Variety is the spice of life they say – and today is no greater proof of that. Out of 8 top 2 finishes, 7 different factions are represented. AoS is thriving competitively, and it makes my job a lot easier when I have such varied lists to pore over and pick apart. Consider today a testament to what is possible – is there an army you’ve been eyeing up? Don’t let their meta representation or win rate fool you, they can probably work with enough playtime and the right list.
Embrace your inner creative and go nuts. Treat yoself.
The Gamers Haven AOS GT
A two-day, five-round event which took place at the Gamer’s Haven in Washington, US. This was a 30 player event and you can find the lists for this event at BCP.
The Showdown
Ironjawz VS Daughters of Khaine – Tectonic Interference
Ironjawz- Giovanni Cancio – By running only one Maw-krusha, Giovanni can invest those points in 10 Brutes and a foot Megaboss for some added board presence. Beyond that, this is a pretty standard Gore Grunta based Bloodtoofs list.
Giovanni's Ironjawz - Click to Expand Daughters of Khaine – Daytond Obre – Morathi and the Bow Snakes (note that this is the old book) Daytond's DoK - Click to Expand The Daughters have got to worry about simply running out of bodies here, as the Gore Gruntas can pretty effortlessly blow through what little line infantry Daytond has if they get the charge off, and set off a Smashing and Bashing chain. Mighty Destroyers also means that he can dodge Unleash Hell from the bow snakes if he can set things up with a favorable teleport. All of this means that the Heartrenders will likely either be kept on the board to act as a cheap backboard screen, OR they’ll be kept in reserves to claim a priority objective early game without needing to commit a lot of points that the IJ player will simple blow straight through. Ironjawz would typically be happy with a Battleplan like this where they can just clash in the middle and sweep the table through superior warscrolls, but Morathi really throws a wrench in things as she simply can’t die until the end of battle round two at the absolute earliest thanks to her Iron Heart of Khaine. Adding to his problems, Giovanni has to come out of his deployment zone to claim objectives, which only brings him into what we like to call Daughters of Khaine (Dayton Obre) Victory – 19-1 Daytond’s List – See Above Joshua's List - Click to Expand Pretty standard Vyrkos Herohammer here – the choice of a foot Vampire Lord as general is interesting but with so many named characters he needed some kind of caddy for his command trait and artefact and it makes a lot of sense to bring the cheap VL who can reroll their casting in Vyrkos and help ensure they can get off two of Mystic Shield/Amethystine Pinions/Invigorating Aura each turn. Beyond that, the heroes are doing the dirty work with sheer power, with some cheerful Grave Guard to receive the myriad of incidental buffs to summoning units to efficiently trade with any unit in the game. Four more players went 3-1-1 or better: A two-day, five-round event which took place in Missouri in the US. It was a 39 player event and you can find the lists for this event at BCP. This event is notable in that players submitted 2 lists (each list had to share 1600 points, 1500 for SoB), and picked which one they used based on opponent. For the showdown I’ll just focus on the list each player actually picked: Nighthaunt – Tom Lyons – It’s the last ride of Reikenor’s Condemned (as they are gone from the new book out soon), who could enjoy for a brief brilliant moment the benefits of +1 to hit on Chainrasps AS WELL AS reroll hits thanks to the wording of the subfaction ability surviving through the update to the Spirit Torment and Chainghast warscrolls in Arena of Shades. It’s a sort of greatest hits collection for Tom here, bringing the best of a wonky book that’s more than capable of putting up results. Nighthaunt - Click to Expand Lumineth Realm Lords – Alex Cotter – Speaking of greatest hits – all your Lumineth Realmlords - Click to Expand First off let’s touch on the battleplan – the event was using Warcoda, a fan project that seeks to update some of the classic battleplans from 2nd edition to fit with what 3rd edition is trying to do. If you had forgotten, Focal Points was about earning bonus points for controlling ‘paired’ objectives, though this updated version strips out the central objective and the bonus for controlling the point with a Monster or Behemoth. As for the matchup, this actually favours the Nighthaunt because LRL is best as a scalpel – it takes apart