 Hello everybody, if it's Wednesday, it's Warhammer, and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly. Joining me, as always, is my one and only, and yet somehow still the loser, co-host Tyler. Oh, rude. I just had a flush to mine first. I didn't say it, Tyler. The people chose it. You were the one voting against yourself the whole time. Now you must. I was, I was. That's fair, it's fine. You must accept the will of the people. That's how democracy works, so. I've heard that a few times, supposedly. That's how democracy works. Also joining us for the first time to talk tonight about the winners and losers of the GHB. It's Alex, what's up, buddy? How you doing? It's thanks for having me. Really excited to be here. I want to say, yeah. It's great to have you. Absolutely. Thank you. You, so we know Tyler is actually a co-host who does things before this show. I just want to share a little behind the scenes information here with everybody. So, you know, we, Tyler, like obviously off week after this show, we talk about, you know, what we're doing in the weeks to come in the interim period. And leading up to this show, Tyler had prepared a document full of sort of, you know, winners and losers and his thoughts and things like that. And he shared this document with Alex, who then went, went absolutely above and beyond the call of duty as a guest and put in like tons of great thoughts and combos and, and, and just all sorts of information and stuff like that. So, so really like in this one, in this one tiny episode, Alex, you did more work than Tom has done in probably 10 years of the show. I want you to know that. So, yeah. Well, that means a lot to hear that. Just for the record, you wouldn't necessarily know this. It was Alex who originated the document that I added to it. Oh, I'm sorry. You know, even more, even more above and beyond. That's true. I didn't want to call you out though, but I had no idea and I'm sorry for miss, miscrediting the, the document. So, okay, even farther. Also, this is our anniversary show. So happy anniversary, everybody. This is it. So, cause it's whatever episode is the closest to January 28th, cause that was the official kickoff back when we did it. So this is like our, I don't know, 19th anniversary or something. Wow. 13? 14, 15, I don't remember. Somewhere, okay. Yeah. A different person that long ago. Yeah, we all, I guess it wouldn't, it wouldn't have been 23rd. So eight years. Yeah. So it'd be this, 2015, somebody can do the math, but I think yeah. It was a while ago. Like 14, 2015. Wow. That sounds, I, 20, something like that sounds right. Either way, it doesn't matter. It's the anniversary show. Who knows? I'll go back and look for the 10th anniversary, which this isn't. And maybe next year isn't either. I don't know, but we're happy to still be here. And in all that time, we've never missed a week. So, hey, there you go. Let's keep the streak alive. Knock on wood, throw some salt over the shoulder. There you go. We got lots to talk about tonight, but of course first, the news. By the way, hit like for the anniversary show and for talking about the GHB and for Alex being already a better guest than Tom as a co-host. So there you go. Hit like for all those things. Wow, thank you. Tyler, yes, I'm sorry, go to the news. Yeah. For once, it's not a 40K thing. Apparently it's a Blood Bowl thing. It's a Blood Bowl thing. It's just the new, it's the new vampire. I'm sure if I just heard my dogs go nuts, I don't know what's set them off, sorry. But yes, it's just the updated Blood Bowl vampire sky. Like it's an exact duplicate of the original old kit, so. Here for it. Yeah, looks cool. And then, let's see, we had a little article about the Sigma organized play coming to local stores across the country, the world. So I saw Metagames in Liberty, Springfield was at the tail end of it. Alex is your local store, a part of the organized play store packs? No, we're a pretty small store, but. Okay. Soon, that's what I'll say. Looks pretty sweet. You know, they're gonna give us, well the main thing is a little plaque that you can win for competing in this kind of league or this, I don't know if it's like a league or an event. It'd be just kind of more of like an event that they're doing. But yeah, seemed pretty neat. Got a few different things included in the pack. So it's nice to see that. Yeah, do you guys eventually have any interest in that? Do you have a local, yeah, do you actually have a local store? I have local stores, but I have one local store, but it's not that kind of store. Great for magic. They're a great magic store and good for like all my sort of D&D needs and stuff like that. But they do have some play space, but it's not really big enough to host a war gaming tournament. They do have nights dedicated to some games and allowing people to play, but it's a couple of tables, that kind of thing. Sure, cool. I'll check it out if you're interested in seeing if your store is on that list. There was a bunch of them. Okay, so Las Vegas open. Got a couple of things. The Warmer preview is happening, I believe this Thursday, tomorrow? Friday. Friday, okay. And 10 o'clock Pacific, I saw. So yeah, hopefully we'll see some cool things. They have a little image. Right, 1 a.m. Eastern. 1 a.m. Eastern, yeah. Yeah. I think 6 a.m. London time, UK time. Yeah. So, it's gonna be something we'll probably not do a live response show too. As one, that's very late. I mean, I'll probably be awake or something, but two, I'll be at the Holy Event this weekend. We'll be at Holy Wars for that. So like, but we'll see what it is. I'm interested enough. So it's, I guess it depends where you are. It's tomorrow night. I guess it is tomorrow night. Yeah, I'm sorry. It's technically Friday morning at 1 a.m. Does that make sense? So it's like Friday at 6 a.m., I think. Yeah, that's right. It's Friday at 6 a.m. in the UK, but it's Thursday at 10 p.m. Pacific time or whatever, wherever Vegas is, yeah, Pacific time. So, Oriental round that. So, tomorrow night, I guess, but Friday also technically, depending where you are in the world. That looks right. Late article here. So either way, not doing a reaction show to that. Cause then I'm getting up early the next morning to drive to the holy event. So there you go. Let's probably gonna feature Seraphon, who we all know, not a real army. So it's fine. That's a shame. Oh, right. The other thing that stood out, I saw, and I don't know if Chuck Moore is involved in helping us finally get here. We're actually gonna have some dedicated Age of Sigmar live coverage at Las Vegas Open this weekend. Exciting times. We made it boys. We made it. So, whomever is responsible for that, thank you. We've been fighting for that for a little while. Wasn't last year's final game covered by Joe Crier with a cell phone while, like he was streaming to Rob, who was actually just streaming then the thing out from Joe's cell phone? That sounds about right, yeah. One of the best coverages I've ever seen. That's just all I'll say. It actually gave me how I want Battle Reports filmed. Like not, no, joking aside, I'm being 100% serious now. I really don't like top down views of Battle Reports and even like Rob's whole setup, which is impressive. Like honest wargame Rob, when he travels, he has all these different cameras that can shoot at all these different ways, right? But it's still way too high and above and hard to actually register. Cause that's just not how I look at the game. And like Joe Crier with a selfie stick and a phone just walking around and Rob would be like pushing on that unit. I wanna see where that is vis-a-vis the other units. You could just be like, whoop, like a person leaning down and like sure, could it have used some extra stabilization and stuff? Yeah, but that's legitimately how I'd wanna see Battle Reports that are in real time. Cause I just, I can't stand the above board move things around view. Yeah. I had struggles with that when I was trying to stream live games. And like you just can't tell what's going on whatsoever. It's one of the reasons I love re-rolling one so much. Like we shout them out a lot on this channel, but they're like passing the camera back and forth and just like pushing down to table level, like shooting from where they're viewing the game and how they're viewing the game, right? You get the feeling like you're actually a person, they're participating in it. Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah. That's how you play the game. So, you know, that's just, yeah, that's what I'll say. So that's fine. I say whatever camera equipment you're bringing over to finally get the AOS coverage is too much. Give me a cell phone. It's piping back to somebody else's OBS. And apparently we've got a winner on our hands. That's all we need. So there you go. I also like Travis Griffin who said or maybe we attach a camera to a very tiny robot to drive it around the tables. Now we're talking. There you go. Tiny robot would be awesome. All right. Anything else Tyler? I think that's news. Simple, clean, effective. You love to see them. Like I'm getting faster and faster at each show with these new segments. This was slower than last time, but that's all right. Okay. So let's do some pick of the week. Alex, what would you like to share with everybody? I guess it's not traditional, but I wanted to share our film games. They do STL files for minis. And I'm working on a flesh eater court conversion army. And this is like one of the minis I got called Lord's Guard Calvary. I didn't get the writer yet, but like amazing quality stuff. Everything is like sweet. I think you showed a vermin Lord deceiver that was from them too. Once in a while. I have painted a couple of Archvillain games models. I have found them all to be excellent. Some of them are a bit busy. Archvillain will sometimes like many 3D printers over design their stuff and feel like they have the need to fill up all negative space. It's okay. I wish 3D printers would learn to print like a painter, which is like scale that back, give us some space to actually just have a flat paint on there, but the sculpts are exceptional. That's a thing for me. Like that whole operation I found to be like actually imaginative inventive doing really cool things, really unique sculpts. Love them. Oh yeah. Very happy to do that. Yeah, I love them. Mm-hmm. Great pick. Dig it. Tyler, what do you got? Yeah, well, first off, we haven't said it yet. So I want to of course shout out Alex's channel, this buddy whose name I'm forgetting, what's your friend's name? Hill. Well, obviously that's how I've, well, no, I take that back. I found out about you, Alex. I believe because you sent me an email about WarCoden and you got- Well, yeah, we did a review show about like battle plans for the very, before season one, the one about the monsters. And then we put your Warcode on there and we had like a graph like incentive, good incentive, bad incentive versus bad map, good map. We put your review there and you're like, oh, I want feedback. So I scanned my way into your heart and said, hey, look at we're a streamer, we do this stuff. Yeah, totally. You're my four viewers, take a look at what we said. But that's how we met and we hit off pretty well. Yeah, 100%. I've told you I've been enjoying your shows. So Grand Alliance. Grand Alliance Death, yeah. Alliance Death, yeah. Which I think is a terrible name now because try to look that up. Warhammer, Grand Alliance Death. You get the rules, not the channel. Might have to reband at some point, yeah. Oops. And then a couple of others to mainstays. Rob had a great video on the Lumeneth Castle build, which we're gonna be seeing plenty of once again in this season, better or worse. And now noon improved with Helan. Extra shots, extra fun for everybody. So that was great video. I definitely recommend checking it out. And then Season of War had a nice video, Osearchbone Reapers versus Sylvaneth, where Jordan was running an Okanbrow list with 30 dryads. I hadn't seen 30 dryads in the table in a very long time. And they were pretty impressive, despite somebody shaking their head down there. And so I wanted to mention it. When those two run it, anything seems impressive. Sure, absolutely. Fair. And part as an addendum on a recent show or shows about battle tactics or events. I took a lot of flak for our lack of having a dissenting opinion. Now, us apparently, sometimes we enjoy our echo chamber. Well, when you're right, you're right. I don't know what to tell you. Sometimes we can all sit here and do a survey about how the sky is blue and all agree with each other. That's not an echo chamber. That's just a senting to fact. I'm not sure what the, you know. If you think otherwise, here we are. There's flak out there to me. Yeah, sure. I appreciate the number of different arguments that I've heard over the last couple of weeks from folks who have different insomnias. One that I've heard quite a bit in particular, which, for example, is gonna be on this Cubic Shenanigans podcast with Dan and Brendan. They were both espousing this. I'll try not to butcher it, but I have Vince and Alex, you may have some thoughts on this as well. So it's along the lines, they were expressing the view, for example, Dan with Cubic Shenanigans. He's going to be running an oak and brow list, right? Bunch of tree lords. That's the theme he wants. That's what he's interested in doing. Let's go to tournaments. He wants to have a shot of going three, two, four, one. So when he looks at the GHB, the idea of going to tournament with GHB only battle tactics, things that could be more challenging for him to get five out of five battle tactics if he's running that kind of army. Like that's the theme that he enjoys, those models that he enjoys. That's kind of the idea. And I think there are premises that there are a number of armies that would fit within that notion. Or there are lists that would have a harder time completing battle tactics if you're just limiting a tournament to GHB battle tactics. So I didn't think we did a good enough job of at least giving voice to that argument, whether it's a good argument or not. Oh yeah, I'm curious if you guys have any thoughts about that. Alex, I'll let you go first before I say anything. I think Tyler, you and I talked about this. I think ultimately battle tactics are in their implementation just completely flawed. So like we can argue about what the best way to do it is or not. I think I talked to you a little bit about this, but the idea of you have a shared list, you score them at the end, and then like let's say I got desecrate their lands, I remove it from the list, you can't get it. So that's how you get counterplay how we're all on the same page. And that way you can put ones that are like, oh, like kill an enemy monster with a battle line unit. Like you would never ever pick that, but if you happen to do that, you could score it counterplay it that way. That's one way I'd like to see it. Ultimately though, like when you said, like it was pretty divisive whether book battle tactics were healthy for the game or not in people's mind, I was amazed because like to me, like these were obviously the wrong thing to do from the get go, making it people not in even playing field. And a valid balance factor for this shouldn't be like your potential point scoring. And I don't really see it a good argument for that. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, that's how I feel. I think Alex makes an excellent point. And I will say the following, and I'll keep this brief so we're not in this pick of the week section having this, since we're doing this. Again. This digression about book battle tactics that we just can't seem to get away from. Here we go. One, all design choices you make will have benefits and costs. That's never in question. Any choice, any change will have some benefits and some costs. Just finding benefits means nothing. It does not win the argument. No one was alleging that it's, that book battle tactics are 0% good and 100% bad. That's not how the world works. That's how the internet works. Okay. Yeah. In game design, things are a mix and you're trying to find the right balance to strike that provides the maximal value to the maximal amount of players with the least cost. Okay. And let's say that argument is true. First of all, you said right at the beginning he's aiming for the mid tables. Okay. Then just make do with not always getting for it. You said your goal was a mid table journey anyways. Who cares? Right? We're talking about incremental two points a game. You can't make up two points a game. Right? That's your confidence in that list that you can't make up two points a game then you're not repping that list very hard. Next argument. How many lists does that add and who are we talking about affecting? Right? We're already in the world of just tournament players. So that's why so many people hate this argument because it's such a minutia argument. Right? It's only for tournament players. Like we're already in the 1% of people here. Okay. That we're arguing over our own little mini club of how we're gonna organize the rules among our little elite no girls allowed dumb club. Okay. And so now we're in the 1% of the 1% because what's the marginal impact? Cause that's what you're talking about. It would allow for a marginal change to some lists. And it wouldn't be the total list in most cases. It would be some number of points in the list would shift. Okay. 1,000 points maybe, 15 or points at the top, 300 points at the bottom. How many lists in all the tournaments in the world would be different because of that? Right? A couple hundred? Maybe? Yeah. Right? So what percentage of that does that represent? How many people are we then making the play experience worse for? For all the reasons we listed as negatives, which were multitudinous. Okay. Not a word, but a fun thing to say. And versus that benefit that's now been gifted to 100 to 200 additional lists. Like congratulations to those people. I'm glad they get to be the favored few. Right? Now in the end it doesn't matter. People are gonna use book battle tactics because people have a slavish devotion to the rules as written, which is completely dumb because no, you don't. No, you don't. Nobody's using the terrain rules as they're written in most tournaments. Nobody's using the attacker defender rules as written in most tournaments. Nobody used the realm rules as they were written in most tournaments. And I could go... And I could go... Yeah, using a different terrain rule system of one flavor or another. Like on and on and on. TO's change crap all the time. We all just accept it. Not one person fights back. For some reason we all drew a line in the sand around this book battle tactics thing. I don't know why it is, but we seem