The Event

Blackout is a long running 2000 point matched play Age of Sigmar event held in Cardiff, Wales and organised by Chris Tomlin. I alway try to go because it’s close and I’m lazy, also the vibe is good. This time around the event hit 100+ players, which was great to see as numbers had previously struggled “post-COVID”. Whilst it’s a pretty big event for the UK, the players tend to skew competitive – as evidenced by about every other list being some GA: Death nonsense. 

The List

Chimp's List - Click to Expand

This list was rescued by the Battlescroll. I had been hovering right up to the list submission deadline on what to take – Sylvaneth was an army I’d painted up recently vs taking my old familiar Deepkin. That it was a decision at all was a testament to how absolutely disastrous my practice games had been with the Sylvaneth. I’d run the full gamut of losing turn one, to five-round heartbreakers, but hadn’t managed to actually win with them. It can be a hard army to play and I was making it more difficult by filling a points hole with Gossamids. The Battlescroll extending easy coherency up to 6 models and a healthy points drop on Kurnoth Hunters with swords made this a direct swap out, and immediately made the army easier to play, giving me a big tough block of wounds that could anchor a position. 

Otherwise, there’s some trad Sylvaneth combos here. The subfaction & season combination give me a once-per-turn 3d6 drop the lowest cast/unbind/dispel, and a once-per-turn reroll cast/unbind/dispel. The former has great interaction with primal dice, and the latter gives a better ability to force magic through when the primal dice run out. This is great for the Warsong Revenant, who gets to cast spells through trees and wants to be fishing for big casting rolls for its area of effect mortal wound spell. The Ancient gets me a free tree summon once per game that can set up for this spell usage, and the Spirit of Durthu can also teleport in to strike and fade alpha. Vanilla Treelords are incredible control pieces with their ability to inflict strikes last & no pile-in, and the Spiteswarm Hive is mandatory for Sylvaneth armies to function thanks to the +3 to charge effect. 

What this gives you is an army that is quite happy to castle at the back of the board and still have the ability to reach out and deliver big hits to the enemy. Whilst it’s low drop, it’s got some built in resilience to being handed the first turn by an enemy thanks to this, and can weather some double turns just by virtue of being very far away. The downside is that it’s lean, with just three ‘chaff’ units that also have to act as your primary points scoring units in the early game.

The best bit of prep I did for the event (beyond making every possible mistake in my practice games) was to put a lot more thought than usual into battle tactics. I had a cheat sheet prepped of them written out, rated for how my army is at achieving them, and also a rough order of when I want to be trying to score them and how I want to be deploying to achieve this, with a couple of variations depending on battleplan. Battle tactics are my least favourite part of playing the game, and having a way to cut down the mental load of it (and the time it takes to faff with them every hero phase) made my life a lot easier.

Game 1 vs Rich Nutter, Maggotkin of Nurgle

Rich's list - click to expand

Fountains of Frost

The gimmick: Andtorian Loci count as 10 models on an objective, if 3 or more units contest an objective they take d3 mortal wounds on a 4+.

Theory

A round one draw into a clubmate you don’t get to play very often is very welcome indeed, going into day one knowing I would have a chill and fun first game was great for avoiding any pre-event nerves. 

Metagaming, I knew that Rich had switched up to this army last minute and had precisely 0 practice games with the army and not that many into this season in general. What I’m hoping for is for this to translate into a scoring advantage: I’m not expecting to be able to kill this army, but I am expecting to have a better time with battle tactics and to be able to use my more mobile units to pin some of his army in place just by having the ability to teleport onto his objectives. 

Practice

Rich deployed to refuse a flank, leaving just the one unit of Blightkings on one side of the board – this gave me an opportunity to push the Kurnoth up and grab an early lead by taking that unit out and grabbing his objective. On the other side of the board, I built a little castle of the Treelord and Ancient sat behind a Dryad wall with the aim of controlling and stalling whatever came to contest me there. 

Two things happened from here that made the game a lot harder than it probably needed to be: the Great Unclean one waddled over and made a pretty monster charge into the Kurnoths, and then proceeded to wipe them out over two combat phases which got Rich that objective back; and I decided to break down my own castle to commit to the Nurgle deathball before it reached my lines and proceeded to do absolutely zero damage. 

This put me in the precarious situation of losing both flanks having done very little damage in return. What bailed me out was, essentially, the Theory. Despite the GUO doing incredible work, it was impossible to capitalise further as a cheeky unit of Tree-revenants lurking in the Nurgle deployment zone would simply swoop in to capture the objective once the GUO moved. On the other flank, my army crumbled late enough that Rich only managed to equalise my primary scoring rather than overtake me. In the end it came down to Battle tactics and Rich ended up dropping 3 to my 1, his army just wasn’t particularly geared towards them and with my army playing keep-away he had to start relying on tactics that required dice rolls, which he failed. 