your best threat and then pieces together a win from there. The problem here is, Tom’s list is stuffed with redundancies and there’s no one key piece that makes the engine go. If he can get any of his chainrasp units into combat with the Sentinels, it will be havoc for Alex, especially as the battleplan will require him to be somewhat aggressive if he doesn’t want to fall behind on points. What Tom needs to worry about is avoiding battleshock shenanigans by keeping 2 CP at all times to ensure an inspiring presence can happen even if Total Eclipse goes off – the Cathallar can transfer battleshock losses to an enemy unit and that could be very bad indeed for his big bricks of Chainrasps that will be trading with the Wardens. He can’t afford to simply sit back and let the Sentinels pick him apart, he has to control the board early and thus FORCE Alex into coming out of his castle. Nighthaunt (Tom Lyons) Victory – 20 – 0 Tom’s List – See Above It represents the best that Nighthaunt could be with such an old book – the Chainrasps with all their buffs up could be hitting on 3s rerolling everything, wounding on 3s rerolling 1s, and a max unit is throwing out 61 dice. That’s not to say it’s high quality attacks, but the metagame has somewhat shifted away from high armour save elite forces and Chainrasps love a good chaff battle. Redundancy and flexibility is the name of the game here, as the Black Coach and Spirit Torment both provide unit replenishment, the Spirit Torment and Chainghasts both provide hit buffs, TWO Guardian of Souls both provide wound buffs – you get the idea. Nighthaunt armies typically suffer from being picked apart easily if their combos are disrupted, which makes this redundancy very important. Reikenor with the endless spell Mortalis Terminexus is a potent combo that not many players will have seen, but it’s worth noting how strong it is – 30″ range that could deal D3 mortal wounds (on a 2+) to everything within 6″ of it – that’s going to seriously disrupt castles. Reikenor can use the Corpse Candle ability to ensure he’s casting it with a +3 bonus to cast, making it a combo that is very difficult to actually stop. Justin's List - Click to Expand We knew the Nurgle book was well internally balanced, but that’s not to say that you can’t just go all in on a warscroll you want to build around, because it’s not like Nurgle is all that dependent on synergistic pieces working together. To that end, these lists goes *hard* on Beasts of Nurgle, providing a strong baseline of mobile mortal wound spewing nonsense. Beyond that, it’s the buff pieces you’d expect to see when leaning on Daemons – a Bilepiper to shut off pile ins and make combat a nightmare, and Horticulous to buff the Beasts and help the summoning engine get going that much more effectively. There’s subtle tweaks between the two lists that effectively come down to ‘do I want to protect the Bilepiper’ or ‘do I need to shut off important command abilities with the LoA’, combined with hotswapping the Maggoth lord depending on need. The rest of the 4-1 bracket (only the first list because c’mon, let’s be real – if you’re interested you’ll look em up yourself): A two-day, five-round event which took place at Warhammer World in the UK. It was a 49 player event and you can find the lists for this event at BCP. Note that his event used soft scores to help determine a champion – Dean Lymath was the overall winner at the event. Below we discuss the top lists purely from a W-L perspective. LOFP – Ric Myhill – This controlling list drops the boomthirster and brings 20 Pinks in the initial list for some enhanced tarpit potential. Synessa comes along to provide a useful toolbox element due to them knowing approximately 500 spells, but other than that this is fairly standard Be’lakor fare. Legion of the First Prince- Click to Expand Ogor Mawtribes – Roger Barker – A Boulderhead list that can cram 3 Stonehorns *AND* Kragnos in the list by opting for the troop version rather than heroes on 2 of the 3. Can you deal with four fatties in your face turn one? Ogor It’s not worth sugarcoating here – this is an extremely rough matchup for the Mawtribes player – Bloodslicked Ground from the Khorne DP will half all his charges and make getting the turn one charge extremely challenging, and if he *can* get there, he has to deal with 100 wounds worth of Horrors before he can even get at the juicy center. That’s before we take into account the summoning potential and Be’lakor shutting down Kragnos for a turn. It’s not *all* doom and gloom, because if the Ogor player can win