to have hit it. I don't know why this is the third rail, but it is. That's why it doesn't matter. You're gonna need to bring a much stronger argument than 100 to 200 people a year might be able to run a somewhat different list at a tournament and do slightly better maybe. Might not anyway, because I just want to bring the hotness too. Sure. Yeah. That's my response to that argument. There, we've now properly aired that grievance. You got anything back to say? Who was it that made this argument? Well, it's been a number of people expressing variation. Well, a number of people, if you have any response to me post it down in the comments below. There you go. No means to call out. Let's hear it. Yeah, it's fine. I remain unconvinced. I just wanted to air it because I thought it was at least interesting and worth airing. I agree. We did not have a lot of dissenting opinion on that show, Vince, that you and I did. We were pretty locked up. So, you know, we tried to... Well, really the dissension was just like, Tom is like, get rid of all battle tactics. And I'm like, whoa, slow down, Tom. He's going farther. We're all sort of center on on that one. I understand his grievances with them, but I think they add something. They're just not properly implemented. Yes. We'd all like, I think you could make 10, 20 better systems than what it is. And I hope to see them all in fourth edition, but for the next year and a half we'll labor under this. I do pronounce Kroger in a heretical fashion and I will keep doing so. All right. But now let's continue with Pick of the Week. We guess that's actually where we were. I forgot. So I'm done, by the way, with my picks, just so you know. That's fine. This is now returning to our normal segment structure. Yeah, so my Pick of the Week is for our good friends, John and Scott, Minniak and Ninjohn. They're back with Trapped Under Plastic, their first one, New Year, New Tup. The first episodes back up, it was a great, fun listen. They're doing a live, well, sort of live, they're doing a live show at LVO. Now, I don't know whether that means they're just recording it or whether they're broadcasting it. They don't know either, I think. I think they're gonna wait and see what they can actually do. But either way, that's gonna be a very fun show. They also got a room reserved at a Depticon to do Tub Live there, and from what I understand, it's one of the big rooms. So they'll actually be able to pack the people in this year, so very exciting. Okay. So go check them out, link down in the description, great podcast. Good friends, good guys. Great guys, great list. Okay, so with that, let's turn over to some hobby time. So you chewed up all the non-news time with that nonsense, that's all right though. Let's do some hobby time. Alex, what's on your desk, what are you working on? I got a lot going on here, so I'll be quick about it, but this is a balacor I did. Actually, I used your tutorial with the object source laying to help me out here. Nice. Yeah, and the last thing I wanna do is put like a locust swarm, because I have a theme of the 10 Fligs of Egypt with my slaves. And I wanted them to be like Abaddon with the locust swarm. I mentioned a little bit before, but I'm doing a conversion army for a flesh eater court. I made an Ark region, that's a pope, did a little tile bases. These are my crypt ghouls, or courtiers. They're like little priests. And then I'm redoing the zombie dragon, and then this is the ghoul on top. And I plan on that. Well, you do have a lot of stuff going on, you're not kidding. Yeah. So yeah, I actually recently sold my flesh eater courts and I wanna redo them entirely. Just because I wanted a full kitbash army. Again, inspired by your Ratcast Eternals. Very nice, that's awesome. I wanna do a Brotherhood of the Beastial Visage is what I call them, and they're obsessed with trying to turn into dragons. So I'm gonna do kitbashes along the way. That's fantastic. I love it. I love a fully kitbashed army. That's wonderful, man. Yeah, sounds like you got as a busy hobby table you got. Good luck. Absolutely. Yeah. I wanna get it done before the new book comes. Nice, nice. That's a very reasonable goal. I like that. Tyler, what are you working on, buddy? So we had our hobby hangouts, only hobby I got in, but got a good four hours of trying to learn how to use an airbrush again. And how do you feel after that four hours? I mean, it was a hell of a lot of fun. Yeah, hanging out with half a dozen friends. I felt like a little child who by friends, behaving as a parent, teaching me how to hold my thumb and my index finger and... Am I swaying it white? It was a little ridiculous. Yeah, how long it took. But yeah, I got a lot of Nurgle, first stage, slap chopped up. So things are in motion. Nice, love it. Great to see. My hobby time has been very busy. I've actually got a ton of painting in this week on something that's coming together pretty nicely that I'm not gonna show you because same sort of stupid things apply. I keep, I'm stuck in this loop. I'm stuck in a loop. I can't get out of it. So I gotta like slow something down, but then paint after NDA's lift. But here we go, here's where we are. But I've got some fun projects coming up. So very excited. At any rate, it's been, it has been an extremely productive hobby week and I will leave it at that. So with that gentlemen, are you ready to get on to the main topic? Absolutely, yeah. All right, let's do it. Okay, GHB 2023 winners and losers. Penfoldorf, if you're like six months into your painting journey, I say go for it. Like six months into, and it's a perfectly reasonable time to pick up an airbrush. It's a tool, it's like the best tool I've ever bought for my hobby, it will, it has a learning curve just like brush painting. You'll have to learn how to use it and what you're doing with it. It's not a magic wand. It doesn't just suddenly paint everything for you. So start early and it'll give you time to experiment, to fail, to mess up. You will do all of those things just like you did with the brush and that's okay. But I say get into it. It's just such a valid tool for where it is and what it is. It doesn't solve everything, but it does a lot of things really good. So there you go. Okay, cool. Oh, well, that is very new. Two weeks into it. Okay, gotcha. Well, hey, anytime you want that, don't feel rushed. You don't have to move to it either. I say usually about the six months marks where I recommend it, but see you got time. All right. Let's talk about some winners and losers. Start with the overview first. Okay, here we go. Utility, these are just the, these to me are the sort of facts of the case. Utility heroes are much safer and hence stronger than they already were in the new season. So let's stop and check that. Utility heroes were already highly valuable. Most armies had some number of utility heroes in them. That is to say small-foot heroes not meant to fight, but to buff and to make a unit worth more than the sum of its parts. Do we generally agree with this statement that they are much safer and hence better in the new season? It seems pretty obvious to me, yeah. Okay. Yeah, all right. Table stakes so far. All right, great. We're all in agreement. Okay. Heroes that can make good use of the Galation champion heroic actions and or I should say and or battalion by the by, which allow a similar thing in the combat phase and that actually want to fight are pretty rare. They exist, but heroes that can like foot hero assassins. So the worst type of hero, second worst unit in the game that can actually make use of both the heroic action and the battalion are pretty uncommon. There's not a lot of these people. Most are pretty bad at it. What do we think? Alex seem like a fair statement. Yeah, it seems like a fair statement. I'm a little biased for playing Night Haunt a lot recently. Sure. Cause all of their heroes are really good. I think there's some heroes that like, especially ones that can abuse a bodyguard that will be put in a situation to do like, okay, things with it. But like, it's really just like a icing on the cake situations, not anything you directly build for. Yep. Yep. I think that's exactly right. It's funny because we'll talk Night Haunt. I'm very excited to talk about Night Haunt cause I know you've got a strong Night Haunt experience and I'm actually, I'm so torn on them. So that's, that's a, it's interesting. Tyler, what do you think? Are you with this statement? Okay. The lines. All right. So we're talking about a pretty rarefied individual that's going to make really good use of this thing. That you're going to be like, yeah, this is, this is somebody I like, boy, I really want to put this person in this thing. Right. And, and I feel like I'm going to get the most out of that. That being said, there's good gotchas with it too. Like I played a game against Skaven and I used the hero phase fight to kill his Gracie on foot before he could get the two spells off with that. And like, so you don't really need to be a good fighter to take advantage of that, but you're capitalizing on a mistake ultimately. Sure. That's fair. That's fair. Okay. Next facts of the, of the, sort of the facts at hand. Objective count is generally lower and often more centralized, especially in the tourney ready battle plans. So we did our battle plan review last week. And if you look at the ones that I think are tournament ready, just what did we say seven, eight, I think out of the, eight, depending on your feeling about only the worthy and or realm of stone cash. Yeah. That's fair. Let's call it seven to eight. A lot of those are very centralized. The really though, the one exception is the one that puts the two out on the flank. I don't remember the name like on the horizontal plan. Yeah, position of power. There you go. The disappear at the top of four. Most of the others, you're really dealing in a pretty tight area and sort of the middle. So maybe like one of the things that spread you out the most is like maybe Nidus paths. You know, like it's not something that's going to make you want to move all over the board. There's going to be a lot of scrumming in the center and near center of the board. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Which benefits castles a lot too. Absolutely. Yeah, they've been arguing the jaws of Gallant right where objectives are being removed. They're still often I think going to be considerable value in moving to the center because the center all a sequel. I apparently catchphrase according to you, Alex, which I appreciate you putting that in my head. There you go. I'm sorry. No, I love it. It's funny because that gives you the most adaptability, optionality, obviously being in the center to then relocate as needed, depending on what's getting burned, what's staying with the other four objectives. Absolutely. Yeah. And so, as somebody mentioned, I played ours for the taking earlier today and while it has only three objectives, they are very spread out. That is true, although ours for the taking is a really interesting example because all of the action really probably in most games of ours for the taking is happening around the center objective because of the nature of the sort of, the risk reward of that thing. I watched, it was the video you recommended last week. I'm sorry, I don't remember the name. Yeah, Jeremy Vissier. Yes, thank you. And he talked about ours for the taking quite a bit and how like, his tactic was you completely ignore trying to get theirs unless you just have this miracle opportunity and the fight is completely over the center, right? So it was, that one's the one that I looked at and really thought about a lot when I wrote this bullet point, but I think even that one still has a lot of scrum in the middle, a lot, because you're both pushing toward that middle point to try to traditional tug of war fashion. Okay. So, so far, I think we're good. The additional battalions are interesting, but the one drop is still extremely attractive and it is very much to be seen whether sharpshooters will be taken outside of the armies that already have shooting as a win condition. Like how much these other things will get used and in what armies I think is very much up in the air. Whereas we know one drop still has a high amount of value. Fair statement? Yep. We'll go ahead, Alex. I'm sorry I didn't mean to cut you off, but I think there's armies that like never cared about the one drop who are very excited to see like Galatian veterans return. Like what comes to mind for me is Bladeguest Revenants with their one entry each and their cropless stalkers. I was talking to Tyler like, oh, they're gonna not be as good when they don't have bonds of battle. And lo and behold, they have it. So I'm gonna be able to chainsaw anything like I could who never wanted the one drop necessarily. So like those kinds of armies are gonna be excited to have it. But I think you're right. I don't think the armies that are traditionally one drop for shooting, like Lumeneth Castle is not gonna go into sharpshooter because you need to shoot the problem units, not the heroes anyway. So you don't care to have a sharpshooter. Right, I agree. There's some exceptions, but for the most part you're definitely right. I was thinking more about Daughters of Cain. I still, I would be a little surprised if, yeah, if Daughters of Cain players are moving to sharpshooters, it's another fragile army. I mean, Lumeneth are more durable on average than Daughters of Cain outside of Marathi, of course, and how she works. But yeah, these, you know, Aideneth, Daughters of Cain, LRL, they generally speaking need to go one drop, I think, just because it's screens and hammers. And they want to control the tempo with the flow of the battle, right? And this gives them a better tool to do so. Yeah, 100%. Absolutely. I think that in my mind, I agree with you. There are some armies that never really cared about drops, Skaven, Knight Haunt, these kinds of armies, where it's like, yeah, yeah, where they'll, sure, they'll take these things, because why not? They'll just mix them into their existing, you know, while I was already taking Warlord and Command Entourage and, you know, whatever, whatever, maxing stuff out. I'm already 13, 14 drops, like I don't care, right? Sure, I might as well stick everybody in something, right? Yeah. And so that's fine, but that's not really an A-B choice. They were never actually going to take Batredge anyways, right? This is just like their choice was that or nothing, right? That's fair. Yeah, I just thought it would be fair to mention that armies exist that definitely want these. I agree. Another thing too is there's a lot of L-shaped deployment maps and those kind of punish one drops, because if they go heavily on one side, you could just put everything on the other side and claim the board. So if like the tournament packs happened to have like three or four of these L shapes that would severely punish one drops and maybe that's a reason not to take one drops, because you can't choose to not one drop if you build it, right? Correct, you have to. You must deploy everything. You must deploy it. Yeah, that's what I thought. So maybe that might come into play, but I doubt it, but maybe. Yeah, I think that's a great point. It's interesting. Go ahead. Yeah. Go talent. Okay, so I've been thinking about this a lot as well, that this is more of a feeling I haven't gone through past GHBs, the curious events, if you agree or not, the feeling is that we have more net missions than we've had in a long time where there's meaningful advantage to actually going first in round one. Obviously, generally speaking in this game, you look at the table and you usually, yep, here you go, have the turn, right? Though I think that's true, for example, with only the worthy, where you put a galley champ on one or both of the middle objectives and some screens around it. Now I think partly why that's important is there's gonna be a lot of games where round one, you're looking to do one of two battle tactics. The cunning maneuver one, which says you have to put a galley champ on an objective that you control wholly outside your territory, right? So if your opponent is doing that before you, then that might be taking away your ability to do cunning maneuver early in the game, which all is equal, I think, is second. Oh my God, if you're in my head, Alex, with that. That's the, early is when I think you're often looking to do cunning maneuver. Maybe if you're winning the game, you can do it late. And then the other one is desecrate their land, of course. So point being, I could see army lists and games where you can actually, potentially just flat out deny your opponent getting a battle tactic in round one by going first. Now only the worthy isn't the best example because I think with cunning maneuver, you have to be wholly outside your territory. So that means there's only one that you could go after in that mission. But hours for the taking, position over power, yeah, a number of these have ways you can play those missions, I think to make life difficult for your opponent in terms of alpha bunkering or alpha pinning and so on. I actually agree with this completely. It's very interesting. And I actually quite like that. I like, I think Alex, your point is extremely well taken and I don't think people have really sort of, what do I say, really ingested that perhaps, or process that yet? The fact that you can respond to their one drop setup by leaning heavily to one side of the L and then pushing it on their weak side or whatever if you're a lot of drops, but also Tyler, I completely agree with you. There is actually a lot of advantages in this season to going first, right? And so it will be interesting to see how that all plays out, right? So I do think all of that's true, but a lot of the, one of the challenges to both of those things you mentioned is it relies a lot on player skill, right? So like, yes, I agree with you. Good players, people who are sort of aware of contextually what's happening will be able to capitalize on that stuff, right? But what does the median player's experience look like at the same time, right? So that'll be interesting to see. And is there a delta there? So if this ends up being a more skill testing season because of that stuff, deployment's always a big part of skill testing actually. I watch a, like I walk up and, you know, I walk around a lot of tournaments and I look at how people deploy and I'm like, what is this? What is this nonsense? What if they're- Your key units expose, they go first, they take it, you're on the back forever, yeah. Right, yeah, I just, I look at so many people, I watch them set up and I just wanna, I just wanna like walk and be like, what are you doing? What is this? So at any rate, it also matters by