and if Cinderfall says it, I believe it. Yeah, Nagash isn't because Nagash learned his magic from the Dark Elves. Like he was a mortal man. And like they were already Dark Elves at that point, which Marathi predates the concept of Dark Elves. Dark Elves, right. Right, right. So at any rate. Yeah, but Marathi's son that created that Dark Elve distinction. Sure, sure, sure, sure. All right, at any rate, lots of fun stuff. Okay, so that's Pick of the Week. Sorry, I'm time stamping here. Time stamping. There's been a lot of great content. Well, I'll stall you while you time stamp, but there's been some really cool content. Whether it's on Twitch, there's a lot of Agus Sigma stuff coming out, whether it's Mephisto or Haywoh Twitch and a lot of cool hobby hanging out right now during COVID, especially, you know, Cinderfall's been pumping out a lot of cool lore videos. There's a lot of cool stuff to guys go explore your world outside of maybe some of the channels you're already watching. A lot of cool stuff at the moment. Yep. All right, so let's talk hobby time. Anthony, have you been able to work on anything when you're on a VK there? I almost did. I ended up ordering another set of Gargants that I was gonna hopefully put into my Armies on Parade Board but I got delivered yesterday as opposed to Monday. So unfortunately, no hobby for me this week that the last couple of weeks, I've been crazy working on Armies on Parade Board and my 2K Sons of Behemoth Army because I have a tournament next month. No, not next month, next week. I literally have a tournament next week. So I'm going Gun Ho, literally the same weekend for Armies on Parade. So just before I left, I poured a whole bunch of resin. I've been just painting nonstop. But it's been good. It's a really cool army. You're really enjoying the character in Sons and I can, despite already owning three Mega Gargants and seven small Gargants, soon to be nine, I already can see myself buying more Mega Gargants because I'm familiar with the kit and I can convert it even more than I already am. So that's my hobby time. Nice, nice. I like it. Tom, what about you? What you been working on? Can see the airbrush there. This is where Tom lets us all down. No, I've been doing some list building. Okay. All right, that's like half hobby. That's like 0.5 counts. I mean, but it got me semi-excited for the game. Which is good. This is a necessary part of your process. I understand. It is. Like I really trudged through. I went, you know, we'll talk about this in the show and the body of the show. But like I went full circle on like the Harcaron. We'll talk about this in the city. Like I really wanted to make that work. And I just looped back around to playing just my pure, like my old dock list. Like model for model, basically my old dock list. Like went through the whole build process. And I was like, yeah, none of that's superior to this thing that I already have built in play. And so. But now you've got to wait on the winter FAQ to see if they, if they bust anything out of up in dock. Sure. Right, right. Which it could like, you know, I can move some stuff around. But then that led me to like, well, I wonder where my other lists sit. And so then I went through a whole cycle of going through all my fire slayers back to something that I'm very similar to only I basically have to add like another gun hauler. But that's easy. And then, so like, what ended up happening was like going and looking at new armies just led me to my old armies and tweaking them with a couple of different units and stuff like that. So, so it's, I'm getting a clearer focus on what needs to be done. Okay, nice. So for me, it's been a good hobby week. I don't know if you can see it here, but see this top shelf right there where I'm pointing. That's my completed Sons of Behemoth Army. That's 2K up on that shelf right there. So that's ready to go. I'll post the last mega that I finished up here on Monday this week. And then if I turn to this side, see this right here. These are my birthday presents. My birthday's coming up in a couple of days. And my wife was like, I'm not putting these anywhere here. Just take them. You can open them now if you want. I'm just gonna leave them in your office. And I was like, okay, thank you. So I was like, I'm gonna wait till my birthday. But I'm pretty sure this box right here is a mega garganty. Like the size of it, it was on my list. And the size of it seems to match pretty, pretty close. So I have a feeling. Like I've opened these before. Right, so I think I'll have another one there, which will be fine. Cause then I can either do like two and six or three and three. So that's good. I would never wanna run the one and nine version of Sons. That's just not interesting to me at all. The big boys are what's fun. So that's cool. And I've started working on this beautiful bust from DioraGuard, which is the here, here. I don't know her name. I'm not even gonna try to say her name, but this awesome bust, this is a nice, this is my reward for finishing my army. I get to spend time on a nice, beautiful bust and just work on some stuff and play with colors and really have a good time messing around with that. So yeah, that's what I've been working on there. And she's just starting out, obviously, she's still in very early stages, but I'm real excited about her. Beautiful, beautiful sculpt. Did a show on Saturday with Andy and Henry and it was an absolute blast. Those two guys are amazing, the Cult of Pain guys. If you get a chance to like take a class with them on the other side of all this COVID or go learn from them or stuff, we cannot recommend it enough. They're both just incredible hobbyists and even better amazing teachers. So, with that done, gentlemen, I think it's time that we turn to, oops, wrong way, sorry, to some broken realms, Marathi, okay? So, all right, broken realms, before we get into the deets, gentlemen, I want your high level thoughts. Anthony, again, don't get any spoilers of the narrative, but you can talk some story if you want, yes. What did you think of this book overall? What got you excited? It's interesting to question because I don't really play any of these armies in this book. Yes, you might try to technically get me that I play Cities of Sigma, but they don't reward the builds that I play. I'm a human based cities player. I'm not a dark elf player. So, for me, I was really hungry with the progression of the narrative. Yes, we've had soul wars, we've had some little spurts here and there, whether it's OBR and a little bit of OBR versus Archeon. Like for me, I picked up the book going in there with the narrative first, rule second, but also looking at maybe is there something in this book that might tweak me or kind of spark some curiosity to start one of these armies next. So, I like it. I like it. Is it a silver bullet all of these armies in and go five and oh at your next tournament? Probably not, but I think it's a cool book. I would definitely recommend it for anyone who was either looking to get more into the law or has an interest in some of these armies. I think it's quite a good book. Yeah, Tom, what's your 40,000 foot take on this? A plus on the narrative. Yeah, obviously, yes, yes, incredible. By the way, just real quick, I just wanna, I wanna even, I wanna hone in on that more. I'm having to do a thing where I give a spoiler alert and we're gonna shove the narrative to later because what's happening is impactful enough and interesting enough to necessitate that. This is the first book that's come out in the history of AOS where I felt that was necessary. That's huge. I'm sorry, please continue. No, you're right. A plus on the narrative. A plus on the relationship of the narrative to the rules. Yeah, yeah. A B on the rules themselves. Okay, all right, fair enough. For me, this book is fantastic. Like cover to cover, it's not a perfect book, but it's maybe my favorite book. They've released in AOS. It moves the narrative, as I just mentioned, in ways that I thought they would never have the guts to do, in ways they should have been doing for a long time. It's interesting and evocative. There's all of the sort of peoples and races participating in the story are doing interesting, compelling, cool things. Everybody gets some spotlight time. Everybody seems awesome, right, which is tough to do. It introduces a lot of really awesome new characters. Okay, like one of my constant laments is we'll sometimes get like a named character here or there and it's like, okay, why would I care? Right, like we'll get a named character and we have nothing to base it on. Like what made Gotrek and Felix such enduring staples was not just because they were a cool dwarf and a cool human dude, right? It was because they had a lot of stories around them that people came to love those characters. And here we get stuff like Lord Veritent Kaiser Von Brecht, this BA dude right here, like I am in for this guy. Like I am standing this dude, okay? He's fantastic throughout here because he also makes mistakes. Like he does some dumb things that I'm like, hmm, wrong choice there, buddy. That makes him all the better character, right? He's not like some perfect flawless sort of, he's clearly like somewhat of a protagonist in the story as a side protagonist at least. He's a supporting character, but he's really, really strong. No, no, the protagonist is on the cover. I understand. I know that this is your main project. Well, whatever, we could talk about it, but at any rate. It's kind of the venture on. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And it's sort of an antagonist's protagonist story ultimately, right? And he is the antagonist to her, I suppose. But at any rate, he's a compelling, interesting dude. And so it does a great job of introducing these special characters and making us sort of care about them. Rules-wise, it does a lot of great stuff, things that I've been asking for, like doing war scroll rewrites, building up portions of armies that weren't getting the focus, that weren't getting the attention. This makes me extremely excited for what we're gonna see in the rest of these books. Like, holy Moses, I am stoked for what, if every book is banging on this many cylinders, this game is going to be incredibly different in five, six months. Like, we will have so many different things going on. This is wonderful, okay? And Tom, your point about the narrative connecting to the rules, agreed completely. This is such a wonderful synergy of that, right? Like, everything fits in how you, when you get to the rules section, you've actually read the story, you're like, oh yeah. Yeah, right, this is exactly what I would expect to see. This is what I was waiting on. Right. And so all of the changes mechanically that needed to happen to certain units, largely, like I'm thinking about one big one specifically, like make sense. Right, right. So like they wanted to do a rules rewrite, and the fruit of that rules rewrite was the narrative itself. Yeah, they grounded it in the story. Yeah. And so it's good, yeah. Okay, so we're gonna start with the rules. Okay, and then we'll come back to the story at the end. So to do that, I need to bring this up, and then I need to drag us over and make us smaller here. Is it a PowerPoint? It is a PowerPoint, that's right. Done, son. As my hero would say, great success. It is PowerPoint time, folks, that's right. You didn't think we were gonna do a breakdown of this book and not have a PowerPoint. Of course we were doing a PowerPoint. All right, so, all right, let's get into it. We're gonna start off with the daughters of Cain, okay? Our doc. Now I have this stuff here from both Marathi and Shadow and Pain included, because it is notable that for daughters, there's actually two sources of changes to that army happening right now at the same time, right? And it's really, I really hope they do an article that kind of summarizes all these changes so that that way people actually know where to go, because I could see a lot of people buying this book and not getting Shadow and Pain, even people who might be casually playing doc and not realize how much of their army changed by what's in Shadow and Pain, because it is a big difference, okay? Like it significantly impacts your force, okay? Right. All right, so, let's start with doc, okay? All right, so, the daughters of Cain in Marathi, we've got a new Marathi War Scroll. Both Marathis are on the table at once, Little Marathi, which is Marathi Cain, and then Big Marathi, the Shadow Queen. We'll come back and dig into all this stuff. She has two drops. What this means is that you get the commandability, the awesome spellcaster, and the monster all at once, and she's now set up a new spellcaster and she's now 600 points. Before we get, I'm gonna pause on each one of these. What do you guys think of new Marathi? Go ahead, anybody? Anthony, what do you think? I thought Tom was gonna say something, I thought I'd be polite and allow. I really like it. I think one of the biggest shames of the mortal realm, actually there's two big shames of the mortal realm. One is we don't see Alariel more often and two, we didn't really get to take advantage of Marathi. You were so quick to change Little Marathi into Big Marathi that we never really got to enjoy both beautiful sculpts. So to be able to put both of them on the table to do it in such a way that it's narrative, it's thematic, and it's not game-breaking, you still got the best of the old world, the old Marathi, but you've got some interesting play styles and some interesting threats as an opponent because I think old Marathi, you had the strategy, right? You do some damage with an endless spell or two in between battle rounds. You would try to get those three wounds on ASAP. If you can take on the Little Marathi early, that helps you, you know, long game, but all of a sudden now the tide has turned and there's so many cool ways you can now use this model both as the combat monster and the superior spellcaster. So for me, like that's so cool. Yeah, I agree. Tom? Oh God, she's so good. Yeah, she is. Yeah, she is. She is beast mode. Oh my God. Suck it, allurial. Look upon what a real God is and despair. This is what 600 points of Godhood should buy. Yeah, that's what I was gonna go. This is what 600 points of God looks like. Yes, absolutely. Rika, you know what the best change here is? I'm ready, I'm ready. I mean, what? What? If that Marathi can fulfill all the roles on the battlefield, she needs to fulfill independent of one another. Yeah, sure. The sort of commander and spellcaster and backline person is literally separate from the forward bully monster that goes out on her own. Yes, you're not tying those things together as you often are with big God monster heroes. So one of the challenges, that's exactly it. One of the challenges with piloting Marathi was making sure she was in the right spot on the battlefield. But your wizard was also where the monster needed to go and making sure that you were navigating appropriately. Now, I'm gonna put whoever needs to be wherever, wherever I need him. Yeah, so. Yeah, go ahead. So just from a simple like battlefield organization standpoint, like, yes, they increased her value. Like she went up 120 points, but I don't have to actually include a snake caster anymore. Assuming you don't need snakes as a battle lancer. Right, but like the key was is that before I was having to include a blood rack Medusa in order to cast my mind razor. Now Marathi does that, only instead of one spell per turn, she gets three. And the only thing I'm giving up is the reroll ones to cast, which are significant, but I'm also getting three spells per turn now, which I wasn't getting that before. Absolutely. Yeah, I got a game in with New Dock this last week. Okay, so I did get it. I got to play New Dock versus New Stormcast, which we'll talk about in a minute. And that was very fun. And Big Marathi, I might as well have just queued up the, I might as well just queued up the wrecking ball because she came in like a wrecking ball really hard. Like Miley Cyrus could not have been blasting hard enough. Okay. She's amazing. The important things to note here that we should cover is that she's, her big monster form is more damaging. Yep. She is much more scary in melee now. Her previous- And she was, and buffed up, she was terrifying before. Right, yeah, yeah. She's brutal now. The, and her iron heart of cane, both Marathi's run off of the 12 wounds of the Shadow Queen. Any wound you deal to baby Marathi just automatically transfers over to Big Marathi. And Big Marathi cannot suffer more than