Result

Major Win 22-18

Game 2 vs Tom Reed, Seraphon

Tom's list - click to expand

Limited Resources

The gimmick: If you control an objective that you controlled at the end of your last turn, you can’t control it again in the battle.

Theory

To be honest, I did not have a huge plan going into this one. I hadn’t practised this battleplan, and I have somehow managed to just dodge Seraphon forever and had never faced them. 

Seeing the draw I was worried about some horrific Starborne mortal wound engine wiping me off the board, realising it was Coalesced made my life a lot easier: I could probably sustain the edge in magic despite the Slann, my biggest concern was getting rushed by his melee threats and ground off. Durthu caring the absolute least about the -1 damage, going from 6 to 5, meant I was less worried about my damage dropping off. As for the battle plan itself, whilst I hadn’t played it yet I knew to avoid screwing myself early by grabbing too many objectives, and that controlling the rhythm of the turns was important.

Practice

We both deployed on no objectives and then Tom gave me the first turn. This is a pretty default thing to do for most games but I think was actually a mistake here – my army doesn’t particularly mind going first anyway, and in this battle plan going first with your opponent deploying on no objectives means you can score hold one, hold two and hold more with just two objectives; but in reply your opponent has to hold three objectives to match you. This is essentially what happened: I got 1-2-more and dropped a big Warsong bomb into his army as he deployed in a castle, but sadly failed the 2+ roll on Spiteswarm for the full alpha. 

Tom’s response to this was interesting, and he ended up playing very conservatively. His caster and support units moved away to his back board, fleeing in terror of the Warsong, whilst his Aggradons moved backwards in the other direction to control his backfield objectives, leaving his Krox sort of meandering around the mid board. This lack of commitment meant that when I won priority I could hand it over to him and whilst he scored big again, it instantly wiped out half of his objectives and he had barely touched my army. This essentially dictated the pace of the game, I had the potential double still in my back pocket and was always one live objective ahead. His Kroxigor took pretty crippling damage from magic over the course of a few turns and the Aggradons got gummed up fighting Kurnoth Hunters whilst my trees had free reign. We danced around and I got the double into 5, allowing me to play to lock down his army, deny his grand strat and secure my own for a pretty controlled win.

Result

Major Win 24-19

Game 3 vs Greg Shelton, Soulblight Gravelords

Andy's list - click to expand

Lines of Communication 

The gimmick: the player going second in a battle round can pick a phase, whenever their opponent issues a command in that phase on a 3+ it costs one more CP.

Theory

No idea. This one felt a bit hopeless. The battleplan lets him blob a million zombies in the middle of the board without opportunity to play the board against them. The +2 to cast vampire that can heroic action teleport for a no-downside Merciless Blizzard 4d6 mortal wound nuke is totally cooked. Nagash is good too I guess. 

Practice

I kept this one competitive on scoring for a few turns and then it all collapsed in a fairly inevitable fashion. I managed to dodge a meaningful blizzard in the first turn, but the teeny tiny nature of my army and the way that battle tactics force you to split your army up made screening pretty impossible and Durthu got exploded by it in the second turn. Whilst I could kill zombies slightly faster than they could come back, the grind was always going to hit a breaking point where I just couldn’t keep the models on objectives and have an army intact. Greg was a gent, obviously knew his stuff and even taught me things about my own army that I hadn’t realised, which would score me points in future games (I hadn’t realised you could score harness the spirit paths with strike and fade, fellow Sylvaneth players). If you have a solution to this nonsense that isn’t “be Null Myriad” please write in, my army is dying.

Result

Major Loss 18-28

Game 4 vs Kieran Harper, Kruleboys

Andy's list - click to expand

Spring the Trap

The gimmick: after everyone has set up their army, both players can remove d3 of their units and put them in reserve, to come back from the second battle round onwards on a board edge. 

Theory

The draw for this round went up on the Saturday night and so I did the obvious thing: ate a huge pizza, drank some beer and gave not a thought to the upcoming game. 

There’s a couple of things that worry me here: Gobbsprakk is pretty good at unbinding my key spells, Boltboys are scary to my big trees and the scenario has the kind of mid-board objectives that benefit the mass of boyz over my teleporting nonsense. 

On the flip side his army is very susceptible to my big damage pieces, and if he isn’t able to overwhelm me early I can lift large chunks of his army very quickly.

Practice

To wield a cliche, this really was a game of two halves, with Kieran playing a blinder early on and then massively gambling into the mid game. I won the roll-off to deploy first and proceeded to deploy with an intention of going second (one of the few games I got to decide, over half the armies at Blackout were one or two drops), and used the battleplan rules to get my Kurnoth Hunters off the board and away from potential alpha strike. What Kieran did was to then supa sneaky his Boltboys to within their moving shot range of Durthu. This put me in a bit of a bind, I could take a first turn I hadn’t planned for to try and deal with that threat or play as I had intended and potentially lose Durthu for nothing. In the end, I had to go first and managed to squeeze out max points – but there was some sketchy dice rolling to get there and the Treelord managed to take a hideous amount of damage from a lethal surprise and unleash hell combo.