the by, the nature of those L shapes also matters what armies are happening to be shuffling to the top. And if you're like, yeah, I'm a one drop but I can pull way back because I'm super hyper fast. Like let's say you get Stormcast Dragons coming back up into the mix in a big way, okay? Well, they can backboard and don't have to worry. Like, you know, whatever, not they're not gonna be one drop, but you know what I'm saying, right? Like if that type of a force with that kind of speed, you know, they can just backboard and be like, yeah, whatever, I can explode out, right? Yeah, exactly. Like there are armies who can afford to like just ignore two parts of the L and be like, I'll just take this back corner. It's all I needed. Go ahead, set up however you want. I'll be anywhere I want at the bottom of my turn, right? Yeah. So there, which isn't every army's experience. So, no, okay. Just a quick asterisk on all this. So I'm gonna do some shout outs tonight because I did take some time to reach out to some friends in the community to ask them for their thoughts on winners and losers. And I have been thinking about this, but this was a point events that Sean Sayer had made to me today, which he's found this in a number of his games, right? And he's been a little surprised by the value of going first in a number of these games when he takes in consideration battle tactics, et cetera. So, yeah. He's a smart guy. So I mean, listen to him, yeah. That's, he has, other than his undying love for Legion of the First Prince, he's a smart guy. But that's all right. I'm just laying the groundwork for name dropping this episode. It's more just to try to get recognition. People take the time to actually follow up with me. I really appreciate it. I think that's fair. Keith, you're perfectly okay, buddy. It's all right. This stuff, it's all good, man. Don't ever feel bad about letting the salt flow. We've all got thick skin here and we all understand it's, stuff sometimes gets you hot. None of us liked a lot of the decisions that were made last season, so I understand. Okay. Just quick review of the realm rules. Just wanna move through these two slides real quick so we all know what the heck we're even talking about here for those who weren't here last week. I didn't wanna assume that everybody had watched the whole show last week. Remember, we're dealing with three key realm rules here, which is the Galatian champions. We will often just call them GCs. No, we don't mean the general counsel of your company. That's, by the way, after spending 20 years or something working with legal departments and with legal, GC only means general counsel to me. I just wanna say that, so. But anyways, Galatian champions. They're heroes with a wounds characteristic of less than 10, no mount, no unique. So, foot, heroes, nine wounds or less, not unique, no mount. We all gotta lock those factoids in our brain when we're thinking about GCs. They've got the key to victory. The friendly Galatian champions can't be picked as the target of attacks with missile weapons while they're within one inch of any friendly battle line units. So, important things to note. They're words that matter. Target with missile weapons so you can still magic them and or hit them with splash effects, like things that target a point on the ground and then hit everybody in the area. They have to be within one inch, so very close. And like that's, it's not a bigger bubble like we might be thinking of. It's not wholly within, it is within. So it's within one inch. Quite a, basically they have to be in coherency with the unit is what they're doing there, right? And then battle line units only. So not just any infantry or other units or just random things you have on the table or some terrain you set down, a tree. And so, no, battle line units. And yes, also Zano, I don't know if I'm saying that right or wrong, but yes, you're correct. Companions are not mountains. That's absolutely true. And then finally, desperate action. For reference, Zano. Okay, cool. I sure as heck hope I'm right because I just spent a lot of time working with this man. All right, well, very good. Well, Zano, all right. Very good, thank you, Zano. If you're taking the second turn in the current battle round at the start of your hero phase, you can pick one friendly Galation champion on the battlefield to carry out two heroic actions instead of one. Okay, so that's what we're working with. Remember, we also have our two heroic actions which you can only do both of these if you're using the thing we just mentioned, desperate action, because it requires, the second one requires you to have used the first one. The first one allows your Galation champion hero to fight. And then the second one allows his sworn bodyguard unit, meaning you also have to have the battalion to trigger this to then get pulled along and fight both of these things being fighting in the hero phase. But as we mentioned last show, this sounds actually quite strong. It is actually quite limited. It is a very difficult thing to pull off with any value, though it will occasionally be used. It's not trash, it's just probably not good. So, all right, now let's get into the meat of the thing. I picked these three examples because I think to me, they certainly aren't the only winning GCs. But I liked these three because to me, they were three examples of using some of the new rules and the types of Galation champions where you could actually make some kind of hay out of the rules that are on offer. So to be clear, like one of the best Galation champions that we're not gonna talk about and is not on this list is like a hag queen, right? Absolutely, yeah. She's amazing. She's a buff bot. She has a sippy cup that's great. She does stuff. She's utilitous. Yeah. Right? Anything you'd like her to. Sure, sure. Like she's just there to provide some effectively pseudo passive bonus to the unit she's near. The fact that she can't get shot now is just awesome. Like it's just pure bonus nachos, right? Like you go through the drive-through, you open the bag. There's an extra large fry in your order. Fantastic. What a win. You've still got your fries and your burger and your shake, right? But now there's just an extra fry in there you didn't ask for. It's a better situation, right? But that's not making use of any of these extra rules. It's just thing that was good, right? It's now can't be hurt as easily. Like, great. Okay. You're bringing them anyway, yeah. Right, right, exactly. You already had them in your army and now they're better. What I'm looking for here is some interesting avenues, plays, synergies, combinations, that kind of thing that might not have been as readily available apparent or doable before, but now could provide a new role or function to that hero or hero unit combination. So that's what we're looking for here, okay? So please don't at me with like, oh, my cool grass cruciator. It's like, yeah, man, that dude was super good all the time. He like, now you can't shoot him. Seems awesome to me, right? Like, great, great. Right? Okay, like we all knew the cool gas cruciator was good. Absolutely. But we didn't, you know, it's just extra magic on top of him. All right. But to me, these fit three sort of archetypes and that's why I picked these three. So I thought I'd go through my example and then we could talk about other variants on that archetype. Sound like- I like it, yeah, I like it. Okay, cool. So here's archetype number one. Archetype number one is the extremely fast foot Galation champion that because of some wackadoo reason moves like 10 to 12 inches even though it's something on foot, right? Right. And has some sweet of, yeah, they have a 12 inch move, by the way, that's- Seven wounds, five that save, 12 inch move, yeah. Correct, two up against mortals. But yes, that's just it. Because of some other odd rules actually becomes very interesting when combined with these rules. So for example, the contorted epitome. I mean, I can't believe I'm nominating anything for slanash just being good. But nonetheless, the contorted epitome, which has always been one of my more favorite units, such a weird Google thing. Beautiful. 12 inch move actually has a decent attack profile and is also a spellcaster, a good spellcaster, by the way, who doesn't mind being in a- Yeah, exactly, re-rolls, yes. Who doesn't mind being in a forward position and when combined with something like the war shrine, if given the tusk helm where it could take a 3D6 charge or not or whatever, even by the way, normal, I'd still think it's fine. It's interesting because once it becomes like, the war shrine is not, I don't think the necessary piece. The point is, is that the tusk helm actually can help put it over the edge and do some real damage with this thing where because it's got a two up against mortals, it's actually relatively immune to the things that get around the shooting targeting. Shooting was always one of those things that actually picked it off very easily with a five up save. So if I can charge it in, go in with another unit, fight on a corner where I risk very little reprisal, I'm basically immune to magic because of my two up mortal wound save and now I'm also immune to shooting and now I'm just getting free extra mortal wound damage out of the hit and because I'm so fast, I can be around the board being where I need to be scoring bonus points when I need to score them, et cetera. So to me, contorted fits into the fast mobile GC that has some extra sauce that also makes it useful, right? It can't, it's not just that it moves fast. It's like move fast plus. It's the move fast plus category. All right, Alex, what do you think about this category? What other heroes would you place into this sort of category of heroes? Before we jump there, I just had a question about, so the tusk helm too, does that, if you charged in, would you get more depravity points in the hero phase for charging with the tusk helm doing damage? I don't know how depravity's worded, but that might be extra. Depravity is at the end of the battle shock, so it's facing up and it doesn't. Okay, nevermind then, but I was just thinking about that. Like that thing has nine attacks, you put flaming weapon on it at two damage. That sounds good. Classic move of the contorted. Classic move, yeah. Is to put the flaming weapon on it, absolutely. But other examples, I think Knight Azeros is a really good one. Yup. Like move in 12. Maybe Vampire Lord because it move, you can cast Amethyst Impinions on it, make it move 12 and fly. You can do something like that with that. Anything in fact that's like the Flayer or the Vargulf. Right, there they have. GCs, yeah, they're pretty big and they do pretty good damage. They're pretty survivable. They're really fast now. Can use that kind of thing. Will we count stuff that can just teleport naturally on the worst girl, like Knight Zephyros here too? I think the teleport one is gonna be interesting. Well, like maybe, maybe that fits here, probably. If it can do it regularly. If it's not doing it through a spell, like the Knight Zephyros I would put in this category, yes, cause that's just doing it through an ability. So yes, I would say Knight Zephyros is in here, right? Cause it has to be as easy as a move. Like there's no counter play to that other than like blocking the board up, right? Yeah. And then I'd say Ark Revenant was another really good example of this. Okay. There's probably, oh, and any hero that has a spell that can teleport to, I think would be there. Cause like there's Spectral Tether, which I'm considering bringing out for like the first time ever in Night Haunt. There's the Deep Ken teleport spell. I think there's a 16 inch move in Daughters of Cain. These are just random examples. I'm thinking of spells make them less. Steve of Shadows. Steve of Shadows, yeah. I think the spell makes it a little less reliable because there's spell doms running around now that can just say no to that, but it's, if you're fighting against like other, like Knight Haunt or Orcs or something, you're like, yeah, cool. I get it on the floor, let's go. Right. Exactly. So that's my thoughts immediately. Okay. I like all those. One Justin Newman from the Dice Cast. Again, get used to the name dropping. It's going to happen in spades here. Justin had a cool one War Channer with Master plus Tusk Helm plus Ginnin' Beat. So I think that's pretty cool. Which would give him a 3d6 charge on a 3d6 chant. 3d6 charge on a, yeah, on a 3 up. Yeah, that's easy to execute as long as you can roll a 3 up. So that could, that could be pretty tasty. Somebody else, yeah, there's a number of these 3d6 charge opportunities, right? With Tusk Helm, Kragnos, obviously, we mentioned last week. Somebody had mentioned, I think maybe Eli, guy in St. Louis area, Killa Boss plus Slippery Scumbag. Apparently that is a retreat and charge roll that crew boys have. Didn't look up just to verify that, but yeah, he thought maybe a Killa Boss with that retreating and charging. 3d6 charge could be interesting. Tusk Helm. Sure, here's my argument about most of these. These I put as the first one because I think this is the weakest play, okay? Because in the end, the Tusk Helm isn't that much damage. Like it's, it's not, it's some extra mortal wounds as a spice, right? Like the mortal wounds on the charge is awesome when it's your army-wide rule like Ogres and you're making, yeah, multiple charges a turn and landing it with every unit you've got, right? That, that's it. That can suddenly become quite impactful to the battle. This one unit being able to pull this off, eh, you know, it's something. It's cute, yeah. It's cute. Many of these units we've talked about, they don't have enough of that high mobility plus. The plus is weak, right? Like most of these units we're talking about, it's like, yeah, they're okay. You know what I mean? And so the question we have to overcome here is like, is it worth putting this thing into your army just to do this goofball trick, right? And I think a lot of the time with a lot of these, a lot of these heroes we've just talked about, the answer's gonna be no. Now, not always. I think some of these we'll get experimented with and I think some of these we'll prove to have play. But like, do I really care about my war chanter and like, he's not like everything in that combo as described works, okay? But I remember like, I'll give a magic example. I was doing a bunch of stuff in a magic game and I was like tapping things and drawing things and playing more things and then tapping more things. Like going through this very long combo for just like to play all this stuff that should have, at the end of it, by all accounts with as long as it took me, it should have been a game win. Like I should have just popped and won the game. Instead, the end of it was, okay, I've done all my things I gained for life, which is nothing. I was like, nothing, that's a fart at the end of a very long buildup, right? Yeah. And that's what a lot of these are gonna feel like. Like you're going through a lot of extra steps, right? To just like get a pretty mediocre thing. When you could just do, you're doing better things like okay, tell me, yeah. Yeah, you could just be picking other better choices, right? That are without accessing any of these special rules, just using what's printed on their War Scroll, better. Right? Yeah, and I think another thing too is like, I think hitting the hyper mobile heroes is important because you're getting like cunning maneuver with them or the two on one objective or the one, or two on two different objectives. Like just having that movement, you're gonna see these units a lot more this season to get those, not to do three damage on the charge. Totally agreed. That's actually the value, right? Like if they have the plus, if you can find in mobility plus, if you can find other interesting survivability tricks like the contorted epitome where it's basically immune to magic or other things like that, right? That kind of stuff is so high value, right? Because then you've got the mobility and something that's probably gonna stick around and we'll get you those battle tactics. Totally agree, Alex. And funny enough too, I think like the Tuskhelm, like this would be like the perfect path to glory relic where you can just like get them like candy. Sure. And you're like, oh, this will be a fun thing to put on my guide, wee. Right. It's like it's not really a match play thing, but like if you use the match play rules in your path to glory, like hell with it, that's gonna be great. Right, right, right. It'll be fun. Not competitive. Okay. All right, let's talk about our second, our second sort of cadre of category of heroes here, represented by the Gaunt Summoner in this case. And this is really people making use of especially things like Tunnel Master, but Galatian champions who are using, who are becoming a delivery mechanism for something, okay? So in this case, we've got the Gaunt Summoner using Tunnel Master, and then he's got two units of pinks up in the Silver Tower. He's Tunnel Mastering near something, probably Land Sharks or Sky Sharks or whatever, whatever they're called, your little fin, your rays. Oh, Screamers. Screamers, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. We got them. And because he has to tunnel up near something or whatever. And he's tunneling up there and then he's unleashing the pinks right into their face, right? And swamping their line. Now this is especially great in zines, obviously, because you can guarantee the charge, that is to say like a nine inch charge means nothing to zinesh. So he pulls two units of 10 pinks out of his Silver Tower, drops them down at nine inches away from the enemy line, auto nails the charges, and then bloop, bloop, now they're swamped with a hundred wounds. They have to fight through. It could be in duplicitous to where you cannot retreat. Right. Maybe have a teleport or something. Yep, they could be in duplicitous hose where they then are locked out from retreating as well. Now you've just completely locked them into their deployment zone, unless they have exactly, as you said, like teleports or other associated mobility tricks. And you've just pinned their whole army. You've alpha bunkered them in. We've mentioned this kind of strategy a lot. Right. But this kind of delivery mechanism unit. Oh, tunnel master is the one that doesn't need to go near a friendly unit. That's right. It's the other teleport that's in there. Yeah. So are they using the friendly unit to make it immune to shooting later? So you're probably still doing that anyway. Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. Thank you, Alex. Yes, I meant land near those guys so you can't get shot. Yes. That's what I was talking about. I didn't confuse it for the other teleport thing that requires you to be near a battle line. I got you. I was just playing four dimensional chess. All right, so yeah, the delivery mechanism thing. You know, what other examples of this First of all, do we think that the gaunt summoner plus pink swamp has gas in the tank or what are the other things that you would think of like this? I think so. My immediate example is like skitter leap onto a scaven hero or priest that you want to put curse on something you get like prayer bonuses, especially if you're near the bull or the knoll. So like maybe curse on a two up. That'll be a great delivery thing. I can't think of anything as drastically good as this gaunt summoner thing right off the top of my head. But I think he's kind of the he's kind of the the example of this, I suppose, right? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I think that at least my mind I mean, if you guys think it's wrong, the general category here, I think of chaos armies that can summon. So, you know, you have a nation champion like a sloppity bio piper or a lord of lights and Nurgle who has tunnel master and then you summon off of them, right at the end of your movement phase. You can chain it and control the sequencing. I think that could be kind of interesting some interesting place that could open up, especially if you're doing that to say you do it lord of lights, let's say with the tunnel master and he tunnel masters onto an objective wholly outside of your territory and then you summon sloppity bio piper or a scriven or whatever, right? And then you've got your two glacial champions hitting whatever it's called United offense, I think or maybe not United offense, whichever one you need to have two glacial champions on an objective. I think it is like that. Yeah. Okay. Things like that could be interesting though. How about this like a soul play in night hot? I plan on taking tunnel master most of my lists and the reason why is I have other units to deep strike and then they can just plop the support hero near them to support too. That's I think absolutely correct. That's where I was gonna go if you guys didn't have other other examples. No, you're exactly right. I think that the other example of this and what you do with tunnel master is like you're an army that has a deep strike capability built in, right? And now you can drop those deep strikers down and then have the support hero show up right next to them, right? And just be there like protected from shooting and then also buffing, supporting, doing whatever they needed to do with that unit. Yeah, I agree completely that, yeah. Yeah, like every necromancer I have is just gonna be a tunnel buddy. Put graveyard over behind you, put the necromancer there. You can't shoot him if you magic him. I can ward him off. He brings back models. Great. Right. I love it. That's a great example, right? Tunnel up from, rise from your graves, bunch of, you know, hoods of zombies or something and then boom, up pops the necro right next to them, right? Handles that classic movement problem. Yes, great example. Yep. I like that, that's good Alex. Yeah, makes me think I've been doing that a lot with, you've already mentioned the Azeros, you know? To bodyguard with Predors, you have to have both Predors and the unit, of course, that they're gonna bodyguard. Both have to be on the battlefield. I've checked that many times over the last few weeks to verify that that's the case. But yeah, so you, Azeros has mobility, right? 12 inch plus potentially an auto run six, 18 inches and then you can, or has tunnel master potentially, but then you just translocate your Predors to put the bodyguard in place where you need it with your Azeros. So yeah, you can do a number of cool things like that. That's neat, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, cool. Very good. I think that this you will see some play with because it is a traditional positional benefit and these kinds of like positioning things are often just going to utilize existing heroes that are often, and units that are often of high value, just what we just described. Like you were probably going to take that unit and that hero anyways. So why not use this trick to then ensure their safety and delivery, right? So this category I think you will see a fair amount of. Yeah, I take my favorite unit and favorite hero and now they're extra good. Right. Right. One other combo real quickly, it just popped in my head that I've already been hearing some people talk about it. So we already know the value of Corbus Cabal and Chaos Sorceror Lords, all of us equal especially in Cabalus List with slaves of darkness. Okay, well, so we have Zinch with the warp reality spell. If you have tunnel master on one of those Chaos Sorceror Lords, I would allow you to tunnel master one of the Chaos Sorceror Lords somewhere on the battlefield. So you could potentially do some swapping where you could do some controlling of put your Corbus Cabal Holy on a train feature, right? Tunnel master your Chaos Sorceror Lords to be within an inch of those Corbus Cabal. Now you cannot target the Corbus Cabal or the Chaos Sorceror Lords with missile attacks. So I think there's some kind of fun one will come up plays like that with mobility warp reality tunnel master Corbus Cabal, et cetera. Like that would be kind of interesting. Yeah. Tyler, would it be possible for you to hold your hand any closer to the camera? Sorry. You were talking with your hands and because you're looking straight at it, you're screened out that you were just like. Oh yeah, I didn't realize it. It was very funny. Okay, no, I agree. I love the Corbus Cabal drop a hero thing is hilarious to me because just everybody shows up untargetable, right? Now we're all immune. Well, just shooting at least. Okay, so that's fun. I like that one. And I want to see Corbus Cabal become something. I think they're actually really valuable and interesting and they look super cool. So I want to see people use them. I don't want to see just all snakes, snake boys. I want to see other things. So there you go. I agree. All right, the last category here and my personal favorite is using the full on rules. Like this, in this case, you're going full on. Like, okay, you're all the way in. You're into the battalion. You're into everything. So we're in a very rarefied clique here of things where you can just make the absolute most of the, all the rules. So the example here is the death master out of, this gave him, plus the shadow magic trinket plus a big brick of storm bourbon. Okay, so how does this work? Well, the shadow magic trinket just lets you always strikes first. And the death master can hide, can actually be like completely burrowed in a unit of storm bourbon where he's not actually present on the board. He's effectively, oh yeah, shadow magnet. You're right. It is not magic. It's shadow magnet. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Warpstone. I'll fix that. This is what I get for typing too fast. Fixed. At any rate, the, oh my God, my dogs are seriously gonna drive me insane. Go crazy. Well, it's worth, I can barely hear them, so. Well, that's good. It's very bothersome to me. At any rate, yeah, well, how does this work? Okay, the death master can burrow inside the storm bourbon. And the shadow magnet trinket can make him go first, can make him always strikes first. So, somebody attacks you in combat, you know, this guy's popped out and then, hey, he's here. Hey, he activates shadow magnet. Hey, he fights first now with ASF and then he pulls the 30 storm bourbon into the fight. Meaning that all of a sudden, the unit that they charged you and all of a sudden you just chopped them to pieces because storm bourbon are one of the most damaging units in the game. They're fantastic. So, when you put, you know, all of a sudden, all of them fighting, like 30 of these things chopping into you, plus the death master's no slouch, I will point out, by the way. Mr. D3 mortal wounds on sixes is nothing to scoff at. That you can often explode with some damage. I love my death master. I've gotten tons of kills out of these guys. So, the combination of suddenly you charge to this big unit of storm bourbon that seemed like they were just out there and then you get annihilated, just annihilated as suddenly you are hit back by, you know, 90 attacks on, let's call it threes, threes, neg one, one damage and then the death master on top of that. You can do the realm command too, right? Cause you have the three and traits you don't really need to pile in. Yeah, correct. Exactly. Yeah. You could do that already. You could do the realm command or any of the other plus one to attack commands being in the general vicinity. Yes, there's like, I was counting, you're getting plus one to attack from somewhere because the claw lord can do it, the vermin lord warbreaker can do it and the realm command can do it. So like there's- It's Gavenbrook too. Yeah, sure, sure. Great, you can even do it twice. Yeah, cause that's a hard effect. There's just so many different ways to give these guys plus one attack, right? So, getting to that 90 attacks and they will basically all fight because again, they're three inch reach on a 25 mil base. So effectively they fight in four ranks which is just wild, right? So it's very rare actually that you don't get to fight but just the whole lot of them. This is one of the rare exceptions where to me you actually have the space to use all of the rules. Like you're actually, and by the way, the reason I actually like this as well is because Gaven don't care about being one drop, okay? Like I've never taken a one drop in the current and in the past season, battle regiment is not in my Gaven vocabulary. Like I'm 12 drops, 13 drops. I'm all over the board. I want some warlord. I want some command entourage. Like I wanna be three magic items deep at least. I got lots of magic items. Like Gaven armies that too. Yeah. So, you know, I've got space. Like most Gaven armies I build use double bonus enhancements. That's usually two magic items, but not all those. Okay. And so the idea to me here is this actually is using nose to tail the whole thing of the season. I think this is great. And this is way better than a claw lord or anything like that because of shadow magnet drink it, right? That's what's pulling us off. The fact that he can pull himself into Ella strikes first and then by association, pull the unit into all the strike first. So there you go. Big fan of this one. My friend Nick was talking about this one to me the other day. Yeah. Pretty sweet. So some other one. I mean, we've already mentioned the looks. I realized I was pronouncing it drought for some reason. Quicksilver draft, the artifacts from Stormcast. Alex talked to you about it. That's funny to say it again, if anybody missed it. So in the stormcast battle tone, you can pop the Quicksilver draft artifact on a galley champ like a Castellans or an Azeros Castellans in particular, if you're looking to use it defensively. Let's say you've got a combined arm shooting list, six long strikes, whatever, and you have a good unit like 10 protectors, whatnot in front of them, kind of forcing the opponent potentially to come into you. And then you pop this to always strike first with your galley champ, who then is in the galley command, glacial command battalion, which triggers 10 protectors, whatever, as a sworn bodyguard to fight first as well. So offensively, maybe you've got 15 hearthgar berserkers that are on an objective, and you don't want them swinging at you before you could swing at them. So if it's your turn charging at them, on like an Azeros, pop this, a chance potentially fight before this hearthguard swing at you. So yeah, I think that's interesting. In general, it's gotta be other always strike first opportunities that we haven't heard of. But I think that's like this is that category, right? That we're looking for these ASF kind of opportunities. What about soul blight, Alex? I was thinking about them, you know, like Van Hell's Dance Macabre is potentially doing GQ sequencing. I mean, maybe one challenge is the holy within six inches. Yeah, that will be a challenge. Yeah, glacial command, like, I don't know, when I go to the new season, I always try the whack-a-doo crap before I completely rule it out. So like your point of like, this will be very hard to set up, I think is true. But I think it's a veritable rattlesnake. Like they can't just walk into it. And if they do, you punish them hard. And in addition to there's a battle tactic of kill a Galatian champion with a Galatian champion or a sworn bodyguard unit. And I'm going to have a lot easier time using like 30 storm vermin or 60 zombies or a bunch of graveyard to do that battle tactic than just like my piddly little necromancer, there's two bonks on the staff. Like that's not doing crap, right? Right, totally. I like it as a rattlesnake. I'm not convinced I'm going to run it in a lot of lists. But I have like ideas that I want to try. And like this deathmaster blue mice gave an idea out of the water. Cause I like the claw lord. Cause to me like the best things in Galatian champions are things that don't need the bonds of battle range, which vermin do. Bodyguard like low keys, probably one of the best rules in this game, if not the best rule in my opinion, it's super good. And like they have it on a four up to most things, two up. And also like, if you take some damage on the vermin or the claw lord, you can get him like a bunch of attacks. And all of a sudden he has like 12 of these things, devious adversary. You can get him to like 14 pretty easily. And then like fight in the hero phase, even without like the Galatian command, like he can do some serious work. So the claw lord isn't terrible. No, the problem is, devious adversary is always going on my arch warlock because it's too funny to me. Or a vermin lord, yeah. But can he do the hero actions to just get it? Or is that if you already take it, you can't put it on him too. Well, the issue with devious adversaries, it's only works in the combat phase. So the hero phase party doesn't work at all. Oh, yeah. I missed those little things, but. No, no, it's just, because I immediately thought, oh geez, can I take an arch? Can I take my smash captain arch warlock? Yeah. I'm sure he'll be fine in here too. Yeah, sure. And run him and pull a similar sort of trick, right? With devious adversary and by burning warpstone tokens and all this, none of that stuff works in the hero phase. Now combat phase, it's all fine and good, right? But it's not, he has no way to get access to the sudden ASF. So that's. Well, on the other hand too, none of their stuff works for them too. So they can't all out defense. Their mystic shield falls off. So it kind of washes out and you can get around some things by fighting in the hero phase. And I think bodyguard is going to make the fighting in the hero phase thing way more important because you can be aggressive, put them there and count on them to live. Like I do this, like I run nine spirit hosts of my night hunt every time now. And I just throw my heroes there and dare you to move them. You probably can't. Nine spirit hosts, I'm not familiar with that. That's weird. That's strange. You're going into witness protection from then, Tyler. No, you're exactly right. The fact that Storm Verman have this generic bodyguard rule. They're so good. And can't be protecting these heroes. Like he takes somebody like an arch warlock who's on a three up base normal. When he goes three up four up, that's actually a very tough to shift foot hero, right? Like that who does not get moved easily. Like you can put him forward aggressively and just be like, yeah, he'll live. It's fun. Yeah, bodyguard lets you do that. And so like I'm thinking of like an OBR, like the Immortus Guard. I really like them to protect Archon. And like maybe there's a place here because they don't need bonds of battle. You can have a unit of six, they can fight. And then they can also pick off heroes for the battle tactic. Another thing I wanted to try is give levitate to zombies and if you end up getting the hero phase combat to work, they're moving six in their pylon and flying. And you can do so much board denial there and you don't really care how much damage they do. Which will be a lot anyway. Yeah. Like I think there's like edge case uses for this that like if your opponent isn't aware of them, could get punished very hard. And the rattlesnake will make their positioning less than ideal to begin with. And you can get the battle tactic. So I'm not ready to write off Galation champion but don't go into thinking you're gonna get the double combat all the time. Right. 