three wounds a turn, period, under any conditions. Forget about it. That's the end of the story, done and dusted, okay? So Big Marathi cannot die until the bottom of two. There's no between turn and the spells. There's no nothing else. And that's assuming you're putting three wounds every turn on her, right? She is hard as a coffin nail. That your mind razor wizard cannot be sniped in turn one. Yeah. That's not possible. Yeah, exactly. Little Marathi can't die, period. Correct, yes. She only gets slain when Big Marathi dies. Then she just is automatically removed. Right, yeah. So you will have Marathi, you will have mind razor in to turn two. Guaranteed, yes. And honestly, often in to turn three because it's actually like, one of the things that I'll say is there's plenty of ways you can actually end up protecting this. So there's lots of armies that can't do any wounds in the top of one. And even that little extension, like if you save her wounds in the top of one, so she automatically gets into three. It's a complete game changer, right? Yeah, and like, you know, you wanna talk about other changes, like Little Marathi always counts as a general in dodge. Right. In addition to general. So you get a second general. So the abilities that are general specific, like command abilities that fire off your general, Big Mar, or Little Marathi counts as a general as well. Right, and so can shoot them off at like 12 inches or the longer range. I would also point out she can take control of commanding terrain, even if your other general is somewhere else, right? Yeah. It seems a minor thing, but I mean, I use scenery rules every time. So that's a thing in games. And having multiple generals rules with commanding terrain, as I will, as I know from playing invaders where you have three generals in your army. Okay. So, you know, that was always like, I had commanding all the time, baby, my general, I had one of three generals always sitting on commanding terrain. Anyways, so yeah, new Marathi is sweet and wonderful. And I love her. Can I just add one more thing to Marathi? Yeah. I'm really happy that she got rid of her cheap tricks. There were two cheap tricks that I really didn't enjoy as an opponent. One was the gaze of Marathi and removing model coherency and essentially deleting, you know, a potentially up to a half a unit because of, you know, a negative experience or, you know, something you miss out. So I'm glad that gaze of Marathi has been modified. And then the other one is the trick transferring small into big and, you know, not having enough space so you're gonna have to leap forward and getting that free movement has been removed as well. So I think for me, it's more of an honest game and she's gonna kick some serious arse based on this new war scroll. Yep. And like new gaze is a cannonball. Yeah, it says like two, two, neck, three, rend, D6 damage. Yeah, it's fantastic. And do you know what the range is on it? Both top of my head, 18 inches, I think, is that right? 18. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, she's got a really good range of attack. For a high mobility unit, yes, please. Yeah. The other thing with it, like, you know, like I could go on because the reality is, is that now, Big Marathi, when she gets stuck in, she gives a bonus attack to all of your snakes and harpies nearby. Yep. And that's not insignificant. It's not. Like that buff alone, like when I saw all that, I was like, oh, why hello, life takers. And it's a huge range on it too. It's 18 inches. 18 inches. I did not find it hard to say in that bubble. And then the other big one, or the other big thing, that in my opinion is Small Marathi now, her commandability is super functional. Yes. It's probably the best commandability in the army at this point because, and it's a unit holy within 24. Yep. Super long range and they fight in the hero phase. Or shoot in the hero phase. Yep. So now like you can make your snake shooters actually do some work in the hero phase. And we'll talk about why that's really good in just a moment. All right. So let's talk about the new sub faction, which is Cobra Kai. I didn't know in the book they called it Xanthar Kai. I assume that's a misprint. It is in fact Cobra Kai. It follows the rules of life, which is strike first, strike hard, no mercy. So very important. The, it is snake focused. The commandability in it is another plus one to attack for a unit, which is great. Well, it's not just snake focused. It's snake or harpy focused. Yeah, I understand, but I'm counting. I know you're all about lifetakers. I'm living that snake life. But yes, it's snake and harpy focused. You can give it, there's another commandability for plus one attacks. Now you get plus two attacks if you've got Marathi as well, which is fantastic. Obvi. It has bonus bravery for all your snakes and harpies. That sounds insignificant. In most armies it would be. In an army with mind razor, where it's all about being higher bravery than your enemy to do bonus damage. It is very important. Yeah, I mean harpy for eight. Yeah. Snakes go to eight, snakes start at eight, go to nine in Cobra Kai, go to 10 if they're near a cauldron. Like suddenly you're higher than anything that's not a demon or undead, right? Right. Which is great. Or a Starborn Lizard for some reason. And then you get a bonus artifact, by the by. Yeah. Unlike most sub factions, it's not that it doesn't set your artifact, it's that it just says, hey, have an extra one. And you know what Doc loves? Extra artifacts, so you can get that iron circle, get that shadow stone and still have something else to go party with. Man, there's so many good artifacts in that book. Yeah. Like, oh. Yeah. I can't take a realm artifact for that one. That has to be from the daughter's book. Yes. Right. You can spend that realm artifact on one of the other artifacts that you have from either of your brutality. Yeah. Sure. Exactly. So really good. This is what I played on Saturday. I did play Cobra Kai. Loved it. Thought it was fantastic. Is it Hagnar? No. Is it as competitive as Hagnar? No. I hope they break Hagnar in the winter FAQ. So that's where I'm living. But if they don't. But if they don't, sure. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. Okay. If they don't, I'm going to five plus crate. Sure. Yes. Look, do the obvious things please in the winter FAQ. Break Hagnar, leave Calibron and Drachy-Geneath basically alone. They're probably fine. And then make crate five plus. And then we'll have five relatively interesting sub-factions to choose from that are all basically on the same playing field, right? And we'll have interesting play. So very, very simple. Please, please fix. Thank you. And then we got three new battalions, right? So one of them is completely worthless and we don't even really need to waste any time on it. I don't normally like to talk in those terms, but it's so bad. I'm not sure I can wrap my head around its badness, which is the shrine brood. Yeah. What, you don't want to keep, you don't want to protect your shrine? It's not even a cauldron. If it was cauldrons, maybe I'd be like, okay, I guess, right? But it's like- You're like, I want to keep that plus one save. And they're like, no, no, no, how about a bad pain aura? Yeah. So two blood rec shrines, two blood sisters or blood sockers and two harpy units. No, stop, get out of here. And you can kill the snakes or harpies to heal the shrines. The opposite of what I want. But, but you have to kill all of them. Yes. You can't, you don't choose a unit. All units in range are damaged and lose models. Sure. All of them. Like it says, you like- You can pick any number of units from this battalion within six inches. You don't have to pick all of them. You can choose any number of units. I'm sure of it. I have it open in front of me. Okay. I'm literally reading the rules. That was a verbatim quote. You don't have to kill all of them. It's still bad. Let's move on. Let's talk about the two that are really interesting. Okay. Which is Vipiric Guard, which is cool. Because it has both versions of Marathi in it. One to two Blood Rack Medusai or Milusai Iron Scales in any combination. Who you could also make your general to then unlock Battleline Snakes which is two to three units of Blood Sisters or Blood Stalkers in any combination. So this is like why I love Vipiric Guard is it's a super tight core of your army. Right? You've got Marathi. You got your snake general. You got all your Battleline. But boom, this is the type of, this is the type of Battalion I love, right? The solid foundation block. The cornerstone of the army that you can just build on with whatever other toys you want on top. Right? And its ability is once per battle. A hero from this Battalion can use a command ability without a command point being spent. Sounds completely incidental. It's actually not bad. This did actually come in big handy for me during the game. Cause just sometimes you will be out of command points and really need to use a command ability. And hey, you can. So that's kind of cool. So there you go. I like this. I like it cause it has Marathi and everything I wanted to play in it. There is some discussion as to whether these Battalions can be in any other sub faction, but Cobra Kai that I think we should touch on real quick. Because it says on page 96, when you pick a daughter's cane allegiance for your army, you can say it will be Xanthar Kai or Cobra Kai. If you do so, it has access to the Temple of Cain rules at the bottom of this page and can include the War Scroll Battalions to the right. Now, the trick is it doesn't in the War Scroll Battalions, say may only be taken in a Cobra Kai army, which is usually how they restrict Battalions. Like in Wrath of the Everchosen, the previous times they've seen this, they actually will put the limiting text in the Battalion. They didn't hear- I mean, if you look at the screen book, like the Stormcasts are restricted. Right, right, right, right. Harcourt as well, the city of the Sigbar one is also restricted to them and Anvil Guard. So I'm assuming that it's not restricted because in the same book, they literally haven't said that it's landlocked. Yeah, I agree, but it's interesting that that comment is there. I would say it's an FAQ question and that's fine. My guess is it'll come down as yes, you can use them in any sub-faction. But we'll see. It might also be worth calling out just to remind everybody who might have missed this because they're not Suns players, is that moving forward FAQs are now a four-week cycle, not a two-week cycle. That started with Sons of Vahemat, but it's also now carrying on moving forward. So just for you broken realms players, just FYI. Yep. And then the other battalion is Scath Coven. Scath Coven is one Blood Rack Medusa bolded, or which the other one was not, by the way. So the other, the one in the first one has to be on foot. This one is bolded. So for some reason, he wanted to take that girl on the shrine you could. Or the Milusai Iron Scale, which by the way, it bothers me to no end. We'll talk about the Milusai Iron Scale in just a second when you get Shadow and Pain. It bothers me to no end that we did not just slap that keyword into the text of the Milusai Iron Scale. She is disappointing in so many ways because of this. Like we had the perfect hero and yet you fumbled on the one yard line with such a simple change. At any rate, one to four blood sisters unit, one to two blood stalkers units and zero to two canary harpies units bolded. And then your special buddy is nobody takes battle shock. Okay. Cool. Like again, if you're in for snake people and harpies, it ain't bad. You can get a lot of your army into this, into this battalion and it includes harpies, which is good. Harpies were traditionally the things that were always increasing your drops. Obviously what you're trading here is all your heroes other than the Medusas are gonna be outside the battalion. Right, so. And you're only gonna get one Medusa. You're not gonna get multiples. Right. Like with the Viteric, you can, yeah. I could see a three drop with this and Marathi. Like I'm not sure that's exactly the army I build, but that you can get to 2000 points on that very easily with Marathi and that combination of units. It will fit with good sized units. Yeah, yeah. The problem is is that then you can't do the iron scale if you get three drop. Yeah, sure, sure, sure, absolutely. Here's what I'll say. As much as I love the iron scale and I'm stoked, I'm not putting it in most of my lists for reasons I'll talk about in a moment. Any final thoughts on the dock? That's basically the dock Marathi based stuff. We're gonna go to the Shadow and Pain. Any other thoughts, gentlemen, on the Marathi Daughters of King stuff? I think you kind of mentioned it a little bit earlier that it's probably not gonna replace Hagnar. If you are playing the witch elf build, it's probably not gonna replace what you're currently doing, but it just opened up a whole new option of building lists. And there are some good lists in here if you wanna go down towards snakes and harpies. So if you're looking to expand your model, this is great. If you are a witch elf through and through, probably not your thing. Right, this is the army I've been waiting for. Yeah, but what I would say is just like, even if you're a witch elf build, like I love the changes to Marathi. Sure. Like the changes to Marathi helped my witch elf build. Sure. And so yeah, like I don't think it's a bad situation. Yes, let me answer, John, Ashley Smith real quick. John, we're talking about the Canary harpies, the Daughters of King harpies. Yes, there are new plastic harpies for Warcry, but those are like more of the Chaos harpies. Canary harpies are the Daughters of King witch elf looking ladies with bat wings. So, well, sometimes I'll sometimes shorten it, but I realize there are two units in the game that are called harpies, but. Canary are probably what we should be talking about are dark elf harpies. Yes. Yep. Which ironically enough used to be the Chaos harpies were the old dark elf harpies anyway. Right, right. All right. So Shadow and Kane, the box set, it did big war scroll changes as well. So like we got a lot of war scroll changes in this. So I'm gonna burn through this real quick. Here we go. None of which are updated in the book itself. No, it's not. None of this information on Shadow and Kane is in here. Okay, very relevant. New blood sisters and blood stalkers. The sisters lost the crystal touch as an attack and it's now an end of combat thing that you trigger, you roll one die. As long as you're within one inch of an enemy, you roll one die for every model in the unit and on a three plus it's a mortal wound, okay? So you can't like jack the attacks of the crystal touch through the roof. I actually found this to be a really good rule nonetheless. Like yes, your sisters are susceptible to getting hit, but when you double charge things, especially like heroes, like I charged, I double charged a unit and then just tagged to within one inch of a hero, chopped the unit to bits. The hero turned around and killed like one snake and then I just mortal wounded him off the table without a second thought, right? Like it was just burzap, he's dead. And I didn't need to worry about splitting attacks or anything like that, right? I just turned around and went, and he evaporated because on a three plus on like eight dice or whatever I had left at that point because I had lost one snake early in the game, he just gone, right? So that's fine. Yes, it's not as great as the world we imagined we lived in for five seconds when we thought we were gonna get 50 million crystal touch attacks, okay? But I also think it's more fair. I wish most stuff that triggered mortal wounds honestly worked like this. Like I wish the evocators and the eels all worked in this exact same way. Evocators do work this way. Evocators I thought were after they attack. I didn't think it was an end of the phase. Oh, that's true, that's true. Yeah, never mind. Yeah, it's different than, like again, I like the end of combat phase trigger for this, right? Because then it means you can't just show up and just be like, just pile onto a unit and blow them up, right? Like there's still counterplay, right? This is the way this rule should have always been designed and I applaud good design, right? Yeah, that's right. The stalkers have two shots now, which is real good. It's like, we did it, we did it. We got back up and we finally got it the second shot. So stalkers were always, you know, like one of the things that I doubled down on when we reviewed like the fixes was like stalkers, you couldn't point stalkers appropriately ever. Right, because with one bow shot, it just wasn't enough. They weren't putting out enough range, like range damage, yeah. At like less than a hundred point, like, you know, like at what did I say? Like at a hundred points, they're still not competitive enough. Right. Because harpies are just better. You get the same amount of shots, you know, and cheaper. Now that you've got two shots and a pretty reasonable access to shooting in the hero phase through Marathi. Like a tenor of those snakes look real enticing. Yeah, absolutely. And what I should say about the melee snakes and their ability to jack their attacks up through the roof is that like, yes, they lost the crystal touch thing, but I had snakes pretty regularly in my game at five attacks a model with sippy cups and mind razor on and nothing lived. Like bravery 10 sippy cupped mind razor snakes are just, I mean, they were doing like 40, 50 damage to things they attacked, like it was red mist on the other side of that attack, right? They are a glass cannon, but my God, are they, the cannon part is in all capital letters. So like, yes, we lost some of the crystal touch, but we gained the ability to jack their offense way up. Just way up, okay? Yeah. Were you running them in tenors? They're creeping from wrongs. Go ahead, go ahead, Anthony. I was just gonna creep me from wrong, but they also now really fast too. There's some really interesting movement and mechanics you've got with your snakes. Yes, I didn't put the iron scale on here and I should have, but let's talk about the iron scale real quick. That was a, sorry, I left that off. I was just thinking changes. So the- He's so bad. He's so bad Vince left him off the bar here. So the iron scale, the problem with it is it does not have the blood rack medusa keyword. Hence, it cannot turn your snakes about a line. So it's always just an extra hero, which is- He's a tax. He's a hero tax. Always. It has another ability to grant plus one attacks that is basically impossible to trigger, okay? Like she has to go in for, swing first and trigger within, when she swings and kills something, she gives out the plus one attack to other nearby snakes, right? A holy within 12 inches. Yes, she has a tight bubble on 40 mil rounds. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. I mean, 12 isn't the worst bubble, but yeah, sure. It's not the best either. It's not Marathi's 18. Having played Night Haunt, 12 inch holy within on anything but 25 mils is a nightmare. It's a little extreme, but I will grant you the point that it's certainly not as easy as Marathi's bubble. The difference between a 12 inch bubble and an 18 inch bubble is truly massive in just pure radius, right? Like the actual mathematical radius on the difference of that, it's like, if you get a 10 inch pizza versus a 14 inch pizza, that's like the 14 inch pizza is like three 10 inch pizzas or something, you know, however crazy that works out. Just because, you know, math circles are crazy, you know? But like, so you're never gonna trigger that, but she has a command ability that can let your snakes run in charge. And if they run, they run 2D6, which is great. Here's the problem I never found. So I ran without that iron scale. I never would have had enough command points to use that. Never. That's the issue. Like you're so, you're kicking the command points off of Marathi every turn to get like hero phase fighting or hero phase shooting, right? Not to mention you're trying to do other things that you're normally trying to do, like re-roll charges or whatever, right? Cause it's important that you land in this army. And you just don't have the extra command points to be tossing around that run. You just don't. I wish you did. But there's- I think when I saw Shadow and Payne come out first, it looked really cool. I thought, yeah, I could see where you'd really use it. And then days later, we got broken runs in Marathi and we've seen now what you can do with Marathi. And you're 100% right that the command point can be just used so much better than what you just said around the Shadow and Payne hero. Right. It's a shame. But that's not to say I'll play it at some point. Like I'll give it a shot and see how it goes. Like I'll give it some, I'm sure I can play it with some builds for it. But honestly, I haven't found the points. It came down to like, no, there's just other stuff I wanted. Anywho, and then Heartrenders, the other big change is your, I should have said Heartrenders and Lifetakers, but I only think in terms of Heartrenders because I'm not Tom. And Anthony, what was your- I have 15 Lifetakers on the shelf fully painted. I understand. Film site. Anthony, when I came to visit you and we drove down to Kancon together, who was your buddy that was driving? I feel so bad I can't remember his name. He was playing Doc. Dane. Dane. He was the only player out of 140 players who played with DOK. Yes, he was the one Doc player in all of like Kancon. It was amazing. Shout out to Dane. Super great. Nice dude. I think he came 14th and he didn't even run Hagnar. Nope, he was running California. Yes. And he was running 10 packs of Lifetakers, Tom. Yeah, he was. His 10 packs of Lifetakers are scary as hell. Yeah. My point is you've got it. Look, Dane did it, not into Hagnar. In California came 14th at like highest, like obviously he was the highest placing Doc. He was the only Doc. But like nonetheless, getting 14th and getting out of 140 people is not easy. He was kicking butt. And yes, shout out to Dane. Lifetakers are terrifying. Like I don't think people have actually, man they have not come to terms with four attack lifetakers doing three damage each. Yeah, sure. That's the world we're in now. Yep. Like on a 14 move, think about that. Like folks have not tapped into the Lifetaker power. That's what I'm saying. Sure, absolutely. But yes, your canary have to drop by turn three now. So if they're not down basically, yeah. Well, they have to come down on turn three, however we want to say it. If they're still up in the heavens on turn four, they're dead. So by the bottom... Oh and by the way, those tenors of Lifetakers are 160 points. Yeah, sure. They're real cheap for all the damage they do. Economical. Yeah, we've been taking some, instead of taking some shadow warriors in cities, so definitely good stop to be buying in. Yes. And 50% of the time, they just decide not to be hit back. Yeah, because they flowed away. Yeah, on a four plus, they just flowed away and just disengaged with whoever they just hit. Yeah. Here's my honest answer for this. This is exactly what I wanted for Doc. This was an absolute home run, point it left field and crank it out there, right? Like, this is in the upper decks. This is great. All we have to do now is nerf Hagnar and Doc is perfect. We've got a fully functional... You... No, we need... No, one more thing. We need to actually make the avatar of Cain do something. Well, he does. When he's on the back of the cauldron, then he's really useful. Just the guy standing alone is pointless and he always will be, but cute. I love that they put it in there. It's a cute thing. I forgot he was a unit. Yeah. Making a scenery piece. Making a terrain piece for the allegiance instead. I mean, I've got one free floating because obviously I have a blood rack shrine in my thing. So I had the extra guy and I was like, yeah, I'll build him. I'll put him on foot. I'll paint him. He's a fun model to paint. Mr. sort of Rio Jesus there, you know. Yeah. Yeah, I have at least two blood rack shrines that I've not built either of them. I like having blood rack shrines. I'll use it occasionally. It's not that much more expensive than just the regular girl on foot. It does have a lot more wounds. So because I've always run snake armies, right? Right, right, right. Anyways, and it is a general that can turn on snakes as battle lines. And gets minus one to hit because it's not a monster. Correct. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It can still benefit from lookouts, sir. Yes, which is good. Okay, cool. Let's move on. Next up from daughters. All right, we're time stamping. And next up we have storm cast. Okay. Oh boy. Let's get ready to rumble. All right. So the storm cast. This will take 30 seconds. Like this is just liberator. That's it. Broke. Move on. Broke. Done. Broke. That's right. All right. Let's get excited, folks, because it's about to go down. So before we get into the craziness, let's lay down the basics here. Okay. So first of all, one of the common complaints about storm cast is that they don't actually have allegiance abilities. I understand they do, but they're not real. They're just this like lightning drop thing. Everything is related to lightning dropping and on total commitment, you lose it all. And if you don't have any reason to deploy off board cause there's lots of scenarios or situations or armies you're gonna face where it can actually be negative to stay in the heavens cause they could zone you out or have all sorts of negative externalities, right? And so that was kind of always the problem. And so instead we have storm keeps. And by the way, you talked about like the narrative connecting to the rules. This is great. Like the storm cast that ride lightning come down from Aesir. The storm cast that are in the realms actively living and defending and in the cities occupy storm keeps. They don't lightning pulled in. They ride out, right? Because they're there. And they have different allegiance rules. Yes. And they have different allegiance rules. So there's a new set of allegiance abilities replacing the existing storm cast so you don't lightning drop anymore. Instead, you're a bonus to bravery and you have the shield of civilization rule. And so the shield of civilization is liberators get plus one to save and plus one to hit when they don't move or set up in the movement phase. This is going to be very important later. Okay. Yep. Yep. All right. So now the liberator, the guy that's on the statue out front of GW is good again in my estimation. Cause this guy already had real ones to save and now they can stand there and bulwark and be on a three up re-rolling ones. Like no other nonsense. They're just straight up. They're out there on three ups re-rolling ones. Always. If they don't. Yep. They don't move. Fantastic. Okay. So that's wonderful from the start. I look at the storm keep rules. I'm in it. I dig it. I think it's fantastic. These do combine with all the normal storm hosts as normal. So like when you can be a storm keep version of storm cast celestial vindicators or astral templars or whatever, anvils of the helden hammer. In fact, the anvils are obviously the main, like Kaiser Von Brecht is an anvils of the helden hammer character, which is also cool. We got a non-hammers character now. So great. Yep. Something we'd been wanting for a while. Anthony, before we get to the battalions, what did you, anything you're thinking on this on the general storm cast stuff, how happy are you about liberators actually being cool again? I was just gonna make a point just in case anyone might have missed this is that the storm cast rules are an option. So if you do like them coming from the sky and kind of, you know, writing their lightning, you can still run that version of storm cast. But if you wanna take advantage of the rules in the book, then you don't. So you come through here. I think I would probably rate this a B or like a B plus. I really do like the rules. I think there's a lot of cool synergies between the cities of Sigma and the storm keeps. And again, narratively, what a storm cast look like when they're in the cities. I do think there was a missed opportunity when it comes to in cities of Sigma, if you bring a storm cast unit in, you do get the hallow heart. You do get the tempest keyword on storm cast. I think for me, it was the other side of not getting that that kept it from being an A or, you know, a higher rating. But I think it was cool. I think it was dramatic. The battalion's a sweet. I think you still get some of the best of the old world, but some cool new ways to play your army. Yeah. The other thing I don't have written here, cause it actually doesn't figure into much of, I think how storm keeps that we played or how storm cast is, but it's worth saying, is that just, it should be pointed out. I didn't write it down, but you do also have mortal auxiliaries if you run a storm keep. So one in four of your units can be cities of Sigma units. And your storm cast eternal heroes. If, if they use a command ability on the mortals, the mortals count as having the, the storm cast internals keyword for that command ability. The trick to remember is that that's all they inherit. Storm cast internals. They don't get celestial vindicators. They don't get hammers. They don't get, you know, storm cast eternal judicators or, or just to cars or, you know, there's lots of weird things like that, right? They don't get any of that crap. So basically there's only two command abilities that you can use on them, right? Which is battle shock immunity and what plus one to hit, I think is the other one. Is that right, Tom? Yep. Yeah. Battle shock immunity and the plus one to hit from the basic Lord Sallison. Yep. Cause those both just target storm cast internals. But none, and none of the abilities that are in the storm hosts, none of them work with, none of them have command abilities that you can use because all of them target the storm host keyword. Correct. So like if you've got, let's say you bring in big old unit of hand gunners or iron drakes or something like that, right? You can't shoot in the hero phase with them with the anvils of the helden hammer because that specifically says storm cast eternal anvils of the helden hammer units, right? Which right, which those units don't get. Yeah. When you're in cities of sigma, for example, you bring in a nightingale tour, in a hallow heart army, your nightingale tour becomes a double spellcaster. It doesn't work the other way. So a rune lord can't take a prayer from storm cast. You don't get that type of synergy. They can. They can. Yeah. As it's written right now, well, so as it's written right now, one of the interesting things you will still absorb is if you bring in a wizard, they will get the storm cast spells. And if you bring in a priest, they will get the storm cast prayers because all it says is a wizard or a priest in a storm cast eternal army. It's just like, yeah, it's not a priest yet. Yeah, yeah. So you can technically get at the spells and the prayers, but you can't. Until this is FAQ. Right, unless they FAQ rule the other way. But yes, right now you can like, you can bring in, for example, a regular old battle mage and he can grab a storm cast eternal prayer. Okay. A spell. A spell. A spell. A spell, what did I say, prayer? Yeah, spell, sorry. That won't, that probably won't survive, but as it currently stands, that's how that works. Yeah. But for gaining the storm cast eternal's keyword, that's only for command abilities. Yeah. So, but we'll see. Your wizard and priest work. The key is your general command abilities like shooting the hero phase off anvils or other things that anything of those things that specifically say you have to be anvils do this, those command abilities don't apply, right? Yeah. And like, you know, when you looked at the old storm cast, you know, lists back in the day, they'd always ally in a hurricane because it used to give a plus to hit to order unit. So there's now that's been changed to cities. So there's not a lot of synergy between them outside of that keyword that they're not getting. So there's still a role for me to play to bring in cities units, like really cheap battle line or at least cheap screens that I think there could have been some more synergies between the two, but overall, I think they're pretty cool. And obviously we'll dig into the rules later on exactly what you get. Yeah. Shout out to Rerolling Ones Jack who says, you can also give them command traits and items. I need to go look at the storm cast book. I'll believe you, Jack. You've been playing storm cast for a while. So, you know, because you can make a city's, it could be your general. You can make a city. Sure. He could be your general. So he could get like staunch. So you could, as he says, you could give an anointed on Frost Art Phoenix staunch defender, which is fine. Correct. Yeah. I would need to go look and make sure there's no key wording, but I'll believe you, Jack. So, Dave, that's awesome. Well, no. So what he's