The Kruleboy response here was to flood the mid board and screen me off of scoring, and set up for a potential double. If there was a mistake here, it was using a wyldwood I’d set up in my turn one in order to score sneak up and still get board position. It’s a good play in a vacuum but when I then won priority and Gobbsprakk failed to unbind a massive Warsong bomb it did a big chunk of damage. Beyond that though, my second turn was appalling as I managed to fail the Spiteswarm Hive 2+ and then also failed four 9” charges to scored just a battle tactic, with my army swinging in the breeze.

This is where Kieran gambled, and his plan was to charge his Sludgeraker into Durthu, his Mirebrute and other bits into my Kurnoth Hunters and then his blob of 20 Gutrippaz to block off some teleport options for me. The intention was: call a Waaagh, kill or cripple the units he charged and then if he got a double it would be mopping up. Unfortunately for Kieran, Durthu made his 3+ strike-last monstrous rampage and that was the end of that plan. The Mirebrute managed to take out 2 Kurnoth Hunters but died in return, and Durthu proceeded to cut the Sludgeraker in half before it could attack. 

From here it was mopping up. We played it through to the end as we both wanted to and there was plenty of time left on the round, so that was fun. A really great game, and I was definitely sweating in those first two turns when it felt like I was having a total disaster. 

Result

Major Win 25-12

Game 5 vs Aaron Boyhan, Ossiarch Bonereapers

Andy's list - click to expand

Every Step is Forward

The gimmick: units that charge count as one extra model on objectives, units that retreat cannot contest objectives. 

Theory

This was going to be tough – the Ossiarch deathball was going to march across the table and beat the shit out of me with relative impunity, so it’s about how much I can play to score before that happens. Null Myriad means anything near a Mortisan gets to ignore the Warsong bomb on a 2+ and the high armour saves and save-stacking available are brutal for Durthu’s rend -2, making unreliable old Hoarfrost my obviously clutch spell. 

Practice

I find that at every event there’s a heartbreaker of a game, and this was that. This was a predictably slow early game, though I did make a silly mistake with a surround and destroy play that cost me an objective point – thankfully that by itself did not throw the game. As it played out, I picked apart some horses and lost my chaff before a big fight erupted between Kurnoth Hunters and Immortis Guard that would end up lasting for half the game. 

Going into the final round, Aaron had scored max objectives every turn and I hadn’t, but he’d dropped a battle tactic when I had scored all of mine. This left me with two routes to victory, though at the time I only saw one. There was a play whereby I could keep the Warsong completely out of any reach but make a teleport charge with the Ancient to kill his general – this would be a 6 point swing on grand strategies and win me the game outright. I probably made a mistake here with monstrous rampages and stomped when I should have roared, so the Soulmason got to do a pretty gross save stack and just passed all his saves. 

The play I hadn’t seen was that in scoring my battle tactic for that turn, bait and trap, I had charged the sole remaining Kurnoth Hunter into his other wizard. If I had instead charged it into the other big block of Immortis Guard next-door and gotten it killed, Aaron wouldn’t have had a battle tactic to do (as it was, the Kurnoth living meant he had an easy bait and trap in response). This would have drawn us on VP and I’d have won a minor by having scored all my battle tactics. In my defence, keeping track of your opponent’s tactics is really difficult, especially with potential faction ones in play, and I was just hyperfixated on the play to win rather than the play to not lose. 

I won’t lie, it was incredibly frustrating to get so close to the 4-1 and watch it slip through my fingers. But Aaron was a great last opponent, and it was fantastic to be in a position to win that game at all, and to be in a position to 4-1 with an army I’d had such terrible games with in the run up to the event.

Result

Major Loss 24-26

Final Thoughts

As much as that final game will haunt me, I’m pumped with a 3-2  and 25th overall here. I put a lot of effort into learning an army with a playstyle that did not come naturally to me, and was the most prepared I’d ever been with actual gameplans, and felt really rewarded for it. 3-2 is my perennial cursed result in events, but this was the best I’ve ever played in the individual games, and only dropping 3 battle tactics over the whole weekend felt fantastic. 

Going forward, I’d love to play with the army more – it’s technically challenging but so rewarding. I don’t think there’s any specific changes I would make to the list, everything had its place and did its job as intended, and the points are so tight that any change would require retooling large parts of the army from scratch.

Now if we could just get one more round of nerfs into Soulblight Gravelords please, and maybe a cheeky OBR tweak…