Greetings Sigmarite and welcome to CI, with this week being refreshingly light with just one tournament to look at. That said, one of the armies featured has rocketed up into competitive relevance with their new book, and has been a mainstay in showdowns since they became Matched play legal. Soulblight Gravelords throw a very interesting spanner in the works for many armies, and have seemed to really depressed the effectiveness of other combat army all-stars like Fyreslayers and Gloomspite Gitz. Their combination of redeploying units with Legion of Blood as well as high mobility also means they have respectable game against KO, which is something to monitor going forward. Anyway, let’s crack on.

Woehammer AoS GT

32-player, 5-round Grand Tournament in England GB on May 13 2023. All the lists for this event can be found in Best Coast Pairings.

The Showdown

Matchup & Mission –

Ash Coleman – Oakenbrow:
Army List - Click to Expand

vs.

Christian Moore – Legion of Blood:
Army List - Click to Expand

Thoughts

Like me turning up to a vegetarian restaraunt, Neferata and her pals must have been very disappointed when they turned up to what they thought was a buffet and turns out it’s just a bunch of oversized wooden furniture. That said, things aren’t all bad here, as sneakily those Skeletons represent a cheeky edge in that unlike Ash, Christian actually has some objective grabbers that he’s happy to keep entirely out of combat and not feel like wasted potential – especially notable when there are no Tree Revenants here for cheeky steals.

Treelords are great into many armies at the moment thanks to their high durability, mobility (with trees + charge bonuses) and ability to hand out strikes-last to skew combat scenarios in their favour. That said, the ents will have had their hands full in this matchup thanks to Cloak of Mist and Shadows and Dark Mist giving Christian access to two high save, ethereal units that can be thrown into combat with relative impunity for one simple reason – weight of dice.

To be specific, the counter to high save units is typically either weight of dice (if low rend), or high quality, high rend attacks to punch straight through. When the second option is taken off the table you’re left with the former, and unfortunately for all the good aspects that Treelords bring to the table, number of dice is not one of them.

Result

Legion of Blood Victory – 26 – 24

Christian Moore – Legion of Blood – 1st Place

The List

See Showdown

Archetype

Giant Monsters go Rrrroaaarrr

Thoughts

There’s something just beautifully nostalgic about Soulblight lists at the moment – for all the talk of efficiently stacking synergies on low cost, high value units that many armies opt for, Soulblight has rewound the clock back to the days of the old world and can put armies down on the table where it’s very clear where the power is concentrated – the heroes.

This is herohammer at it’s best, with nearly two thirds of Christian’s army devoted to the leaders section in just three units. The army wants to hit you very hard with quality, high save units, with very specific buffs like access to ethereal or debuffs like shutting off wards via a heroic action that give them some play into the typical answers that combat focused herohammer lists get addressed with.

The Best of the Rest

There were 4 more players on 4-1 records. They were:

• Position – Player Name – Faction:
• 2nd – Daniel Scott – Oakenbrow: See showdown
• 3rd – Ash Coleman – Oakenbrow: The same list as Daniel’s, which makes this list a surprising contender with a combined W/L record of 8-2
• 4th – Owen Jackson – Kharadron Overlords: One of Britain’s lovelist men still finding success playing one of Sigmar’s most toxic lists – Thunderer spam!
• 5th – Baz Norman Jr – Lumineth Realm-lords: It’s Teclis and 40 Arrow chuckers, but what’s interesting here is Baz has deviated from the expected and gone for a 5 drop list that utilises Sharpshooters, likely a shift to have better game against KO lists that have themselves gone high drop (so 1 drop is less valuable)

Wrap Up

Things will ramp up this weekend with one of the UK’s biggest and most entertaining events, Mancunian Carnage. I’ll be in attendance competing for a podium spot, but more importantly it’ll be our first really big event in a while that’s using all of the exciting new books (bar Seraphon) so it should give us a really good sense of the metagame when we look at the top table standings once the dust has settled. Until next time!