the initial roll off he has the same number of drops so could opt to go first and get his forces into his opponent’s deployment zone before he has an opportunity to use Bloodslicked Ground, but this is going to be very much a lopsided matchup. Result Legion of the First Prince (Ric Myhill) – 28-18 Matt’s List – See Above We’ve covered LOFP lists pretty regularly in this column, so let’s hone in on what’s different than recent lists: Pink horrors are back with a vengeance, which makes sense when you consider how prevalent Nurgle have been recently and thus the need for high quality tarpits that can maintain control of contested objectives. The other main thing here is Synessa, who knows three spell lores but can only cast one a turn (y GW?) – enter the Cogs, which can give it a useful second spellcast and really help unlock the toolbox potential. So what can Synessa do? Well I won’t cover every single spell but consider the following in light of the current meta game: Amongst others – it’s an interesting twist on the archetype. Chris' List - Click to Expand Giving a Seraphon list an Incarnate just *feels* dangerous, yaknow? It’s like giving your car keys to a Toddler. This list goes extremely light on heroes and packs in the murder, bringing 4 Salamanders and the Incarnate to provide significant ranged punch AND a murder beast that won’t be easily killed. It’s interesting to see a list that sheds Thunder Lizards and goes instead for Starborne. You’d be forgiven for forgetting what they’re all about – they summon skinks! Well they can also summon anything else you could want, but it makes sense in this context to just keep bringing more bodies onto the board for objective control while the Salamanders and Incarnate do the leg work. Oh, and they can also teleport a Seraphon unit every turn, which means you’re going to have one hell of a hard time keeping your valuable pieces safe from their deadly rend 2 weaponry. Top 8 all went 4-1 or better: A two-day, five-round event which took place in Michigan, America. It was a 34 player event and you can find the lists for this event at BCP. Skaven – Anthony Trentanelli – He chose violence with this army I’ll tell you that much – 9 Stormfiends shunted up the board with Bridge while doped up on Warp-crack to deliver an absolutely punishing amount of damage. If that wasn’t mad enough, Thanquol himself is here to unleash hell (in more ways than one). Skaven - Click to Expand Idoneth Deepkin – Jon Anderson – A stroke of genius with this list right here: two units of Drakespawn Knights provide cheap and efficient 3+ save screens to absorb shooting from your opponent’s army. Behind said screen is a *ton* of efficiency in the Namarti, with a turtle to deal with the big stuff. Idoneth Deepkin - Click to Expand The Idoneth list has a great answer to early aggression with the Drakespawn Knights to protect his inner centre, though the shooting from the Stormfiends is high enough quality that it’s not likely to protect him for long. This is debatably a matchup where flipping the tides with Teachings of the Turscroll makes sense in order to have access to fight first in round two – he could keep it as is, but his front screen won’t benefit from cover so he will be relatively safe from the first round of shooting provided he deploys sensibly. If he can avoid being doubled he’s in for a strong case of winning here, as his Thralls and the Thrallmaster/Lotann matchup well against the Stormfiends in combat… provided they can survive the Unleash Hell (it’s arguably a good use case for charging with a sacrificial lamb like the Tidecaster just to ensure the Thralls make it in safely). As for the Skaventide side of things, he needs to get a devastating blow into the innards of this army sooner rather than later, as he’s not set up well to play the long game against the punch the Idoneth list has. That said, Thanquol will have prime targets in the big thrall units, and with More-More-More Warp Power! and access to +1 damage on the ranged profiles of the Stormfiends thanks to Warpstone Sparks he can tear a massive chunk out of whatever the Stormfiends are able to target. This is a good matchup for the Warp Lightning Vortex as well, as the overlaying buffs means the IDK list will be castled up and thus dangerously vulnerable to the high mortal wound output of the endless spell – especially notable against the Turtle (who hates Mortal Wounds). On paper both lists are dangerous enough that a double turn may swing it either way, so it’s important here that the Skaven player is a 1 drop and thus can give