100% agreed. It's like it should be seen as an occasional bonus when you get it and nothing more. Yeah. Agreed. Okay. If you think of it as a zoning tool, go ahead Ty. No, please, go ahead. I was just like, if you think of it more as like a zoning tool than actual combat, you'll be way happier with it is how I feel. I think that's a very good point. And I agree with Warpstone and Joyer. Absolutely. Is this correct? And I just got these comments there. And then I just have a little final note here which is any army that can summon Galation champions. This is just a thing worth stating very clearly and plainly and loudly. Which is that the summoning armies, I realized after I wrote this, by the way, do you notice the unifying factor of our three examples I have on this slide? Eleporting or summoning heroes, yeah. And they're all chaos. All chaos. Fair, yeah. Well, I'm thinking fact would really like this too because like I could just pop a car vargolf. I could put a little hero anywhere. Well, I'm born edge, but like it's still summoning. Yeah. Still summoning. Being able to suddenly manufacture Galation champions. Or command point even. Is very potent, right? It should not be understated. So like as an example, as I'm sure one that's close to Tyler's heart, it's pretty easy to pop out like a little nergal dum-dum. A little nergal Galation champion to just have him toot his way right out onto the board, right? Earliest turn two, right? You can do it in turn one with the Falling Host. There's some other ways, especially the Falling Host. You can lean into it. Then you're playing the Falling Host, which is, you know, that's the unfortunate part there, but... Brought COVID. Yeah, but yes. Like realistically, turn two and turn four, you can pretty easily have that happen, where you can get two. Yeah, that's fantastic. And that's enough, often, when we're talking about some of the bonus points these guys are worth, not just for the actual battle tactics, but in some of the battle plans as well. And being able to summon and just drop them into position is also another way around the aforementioned mobility challenge, right? So it's another way up top when we mentioned, you know, the high mobile GCs just making them up here, bloop, just be there with my summoning, is also pretty high mobility, right? So if not really, if your opponents aren't really thinking ahead towards your ability to do that and screening you pretty effectively, then that becomes an extremely viable tactic. So, mm-hmm. Okay, cool beans. All right, let's talk about our winning units. All right, so this is slightly different. Now, first of all, I saw this joke made earlier in the chat and I completely agree with it. We're all winners now that bounty hunters is gone, okay? But what I wanted to look at is what are the units or the unit types or specific units that because of the shift, no more bounty hunters, the different construction, the ease of keeping support heroes alive, right? What are the units that gonna benefit most from the season? Even if not directly from the rules? Yeah? Like there's nothing that says, make chosen, be really good, right? That's not printed in any rule, right? But the emergent property of this season's rules is chosen or bonds are good, okay? So my six examples here are Stormverman, Paladin's writ large, like I picked a Retributor picture because they have hammers and that's cool. Good day to be a Paladin, yeah. Yeah, IDK thralls who I feel were just like so amazing and with their potential in the IDK book when it was printed and they just fell on the worst possible season for them to be released. So I am very, very interested in the world that they're suddenly finding themselves in. Like, will that Dom Hain Thrall list actually become a thing? I hope so. Right, it was probably gonna be something in general. I hope so. I was full of angst, Alex, for two hours on that show. Maybe bumming our amazing guest, Constantino's out, who was just full of life and inner passion for how excited he was with this battle zone when I was being a ho hum because my concern of thralls and they were completely irrelevant. So please, make them good. I would love to see them, they're great. Great sculpts too. Yeah, so I read that Dom Hain rule and I was like, you gotta be kidding me, this is wild, right? And then I never saw it, yeah, what the hell? And then you never saw it because they just got exploded to bounty hunters. So we'll see if that changes. Spite Revenants, the once in future battle line slash interesting option from Sylvaneth that everybody's sure is like, this is the time. This is it. They went down too, yeah. I'm gonna try and see them. They did, yeah, like, no, no, now this is the season where Spite Revenants are gonna be good. Like it's come up so many times. Will this finally be their moment? Who knows? Perennial underdogs, Spite Revenants over here. Chosen, who I think we would all agree are just bazongers good in the current season, like they're great anyways. They're good in the battle. Yeah, right, yeah. Don't need bonds, really, really good base, and just like going to be highly benefited in the current environment they find themselves in. And then finally, that big old pack of zombies, baby, like zombies, zombies now they don't have to worry about everybody and their brother having two damage attacks. Still fear the iron jaws, of course. Yeah, of course, yeah. But zombies when dealing with mostly one damage attacks are truly a nightmare to deal with. So yeah, I thought those were by six examples. Yeah, Tyler, you and I had a game where I had like the unit of six zombies and you put like five nights and they cleared the whole thing with Bounty Hunter. Like, oh, cool. Yeah, that did happen, didn't it, yeah. It's like I used to this thing like lasting two to three turns. Yeah. And like it was an actual anvil and it's just paper. Like Storm Verman were the same thing too, is like. Oh, sure. They're pretty good anvil until everything does double damage for no reason. I never want to see the word Bounty Hunter ever again. Like in any other fantasy, no. That word is excommunicated from my lexicon. I don't want it. Absolutely. I was so excited when Storm Verman moved up to a four up save in the current season, just like all the time like base four up save. I was like, yes, finally we got to the, we got to the four up save. We're living the dream and then, oh, but everything does two damage. Nevermind, they're dead, they're dead. Yeah. It's like GW's playing the meanest joke on us. Right. But these are my picks. We mentioned pinks earlier. I think pinks are back on the menu for sure. That'd be another one that I could have put on here. What else do you guys think? Any other, any other hot picks come to your mind? Honestly, you could put a phone book here and it would be valid of like anything. Dire Wolves are a very big example for me. Cause I used to love them. And it's like 20 wounds on a very fast body or like 12 inch move, maybe 10, but somewhere around there. Yeah. For 130 points and then you can bring them back. Like that was like a staple in all my Soul Blight lists. And then seeing Bounty Hunters and seeing like my five or six tournament viable lists just be melted into one. Yeah. It was just like one of the most heartbreaking thing. So like Soul Blight, like anything in that book, winner. Anything in most death books of winter, like Crip Ghouls or Crip Horrors, Crip Flayers, like they used to be very survivable and they still kind of were. And then now they're probably going to be pretty survivable again. So like one of my early lists this season's unit of nine Horrors, nine Flayers, zombie dragon and some chaff and some relation champions. I'm excited to run that cause I think they'll survive and then the muster will bring them back pretty well. Sure. More tank guard speaking of deaths. Yeah, absolutely. Like it doesn't matter that every role saves. Like if one thing gets through the whole unit goes away. Right. And then I guess necropolis stalkers get scarier too cause that was like the one thing keeping them in check. And now they're like 36 wounds, re-rolling saves. Like you make them like a three up save with Mystic Shield ignoring round to one. Like what do you do about that? Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, they're going to be a problem. Maybe. Maybe. Like these are all possibilities. Again, I'm not, I'm not sure I'd put hard money on any of these, but I think these are all like you're effectively with bound. Like I think if I wanted to summarize what I'm saying here is that there's the potential now for traditional low to moderate armor, high damage mass body units to actually be played again. That's the short story, right? Yeah, absolutely. If we wanted to summarize the point we're making, it's that the last season really artificially suppressed an entire unit type. Namely these low to medium safe, but high damage infantry units. They just weren't around. Shadow Grand Lump, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they all outside of like Night Haunt who could survive it because of, you know, Kruelgast appreciators. Yeah. And so just ignored bounty hunters. You just didn't see a lot of the, like this unit basically stopped existing as an archetype. Get my favorite kind of unit just out of the game. I know that's a personal bias, but like I didn't like that. It wasn't fun for me. Right, like why would I take these paladins when I could just take fulminators? It's roughly the same price. And like the fulminators couldn't get bounty hunter, could be bounty hunters and we're such a smaller footprint, right? With the mobility. And so, you know, yeah, sure they have less wounds or whatever, whatever, right? They don't take double damage for no reason. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, like it's not less wounds when you're taking double damage randomly sometimes for no reason. So, yeah. Tyler, what'd we miss there? Anything we missed? Yeah, so my head's been in Stormcast and Nurgle. I mean, Stormcast got a lot of point changes. There's a number of units that are now on the menu with that army. I think we're going to see some interesting new lists emerge. So, one that came up a couple of times today, including in a chat with Murganc that you may have seen a little bit of events. So, I was joking with him that I've already got Erisai locked down for a dragon in Missouri and he needs to find another dragon. And apparently he's looking to play Krondis. So, of course, we had a Listercatite last year, French on Lindsay in Missouri and others were playing it. So, it essentially was leaning into Undis' Atavastic Tempest spell that would often make you minus one save on a key unit. Combine that with Purple Sun, another minus one to save, right? See what I'm getting at here. And then it really turns on range damage, potentially a whole new level. With Stormcast, in particular, some of the units that you didn't see a whole lot. So, I could see Krondis plus Judicators with Boltstorm Crossbows. Maybe not Hurricane Crossbows because Judicators Boltstorm Crossbows are still probably better. Maybe get Wild and try Cascades. My friend David was talking about that today. Like, Cascades are very cheap now. I don't know if you've seen their price, Alex. They're 90 for three. Yeah, I'm wondering if there's something to that. So, I didn't think they were bad before, right? The spite-revenants of Stormcast right there. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can empower them, potentially, the spell from the Evocators on Foot or on Kitty. Yeah, like you potentially have them, two's and two's minus two rends or minus four rends with this combo that I was talking about here. So, I could see that being a space where people lean into it. Obviously, Tempestors were part of that combo last year. They could still have some value as part of this with ranged output, high volume shots at pretty high rends. Speaking of Evocators, I think they're pretty intriguing now. I got a point drop. They could go into the Galatians Veteran. It's really benefit from Bonds of Battle. That was one of the challenges that they used to have, where, well, I guess you could have rend them, benefit from Bonds of Battle last year as well. Mainly, it's the point drop, and then you put them with Laoshan. So, you know, he ferries them around the battlefields. I think that's kind of interesting. You could have a unit of 10 fit around that. But they've got, there's a number of possibilities of Stormcast now. Yeah. I will be very interested to see where armies like Stormcast would have such a wide bench go. I think, I mean, when the beginning of any season, the armies that are always positioned, that are always sort of the best positioning are those with a deep bench. So, you look at something like S2D, Slaves to Darkness, you look at Seraphon, you look at Stormcast, you look at Skaven, right? These are armies with like 50 plus war scrolls, right? It's just a huge bench with like multiple stacks on stacks of options in every role, right? And so that kind of an army oftentimes is able to respond quite strongly, especially before the Met is really unlocked with different options, so. Okay. So, another one that's been in my head, of course, are the trees. I think they've also gotten pretty interesting. They got a lot of points. You're talking about dryads? You're talking about base? I mean, I probably should be thinking about dryads also enough. Like dryads enough. Yeah, we'll see. I wouldn't be shocked if some people play them. And I don't know, minus one hit, minus one to wounds, there are other ways. You don't want to lean too much into the buffs with them. I mean, you can really lean hard into it, five up or potentially from Lady of Vines, et cetera, et cetera. I'm curious to see. Who did also get quite a bit cheaper. I love her. Yeah. She's so good. Tree Lords? Tree Lords got a big drop. I think they dropped 30 points. Yeah, they're 230 now. They're another one. I'm mentioning all these units that are spike-revenant equivalent like these perennial pieces that people really want to find a way to make work. If we have more bodies coming back this season, which we will, I mean, I think generally about that, that seems to be the overwhelming consensus. The community right now is that the main thing that's gonna have the most impact on list building over the next six months is not the Galation Champions. It's gonna be the fact that bounty hunters doesn't exist and expert conquerors, potentially to some degree as well, be making Stormkeep or Ogre, you know, Foot Ogre is anything that counts as multiple models, making that higher value than it used to be. Alumnia too, right? Alumnia, yeah, man. I was thinking about Alumnia might be interesting. I mean, it'd have to be really competitive, you know, really good, right? Really intriguing to pull away from Helan and Die Trek and some of these things, Techless builds, but yeah, the Tree Lord was getting at is, of course, the Tree Lord just has to have a successful hit to turn off Pylon. But you have him on a corner of a big old unit, turn off Pylon, I think that can be interesting. Another thing with, I mean, he's got other roles, but that stands out in particular. Also the Tree, right? Yeah. Yeah, for the ancient, yeah, definitely. Kernelth Bose, so of course they were one of the core sources of ranged damage, but they're not gonna fit in Sharpshears. Maybe that's a problem, maybe that's not, but I wonder if that in part might make Gossip of the Archers more attractive to numbers of enough players. Maybe one by 10, two by five, or at least at least one by five. That's one thought, I could see Gossip of the Archers getting some more play. I could see it too. They went down a little bit, right? Oh, did they go down? Let's see, Gossip of the Archers. I think they went like five down. The Archers, Spyra, they went down 10, 210. Okay. Okay. So, yeah. Maybe, maybe. I don't know about you guys, I don't play against shooting marmies much or with at all cause I'm usually deaf. I found shooting the support heroes was often a track when you needed to move problematic units instead. Well, this is the thing. This is the other concern with Sharpshears. I think, Alex, you just hit on a good point. A lot of the shooting armies weren't really caring as much about shooting the utility heroes. If you had the sort of potent mass shooting, you were using it to remove entire units that were a problem, right? And they're no more protected than they used to be before. You mentioned sentinels earlier, Tyler, or whatever, you know, sentinels and Starshard, or, you know, pick your poison, okay? As far as that goes, you know, those things are just going to shoot at the units and remove the problem, right? That's their target and that's gonna continue to be their target. And so oftentimes those people had don't... And that's why I said the use of the new battalions is all highly suspect to me because I don't know how many people are gonna feel compelled to be in Sharpshears. Like, nah, I wasn't gonna shoot that stuff anyways. Right. That's what I was thinking too, but... Yeah. And so it's really a time-will-tell kind of situation. I feel like there's so many moving parts that it's tough to say, but yes, exactly. As the Harrower said, if the support hero has nothing to support, who cares? That's right. Yep. You know, and they can die all the same once the unit that's standing beside them is now just like red mist. So, yeah, okay. Caleb, what's up buddies? It's so many new combos. Consider two months from now a show around battle-tome combos. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. That'll be a great March show, right? Of like, what are the emergent battle-tome combos? Okay. That'll be a good one. Absolutely. Anything else we wanna say on the winning units? The people back in rotation, worth experimenting, anything like that. And you were talking about armies of deep benches. I think Skaven fits there too, because they feel like a buck of silver bullets. 100%, they've got so many units, so many, and yes, right, a bunch of them are silver bullets. Yeah, so I feel like they might be able to capitalize on that same space earlier, but that was more of a yes and. No, very, very good. I agree, there are many units in Skaven that I am ultra-excited for. And in your notes, you outlined a couple of them. Like, you were shouting out like the plague furnace in your notes, and I agree with that. Yeah, I love that thing, yeah. It was an incredibly valuable unit at protecting these big blocks, keeping all your Storm Vermin, battle-shock immune and stuff like that, and whatever, people come attack it, who cares. But like, the Deathmaster Storm Vermin combo we just talked about, Sensor Bear is still highly valuable, and by the way, can be battle-lined and keep the plague priests next to them from being shot or whatever. So just all sorts of things like that, a lot of different things. Do you hear about my buddy's memelist that he wants to try to bring to tournaments? That's a three screaming bells. And he wants... I knew you were gonna say that, but... This is what he wants to do. He wants to put them all in the middle of the objective, put warp lightning storm near them and then use Jaws of Galay to hit them all, and then bodyguard the west rest of the runes off and try to get three Vermin lords. Yeah, and he's like, I think it's gonna work. I'm like, one is probably reasonable. Two, if you want to be funny, three is too many. That's too much greed. First of all, the better play would just be take three Vermin lords. If you want three Vermin lords, it's okay. Just take three Vermin lords. But these are cheap. Like, I could get somebody to wear Clam Rats. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, it is. I do think one has a place. Cause like, if you look at that going down a little bit and then I think we're going up, like you're just taking a big casting bonus. You can give it reroll casts. And then have more in units instead of just the thankful utility. Maybe. I think even with the drop, it's still not worth it. It'd have to drop like another 50 points in my mind to be worth it. So there you go. But at any rate, it's, that's, we'll do that during a Skaven show in the future. We'll do a Skaven or visited show at some point in the season for sure. You can told me so that, but I get it. Right on. What about Cross Boos, Alex? That popped in my head. Have you tried them out? Oh yeah. You went through my whole saga of them like, oh, they're going down 25. Like they're cheaper than chain. Yeah, my logic was they're cheaper than chain rests and they can do the kind of the same thing but with like a little bit of chip damage. It might like intimidate people going after them. And if they don't, they're one more thing for the wave of terror. And then what I ended up finding is that they do an average of zero to one damage versus clan wraps. So they're not going to do any damage to anything reasonable. And I just thought they'd be like similar to Canary in a way. But the thing that makes Canary better is they have a free battle tactic that they just get attached to it in addition to screening. And they can move after they shoot too. Which if Cross Boos could do that, like they're, I'm sold on them, but a bad war scroll is a bad war scroll. A bad war scroll is a bad war scroll. And that's very... I tried so hard to make them... To understand in this excitement over all these units being viable again, when everybody's viable, no one's viable. Right? Yeah, of course. When the season opens up, everybody's like, oh, my pet crappy unit can be played again. And it's like, yeah, it can be played. But guess what? It was bad before and its rules are still bad. The unit that had really good rules and can be viable again now, will be better, yeah. Yeah, and like, didn't we learn nothing from body hunters and we're like, oh, like this little piddly thing has two damage now, maybe it's good. No, the thing with three damage is just gonna have four and ruin your whole life. Right, right, exactly. That's what's gonna happen. Yep, I agree with Keith Rogers. Skaven players got other stuff to fill the screaming bell sized points gap in their list by now. So next book, they might make it good again. Yeah, I mean, what a tragedy, a tragedy as a war crime that was committed by giving a screaming bell that particular war scroll. So, but hey, there's always the next book. I've been through so many Skaven books at this point. So, I'm good with it. You see it all. Yeah, exactly. From my first Skaven book in fifth edition to today, there's been many Skaven books in between. Not as many as there should have been, but many. I agree. I don't know if it's the right time to have this discussion, but we had talked before the show about how I've been seeing a lot of folks who are of the opinion that number one, unique small heroes, that is unique heroes, right, if nine wins or less, plus mounted heroes, unique or otherwise, are going to be less relevant, let's say, this season. I'm curious to get your guys' thoughts on that. I know just to kick us off. So, for example, as you know, Alex, I've been running that Thunder Buddies list for a long time, Ash Jinn. Oh, I thought that I was gonna have to drop one of them, but then I realized Battle Tactics is gonna be challenging for Stormcast without a dragon. Therefore, they're both out and Karazai is in, my new list. I was definitely thinking about dropping one or both of them is the point because they're unique. Yeah, Vince, you definitely had some thoughts on this. I do too, but go ahead first, Vince. Okay, I'll go first. That's fine. I need the soundboard from Trapped Under Plastic of myself that just says, here's why you're wrong, okay? So, here's why that's wrong. Like, are you telling me Sigvald isn't still good? No, of course he is. Like, don't be insane, okay? Like, is Prime Time still valid in other armies? I mean, still nothing in Stormcast, but he's still valid in other armies as a great ally? Like, of course he is. Rude, that's fine. Nothing actively made them worse, right? Correct, that's exactly it. Like, oh no, I don't get access to these other rules I didn't have before and don't care about. Was I good before? Then I'm good now, because nothing actively made me worse. Some of these things even got point drops, okay? And like, good war scroll, still good. Lord on Karkadrak, still good. Charging and fighting with ASF, and then pulling your unit of cast knights into an ASF fight. It was super good before. Still, let me check. Still super good. Yeah, the thing he's doing is the thing you're building the battalion for. He just already has it. Right, yeah, like, I don't need your extra rules. There was a Order of the Stick, which is a very funny, like, little D&D comic, right? It's been around for a long time. Yes, so like, back in third edition days, there was a moment where they all fought, the Order of the Stick team, all fought like a druid, and the druid was just kicking the crap out of them. And they're like, how is he doing this? And he's like, I'm a third edition druid. Any one of my class features is more powerful than your entire class, right? So true, yeah. And that's the point here. Like, if the unique character is good and all of its rules are better than all of your layered special garbage, then it's still worth taking. Same with the mountain thing, right? Like, if it's a non-unique mounted hero, who cares, they don't benefit from this. You can still soup them up with a bunch of good stuff you gave them before, and you'll still give them now. So, no, I don't buy that for a minute. I give that argument for Pinocchios or whoopsie-doosies or whatever we're rating this on. Because, like, good heroes still good. Bad heroes, still bad. End of- Give a little more context. I mean, one thing that I've heard from a number of folks is with armies that don't have a ton of easy-to-medium battle tactics, that they think that they can get reliably and consistently, that if they had, say, a mounted hero in their list, but they also think they need to add at least one Galatian champion, mounted hero is not a Galatian champion in their list, they're more on the margins of list changes is they're feeling some pressure to make some, you know, like 200 point changes, right? Like, I'm gonna take out this mounted hero because he's not a Galatian champion to add another Galatian champion, those kinds of things. Yeah, maybe you'd see some list fiddling here or there, like, but that's not weird. Yes, prime time is the Celestin Prime out of Stormcast, goon94. It's not gonna be a phenomenon we see at large, but some people are gonna do it because it makes sense for that particular list, right? Exactly, like, yeah, you fiddle a list here and there, you cut a unit to get an extra foot dude in or you swap a hero around where it wasn't essential and blah, blah, blah, like, of course, but like, carte blanche, it's like, of course you're not gonna see it, like, of course you're still gonna see all the good foot and uni hero, or sorry, mounted and uni heroes, like of course because they filled a valid role and we're doing a valid thing and that thing still continues to be a thing. Like, the fundamentals of the game didn't change, so hence they still, that expression is still worth it, right? Yeah, that's it. I wanted to, yes, and your point too. Go for it. Another point, Nashjuf at one, or yeah, Kaleboss on Nashjuf at 130 is kind of ridiculous, right? And like, there's gonna be points, changes like that, some things went down in accounting for that they weren't relation champions. Sure. That are probably gonna be very good. Also, another thing too is, I'm looking at Kerdos a lot more than I used to in my Nighthunt lists because I wanna get more battle tactics. The Nighthunt book ones are okay, so I'm looking at this one's mine particularly and I have a book of terrible command traits. I guess I get Arcane, or Master of Arcane. Like, who gets a dunk? Like, I'm just gonna take Kerdos, make him my general, and his command trait is that he can get two points. Like, he's still the best thing for this one's mine. Prince Ford Dry might still be the best thing for this one's mine in Soul Blight. So there might be a reason because like your inability to get some of the battle tactics that these heroes will grant you if they're your general anyway. Yeah, I completely agree with that. Absolutely. All right, fantastic. That was good to, thank you, Tyler. I'm glad you reminded me about that. Yeah, it was a good discussion. That's a good point, yep. But like, I'm still holding stonks on all the good mountain unique heroes. Like, you bet your bottom dollar that I'll still be putting a, you know, a KS Lord on Karkadrak into every S2D list I built. Like, that dude is like the first hero I add. When I select S2D on War Scroll Builder, it should just auto load. One of those two is anti-all that's just like, click. Yeah, all of this just relates to the, one of the running threads of last show, which the world where they're playing with book battle tactics, not to bring up a source spot, but just the fact you have gaining momentum to create their land, eye for an eye and cutting maneuver are gonna be the four battle tactics that a lot of players will get. And then they just need one book battle tactic before they can ignore the three other actually challenging, actually. Oh, you may not get them Galation Champion battle tactics. So I still think that like, that's one of my main theses for the next six months is what we're gonna be doing. Also, and I totally, I brought my very first list in the season was two Necromancers, two vampire lords on foot. And you know what happened? I got some of these tactics, my army fell because I didn't have enough bodies to support what I needed to do. Sure, right, right. All right, let's, now let's go to the most controversial slide of the night. I'm excited about this one. Okay, winning and losing armies. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Winning and losing armies. So, winning and losing armies. My concept here was to chart out what I thought were three interesting big winners and three interesting big losers, though this is not meant to be an all-inclusive list. And one of them in each, I suspect, there might be some controversy, controversy that I'm courting here with this, but we'll see, we'll see, okay? Let's talk about winners first. Maybe the less controversial column. Yeah, Alex, I want you to talk to me about Night Hunt because I agree with you, they're a big winner. I want you to tell me why you think they're a big winner in this season. Yeah, tell us why Night Hunt are the most busted army in Native Sigma. Please, the floor's yours. Look, it just because I beat you with them doesn't mean they're busted, it's like good. No, but like, the whole incentive was Galation Champions and that was like our best unit. Like, it's a whole book of like, here's our crap units that are brought to extraordinary levels through the power of our Galation Champions and like what you're saying is like, you're gonna bring the good ones and we have the good ones. And in addition to being powerful buff pieces like minus one damage, plus one to wound, bring back three models. Like, I even like Lord Executioner who gives like a minus one to wound. That's like our best relic for free. And then you can also bring that somewhere else. Like, you could debuff the crap out of enemies and bring them down to your level and then have the Galation Champions that can do a lot of work in the hero phase just by being in combat to fight. You have Spirit Hosts, which are like the best unit in that book, in my opinion, with the three at Bodyguard. So you're not risking anything putting your Lord Executioner with five attacks up there with run two, two damage. And then the hero phase when they charge. You don't even care that you have a Strike Last because you gave them Strike Last, it's your turn, you go with them first. Yep, also they're a unit that you could put stuff in the underworld to teleport into points to get stuff. You can use Spectral Tether, which I'm gonna bring a lot more now, to teleport wherever you need them to be. And Tull Buddy, great here. Stubborn as a Rhinox is hilarious because you could put your Galation Champion right on the point, Spirit Hosts. And you can zone out pretty well. And then they have to kill all of the Spirit Hosts before they get your counts as 10. Yep, yep. Great stuff. All good reasons. I mean, yep, yep to all of that. I mean, I cannot think of an army. To me, they are the actual big winner of the season. I would give them the crown for the top spot, is my honest call. You said they didn't care about bounty hunters? They care even less because they still have the minus one damage buff. Yep, they still, yeah exactly, yes. They still have the minus one damage buff. They still have. It doesn't stack anymore, but yeah. Yeah, it's, that's fine. It didn't need to, that was insane, yeah. They, I mean like everything about them is primed to be good. They can actually make take good advantage of all this. They have incredible debuffs that can play around the rules as you mentioned. They're, all their supporting rules just feed into everything you wanna be doing in every battle plan. Like being where you wanna be, having your GCs where you wanna have them. They have multiple, you know, in army teleports and mobile crap that can happen as well. Like it's just, it's all over the shop on exactly. It is truly the, what was it, the American Express or whatever it's everywhere you wanna be, I guess of this current season. I agree. Yeah, hold on to the pollution chip and I was doing that anyway. Yeah. Right, right, exactly. They were already taking all these heroes. They were already good versions of all these heroes. Fantastic. Right, they have a lot of higher mobility type of heroes like this. It's fantastic. All right. Tyler, any disagreement on Nighthawk? Not really, I had some questions for Alex on them. So you mentioned that not necessarily you've been struggling or maybe you have with battle tactics. What are your thoughts on the state of battle tactics with Nighthawk assuming you're at a tournament that's playing book battle tactics? All right, I need to look at it a little bit more because like honestly I never looked at the book battle tactics before this season because I never felt I had to. And like I hate them so I didn't do with them even at the GTs. So I'm not super used to them. We have one that's killed something with a summonable unit or a monster or a hero with a summonable unit. And again, with the charge bonuses and unit of nine spirit hosts in the bonds of battle that's probably pretty easy to do. There's one that's like be in combat with one unit with two of your own units. And like I find what happens that I just accidentally kill the thing. Or like one tournament I was like, oh, Marathi can't die, this is sweet. And then she split her attacks in three units and killed all three units because I failed every four up in every ward. Sucks, but you gotta be careful with that too. So I think they're probably poised to get four very easily. I think the fifth one's gonna be a struggle which is why I was talking about looking into Kerdos to get this one's mind much easier. He has BC. Yeah, and I'm thinking Grimcrest Reapers for the Galation Command. Just because they have a two inch range, they don't need the bonds of battle. And they're probably good enough at hitting heroes anyway. If you have like 10 of them, that's 20 attacks. You can all out attack them plus one unit. So three's two's minus one one, whatever charge bonuses, yeah. We rated four of just to go back to our Battle Tactics review show. We rated four of the Knight Hunt Battle Tactics medium and two of them as hard. I would agree. Yeah. But medium's still a little tough compared to last year. I just gotta get used to it, I think. So that might have been a me thing having struggled with them personally because I never really looked at them but maybe it'll get better as I play it more. Maybe not, I'll keep in touch with you when we do the look back at Knight Hunt and see how they actually fared. Yeah. Or when you guys do it rather, yeah. Yeah, sure. And you're usually, Knight Hunt players usually pretty high drop, right? Oh yeah, minimum 10, I feel like. Yeah, you're like, you're a million drops and who cares? Yeah, cause I like the chain rest because of the chain gas. I have a bunch of little chain rest everywhere. Yep. Like I reinforce blade geists and like I'm bringing less of those now cause I really like the horses. And Knight Hunt are like so happy to go first. Especially in these new battle plans. Like yeah, I get to go first, awesome. Thanks for handing me the game. And that's just my play style anyway. Like I like to see what you're doing counter deployed, make you want to take first or make you take the turn you don't want to take. I'm happy either way. I can make it work. I have eight inch fly everywhere. I'm fine. Yeah, certainly in our games it felt like you have the DP. I asked the question because I wanted to what degree they might have games where your opponent goes first, alpha bunkers on objectives to what degree can you compete? That is get them off and catch back up in primary scoring in particular. And it seems like they have the DPS to be able to do that. Let me put it this way. I didn't take bounty hunters in my Knight Hunt list at all cause I wanted expert conquerors on my blade geists instead. I think you even seen that. And like they didn't need the extra damage. They're not going to need it now. Maybe there's more bodies, but I make it so you can't inspiring presence. Right. Like I can just do enough to make you run away. Especially feel like a piddly little rat with the bravery for. Another highly underestimated thing. Like in the last season where you had almost no infantry units, the fact that they shut off inspiring presence barely ever mattered. If we do see a return to a lot of like larger infantry units if people start trotting these things out, suddenly that is a huge deal. I did kill three pigs with that once. And that was pretty big. But yeah, like you can still do stuff like to any sized unit. Oh yeah. The main thing that said, I mean in terms of weaknesses or ways to compete against them as area of effect damage. That's when they came up in some of our games. So I mean, there are some armies that can lean into that. But we've joked a lot of bad night haunts. You knew my feelings on them. It's not simply the games that you and I have played, but I've played against a lot of armies in this game for a long time, obviously. And they are doing so much. They are so strong on so many levels that I do worry about them just being a little too, too good. I definitely play the blue-black control build to throw another magic reference here with them. It's like my favorite thing to do with them. And like I had like my is one to wound everywhere minus damage and just like zoning you out what you needed to be. Yeah, returning models, five upboards, multiple units, amazing damage, debuffing, stacking negatives to save, incredible mobility. It's like they do about everything. The damage doesn't feel amazing compared to the 18 stalker list I brought to Everwinter. But like nothing will, I don't think. Look, there's a reason Demir is the most popular combination. That's all I'll say. Okay, let's talk then, Tyler, I want you to take the next one list. Another one I feel is high-primed for success in this season. Next up in our winners category, slaves to darkness. What do you like? I think they're very primed for success in this