queuing in on here is that staunch defender says add, well, no, it says add one to save for attacks at target friendly storm cast to turn all the units holy within nine inches of this general. Right. Which would still apply to other people that wouldn't apply to him. Right. So he could grant it to others, but he like, it only says command abilities, not command traits. Right. That they get the keyword for. The Phoenix would not absorb its own staunch defender. It would only pass it out to others. Right. Right. Assuming that there's nothing in the command trait section that bars that says like, you know, storm cast eternal hero or something like that, which I don't think there is. Right. I think it just is the genre of your force has that can take one of these. I'm staring at the page right now. There you go. Okay. So yeah. As we've all said, it's like it's pre FAQ. Like who knows what FAQ is going to bring. Yeah. But it's the wizard and priest play is the most interesting to me because I could see the argument for like a rune lord and a bunch of iron drakes or iron drakes. Or something. Yeah. The play here is a rune lord with a bunch of iron drakes. The rune lord has like one of the prayers. The like probably the reroll like the buffing one that lets them reroll, reroll hits of one or like you could do it to at incoming attacks are reroll sixes. Those would be good. You can't teleport the unit unfortunately. That would be great if he could. But there are a couple of tools that he would have that he could use in addition to because that prayer is above and beyond the rent prayer. So you could do both of those. Yeah. I want to point out something that Jack is saying that I wasn't connecting, but Jack has nailed it here. I love this. This is good. I totally miss this, but he's absolutely right. This is fantastic. He said it's a way to be cheeky and get staunch defender in an anvil's or basically any host army because all the hosts say an anvil's of held and hammer general or storm cast eternal general must have this command trait instead of the other one, but you're not. If you're the frost art phoenix you're not, you're not meeting the qualifications to take that. Jack A plus I hadn't put that one together. I put together the prayers and the spells. I hadn't thought about the way that you can sneak around the first command trait. I like where your head's at now. A plus work Jack. Now we got a winner there. Yeah, killing it with that. He's earning the herald of shooting title. Rerolling ones Jack. He's a smart one that guy. Okay. Yeah, that's good. Okay, but anyways, who cares about any of that? Because let's talk about these battalions that are gonna break the game. Okay, here we go. All right, so there are like four new battalions here basically, I mean there's actually five but one of them is like a new mega battalion that you can't actually ever take unless you're playing 5,000 points of Stormcast. And they actually set up this one correctly that there's just no human leeway. Like this will never accidentally sneak into match play. This is like literally a 5,000 point army. It's meant to represent an entire Stormkeep. So there's Van Breck's Blackwatch, which is fine. It's kind of cool. It's basically just a modified version of one of them we're gonna talk about. I don't have any problems with it but we're gonna talk about it for free. Let's talk about the main three here which are on the screen. So you've got Wardens of the Stormkeep which is your new hero battalion. Okay. One Lord Celestant, bolded, important. And then two to five other Stormcast Eternals heroes. And this battalion can only be included in the Stormkeep and it cannot include any monsters. Meaning no boss on Torralon or Star Drake but you can be on the Kiddicator or whatever. I love how two weeks ago I was complaining about the Lords of the Storm battalion. Like it was probably only two to three weeks ago. Yeah, yeah. And I said like, here's the solution. Lord Celestant with a couple other heroes and that's exactly what this is. Yeah, yeah. This can be your entire grip of heroes obviously. All six heroes could go into this one thing if you have all six. I think they've got a great ability at the start of your first hero phase you roll a die for each hero from this battalion. You add three to the roll for your general. So he does this on a two up, everybody else is on a five up and you get a bonus command point. It's just a start with a bunch of extra command points. Just. That's what Lords of the Storm does functionally. Yep. Like the only heartbreak, the thing that's actually the deal breaker for me for this battalion is the fact that I don't get the start break. Yeah, no, it's what broke my heart too but I'm hopeful for the future that we'll get a monster focused storm cast story in here somewhere that's going to be all about like the Lord on Torlon or the Lord on Star Drake or whatever. And that's what will make me want to do a rat cast army. I hear that like for me though, when they dropped like when I hit that clause, I was in 100%. Sure. Like I was all in on this battalion. I was like, this is everything I wanted. And then I got to the end and I went, oh, I can't include a hero. That's fine, you know, a hero on monster. I guess that's fine. You know, like, I was like, okay, that's fine. And then it hit me. I was like, well, I'll just add a drop, right? And just still add my start break. And then it hit me that I now have a Lord Celestan tax that I have to pay. Right, sure, sure, sure. No, I get it. Because I don't want any of the other Lord Celestans. I only want the one on Star Drake. Well, there is one Lord Celestan I really like in this, which we'll talk about in a moment, but he's not the regular Lord Celestan, okay? Sure, sure, sure. So, notably this is the bolded Lord Celestan, okay? Yep, yep, yep. Which means that Vandis Hammerhand, for example, who's a Lord Celestan on his drake off, could be your Lord Celestan you take in this battalion. Yep. Or our old friend, Gavriel Sherhart, who is also a Lord Celestan can be taken in this battalion. As if this guy, as if he needed a better battalion to buff him. You know, you remember how Gavriel Sherhart's command ability can still be button pushed as many times as you want? And you know how this battalion gives you like 50 command points to start the game? That's an interesting thing I'm pointing out. Go ahead, Anthony. Oh, one plus one equals two. I was gonna say, if only there was a battalion that would give you enough command points to allow Gav to come back into the game. If only. Now, I mean, and it's fine. Now, if only there was some way, why isn't there some way that I can just like take my entire army and put them like nine inches away from the enemy and then just spam Gav's button so I automatically make the charge every single time and just smash my entire force into them at the top of one. If only there was some way to do that. Well, I guess we'll have to keep reading. Well, at least we don't have any overly overpowered units that could go in and then really take advantage of that Gav bomb. Like we're really lucky not to be in that position now. It is nice. It is nice. You know what? We better keep reading. Let's see what we find. Okay. Is this like a TV shopping network, but wait, there's more? But wait. But, but, but no, actually it's a rap song because it's but, but, but wait, it gets worse. Okay. Here we go. So we're going to talk about the storm tower garrison real quick because fine, we have to. It's the next one in the list. I actually like this one. Yeah, I know you do. And I, it's fine. It like, actually this is a perfectly fun when you could build most of an army around. It's a night vexelor, which is your teleporting banner guy, right? That's a, yep. Yep. Yep. Two to four liberators units. Which has no range on the teleport, by the way. Yeah, yeah. The enemy units. No, it's pick up any unit anywhere and put it back down nine inches away. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's great. My, the, the, when I played against the storm cast this last weekend, he was using the garrison and had a vexelor in there and did just that. It was good. Two to four liberators. Great. Yes, re-rolling one. Jack got the reference. Absolutely. Oh, Jack, your mother, your man. Which is great because as we'll find out in just a second, we want lots of liberator units in this army, in this particular battalion, probably fivers of liberators and that's for the most part. You get one to two paladin units. So paladins are obviously like your evocators and your retributors and your, all your big three wound swing a big giant hammer or axe guys. And then you get one to two just a car units and just a cars are your shooters. So these are your judicators, your castigators and your raptors, either your long strikes or your hurricanes. So, and then what this gives them is the paladin and just a car units from this battalion, wholly within 12 inches of any liberator units from the same battalion, can use the shield of civilization battle trait. Meaning if your shooters don't move and they're standing near liberators, they're getting, oh yeah, sorry, yeah, you're, thank you. Raymond correct me. Yes, it's not evocators. It's the, all of the retributor original version. So whatever they're called retributors, decimators. The sequiturs, the sequiturs. The sequiturs and the liberators. No, no, no, the paladins are only the original three wound guys. Oh, sorry, no, sorry. So I'm being a redeemer. I'm jumping ahead to the next, the patrol. No redeemer is sequiturs. Yep, yep. At any rate, yes. Thank you for the correction, Ramon. That's right. I named the wrong guys because all these storm cast names are like the same. So at any rate, so your shooters like can just stand behind liberators and get plus one to save and plus one to hit. Fantastic. Your big paladins, if they're like, if they keep liberators in tow, like if you keep a little five pack of paladins, or sorry, of liberators, just literally running behind your paladins when they fight, suddenly they're getting plus one to save and plus one to hit. You can still charge with shield of civilization. You just can't move or set up in the movement phase. Right. So there you go. Right. So it's cool. This is a cool battalion. I like this. It's fun. It's a huge, you could build a very big army out of this. Like you could do a two drop with that in the Hero Battalion. Yeah, 100%. Absolutely. Yeah. And you could also do a combat or a shooting, a real shooting focused one. So if you want to drop down and do an alternative version of shoot cast and drop down those raptors, drop down those judicators, there's that build, but then it's equally the liberator build, which then kind of leads us into. Into the next one. Now let's get worse. Here we go. All right. The Stormkeep Patrol, this is gonna be, this needs to be undone. Like tomorrow, this needs to be undone. The FAQ should just be like- Well, I read this, when I read this, I was like, I was talking to Vince, I said, you know what I miss? Vanguard wing. Yeah. What we all missed was Vanguard wing. That's what we need more of in our life. This needs to be unwritten, fast. Okay. Let's talk about this thing. Stormkeep Patrol requirements. One Lord Veritant, one unit of Griffhounds, which is six Griffhounds for 120 points and just so we're all in the same page. There's a tax there. Sure. I mean, is there? Because actually in the inevitable mirror match of patrol versus patrol, theoretically, you get to pre-game shoot them. When they pre-game drop on you. When they pre-game set up, you pre-game shoot. Awesome. So you have to have the dogs to counter each other. Okay. We're about to go down the rabbit hole here, folks. And then you have two Redeemer or Just-A-Car units. So the Redeemers are the Liberators or Sequitores. In this case, we're gonna pick Liberators every time and twice on Sunday because, hell yeah, we are. I could do a 30 and a 20. Yeah, I'm not. I mean, I'm all in, baby. All right, what is the special ability of this battalion? The first one, this book, the first one was like some command points once. The second one was like, if you maintain this kind of complicated strategy, you can get like plus one to hit, right? This one, all right, after armies are set up, but before the first battle round begins, you can remove the units from this battalion from the battlefield. Just take them all up. If you do so, you must then set up the Lord Veritat from the battalion anywhere on the battlefield, more than nine inches from enemy units, and then set up any other units from the battalion, wholly within 12 of the Lord Veritat, and more than nine from any enemy units. Meaning that I am going to take my two Redeemer units. Let's do the fair version of this, okay? Let's just do that. Let's do the super fair version of this, you ready? My two Redeemer units are going to be 30 liberators and 20 judicators, okay? Sure, sure. This is the fair version. This is the fair version. It's not what I've seen, but it's the fair one. And I'm going to, before the game starts, set up my whole army nine inches away from you. I'm gonna set up 30 liberators nine inches, not my whole army, but I'm gonna set up a huge chunk of my army. 60 wounds nine inches away from you, okay? And I'm gonna put the judicators on the other side of the Veritat, right? Or behind them, so that, you know, shielding them, right? Behind them is the right option, yes. Exactly, behind the liberators. And my, and then if I'm like Anvils, which I certainly could be, right? Then I'll just shoot in the hero phase with all of the judicators. Yep. Easy enough. Triggered off the Veritat, yep. Triggered off the Veritat, yeah, 100%. And then my liberators will all just charge, will move if they want to. They'll lose their bonus, but they could, or they could just charge you, or if we have, say, also a warden of the Stormkeep battalion floating around in here, as you can easily, easily fit both of these into an army. I built like four different variants of this that had both of these. Then I've also got Gavriel Scherhardt, okay? Who's- What a huge rubble. Who's gonna be like translocated up, or something like that into, or Vexilord up, right? Or whatever, and put him in there just so he's close enough. And then he's gonna wham, slam, bam, the plus 12 to charge button with all my bonus command points. And I'm gonna then charge my 30 liberators, like 21 inches into your lines, just making sure I get exactly the charge I want so I wrap way deep in. Like I am deep in your guts at that point, because I'm making like a 19 inch charge from nine inches away. I am in you, okay? Like deep in there. I'm touching every hero tangled in your army, okay? And now I'm on a three up re-rolling ones. With a 60 wound unit. With a 60 wound unit. On a three up re-roll ones. And if there's a cell set that can, or a castellate that can run fast, a two up re-roll one. Sure. There's all sorts of fun things I gave you. This is more of your Brotherhood 2.0? Yes, yeah. And you keep telling, yeah. There's so many interesting variants of this based on what you do. Whether you go like for the shooting thing and you've dropped down and you go anvils and you pu pu like mad, you can go hammers, which is actually really interesting and do the gav bomb thing like I just talked about. You could, and by the way. My go-to here when this dropped was go astral templar. Oh yeah, my personal favorite too, astral templars. You might say, Vince, what does astral templars do? Tom, what is this crazy thing you're talking about? We've never played astral templars. Tom, why would I want to play astral templars? Tell me more about this. Because the command trait for your astral templars, which is of course going to be your Lord Barathan who has reset up with your entire army, after setup is complete, but before the battle begins, friendly astral templars units, holy within 12 of this general, can move an additional six inches pre-game. It's three inches off of your life. Right, right. Go. Yeah. Isn't there a command trait that allows you to move up to five inches? Or isn't there a different thing? But no, I can move six straight away. And the key is in that build, I would take every liberator I can. It would be two units of every liberator I can shove into this 12 inch circle. I would start three inches off your line with something like 100 to 120 wounds of liberators. And I would absolutely vexelor or translocate a Lord Castellan up there to also be lantern buffing one of the units. So one of the units is on two up re-rolling ones and one of the units is