the first turn away, corner deploy to mitigate as much of the opponent’s shooting as possible and then use Bridge/the Gnawholes to get his elite forces where they need to be once he’s seen the state of things after the Idoneth players first turn of shooting (and where the alpha objective is in Tectonic Interference). For both players its vitally important to not get caught out in an unfortunate double turn situation. Result Skaventide (Anthony Trentanelli) – 29-27 Anthony’s List – See Above While I’m not going to stand here and try to claim that AoS is a perfectly balanced game, it is certainly *encouraging* that we’re seeing every faction have the capability of winning a tournament, even if the BREADTH of each book might not be entirely up to the standards we’ve come to expect in the third edition of AOS. I wouldn’t try and claim that Skaven are in a overall healthy and balanced place, but Anthony’s list shows there’s power in that book, it’s just about utilising it in the right way and leaning into your strengths. In this case, the strengths are it’s high quality shooting thanks to the many overlapping buffs in clan Skryre – it’s possible to give the high powered weaponry of the Stormfiends +1 to hit, +1 damage and reroll hits and wounds: an extremely powerful combination when you consider that this is high rend shooting that can rip chunks out of anything in the game. Beyond that the list is fairly bare bones – the Arch-Warlocks are here as buff pieces and to provide incidental mortal wounds, some token Acolytes fulfil battleline requirements and Thanquol acts as a secondary bully piece that absolutely dominates any horde army. Ridge's List - Click to Expand Woah we’ve managed to get two very different, non-Thunder Lizards list this week! This one embraces the potential of Saurus, who have always been quietly statistically efficient, though were the rather unsexy pick as they had to do such troubling things as ‘charge the enemy’ and ‘fight in melee’. It still has much of the same trappings as other Coalesced lists – there’s a Slann, EOTG and a Starpriest after all, but a Scar-Veteran on Carnosaur takes the stage as the general, who can give that unit of 30 Saurus exploding 6s on hit, which is notable when you consider how many dice each Saurus model is throwing (4!). It’s not the ‘best’ build for Coalesced by any means, but it’s also very cool that the ceiling of a Saurus-based list is still podiuming. Hell yeah. Let’s just touch on the other 4-1 players: So we have control lists here, we have horde lists, we have ranged output and we have melee power houses. Not to say that everything is sunshine and rainbows in Azyr, but the scene feels exciting and energised, and the hope is as more books are updated to third edition, that the internal balance continues to improve both within individual books and externally to the metagame itself. Exciting times – until the next one! If you have any questions or comments leave one down below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.Thoughts
the cool zone no man’s land where the Bow Snakes can get their hero phase shooting on and really make his life hell.
The DOK player has priority thanks to being a one drop, and if he gives the turn away and can weather the initial storm of the Maw-Krusha in his face and/or a brick of Brutes with a damage buff up, a double might just win him the game on the spot.Result
Dayton Obre – Daughters of Khaine – First Place
Why it’s Interesting
Alexander Gonzalez – Soulblight Gravelords – Second Place
Why it’s Interesting
The Rest of the Best
Vault Wars 2022
The Showdown
Nighthaunt vs Lumineth Realmlords – Focal Points (yes that’s right)
nightmares favorites are here! Teclis! 30 Sentinels! A lifeswarm so they never die! A cathallar with Goading Arrogance to make actually fighting Teclis with a combat hero more difficult!Thoughts
Result
Nighthaunt – Legion of the First Prince – First Place
Why it’s Interesting
Justin Newman – Maggotkin of Nurgle – Second Place
Why They’re Interesting
The Rest of the Best
Warhammer World Age Of Sigmar: Battles In Thondia
The Showdown
Legion of the First Prince vs Ogor Mawtribes – Battleplan Unknown
Thoughts
Ric Myhill – Legion of the First Prince – First Place
Why it’s Interesting
Chris Myhill – Seraphon – Second Place
Why it’s Interesting
The Rest of the Best
Motor City Mayhem 2022
The Showdown
Skaven vs Idoneth Deepkin – Tectonic Interference
Thoughts
Anthony Trentanelli – Skaventide – First Place
Why it’s Interesting
Ridge Hanna – Seraphon – Second Place
Why it’s Interesting
The Rest of the Best
Wrap Up