season. What do you think stands out? Why do you think that? Do you think they should be a winner? What do you think their strengths are into the season? I think so. I think you have really good players. They're pretty popular right now. Really good players are gonna do incredibly well with them. I think they play into a number of the elements. We've mentioned the show and last show about the nature of this season. We're gonna be playing on less board space. There's going to be in a fit in many ways of being hyper aggressive. Just doing raw damage and this army does raw damage maybe better than about anything else in this game right now. So in terms of, we were talking about SoulScreen Bridge from the get-go with this army and you've been seeing that a lot because it addresses one of the core needs of this army that leans into the strengths that it has which is the extraordinary spell casting that you can leverage, especially obviously I've been talking a lot about Kabbalist. Phil Marshall, for example. A lot of people know about Phil now. He's this incredible player. He's got a good chance of winning Las Vegas Open. I've been watching Phil play just to give you guys an idea if you haven't seen it. Two Chaos Sorcerer Lords, Six Baron Guard and Showsen and Knights two by whatever, eight or nine Corvus Kabbal, right? Like that is raw with the SoulScreen Bridge. That's raw efficiency. Three units with the delivery mechanism of SoulScreen Bridge to have three waves. Those units is fighting twice. Like, it's not a whole lot. It's gonna be a challenge to hold up to that kind of army when it's piloted incredibly well, just the sheer efficiency of it. So yeah, I think it's an amazing book. There's a lot of variety. Legion of the First Prince has more play. Sean, I was talking with him today. He was emphasizing, he thinks Zinch has a lot more play and the people are realizing with some of the tricks that you can do there. So it's a very deep book but it also has the spike raw efficiency button that you can really hammer. Yeah, it's gonna be really good. Yeah, I think it agreed with everything you said. And Sakura Skull miniatures, no. The SoulBlight Grave Lords are gonna do just fine. They're super good. Oh, absolutely, yeah. I knew it was just there. Another silver bullet book, yeah. Yeah, these are sort of the top winners list but I would absolutely put them in a strong category. So I think it's also interesting how they can both, how they have so many strong options that were already there. IE the aforementioned Lord on Karkadrak plus Chaos Knights. And now this season will also take some of their other units in the ways that you mentioned and tool those up as well. It's actually interesting, the combination of how some of their maybe units that weren't as performant, now we can become more performant. They've gotten ramped and can now keep the pace along with their higher performing units, right? And so you get this really nice combination of suddenly having almost everything in the book becoming a really interesting choice, right? And having some play. Now that's obviously not true. I'm overstating that to some degree just because S2D is such a ridiculous book full of so many scrolls. I don't want somebody to come in a vagabond and be like, well, I wanna play this particular ridiculous work cry unit that's obviously bad. And I'm like, all right, look, I didn't say everything, right? But it opens more doors, right? You can have so many different combinations, independent actors, power pairs, operating all simultaneously. It's the rare book that actually can do like simultaneously a sort of Death Star build, a power pair build and some independent operators, all of whom are punching extremely efficiently, right? And fulfilling a role. And to me, that's why it's so strong in the new season, right? We go ahead, Alex. Yeah. All right. Yeah, another thing too is like the marks just change units fundamentally. Like a unit of warriors with the mark of corn is an extremely different unit with an extremely different role than the mark of Nurgle one. And the same with like a Slanesh unit versus corn versus Zinch one too. Like Zinch Knights, I think are gonna be cool cause you can teleport them out and then guarantee like a pretty easy charge with just one five on four dice basically. That'll be a very different thing than a corn knight unit. So like the marks just make them fundamentally different in addition to having a deep book. So there's like a lot more than what the war scrolls say even. Absolutely. I would also point out that S2D can also do the Gaunt Summoner Silver Tower trick. They can't auto hit the charge cause they don't have cheater dice, but they have plenty of units that are plus one to charge built in. Or if you do the Knights, lower four like pretty easy. Absolutely. Yep. For a random triple. Sure. You can also pull that a version of that same Gaunt trick. Not necessarily for Alpha Bunkering, but just for traditional Alpha Striking. Right? So I mean it's- If they leave an opening, you can punish it so hard. Absolutely. Yep. So it's- Speaking of Alpha Bunkering, it's gonna be like a once better than 20 Chaos Warriors, Nurgle, Earl Banner on an objective. You know, we played that a lot of Alex. We saw how- Yeah, some Bumble's a flag, right? Yeah. Chaos Lord is one of the more incredible Glacian champions you can take, Retnude to 20 Warriors or Tenchos and whatever. But yeah, although to beat a dead horse, Knight Haunt, like I would, a good Knight Haunt player with a good Knight Haunt list, I would favor them, maybe favor them highly against most slaves of Darkness list. I think they're a pretty good counter. I think I agree because like slaves rely on rend and quality damage and Knight Haunt scoffs at that. Yeah. Right? Okay. Got wasted due debuffing, et cetera. And then finally, my last winner, we've talked about him a bunch. It's Skaven. I think they're the other big winner this season. They're all there, like they're really good units that have been suppressed or back on the board. So this is like Plague Monks, Storm Vermin, things like this. Suddenly they don't have to fear bounty hunters anymore. That joins the cadre of already highly efficient units like Sensor Bears and Gutter Runners they had, all of whom were just dropping bombs last season. It's another army like you said where it was like, look, I was winning with Glacian champions in a million drops anyways. It's very much like a Knight Haunt situation. I was already 12 to 14 drops. I can take all the battalions I want. We've mentioned the Deathmaster, Storm Vermin, Shadow Magnet, Trinket combo earlier, but that's certainly far from the only one. We talked about things like making, just being able to put your Smash Captain, Arch Warlock into a forward position and just watching that guy go ham on a unit. And just, you know, like anything with medium armor, he will just rip apart. It's wild how much damage that guy does, by the way. I don't know if you've ever seen this guy in action, Tyler. Have you ever played against the Smash Captain, Arch Warlock build? He's awesome. No, I think you may have mentioned it to me a while back, but yeah, I wouldn't book him out, but no. It's wild. If he gets into like low medium armor units, like Daughters of Cain, fear this guy. He'll just tear his wear through their entire army. Like he'll just rip them apart. So at any rate, they plus all the, you know, really interesting other silver bullets they have. The furnace for non-inspiring presence, massive bubble, battle shock immunity. So they can, you know, ignore all the new stupid rules that say shuts off inspiring presence. And it's like, yeah, I wasn't using that anyways. So nice try. I'm still battle shock immune. You know. The great handful too. Right. You know, strong magic, short teleports, like access to six inch away teleports, teleports galore, by the by, like just fallen out there, little rat behinds are with all the teleports to make their Galation champions be always highly mobile. So it's just, I mean, it's, you know, it's everything you'd want to happen. Their only challenge is really still, they lack what they always lacked, which was a, you know, a real traditional anvil, right? So. Yeah. And that's fine. That's the nature of the thing. They, their anvil is just having a metric crap tone of bodies, right? Like that's what it is. Okay. Let's talk about losers. I think some of these may be a deep discussion, but we'll see where we go here. Okay. So, big loser of the season, sons of Bahamut. I mean, I think that's just the case. They've been punished in a lot of ways. They have no interplay with the Galation champion thing. There's a lot of battle plans where they just get shut out of all the bonus points. They get locked out of all of the, they get locked out of four battle tactics. Their own battle tactics are complete random chance. It's just roll a dice nonsense. And so you could very easily just fail all your battle tactics on a die roll. It's like, roll a die on a three up, you get two points on a one or two, you don't. It's like, no, I didn't. Okay, cool, neat. That's most of their battle tactics. Yeah. I think there's like the three monsters rampage, just one that's kind of consistent, but you need to bring the Beast Smasher to do it. Correct. You have to be in a very specific bill. People didn't want to do that. Yeah. And by the way, what happens if you run into no enemy monsters? Oh, yeah. Then you ain't getting that one. That's a great, I need to think about that, yeah. Cause two of those only work against monsters. Yeah. So, I hope the enemy army has at least one of those and is willing to come get near your Beast Smasher with it, right? Yeah. So, you know, there's just like, there's so many places that they get tripped up. They're just, they're just bad this season. I don't know how else to say it. I mean, this season was written with them clearly not in mind and not caring. If they say above 45%, I'd be amazed. At that, like, you know, at the end of this season, if we do a six month look back and they're above 45%, I'll be shocked. Okay. How the, truly how the mighty have fallen. Somebody's gonna have to call Timber on this whole army book. Yeah. Okay. So, I think that one's probably fairly non-controversial, right? There's not, yeah, there's not much more to say. Yeah. Yeah. And great point Warpstone and Juror. They would need to get played to have a win percentage, yes, indeed. Their meta representation will also fall to the floor. All right. Now let's get to my controversial pick. Nurgle. Yeah. Okay. I'm dying to hear this. Both, we both message you like, are you okay? Do you really want to have this in this? I messaged Tyler. I'm like, am I an idiot? What am I missing? Tyler's like, I don't know, man. Yeah. Okay. Why don't you both tell me? I'm actually, I'm gonna let you first tell me why you think I'm wrong. Not hearing my argument, just why you think they wouldn't be in this category. Like why, what about them makes you think they're gonna be successful in this season? Go ahead. Okay, I can take this. I'll start Alex. Okay. I'm falling in love with Nurgle. Oh, Nurgle is one of the more resilient armies in the game. Many hunters has gone away. I have a hard time understanding how that's not gonna benefit them considerably. They can be slow, which is appropriate unless you're spamming flies, which obviously was done for quite a while. I think in general, excellent Nurgles have a mixture. They'll have some mobility. You can get that from the book or you can get that through allies Corvus Cabal, make a really nice ally to give some mobility to your Nurgle list. They've got a number of interesting ally options, particularly now with the slave's book on the table. They just, I don't know, like I've played about four games with them so far in this new season, and they still feel fantastic on many fronts. I like just about everything in the book is playable in my mind. Like King's Plague Bears, I think are more playable. You may see Plague Bears on the table. They have a number of reasonably good Galatian Champion options. They still, I think you'll still see the heroes that you've often seen in different combinations. There's a good argument in my mind for Glotkinless to see more play, particularly with less objectives with more kind of center space focus on these missions. I think the Glotkin could have fair amount of strengths in combination with Blyking's. Yeah, I mean, I could go on for quite a long while why I think that Nurgle is still going to be a very strong army in this game. I'm very, very interested in what you've got to say. And I have a theory of what you're going to say too. Tell me if I'm wrong, but there's the idea that if there's more bodies and Nurgle's most of its damage was like quality mortal wound base damage. And if there's a lot of more teleporting awful locking strategies, they might struggle to get their Galatian Champion summoned onto points to score these battle tactics indeed. Is that something you're hitting out or is there more to it than that? There's more to it than that, but you are hitting a point I'm going to make, yes. Okay. Yeah. All right, so let me tell you why I think they're a loser. They were one of the most successful armies in the last season. I think they're not sons. I want to be super clear here. They're still going to end up in the fat middle at the end of the season. It's not like suddenly Nurgle is going to have like a 42% win rate or something, right? And although Joel Graham disagrees with me and Joel is a very good player and a smart guy, I think that they're going to drop a noticeable percentage points. Let me tell you why. I think they were over-reliant on flies, which as you mentioned have gotten more expensive. And you can say, well, Black Kings will pick up the slack. No, they won't. No, they won't. They just won't. They're not the same unit. They don't move 16 inches like basically before the enemy army goes. You mentioned the contention, like there is a world of difference between what light lords are able to accomplish and what Black Kings are able to accomplish. Okay, there just is. And the speed factor's huge. And a couple of units of Corvus Cabal that's a cute trick that ain't picking up the slack. All right, like plenty of armies have enough speed that you like, yeah, sure, you'll pick up the desecrate or whatever. And then that unit's gone and it evaporates, right? They didn't have to really dedicate any real resources to killing that, that ridiculous unit on like it's six. Also Gutrot, which arguably has been undervalued and what Gutrot can do. Yeah, you know, Gutrot's so much more limited in his capability than what that is, than this. So the fly build got more expensive by a good chunk. Black Kings can't pick up the slack. I do agree with you that like, yeah, plague bearers become more interesting. But, and their ability to summon Glacian champions is not bad, but in a world where you're still gonna see a lot, like this is gonna open back up the world of effectively glass cannon infantry units, like high damage infantry units. And that's exactly what Nergal doesn't wanna fight, okay? They don't wanna fight like 30 storm vermin who come into them with a, that kind of metric crap ton of attacks. And like you put seven disease on my storm vermin or something, like, oh no. Oh, oh no, whatever will I do? Oh my stars and garters, not three storm vermin. What'll I do? Right? I guess zombies are pretty resilient to disease. Like all of the things that you're talking about that we just talked about being strong are exactly the types of things this army doesn't wanna see. Now, the exception to that is blight kings. You might say, well, look, then, okay, the plague bears are a trap because they're just gonna get chopped up still, but we're gonna lean heavy blight kings. Blight kings are good at killing storm vermin or other associated things we've mentioned, right? Okay. And my answer to that is I, relying on blight kings at their cost and for what you get out of them is such a trap because it just doesn't have the board presence or the speed to actually win in this game. Like sure it's going to remove, but it's just, it's not like, it's a fine center, okay? But it will still get blown up by the other things. There's two units that you haven't mentioned yet, one of which I know you love, plague drones and then Rottmeier Creed. I believe Joel, who congrats, by the way, Joel, I think he went 5-0 over the last weekend. I believe my, I can't con. I think the running joke, they may have been Joel McGrath, one of the Joules. One of the Joules. So Rottmeier and or plague drones. I told you that I've been playing with two units of three plague drones. Love in every minute of it because of the high volume dice that they put out. Love shooting, shooting and being a combat with four or five up six up high body units. That's what they're designed to do. Yeah, Rottmeier are interesting. I'll give that to you. Like I don't know, I don't know how to quantify exactly what they're, how much that's going to become the shift. If people suddenly shift and are playing like a ton of Rottmeier Creed and not Blikings, if that's the shift, I think the existing plague bears are a trap. I think Blikings are a trap. If people shift real heavy Rottmeier Creed, okay, then I think maybe we're living in a different world and I'm not sure I know how to properly quantify that. Ultimately why I think there's a loser here is not because they're going to drop suddenly like a rock and be at 44% or something, right? But I think they're going to lose three, four percentage points of win rate in this season. Okay. I think you'll still see some high percent. I think you'll still see some, oh Joel, excellent. Yes, it was Joel Graham who went 5-0 and absolutely a good job, Joel. And like, I think you'll still see him 5-0. I think you'll still see him, you know, be competitive. But I think overall you will see their win rate go down because I think the primary tools that most players are going to utilize with them won't be up to, like, will be negatively impacted by the other externalities of this season. That's my argument. I think Glock can still a trap. So that's just nonsense crap. Okay, go ahead. I think what you're ultimately getting is like, if you're going to a tournament and you could pick last season or this season being Nurgle, you'd probably pick last season, right? Yeah, exactly. Okay, yeah, I could agree with that. I still think they have plenty of powerful tools but I think you're definitely right, they're going to drop a percentage or two or three. Nothing crazy, but they don't like the season as much. You guys remember where they ended up? I don't know if we can look it up. It was 56, wasn't it? It was, I know it was north of 50%, but I just remember. Yeah, they were up near the top. They're up near the top of the fat middle right now, right? I thought they were 56, but I don't know, for sure. Let's say right now they're probably 54 to 56% right? So I would not be surprised to see them drop down to like 50, 49 somewhere in that area, right? Again, which is not. Yeah, I could potentially say that. That's still fine. That's still perfectly good, right? But that still makes them a loser. Like if you lose, for many other armies can't afford to lose five percentage points of win rates. I know Dan said losing three to five points when we have the best books come out of the season ain't that how to take? I mean, five percentage points of win rate is not nothing, okay? It's significant. It's significant. Now I think sons will lose 12. You know what I mean? They're going to crater. They're whatever the opposite of Stonks is. Right? And that's exactly right, Keith. I think the army is still good. No part of me thinks the army's bad. I think that book was good. I still stand behind the fact. I think it's one of the better books of the season. I love the book. And it's highly tuned. I just think this season does not play to their strengths. That's it. And they will suffer some because of it. That's as simple as I can make it. Like if at the end of this season they're down four percentage points. Let's just construct like a faculty term here, Tyler. If they're down four percentage points at the end of this season, wouldn't that make them one of the bigger losers probably? Possibly, yeah. Unless like three other armies went like five or six. Sure, yeah. Unless we really get a lot of movement, right? But nonetheless, it would put them in the loser category. Like they lost ground and it might still be fine. They might still be winning, but sure, okay. Yeah, like if everybody's winning this new season and they're winning the least, they're still the loser, is your argument? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sorry, Tyler. They have to, yeah, it's all good. I do think they have to like, I don't know, it's this weird reality. I really think we're gonna see so many one or two drop armies really on this season. I mean, well, it may be the case that we'll see a higher number because people wanna try out the sharpshooters, the Glacier Commands, et cetera. And then we start seeing a ton of one or two drops. But like that's my general expectation is that at some point, relatively soon, there's just gonna be one or two drops all over the place. But to what degree is there value? You show up at a tournament and four of your games or five of your, oh, maybe not five of your games, right? But like four of your five games, you're doing well. And mostly you're just looking at a roll-off against a lot of folks. Is that meaningful to continue doing that? But all is equal. Yeah, if let's say it's one drop, one drop and Nurgle loses that roll-off, they are against an army with a lot of bodies that has the potential to do some alpha pinning. Yeah, that could be a potential challenge. I mean, but that is why you need to have some balance in your list. You need to have gut rot, or you need to have corpus cabal, or you need to have some flies. You need to have a combined, I mean, eventually, you know, I'm obviously very biased toward combined arms lists. And that's what I played with Nurgle. And it was amazing. And it kind of took, well, anyway, it was not reflective of the norm that was out there. In the same way that Emma's list at Adapticon was not reflective of the norm, taking Rock Covenant doing incredibly well with it. And it's an incredibly good player. That's not too surprising, but when I just think about that book, my experience with it, Nurgle will find a way. It's, particularly in the hands of good players, that it's going to still be very powerful. Let me put it this way, Tyler. Like you and Emma, not dropping. I know you don't like that argument. You don't like that argument, Vince, because it's like that's not really me necessarily saying so much because skill matters a lot. Sorry, Alex. That's what I was gonna say. Yeah, like just because you're not losing percentage games doesn't mean the average isn't. Yeah, right. Exactly. Sure. Spoilers with a, with like, you know, a book that's pretty highly tooled, top players able to make a lot of hay is like not the most breaking of news, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at the averages here, right? That's fair. My third big loser is K.O. Yeah, obviously. Yeah, like they're a shooting army where none of their shooting can really easily benefit from most of the new rules. Like they don't have much. They want to stick in sharp shooters that's of any real value, maybe thunders, maybe. They still, but they won't take that anyways. They'll want to be one drop. They can't, they don't often have like unit destroying shooting despite the fact that they're an all shooting army. A lot of the shootings actually pretty weak. They really suffer when the meta shifts to big piles of bodies. Like that is not the world they want to live in. They want to live in the world of like, you know, hey, that unit is two people and I can just focus my firepower on them with my boats. They do not want to live in the world of like, well, that's 30 dudes and that's 30 dudes and that's 30 dudes. And they're spread out over the board, like the more bigger units with more bodies, with more wounds, with more board control and unkillable utility heroes, the worse everything gets for K.O. Right? I can miss my leg. I just think they are, again, there's nothing in the rules here that says K.O. are now bad. Like kind of there is for sons. Like it's almost written in the rules like, sons, you're bad now. Sorry, just deal with it for six months, I guess, right? But K.O. it's very much the emergent property that they are just suffering from every choice. Like every consequence of what this season encourages hurts K.O. Yeah, absolutely. And they can't hold objectives with the units if they're in the boat, right? Correct. So like in order to get the GC ones, they have to hop out of the boat and be like, I got it, guys. And then just be vulnerable to any sort of ranged output. Yeah, that sucks. Yep. You mentioned him earlier, but yeah, Jeremy Vesier with this new channel. He had a nice video going through some of his thoughts on what K.O. might look like. So yeah, if any K.O. players haven't seen it, definitely worth checking it out. Just, yeah, Google on YouTube, and you should be able to find it. But yeah, he had quite a few changes he was looking at with this, although it's like even thinking about like Sky Wardens, engine riggers, that sort of thing. So yeah. So yeah. No, no disagreement there. Yep, it's gonna be a rough time for our boat boys. More sadness for me. I hope their new book is way better. This is like my want-to-be army project for the year. Because I would really love to see the, I really wanna do a Lisa Votan conversion. Like I have all the stuff for it to turn it into a K.O. army. I know what all my units and conversions would be. I've like mapped it all out. I'm just trying to work on a color scheme kind of in the interim period. But, you know, like, yep, we're gonna need that book. Doug Beard, Thoughts on Beasts of Chaos. I have done Doug because the new book, we'll talk about that next week because we'll be doing the Beasts of Chaos show probably next week. The next two weeks will be beasts and then gets. So that'll be because they've announced that obviously as being going on pre-order this Saturday. So I have no thoughts yet. The cool synergies that you'll have for three days will just have to wait, right? Right, yeah, exactly. Well, ask me on Saturday when I can talk about the book and then we'll go from there. Okay. My impression, guys, is there's gonna be a lot of, like a lot of armies, I think, are in a good place. Maybe that shouldn't be too surprising because at the time of the season, we had a lot of armies that were in a good place. Most armies were in a good place, but, you know, fire slayers. Just looking at the list here. Fire slayers, Aideneth, Lumineth, probably Seraphon. Obviously they got a new book coming out, but Seraphon always seems to find a way regardless of any point increases that they get. Zinch is still gonna be really strong. I think Sylvaneth are looking quite intriguing. I know, Alex, you're getting into Sylvaneth. Yeah, I've been playing them for a little bit, but I've been playing them a little bit more now. Like, I like what they bring a lot. They can teleport, they can do a lot of these tricks, and then they don't crumple them on the list. I almost put them on the loser list. Did you? I almost. I don't know. I just think most of the stuff you wanna run just crumpled so hard to bounty hunters that will take all the other negative crap to like get that thing out of my game. I don't want it. In the end, I just didn't believe in it enough. I was just trolling Tyler with that choice, so. Yeah. I agree with you. I don't think they're in a bad position. No. Ogres, Ogres is gonna be good to think in a number of different ways. Do you guys think we're gonna see or there's more value this season with Foot Ogres? I think so. Yeah, I think so. Definitely. I mean, the new book was very tilted towards Godbusters already, and this season just said, hey, let's go, right? So. Also, the double name on the Ogre Tyrant for like the three-up save, five-up board. Think I'm pretty sturdy GC. Yeah, 100%. Open as a Rhinox, holding that little banner for the plus one to hit. We're good. Absolutely, absolutely. So yeah, I mean, Stormcast, the one, yeah. Daughters Kane always seems to find a way as well, so yeah, just a ton of armies that I think are gonna be quite competitive. They find a way with their three insanely easy battle tactics to get. Sure, yeah. Is how they find the way, yeah. I'm really hoping we see Iron Jaws with some actual art boys and brutes in list for once. That would be wonderful. Yeah, actually, I saw a big wall list played against me. That was two units of 15 brutes with the War Chanter, like four units of a cruel boy shooting bull boys. Bull boys. Yeah, Nashtooth, two War Chanters and the Swamp Collar Shaman. And that actually did an insane amount of work to my Soul Blight. Of course, that's only one game, but I was pretty impressed with 30 attacks of two damage. Especially if what you think is true is more of these T-shirts saving kind of units are going out there. Yeah, sure. They'll be quite the tool to clear with it. More attacks. Yeah, you don't need quality damage. They're great. All right, let's close it out. I kept these two in here just in case we needed to reference the Galation Command, Sharpshooters and Veterans, just in case that question came up of, hey, what exactly do those battalions contain? I left that in there, as well as then the reference to the artifacts and enhancements just in case anybody was curious. It was the Night Flyer Cloak, is what I thought of earlier, by the by. That's the one that has to be set up within one inch of a friendly battle line. I apologize, two different weird teleport things, but yeah, only the one has the one inch requirement. Let's get to summary. By the way, hey, what's up, the Diascast? We've referenced some of your thoughts earlier. And if you've watched this long, first of all, thank you. Much appreciated, hit that like button. If you haven't subscribed, already do so. We're in the final push, everybody. We're almost at 100K, we might get there after almost darn near 10 years with this channel. We might actually get there, slow and steady. This is the, thank you for watching the Turtle Channel, where we go slow and steady to win this race by making only the content that seems interesting to all of us and not ever trying to do anything that's actually valuable to YouTube size. So at any rate, I think the summary for me is this season promises some big changes. I think some things will remain the same. Shooting and power projection is still a very powerful strategy. If you can remove problem units, you still win, right? You may often not need to start, what's that? That's always gonna be true, yeah? It's always gonna be true. Ranged is by default powerful. That's why I invented bows. Right, yeah. And nothing in the rules has fundamentally changed that this season. Because it's like, oh no, I can't shoot these guys. I probably in most cases, wasn't gonna shoot anyways, right? And by the way, if I'm using magic, I can still just mortal wound them off the table or whatever or careen into them and eat them with some gnashing jaws or whatever, whatever, whatever. So you may not often need that sharpshooter battalion and many of the shooting armies may be incentivized to stay one drop and control the tempo of the game, which as we said earlier, may or may not work out in their favor based on the nature of the battle plans and things like that. And then Josh A. said, Vince, thanks for the show. Can you tell me where to find your arch warlock build? It's real simple, man. It's the arch warlock plus the devious adversary, command trait, and then plus, you give him flaming weapon, obviously, and he uses his own warpstone sparks to benefit his hit and wound. I mean, that's basically what it is. There's probably a magic item in there, but I don't remember what it is. You want the claw lord to follow him around as a little buddy with the rush charm and just walk up to the thing and fight the same units he's fighting to give the negative saves. Okay, that's basically the build. He's a little claw lord companion. Okay, and then powerful infantry that was kept in check by bounty hunters is back, armies that don't mind being high drops will make the best use of the new battalions and some armies are simply straight losers in this new season, suns being the prime example. All right, so that's it. I miss anything in my summary. Alex, any final thoughts you want to leave anybody with? Yes, and I'm like, I think four moon infantry is going to be huge this season, even with like the crappy save ones in fact, and the ogres, cause like they're not dealing with bounty hunters and they're pretty durable to most stuff without bounty hunters. So I think that's going to be a huge, powerful infantry will be in check. That's a perfect example. Stalkers too, from OBR. Yep. So mostly just yes ands here. Yeah, suns definitely a huge loser. And then some armies are going to love the new battalions, but there's stuff that we're never, ever going to take a one drop anyway. Right. Yeah, I agree. Tyler? Yeah, good summary, man. Oh, not a lot. It's coming to mind to add on to it. I mean, one thing that just popped in my head, we didn't talk a whole lot about storm cast, obviously I'm very biased around, but the storm keep almost went away entirely. That was a big loser of last season, right? I am curious to see if some people try to make storm keep work. Like, count as three durable bodies, 15 vindictors, or even sequiturs, two by 10 sequiturs. There's a number of these you can lean into, particularly with GARDIS and Hall of Nights, five up award bubble, fighting on death on a four up, like these various things that you can stack, that I think might make storm keep interesting if you've then put in some mobility pieces with it. Oh yeah, curious, just a number of lists. I think there's a lot of space for new and intriguing list design if there are enough Johnny's in the community to push things forward. So I'm really excited about that, especially, but like we talked about near the top, I think the main change with lists right off the bat is gonna be bounty hunters going away, more bodies coming back, not so much the Glacian champions. I don't think the Glacian champions is gonna have, is it really gonna move the needle a whole lot on average when it comes to list design? Do you guys agree with that or? It's icing. If you were in a position to just take advantage of it, you're gonna be happy to have it, but I'm not building for that tool. Agreed, absolutely agree. Yeah, definitely. I'll be happy to have it, yeah. And then one last thought, kind of leave on this mission, Sean, he made my favorite point of the day to me, which was the importance of tournaments having more standardization into rain placement, particularly when it comes to this season, round one battle tactics, where he was kind of making the point of the potential of there being, say, some inequity getting created if a Tio is very sloppy with how they're doing terrain placement, which then makes, I don't know, this might be a little crazy getting this level of detail, but specifically thinking about desecrate their land here, like I made that case, right, that maybe on a number of matchups, if your opponent goes first and they cancel out your ability to meaningfully get cunning maneuver, you might be down to desecrate their land. And then if you're looking at a table where there's no possibilities with desecrate their lands, that's just one thing that came to my mind that that might be something for Tios to consider. Yeah. Yeah, I agree that, I mean, I think that you won't see, like it's just not how it's gonna be. Terrain will still be pretty random because terrain is terrain, it's hard, you know? So it'll be what the TO has access to and they'll do the best they can do with it, right? Like, it's just, it just is what it is when it comes to that. Like I'd love to say there's some different world, but there's not. All right, cool, very good. Well, thank you everyone for watching. We certainly appreciate it. Alex, thank you so much, buddy, absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me and like thank you for taking a chance on literally a nobody to come on your show. Nonsense, Alex has an absolute pleasure. Alex's channel is linked down below, go check that out as we imagine later. So hit that up as well as all of the links and things that we shared earlier in the show during the pick of the week, you can find all those. Don't forget to hit like, subscribe, as I mentioned. We're on the journey, 200,000, I think we can get there. It's gonna be very exciting, but thank you so much for watching. If you wanna support the channel, there's a Patreon link down below, focused on hobby and taking your next step on your hobby journey and review and feedback. There's a merch store down there, you can check that out as well. I was actually looking at some new merch store options and new merch options over last weekend with Uncle Adam. So I'm probably gonna be moving that soon. So if you wanna wait on that, I understand. But we're gonna, we're gonna, very excited about some things that'll happen later in the year there. And as always, thank you so much for watching. We really appreciate it. We'll see you next Wednesday.