on three up re-rolling ones. And I'm going, here's 100 wounds. Just deal with that. Just deal with that. Like if you're not somebody who starts off board or can teleport, right? You lose. You lose the game. At setup, you lose the game. Because you're going to chew on all of the wounds. Correct. This is the toxic part of this. Like joking of funnyness aside. Because you know what? I've made this list before. It was my nerveless. Yeah, yeah. Like this is seriously toxic against a huge portion of the meta. Now there's some people who will be able to get out from under this oppressive thing, right? But not a lot. Because if you've got enough flyers, maybe you can retreat over the top. I mean, you can make it very hard for them with 50 or 60 liberator bodies for them to actually make it hard for them to retreat over the top of you forward. Like they have to have a heck of a blight speed. Sure, some armies have some teleports. If they have a big null deployer can start largely off the board. That's fine. By the way, you can still zone them out with your outside. Yeah, I'd say if they did that, you know what you do? You zone them out. Right. All your heroes and all your dogs just spread and zone hard, right? Like every griff hound, your bonus griff hounds and your six-pack of griff hounds, they're just spreading to be board control, right? So they can't drop anywhere. But yeah, but there's plenty of armies that it's just like, oh, well, you lose now, right? Like you just lost this game. Have fun grinding. Because I put 100 to 120 wounds and army's worth of wounds. Let's be real frank here. The average wound count in an army in Age of Sigma right now is 125-ish, okay? Yeah. So I just put 100 to 120 wounds touching you on your line. Regardless of who goes first, like I'm on you with Astral Templars, right? And if I go first, which I'm gonna probably be like, the couple builds I made of this one was three-drop, one was four-drop, you can get this pretty low, right? And a lot of my stuff is on two up-rerolling ones and the rest is on three up-rerolling ones. Like good luck, just good luck. That's my answer. And if I go first, I'm gonna do a significant amount of damage to you, by the way, because liberators with that plus one to hit, they will actually do the work. And you don't have to move at that point. You can just charge. Right, correct, you just charge. That's it, you're three inches away, you just charge. And you don't lose that plus one to hit, plus one save when you charge. Correct. And like many armies that will just be stuck in, it's just like, well, all the rest of my stuff that I mentioned, all those dumb dogs and the rest of the heroes and everybody else I've got in the army, they're just literally gonna sit around and camp every point. And by the time you get free of this, I'm so far ahead that like, you're done. That's it. Like have fun. That's why this is toxic. Right? I may have started building liberators. Here's the thing. I hope they fix this, I really do. But liberators are still really good again. Like this battalion is just bent. But even in the absence of this battalion, let's be clear. Yes. They did. Liberators, they did it. Liberators are wonderful. I would run a bunch of libs in a storm tower garrison. Right. Right. Like as much as Vince is not taught, he's talking about the patrol, I would run a garrison with a wardens of the storm keep. Like a dual, like that is a true, that is a two drop viable storm cast list. 100%. I think it's solid too. You can have a lot of different units in there. There's a lot of different play in there. I think that's actually like just the versatility, a lot of that because it's very, other than the liberators and the Vexilore, and the one Lord Selicent, which again is still bolded so you can have lots of different variations on that. There's actually a lot of different play in what exactly you could choose there. So yeah, I dig it. Anthony, what do you think of all this nonsense? Nope, Anthony's still muted. He paused for a minute. Anthony, what do you got? I'm unmuted now. Look, I think this is really big FAQ risk. I think I would not be going to eBay right now and buying all of the liberators. I think it's important you stop coming, but you know that an FAQ is coming because there's just some brokenness coming out of these builds. Yep. It's so amazing. And the, by the way, the Van Brecht Blackwatch is just the Stormcast Patrol again. It's the same one that's broken, but it also gives Van Brecht like a unique ability. But it's much more like, it's much more dialed in, right? What I mean is like you have to have judicators, units, not other things, you have to have castigators. Like he has very specific unit choices that you have to have. It's the same ability, but on a much tighter list of units, but it's cool. So anyways, please unbreak this. Thank you. The other thing I think about is that cities players love the Iron Drakes with the bridge, Soul Screen Bridge, and teleporting that warden, teleporting that Rune Lord. This is just a guaranteed version of that on steroids. If you build it out with Vanguard Raptors or judicators, let alone tapping into the other side, which is the combat-focused liberators, whether they're in combat or just taking up the board, this is going to be the must-watch battalion when tournaments run, until the FAQ comes. So start thinking about what you would do if this happened. Yeah, I mean, there's lots of non-jank in here you could do that's just oppressive, right? Like 30 lives in a maxed-out unit of hurricanes, right? In something, in whatever you feel, in the flavor of your choice, like Anvil or something, where they're just bubble-wrapping the hurricanes who are now easily dropping within range to unload six shots in the hero phase and nine shots in the shooting phase, right? And they're gonna do it on relatively good numbers there because it's just, you know, you just do it. It's great. Edity, right? Okay. I love it. I love it. I love all of it. I mean, like it's just so egregious. It is egregious and terrible. All right. Yeah, yeah. Let's move on. Okay. Time stamping. Let's go to, oops. Cities of Sigmar. So let's talk cities. Oh, we have so much left of this book. I know. Yeah, yeah, this is a big book. I told you this is gonna be a marathon show. Like I warned you. Fortunately, it'll go quicker from here. Here we go. Cities of Sigmar. So Hark, you're on. This is a little spoiler, but there's no way to talk around this. Formerly Anvil Guard. Anvil Guard is no more. It is now the city of Hark here on. I'm not gonna say any more than that, but there you go. Okay? Bye-bye. And you can still play Anvil Guard. You can, you're just representing either partisans that have, are fighting to retake control of the city or you're playing a past like a historical army. Fine, great. Perfect. I always should have done change like this. Thank you. Please keep doing this. Much appreciated. Well done. So it's obviously still in Akshi. You lose the normal cities of Sigmar allegiance. You can only include Darkling Covens, Order of Serpentus, Scourge Privateers and Shadowblades. One in every four can be Daughters of Cain. Okay? You get a new prayer called Catechism. You get a new prayer. It's not called Catechism of Murder. It's called, It's called Spam of All Catechism of Murder. Hold on. I've got to look up what this is actually called. It is called incitement to murder. Sorry, I wrote Catechism of Murder because that's all it is. It's just Catechism of Murder. Sixes are double taps, right? It's a prayer you put on people and sixes are double taps, but it also works in shooting. Yes, which is right. And it can be repeated. And it can be repeated. Yes, there is a way to do it multiple times. And you get a new commandability for a very large bubble of Battleshop community where you can basically an upgraded version or the same version before. You can ice a guy and you can make an example of someone Commissar style and then everyone else in a radius around there will run is Battleshop community. So, cool. Cool beans. Yeah, I mean, Hark here on is interesting. It is sort of the, it's actual allegiance abilities beyond what I've talked about is, the way that works out is there's also full like relics and a spell lore and, you know, command traits and everything. Like it is a full city, right? And, but it's only, it's much more restrictive because you can only have these dark elf units but you can bring in daughters. I've seen some people have some interesting play though. What's that? It's not a full city though. Why? So, it loses all of the base abilities. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't. It has a new set of stuff that you wouldn't normally get that much of. We can, whatever. Like, so to be clear, like what it does is it changes your composition rules. Yes. And it gives you a prayer for canite priests only. Correct. That's it. Like that's the entire army for allegiance abilities. And so you have altered it, like you have altered composition rules and you have altered composition rules and you have a prayer for the one in four priests that you include in the army. And that's it. Yeah. And now I, you know, I don't disagree with you. I think this is, I think that's a big cost, right? That being said, I think this is interesting, especially for people like thematically, this is on point to me. If you were an old school dark elf player and what you always wanted was to have like a new refactored all the dark elves in with some daughters as spice, this can get there and it's not bad. Like don't get me like, I do think this army is still quite interesting. Like there is some good stuff in here. Their lore is good. It's basically an upgraded version of the old Anvil Guard lore. They have- It's Anvil Guard married with the daughter, the Dark Elk Speller. Yeah, correct. Exactly. It's like they've got the full, you know, full six spell list, which by the way, remember most cities don't have only Hallowheart has a full six in the base book, right? Right. It's like they have a great artifact in the Traders Banner. Like I sometimes one good artifact is just that good and this is just that good. The Traders Banners subtract one from hit rolls for attacks made with missile weapons, the target friendly units, wholly within 12 inches of the bearer. That's a huge bubble of neg one around the bearer. Like that is quite solid, right? Now I'm not gonna say that you're not giving up a lot because I do agree with you. You give up a lot here, right? No doubt about it. I think this is a more- It's egregious how much you give up. Yeah, I think this is in the end. I think both of the cities are honestly, like the city stuff is more narrative than it is fixing. It's more for like people who had very specific armies, they wanted to play, right? Very specific themes and sort of things that they wanted to play into. And this does hit those notes, right? But it's not displacing any of the actual cities in terms of competitive capability. Right. No, I think that that is dead on. Anthony, I'll let you jump in before I go on my rant. No, no, no, you're right. This to me is a token olive branch to those dark elf players who wanted to bring their witch elves or their had queen or bringing something into their cities that they couldn't quite do with the one in four in the cities. It is a nice olive branch. When we get to the battalion, I guess, it then asks the question, is your list just better under Anvil Guard as opposed to one of these new cities? And you probably could argue either way, because you're right, you do lose the loyal shield rule. You do lose a wife council from the adjudance. You do get three of the, so you still get the Anvil Guard spell so that the three original spells get brought in plus some extra spells. So I'm a little bit disappointed that they named Sorceress on Black Dragon didn't get a war scroll. I would have liked to have seen that. Or have her have some real unique abilities that buffs that war scroll up when it's her in a real way, because it is like an underwhelming war scroll. And that's a pain point for sure. A Black Dragon having a five up armor save kills me. It hurts me deep. Dragons are such a majestic unit, yet this has a five up, like I struggle with that. Yeah, I agree. Get the hell out of here. She has the same armor as a naked witch elf. Sure, sure. Yeah, I get it. It's egregious, like, so for me, Anthony, I hear you comparing it to original Anvil Guard, but you didn't even mention one of the most, like the one of the largest losses, which is maximized endless spells. Yep. They lose the ability to put a spell mirror anywhere on the table, which is a really big deal if you're trying to do vitriolic spray. And you also don't get your gyrocopters to take advantage of spray. Right. So, you know. Now a witch elf, a 30 block of witch elves with spray, kind of a big deal. Sure, or Dark Shards shooting, but again, like I've seen, I saw Simon on Honest War Game or Rob Show put out an interesting hark here on list. It was fun. Again, I think there's like interesting builds here, but at best they're gonna be interesting. Now, you know, who knows? This is just my read on it, right? Like if Simon says he's interested, that dude is a city's player extraordinaire and he knows his stuff. But, you know, to me, this reads, again, both of these read as like, hey, here's some fluffy stuff you can do, right? So I crunched the permutations of this army, like the hark here on, like I, like I ran the numbers of like, okay, what do I take to get up to 12 units in order to run three daughters units? And at the end of the day, like I just realized the army that I wanna play is just better going pure dock. Sure, yeah. Yeah, I mean, and actually, one of the biggest disappointments to me is the battalion, we didn't really talk, like I mentioned the name character battalion, the craith shadow post, which is the Sorceress on Black Dragon, which is Drusa Craith. And then one Dread Spears unit and one Dark Shards unit. I hate that it's so hard locked to one of each of those, right? And not like one to three or something like that. It just feels like they could have done that kind of thing. Like that's, even what's his name, Van Brex, is a little more open-ended than this, okay? Because Van Brecht is like one to two judicators units. Okay, cool, right? There's some play there. I can choose you to lean into this more or less, right? And it's not that it doesn't have some okay abilities, like where you can make it so your guys get plus one attack, but subtract one save. Like they get one save worse. I don't really care on my Dark Shards. I mean, that's what I'm using that ability on, right? And it's not actually even a command ability. She can just choose to do it, which is cool. Right. But I just wish that was like one to two units of Dark Shards. Even if it was just like one to three units of Dark Shards or Dread Spears, I would be like, great. Okay, now they're actually like, might see some play here, right? Given the restrictions of the units you can take in this particular city, I'd rather just move on to the other city. I'm not prodding you to move on, but I feel like the list is better served in a Miss Haven, or you can do more things with Miss Haven than, yeah. I don't know. For me, I'm just like, eh. Yeah, I get it. Well, I mean, both of you guys can testify to this. Like I bitched about this for like two hours one day. Sure. Because the reality is that like I wanted this to work. I wanted to play the Dark Elf Army. I have a daughter's army. I wanted to spend money to create a unified Dark Elf Army. Like I have like, I have some executioners. I have some Dread Spears. I have, you know, I have a lot of this stuff. I wanna go out and buy a Black Dragon and put together a nice competitive fun mixed force. And I tried and I tried. And there's just nothing that like was gonna be reliable enough. Like I just had to like strain over backwards in order to get any functionality out of the vitriolic spray because of the non-maximite endless spells and because of the limited range and because of the lack of teleports. And there's no synergy between any of the sub-factions ever. Yeah, I get it. And like it just, it was really disappointing. Yep. All right, let's talk Miss Haven or Miss Whoven. Miss Whoven. I understand it's probably, it's pronunciation is probably as, because it's the A with a little circle over the top. So it's probably Miss Whoven. But I'm gonna call it Miss Haven because that's a letter A and there is no A with a little circle over top of it on my keyboard. So there it is. So Miss Haven or Hoven, as ever you would say it. It's a city in Ulgu. Happy to see additional realms being opened up for cities. So that's cool. I wanna see much more of this over the course of broken realms. It is basically a big shadow port of a bunch of boats tied together and it can move around which is a really cool idea for a city. Like, narratively the city is very, very cool. Narratively it's Anvil Guard 2.0. They just scrubbed off the label. They changed some of the abilities and they're like, hey, you want a shady city? Well, Anvil Guard doesn't exist anymore. So have Miss Haven. Have the even shadier city. Yes, this is like the real shady city. This is the real slim shady. Yes. So, okay. Now, let's talk about their sort of, their generic ability that they have. Underhanded tactics. Instead of setting up a friendly Miss Haven, Warder, Serpentish, Shadowblades or Scourge privateers unit with up to 10 models on the battlefield, you can place it to one side and say that it's set up as a flanking force as a reserve unit. You can set up one unit in a flanking force for each Dark Link coven's free guild or Duriden unit. You have already set up on the battlefield. So basically 50% of your army can go off board. And at the end of each of your movement phases, you can set up one or more flanking force units on the battlefield, nine inches away from enemy units at the start of the fourth battle round if they're not deployed, they're dead. Okay, great. Fantastic. You also gain special like magical narcotics that are a little bonus thing you can get for your heroes that are all one use things. And you have an artifact list that's got a very interesting artifact on it that we'll talk about, I'm sure in a moment, namely the Strangler kelp noose, but you do not get a spell lore and you do not, which is, you know, sad, right? Like I'm sad about that. And you don't get to- So you get drunk, you get drunk. Yes, you do. That's the most important thing. But you don't get the normal city's abilities again, you know, standard stuff, right? But you can take all your other units here, right? Like you can still have everything else that cities can have in this army. It's not locked to just like the Dark Elf stuff. It's just the special abilities are for the Order Cervantes, Scourge Privateers and Shadow Blades. Now let me ask you a question. How did the person who wrote this section of the book and was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we got to limit this ambush ability on the Scourge Privateers. Okay. These Corsairs coming in and blocks a 30. Anywhere from nine inches is crazy. It's crazy. We got to limit it down to 10. How did that get past muster? Okay. And yet the previous one, they were like 60 libs, three inches off the line. I don't see a problem to you. Nope, we're good. Like the fact that these things are on like opposing pages, like you flip from one to the next, I'm like, what happened here? Okay. And they're not even like, and you don't get bonus spells either. There are no spells. No, there's no spell list. That's what I said. Yeah. Yeah. There's no spell list, which is sad. So the... Despite there being a Command Trait that allows you to have an extra spell cost. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I guess you could go off-board with a Dreadlord on Black Dragon and he could ambush in from nine inches away. Well, I like a Dreadlord coming on with like 10 nights. Sure. That's interesting to me. Now, is it more interesting than doing the exact same thing in Living City? No. Where I can then like shoot and move closer with the Black Dragon? Not really. Sure. Let's do that. But this can be anywhere rather than the board edge. Yeah, I don't know that I'd ever play this ever. Yeah, sure. But then the command ability for Shadow Strike then allows you to move an extra D6. Right. If you brought in the Black Dragon with the Knights, you've now advanced your Knights potentially just within three. So like there's some good use still there. Yeah. It's not like, honestly, Missedhaven, Hoven, Haven. Yep. Misty, Misty Town. Let's just go with that. Misty Town is underwhelming. I would love to see this honestly boosted a little bit. Like I don't mind the 10 units or less thing. I really don't. I think more stuff should be like that. I think that's for like, my problem is not that. I think that's fine. I like the idea of little flanking Harrier units that can come in and do stuff like that. Like you mentioned 10 Knights or the Dreadlord on Black Dragon or whatever, right? My issue with it is it didn't do enough to buff the stuff that clearly needed to buffed, right? These are meant to be like, if you read the story, these pirates are like, they're for real, right? These are serious customers here. And I would have loved to see them have actually some kind of like offensive buff, something like that, right? Where even if it was through the command traits or through like the narcotics that you could use on units, maybe, right? If they could, if they instead of sort of buffing the hero, maybe you could like pass them out to the unit and get the unit all hopped up on goofballs or something, you know, like whatever, you know? They're like, there could have been play here. They could have had a, like, here's my problem. Do they not have a spell list because they ran out of room on the page? Yes. Is this a layout issue? Yes. That is exactly what happened. Okay. And like just buffing the knights or giving like giving around some good, a cut like one or two small buffs, right? Like a way to give the knights an extra attack, something like that, right? That's all it would have taken to actually make some really interesting play here. Yeah. I mean, there's just, there's a couple of ways they could have went. So yeah, it's unfortunate. Again, I feel like the cities are kind of the biggest mess in here. Well, I mean, at least you can get a six up shrug on your general. Sure. You do have a cool artifact. Let's talk about it real quick. The Strangler Kelp Noose. This is a funny artifact. I will admit this, this is like, it's pretty funny and it's pretty funny what it can do. Once per battle at the start of the combat phase, you can pick one enemy model within three inches of the bearer and roll a die. If the roll is six, or is less than the target's wound characteristic, the target cannot attack in that phase, in that combat phase. So any hero of more than six wounds, yes, exactly. Any hero of more than six wounds, you can just like automatically shut them off. Which is pretty cool, right? Like Archeon or... Oh, you told me that you have a Vlasda, huh? Yeah, sure. Or Marathi or whatever, right? Now, it won't shut off things that fight at the start of the combat phase that have old style activation wars nonsense and fight before you when it's their turn. Like, right, like they would have had a charge. Yeah, yeah, sure. But nonetheless, still a cool item. I do like that, that's neat. And as I hate to keep quoting Rob, but I will hear, why are nets in this game so good? Why is it, as we're about to cover when we get to IDK, Tom, do you remember back in like D&D some edition where nets were like super broken and like one of the best things you could wield? Like you could just shut people down with nets. It was 3-0. Yeah, yeah. Nets were like this sideways broken dumb weapon and like a net is actually a really inefficient weapon. It was, you know, nets are really just used in like gladiatorial combat and stuff like that. They're not actually a wartime weapon. And yet they became like the best weapon in D&D. That's what I feel like we're doing here because every net is like the best net. Whether we're talking netters on goblins, this net, this strangle kelp net, or the net we're about to talk about in a minute when we get to IDK, which is like the best net of nets. Too many nets. And I have a real problem with it. I have a real problem with it. Okay, anyway. Anything else that we have to cover with cities? I don't think Ms. Haven is as bad as it might sound. I actually think there's some good stuff in there. I think there's missing spell law and then you combine that with darkling covens and your sorcerers, stabby stabby, some dread spears. I think all it took was a spell law and this is a really cool city. But I still think the shadow strike and that teleporting shenanigans will find its place in the tournament list. So I think there's some good stuff in there. But again, it's not going to be five and knowing if that was what you're expecting. But I don't think it's bad. I actually don't think it's bad. I think Har Kuron, that for me is a bit, that for me is certainly something that if I was a Dark Elf player and I want to bring the band back, I'd be super happy, but I probably wouldn't go out and rushing by Dark Elf model. Yeah, I'm with you. All right, so next up, IDK, IDK. All right. So, let's, a lot of big changes here. Let's, I'll roll through them quick and then we'll just talk about it all. A lot of war scroll changes. Allopex, your Sharky Shark, improved attack profile and the most gross net launcher in the game. More nets, sick nets, bro. What the net launcher does is if the net launcher hits, not wounds, not causes damage, hits, that unit, unit cannot pile in. That's right, 60 goblins. You're all in the net now. Take that, that's right. All 60. All 60. I don't know how this works. Very efficient netting. Very, very good strong ropes under the sea. Both Eidolons were buffed. Five up, feel no pain on both now. The Eidolon of the Storm, the Drench with Hate bonus was expanded to Holy within 18 inches from Holy within nine, way better. And the pulled into the depths changes to plus one to hit for the Eidolon rather than neg one to hit for the enemy. Which is, you know, pretty powerful against an enemy hero. Makes actually quite a good hero fighter. The Eidolon of the Sea, again, five up, feel no pain. The Bravery buff was expanded to 18 inches Holy within. And they can reroll all casts, unbinds or dispels as opposed to just one. So good. They also got a lot cheaper by the by. They're way, both of them dropped on points even though they got better. Which shows you just how far off these things were originally. The Leviadon got much more offensive. I'm not gonna go into each of his profile changes. He has a lot of them, they changed. He does a lot more damage now. The Void drum is now plus one to save for all IDK within 12. And plus one to hit for all Nomarty within 12. So it's not cover anymore. It's just plus one to save. It's real good. And the Leviadon is 340 points. So he went back up just a little, but he's like way better. Again, not to get into the narrative, but there is a moment in the story where like 12 Leviadons literally attack a fleet of ships and it's amazing. So anyways, like a dozen Leviadon turtles. Did its base armor save go up from, was it normally a three now or two? Or was it always a two? No, so yeah, that's also good. Thank you. I didn't include that, but yes, you're absolutely right. So it's armor save also, it moved to a star, right? So it's like a Vestilodon now. Thank you, I didn't mention that. But it starts at a two up for its first eight wounds. And its monster profile also changed to be the best monster profile in the game. It's even better than the Megas because it does not lose efficacy until half of its wounds are eroded. Most monsters are at a quarter or a fifth where they lose, where they start to degrade. It has to lose more than 50% of its wounds and its initial eight wounds are on a two up save. I wish Megas had been 18 wounds before they started to degrade when I saw this. I thought we got to a third and we were blessed and lucky. And then they were like, no, no, no, dog. See people are better, fish people are better. We got this. So yes, thank you. It all starts at two up and then degrades as they, as it, you crack the shell. So yeah, and then there's a battalion, which is like, whatever, it's fine. It can make your king immortal. If you, for some reason wanted to take it, it's okay. Like you can pass wounds off to your sharks. And there are new mount traits for seahorses and turtles, Volturnus included, and they are really good. That's my note here to myself. They are really good. So good, so good. The mount traits make me angry. Can I talk for a moment? I'm, look, I've just got a digress for a minute. I've had this in me for like a week and a half and I can't, I've got to let it out. Here we go. Why? Why? Just it's stupid undersea unicorn and his turtle friend just get bonus mount trait rules that are good, like good abilities when my mega-gargants don't get like a legendary name or a special ability or a quote unquote mount trait for them. They're all named characters. Every mega-gargant's a named thing. In the, in the narrative, they're all named things. We could have just had our own monster mount trait type thing, like almost every monster in the game gets stupid war hydras and caribbises get these things in and black dragons get it in Anvil Guard and we don't get them in our book. I hate it. It should have been in there and I will never forgive you for not including it. Okay, back to this. At any rate, sorry, that's, it really triggered me, man. It triggered me. Okay. Anthony, what do you think of all the IDK changes? So, I am so effing excited, not because I'm an IDK player, but I'm so sick of playing Eels. I'm just sick of playing Eels. I remember when IDK very first come out, I was excited that the idea of Nomadi and Reavers and Turtles and Eidolon. And I got to play some of those early on, but I haven't really seen much of it. It's always been like cookie cutter one list. So, I think we will still see Eels. I don't think people are gonna just drop their Eel stock, but I am seeing a lot of lists now with a Levidon. Having the ancient Mount Trait, having ignoring it in Rend 1 and having a two-up armor saved for half of its wounds is crazy cool. I think you'll start to see a bit more list diversity. So, overall, I'm excited. I hope to see some more things like, even like the Eidolon's been, it's been such a long time since it was in Eidolon on the table. And it's such a beautiful skull. Yeah, I agree. Tom, what are your thoughts on the IDK? Yeah, they're good. Yeah, I mean, this a lot rests on the winter FAQ. Because right now, what most of this did is still buff Eels. Like you probably wouldn't go full Eels spam. You'd mix in like a shark or two to net launch people and stop them from piling in. Or you're gonna have Volte with his void chill darkness so he can subtract one from hit rolls for attacks made by enemy models that are within three inches of this model. Just period, he's doing that, right? Like just, he's just got this bubble of neg one to hit around him for enemy models, which is really good. And there's a lot of situations in this army where you could be under like neg one, neg two, neg three to hit depending on how they built the army, right? And yes, some of that's gonna cut into your eel count, but with the extra control you're getting out of like stopping all pylons or just plowing into somebody with a very invulnerable Leviadon or maybe having an Eidolon actually being a good caster now. Like there's lots of play. It's my point. So I think you'll still see a good chunk of eels being the backbone of the army, but a little bit of it, that end stuff will start flipping into these other things. Now, if in the winter FAQ, the eels go up points, right? Then I think you're gonna see much different armies built. I think you're gonna see people start, especially if the offensive eels go up and the defensive ones don't. You'll start seeing some like two plus unrendable eel builds where they're like where you have shielded eels to start the game. You'll start to see like a lot more Eidolon play where they're looking to sort of dominate in that way. You'll start to see more Neymarty builds built around the Leviadon where he's making them, like he's buffing them in a radius around them and keeping them more alive because of the save bonuses and stuff like that. So it's interesting. We'll see what happens. Yeah, IDK changes were good. I mean, I'm scared because I think IDK, the IDK changes make them. An already army that was regularly in the top five, top 10, got patently better. Right? It kind of comes back to my point around Marathi is that Marathi was relying on one or two one tricks. I feel like we all know what eels done and we all know they're gonna come on the side of the board. They're either gonna reverse the tide or they're gonna come on turn three. We know, I think there's gonna be a little bit more diversity, which will be fun. And also shout out to the sharks. They've been trying to make sharks good for a while. I've got a local player who's very, very good and we've been running sharks for years now, Ben Speneti. And Ben's been running sharks really well. And I think finally they're getting some time in the sun. Yep. Yep. Yeah, I agree. I think the blood surf, I don't like I'm not sold on it because you're locked to one of their, I don't know what their chambers are called, but you've got to run it as a, was it a off branch or whatever it is? Oh, yeah, yeah. It has to be in an Iron Rack. It has to be in an Iron Rack Enclave. Yeah. Yep, agreed. I didn't mention that for blood surf hunt, but yes, it does have to be Iron Rack. Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, I am scared and excited for IDK. That is my answer. All right. Next up, slaves to darkness. All right. I forgot they were in this book. Well, if it makes you feel better, GW might have as well. No, that's a joke. That's a joke. Go ahead, go ahead, Anthony. No, I was just going to continue the jokes and saying that when you said that you thought cities was the weakest of this book, I was going to disagree. I think for me, slaves was underwhelming, but let's unpack the rules and maybe you will convince me otherwise. I'll say that there's one egregious misstep on slaves, but we'll talk about that. Okay, I don't hate this. I don't know that it's good, but I think it's still better than what the other one was, okay? All right, so idolaters. So this is your new sub-faction. You take it in place of ravagers or cabalists or whatever. And in this one, you get an idolater lord, which takes one of your chariots and upgrades it to a hero. He becomes the idolater lord, priest, and hero keywords. He also counts as an exalted charioteer, even though he's only a unit of one. And he knows the prayer that corresponds to his mark, right? And the prayers that you get are very similar to the war shrine buffs, not exactly the same, but similar enough that I don't have to go into every one of them, right? They do basically the same kind of stuff. Your priests in this army, okay? All priests gain plus one to all prayer rolls and all priests have the leader battlefield roll, okay? You also get plus one to wound enemy priests and you can destroy enemy faction terrain. Fine, not all terrain, just enemy, just like enemy faction terrain, but I don't know how much that would ever come up, but okay, fine enough, I guess. It's a neat little bonus thing. Feels just like an extra thing thrown in, so that's fine. Take that, Sylvaneth. Sure. You're gonna break up some woods, yeah. It's like crazy good right now. Yeah, exactly. Hitting them where it hurts. It's about time you came down to peg Sylvaneth. Cultists, this is obviously the interesting part of the army to me. All of the war cry cultists are now battle line. And in addition, they gain the Marauder Charge rule where when they charge, you set the lowest die to a six. Whoa, which means that it's quite reasonable that untamed beasts can move 28 inches or something, right? Because they'll like start the game on the line, move six inches pre-game, move six, run six. They have built-in run in charge and then they charge. So it's like, right? When I read it, I could just see a marketing person being like, so we gotta sell war cry war bands. Right. Well, this is the thing people always wanted, right? Because people wanted their war cry cultists to be battle line. Now you still can't give the war cry cultists marks, which I think might be the thing you were gonna talk about, I don't know. Nope. Okay, that's fine. So they are still what they are. Yep. They are not as good as marauders, mainly because they're not all on 25 mil bases with ridiculous stupid bonuses to attack and rend for no apparent reason. Their axes don't get sharper when you have more than 15 of them. But at the same time, I think that there is interesting play here and I think it's cool. If people really like the war cry war bands, I think this is valid, right? So I mean, I think this is a cool army that they opened up. And here's why I like this and I feel this is more successful than the cities. If I wanted to make a cool dark elf themed force before, I could do that, right? Like I could have taken Anvil Guard and kind of leaned into the dark elf aesthetic and I had stuff that like boosted my black dragons and whatever, whatever, right? Like I could have felt like I was building a cool dark elf force, yeah? And neither of the new cities actually made me feel like I'm building more of an efficient or better dark elf force than what I was doing before. In fact, it's possibly worse, right? Like it did make me feel like, oh, I'm more in theme in any big way. In my opinion, your mileage may vary, okay? I still think the Darkling Coven build of Miss Taven still is good. It keeps you in that dark elf build, but I can appreciate what you're saying. Sure, whereas to me, this was just an unbuildable thing before, right? Like I couldn't do the Warcry army that I wanted to run. Cause let's just be honest that the Marauders are stupid figs and the Warcry warbands all look amazing, right? And like people wanted to run this. And the fact that they turned them battle line and gave them the cool Marauder charge rule says, okay, they've got some play. Do they have as much play as Marauders? No, but they've got some play, right? And the whole like upgraded chariot lord thing is a cool, it's a cool tech piece. I like chariot heroes. I think it's a neat idea. I'm glad we got that brought in. I hope we do the same thing with other things like that. Like I hope we get like a demigraf hero at some point and a Gorgoranta hero at some point, you know, whatever, whatever in the same way. So I think that's all good. Yeah, and as far as stuff that they can do, I think they're mostly still acting like a slave to darkness army and relying on a lot of the same slaves stuff. Is it as good as your demon prince, uh, dispoilers? No. They fundamentally failed. Okay, tell me why Tom. Fundamentally failed in design. Okay, I'm ready. Walk us through it. We don't need to build up. You have, you have traded your idolator prayers, which is the, the, you know, like your general's prayer for all magical items. Yes, that is true. There is not a magic item list in this. And there are no generic magical item lists for all of slaves to darkness. All slaves to darkness only have items in the actual sub faction, which means if you take this, your heroes don't get items other than whatever realm you're from. You get one item. Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, that's a fun. That is a fundamental failure. That is a failure on the level of like the sacrifices that were being made for like the allegiance like grand alliance order where you had to like delve into like the realms to get functional artifacts. This one doesn't even have real artifacts. Okay. Let me ask you a question, Tom. Yep. Is Celeste's battalion a fundamental failure? Cause it doesn't have magic items. The Celeste sub faction, I should say. It has no magic items. So none of your heroes could ever have any items. And other than the one realm artifact. Yeah. And you can take multiple battalions in that build pretty easy. I would say that it leaves me with like, let me say it this way. I feel that I am leaving things on the table. Sure. Like things that the base rules grant me. So there's a hidden cost to doing this thing. Sure. Sure. There's a built in penalty that they're not even being honest about. Yeah. Like to me, what ends up happening is you build this out and then after you've gotten excited about it, after you've built it out, you realize, oh, I don't get to actually play with this base mechanic that everybody else gets to play with. Yeah. I lose that thing. Sure. Like it would be different if they said in the actual legions abilities, because idolaters are iconic classic, they can't take items. I would have went, okay. Like, so they're balancing out other abilities with the absence of items. What I read here is they just ran out of page space and so they just couldn't fit items. And so it feels like I've traded this bad prayer for the Lord with an actual item chart. Yeah. Which let's be honest, you could realistically have two items with a battalion in slaves. Yes. Yes, yes. Absolutely. Well, I mean, you could actually take the Gresh's Iron Reapers battalion in this, right? And, you know, like, that's fine. Like there's a battalion literally built for this. Right. Right. And so the cost of that is you also don't get an item with that, a bonus item. Sure. And so like it just feels like a failure because like it feels like that battalion should be 50 to 70 points cheaper then because you don't actually get part of the benefit of battalions. Right. So that's like, so I was excited about this until I realized I didn't get items and I'm like, oh, that's a lot less interesting. Sure. Nope, totally fair. Anthony, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I actually agree with both of you. I think Tom's 100% right that you don't get that extra artifact. So whether the points were reduced prior to publishing or it could be reduced or an additional benefit some way to compensate for the lost artifact, I can, I actually agree wholeheartedly. The same time, like if I'm a slave to darkness player and I want to run an army full of chariots and knights and maybe Marauder horsemen, if I want to be tapping into, you know, the iron golems, the untamed beasts, you know, your war cry warbands, the new, is it the Scions of the Flame? They're pretty cool. I think this will allow me to do some different things. And I think comparing them to Marauders is not fair. I think Marauders in general need to be altered. So that shouldn't be our benchmark. But I think overall, again, a nice interesting build. I think people who are very passionate about this type of style or may justify, we saw some chariots being built in cities and people really enjoy running Scourgerunner chariots. I want to see what slaves do with this. But yeah, for me, I wasn't initially amazed, but I'm sure there's some secret source somewhere and who knows, again, what's coming next in broken realms. So I think that's always a grain of salt I've got to think about is we don't know what's coming with that updated points adjustment. We don't know what's coming, you know, what else is going to be able to synergize and be brought into this mix. Sure, it is cool that all your war shrines get the leader role, so that's cool. Okay, like that's not bad. Right, and your chariot can be a hero, but actually can't carry an item. Your chariot can be a hero, but can't carry an item. Well, you can carry a generic realm item, but you mean like other than that. Yeah, sure. But those are all bad. Well, yeah, I mean, they're all questionable. Let's put it that way. Like your two choices don't, the two actual decent ones aren't super useful here. Like the only halfway decent realm artifacts are the rage blade, which is good if you have a high number of attacks, right? Which this guy doesn't. He'll have like four with his main weapon, so it's not like sixes to double tap or doing that much. Or the plate of perfect perfection from Shimon. I mean, ignoring rend one is not terrible, right? Like it's okay thing. It's certainly better than no magic item. I mean, I'll give it that. And it's a decently defensive item. Yeah. Okay. All right. Anything more, I don't disagree with you, Tom. Anything more we wanna say on slaves? All right. Uh-oh, that's right. What's up, folks? Nothing to make with slaves. You thought there was only five factions in the book? Well, you're right. There are. Boom, Slinish. Bonus nerf. That's right, folks. You thought that I was not gonna talk about this? You were wrong. Okay. Slinish with the fifth nerf of the season. That's right, we cannot help but win for losing. Now I'm excited to see what's coming. I hope we get Mortal Slinish announced and that could turn all of Slinish's problems around. But with Shadow and Pain, we got a fun kick in the teeth. And I wanna talk about it. So, obviously, since Shadow and Pain released at the same time in tandem, there were also war scroll changes to, and points changes to Slinish stuff. Namely, Hellstriders have a Hellstriders, the mortal dudes on the Lickitung anteater demons, have a slightly upgraded melee profile. Slightly. They went from killing nothing ever under any circumstance to doing a couple wounds. Okay. And for that amazing benefit, they lost the battlefield role. Or the battle line, sorry, the battlefield role. Good Lord, what did I type there? Sorry. We all knew what you were saying. We all knew what you were saying. There we go, fixed. Our battle line. They lost the battle line role. Are you serious over here? This was the stock staple battle line that- In your army. In your Slinish army. You never took Daemonettes. No, because Daemonettes are terrible. They're the worst demons. They're the worst. They're worthless. Okay. Like straight worthless. And they don't do anything. They add nothing to the army. They benefit from nothing and achieve nothing. They're the opposite of what you want in the army. And Hellstriders at least had the decency of being like fast chaff, right? Right. Which is all you needed. You needed fast chaff to get in the way to keep your heroes alive. Because that's what you're looking for in Slinish. Now I'm excited that by doing this, you've said the only valid bill to Slinish is Lurid Hayes Invaders. What I was running back in February. But with just all the marauders. That's right. Bring in all the marauders, baby. Because that's your only other battlefield generic choice left. Or battle line, why do I keep saying that? Only battle line generic choice left. So just get them all in. Get them all in. That's right, folks. It's marauder time. It's marauder o'clock over in Slinishville. They're bent sideways. And they're the only option you got. It's that or demonets that do nothing. So make a choice. Real shame. Real shame. It reminds me of that internet meme like 10 years ago where that guy was in bed telling leave Brittany alone. Like leave Slanesha alone. Like hasn't it suffered enough? Yeah. No. It's already dead. No, he loved. They love that. I never would have thought 12 months. 12 months ago that I would be feeling sympathetic to Slinish now. Like I would have been 12 months ago. Like you deserve it. Suck shit. But now I actually genuinely feel sorry. You are on Sylvaneth level. Sympathy. No. The legions of the gas sympathy. Take it. Take it and like it. Sure. You know you like the pain. Just suck it up and deal with it. Yep. So at any rate, we all have high hopes for this weekend and whatever they announce. Because this could be very much fixed with cool new mortal Slinish units, right? Like if I get cool new mortal Slinish options, I'll be like who cares? Because I do not like health writers anyways. I think they're stupid looking figs. I'd love to jettison them and get some cooler options. So all will be forgiven if you build me on a new mortal Slinish. So three days and counting. OK. All right, gentlemen. Let's talk lore here for just a few minutes. We've been going for a while. We're going to do a nice quick lore overview. You know, I would direct everybody to Doug and 2 Plus Tough to do the full lore. But we wanted to wait till deep in the show so we can talk about that. Let's move us back over here. And let's minimize that down. There we go. And we'll bring up our lore here. What did you think of this lore? What are the high points of the story for you? I don't want to, we don't have to beat by beat it. I mean, I guess I'll do a quick summary. Here's the very quick high level summary of the lore. Spoilers. You've been warned. OK. Long story short, Marathi is going after godhood. To do that, she collects several different items, one of which is the magic soul lantern from the IDK. The other thing she needs is Varanite, the realmstone of the eight peaks. And on the way, she tricks Sigmar and Stormcast into helping her, even though Sigmar never fully trusts her. She tricks, basically, what's his name, Catacross. She tricks Krakatoa into helping her into distracting the slaves of darkness. There's a really cool beat in there where the zinch has developed a spell that can actually, if Stormcast die in the range of this spell, their souls get sucked into war shrines and don't go back to Aesir, which is terrifying, obviously. So some cool stuff there. Marathi ends up getting the little lantern, getting enough Varanite, diving in and destroying her mortal body completely, disassembling herself, and diving back into the gullet of Slaanesh, where she swims around inside his infinite weirdness of chaos inside him. And she uses the soul lantern to attract all of the ancient elven souls, the most potent and powerful from the world that was and back farther, all their old gods and all their old heroes. She attracts them and then eats them all. So she consumes and destroys the souls of all of the ancient great heroes. So none of them are coming back. You can all, like, El-Tharion is the only one who got out the rest of them? You're dead. Yeah, I know. No, El-Tharion's still in there. Well, I'll get to him, OK, in a second. Because, assumingly, that's a very logical assumption that that's who that is. It could be Kaldor as well, potentially. She gets to a final soul and pauses because she has actually some love for this soul, is how they describe it or whatever, right? There's, like, Marathi, despite her tens of thousands of years of existence, right? Still has some love for this particular soul. The easy guess is El-Tharion, her former husband or whatever, right? It was the greatest of the kings, which is what the text has. Yeah, exactly. He's the easy read. It is El-Tharion. He also then turns into a giant fire sword, which, famously, El-Tharion also drew the cane. And he turns into a giant fire sword. His spirit turns into a giant fire sword. And he splits her in half. And then the ritual completes and she gets out. She's achieved godhood, but she is forever sundered, hence why she has two forms of baby Marathi and big Marathi. Because her ex-husband turned into, hey, why do you have two bodies? Well, I was fishing around as a soul form in a god that I had in chain. And I met my ex-husband and he turned into a fire sword and split me into, and then my god ritual completed. You know, life's crazy, right? I mean, it's just, it's a wacky world we all live in, huh? So anyways. Makes sense to me. Yeah, so she attains godhood and then goes and attacks Anvilguard. She shows up under a flag of peace and then through her allies in the Black Coil Network and the other nefarious dark elves who run Anvilguard. She takes it over. She carefully does not kill any of the Stormcast in the city so they can't lightning back up to Sigmar to warn him. Like Von Brecht. Right, she takes it captive. She takes over the city. It's now Hark here on. She renames it. So Marathi stabs Sigmar in the back. Kills a lot of innocent people. And Von Brecht is alive at the end, but imprisoned. He's getting all like, talked to down by some stupid Fleetmaster, Black Ark Fleetmaster who Von Brecht wouldn't certainly paced out through a wall if he ever got his hands on him because give me a break for your little coarse air self. And then all of a sudden, some being that's clearly a teaser for the next one comes in that's like got crimson eyes that glow in the dark and big leathery wings and is a vampire. Just saying. Shows up and kills everybody. Every dark elf in that place rips through him like a hot knife through butter and frees Van Brecht and then like just leaves. Never says anything to him. Just clearly murders everybody, rips open every gate and allows Von Brecht to escape. And he then leaves the book like saying, I need to figure out where I can get a boat and get out of here and get back to warn people. I, by the way, I think he is going to be, like you asked earlier about him as a character. I think he's going to be sort of our human POV Sigmar side character throughout the whole story. Where he'll kind of keep, you know, he'll keep going throughout the stories and be kind of our character that we get established we stick to. And then also this thing, this thing over there, that sexy, sexy image that's over there on the side of my screen, that is the protein form being born. A form of depravity and exultation, witness its glory weep at its majesty as slanesh, baby slanesh is reborn. So they did say in the art, like in the book, they're not very clear about what the protein form is. They just have all of the slanesh things are coming and worshiping at it at the birth of this protein thing. And in the article, they were like, slanesh is reborn. It's a little baby now. Like literally just said that in the lore article that they were like, catch up on what happened. Here's spoilers. This is slanesh reborn. Oh, okay. You didn't say that in the book, but all right, I guess that's what it is. Okay. Baby slanesh. So this happened a little bit earlier than I anticipated. Sure. So that's your high level beats. Anthony, there's a lot of other stuff I didn't cover there. That was super summarized. Which thing of all this? I think it's awesome. I think it's the first step. And I mentioned right at the start of the episode that it's not my armies. It's mostly not the stories that I really care about but it's interesting to think about how the different realms are about to respond. I always said that I would have loved to have stayed in malign portents for longer than we did. And there's so many questions that need to be answered for me. So very cool to hear my dog licking his water now. Stop that. But yeah, no, I think it's really interesting. I love the advancement of Marathi. The book is, I think from this particular book, it's about at least 70 to 80, I think at least 70 pages are just story, just straight-out story. So, and the Marathi journey is broken up into what, three acts? So I'm really conscious not to spoil it for anyone. I think what you've said was really good. Learn more from the book. Go read it from, go listen to it to pass tough dog bit. I have more questions than answers right now. I want to know what's happening, you know, as a Hello Heart Tempest Eye player, Anvil guards just up the road for me. How are we going to respond? What are we going to do? Have we just, you know, shit our pants? Or what are we going to do? Because Marathi is around the corner. But there's two other big cities, both on that peninsula within range of, within range of. Tempest Eye, Hammer Hall, and Hello Heart, let alone Corn who's roaming around the flame scar peninsula. Like there's so many other cool things that we tapped into, but yeah, I'm down. I'm excited. I want to see what the next book is about. And hopefully we're going to reveal this week. Yeah, and I do think slanesh is still trapped, right? Like slanesh is still trapped, but has slowly been like breaking chains and then replacing the chains with illusions so that the elves don't notice. And I think sort of like slanesh, these are both slanesh. One is like baby slanesh and one is papa slanesh or whatever. I don't know if that's an allusion to the same thing that happened with Marathi in a certain way or not. I, you know, I don't know where the story is going. I have no idea, but I am in. I mean, like the beats in this, the fall of the city, the story with them assaulting the eight points and getting the baronite was freaking crazy awesome. The thing that happened with probably the naryon and the fire sword, like it's nuts. Like there are just crazy good beats in this story that are just like, it's an exciting read. Even just learning about how the, the blood shrines work in conjunction with the big cauldrons in Hagnar, you know, those little, there's so many little gems that are dropped through the book. You get a real appreciation. Or again, you ask more questions because you've now learnt something and you want to know more about the story. So yeah, for me, it's been awesome to get into a story advancement. Yeah, it's, it's a, it, it absolutely leaves more questions and answers. There's a lot of neat turns in there. Like the, the IDK show up in this obviously in a big way to go get their lantern back. That's a really cool confrontation and sort of an, it resolves in a way you wouldn't necessarily expect when like the King shows up and talks to Marathi and like, like as she's born into Godhood and what ends up happening, I think it's actually called like Marathi's mercy or something like that is the name of the, the chapter or the name of the section, something like that. Yeah, Tom, what about you buddy? Can we just talk about the fact that like she achieved Godhood? Yeah, she did it. She got it. She got it. Yeah. Like that was her motivation when the first book dropped. Tens of thousands of years in the making. She got there. She got there. I had to laugh when this was exactly the beats of Nagash in End Times. Sure. Like- Go around, steal certain artifacts and then conduct a big ritual. Yeah, yeah. And then go destroy something that you're angry about. Right. Yeah, yeah. Like for him, he's like, ah, Kamri, you're mine. Right. Here, she's like, you know what? I'm going to take Amplegard. Let's start there. Yeah. I was arrested at Pantheon. Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry. I was just going to say, I think for me, it's like, well now that she's achieved Godhood, how does the Pantheon respond? Like what does Gorka Malka going to do? What's going to happen with Sigma? What is Nagash thinking about this? Like just, and then obviously the trickle down effect to the, you know, are there going to be champions that rise up much like the heralds of old? Like are we going to see new champions, new people who are going to rise up and how they're going to interact with this story and other stories? And then how does it come to a head? So I think we've got a cool seven to eight months of books. I was always worried about how these books would start to drop. But if this is going to set the pace, I think we're up for a really exciting, I guess, six months. Yeah, she's an interesting God too as she's one of the few in the Pantheon not directly tied to a realm, right? Like Malarian has control of Ugu, her son technically owns Ugu, right? And Sigma is tied to Azeer and Techless is tied to, Techless and Tyrion are tied to Haish, right? Elariel's tied to the realm of life and so on and so forth, right? Because they became gods through the wind of magic that occupied them in the end time that they ended up reincorporating through, right? Nagash obviously has Shaish and whereas she has no plane that she's attached to, hence why she could just be like, you know what, I'm going to Akshi and I'm gonna steamroll Anvil Guard and that's my city now. I'm not tied to my son's realm, right? I'm just gonna go leave this and go put my boot up somebody else. And there's no gods associated with Akshi, for example. Yeah, so sure. So technically Grimnir, right? Like kind of, but he's in pieces. He is in pieces, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like I think about the same thing with the realm of metal. Like there's no god there, although kind of grungy. Sure. Yeah, the dwarves get kind of partial credit. They bid bid by name really. So yeah, it's just really interesting, just really interesting developments that I just didn't think they would do. Right, I mean, they did, they hit so many things in this first book if this is the kind of pace and like story beats were moving out through the rest of this story. That's why I said like we are going to, truly this is gonna live up to its name of broken realms. Right, I don't even know what the world looks like on the other side of this. Like I'm not just flippantly relating it to end times. Like it feels like of the same weight and significance of the narrative developments that happened in times. Right, not that they're gonna end by literally blowing up the mortal realms or something like that. Right, I'm not testing that at all. But just simply that like the narrative development of major players and the rise and fall of nations and the reforming of the narrative landscape. Like all of that is happening here in spades. Right, yep. Absolutely. And speaking of narrative landscapes, there are also some cool and interesting realm rules as well that you can bring into play. So I'm gonna explore that locally, but it's a very interesting realm rules you can tap into from this book. Yeah, I played with the, so the past two weeks I've played with two of those new realm rules in my normal games, my normal weekly game and they were fun. It's really cool. It's neat rules that let you feel like you're kind of playing in that. There's like a Veranthrax one for the eight points. There's a subsection of Akshi and a subsection of what we'll do I think is the three of them. I think that's right. And they're cool. They're really neat rules. What's some interesting counterplay? Like one of them you can like gather, your commander can like gather mists around the units to like give negatives to hit in shooting. And then people can jump their own command points and negate those. Yeah, to like which like the mists and stuff. It's actually really cool counterplay. It's kind of, it was a really fun realm to play in. I thought that one was really neat. There's certainly like, like there was some discussion of should they be in match play? And my only argument would be no, just cause they're kind of hard to, like people might not have access to them would be my only reason not, but like power wise, there's no reason you shouldn't use them in your match play games. And if somebody said they were using mid a tournament and had them like on a sheet where I could see the rules, I would be perfectly fine with it because there's nothing broken in them. They're actually like less impactful rules wise than the normal realms. Like play and shum own some time and talk to me about how impactful realms are, right? When the whole board is suddenly entangling. But like, yeah, so they're fine. They're fine. I really liked those realms. I thought they were good. Oh, they're cool. I was glad we got an eight points realm to play in cause I've wanted that for a while. I thought that's a neat battlefield that I was sad there was no realm rules for. But another one. So there you go. All right. Oh, and all the realm artifacts with them that you could theoretically maybe use are all junk. So there you go. So that's fine too. Sometime I gotta get a flying artifact that I'm allowed to use. It's all I want. It's all I want. Yeah, anything else we wanna say before we leave this behind this mega review? I'm excited about the future of Warhammer. You know, I saw somebody make a comment in the comments and I fully agree with it. Like if there's this much narrative development in the first volume, who knows where we'll be at the end of it. Agreed. Yep. I agree. Anthony, final thoughts? Yeah. Look, there's no affiliate links here. There's no, we're not trying to sell you anything. But like just reading this book again it's just been really interesting. We learned a lot. I think again, we talked about it's a good balance between narrative and rules. So I think there's something for everyone. And I would again, highly recommend at minimum you go and watch someone like Two Plus Tough Doug and go get across this story. If it sounds like a thing for you, go grab the book. But at minimum, I would suggest everyone goes and watches those videos just to get across what this means. And then when Broken Realms touches your army, you're across how the story is kind of coming together and what each little arc has kind of meant for your faction, your realm, your leader, your God. Yep. Do you think we'll get a starter box like we did for all the battalions in Marathi? Do you think we'll get one of those for every single book? I think there'll be some kind of release tied to every book, but I don't know that they'll always be that. But you know, I think they'll vary. I think they will. That's why I was confident. That's why I was confident we wouldn't get any battle, battle force boxes. I thought nothing's going to put out these three to five boxes every book. And that's how, that's how our model is, but yeah, so I think there will be. I hope so. All right. Well, thank you very much, everybody for watching. I know this was a mega review. This was a long one, but there was so much to unpack here. I hope you all enjoyed it. Thank you very much, coach, for sticking with us for this whole time. It was a pleasure to have you on the show, brother. For all of you out there, thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to hit the like button over there. We really appreciate it. It's as easy as sliding your mouse from here down to here and clicking a little thumbs up. It helps other people find this video. If you haven't already subscribed or if you're new, please do give a subscribe. We're here every week doing this. But as always, I thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next Wednesday.