Painting frogs and one eyed monsters!

I haven't updated for almost 2 weeks now, so I thought I should get down to it and well... update.

I've mostly been building and painting my Wood elves but I have been trying to push forward on my Warbeast painting too. I finish the two Basilisks and I've got the Shaman maybe 80% done. They're just tabletop but it's at least a step forward and I hope to get my full 750 point list fully painted. I did have E morghoul almost done but I decided to strip him and repaint him up because his pose is just so.. difficult to really get at, so I'm going to put pins in him and then paint him in sections. I'm tempted to buy a Primal Morghoul and put E Morghoul's torso and arms on him rather than have his weird "I'm falling off my epic base" pose he has now, but I don't want to wreck my Primal Morghoul in case I want to use him for tournies in the future.

Oh and this guy is getting painted up as best I can, I think he deserves it for running through half a Menoth army in his first game.



I need to find a new gold recipe for him though, my current gold just isn't suitable to larea areas and his shoulder plates are HUGE. Which is also why I'm going to be free handing a Skorne symbol on his shoulder and left the spike off to do so. He is a character Warbeast and will be up in my opponent's face every single game so he needs to look pretty.

On the Fantasy front, I hope to get my first game in on Thursday or Tuesday, but Tuesday will probably be me taking my Skorne to the local store instead. Either Hexeris or Mordikar will be played, probably with a list very much like the one I played last time. I like that style of army, although I may (GASP!) drop my 3rd beast and risk running 2. Maybe Molik and a Shaman or a Krea. We'll have to see how it goes.

Moliktastic

Today I finally got to play with Molik. Yes, F'king please! Molik is absolutely insane and more than made his points back. The guy was a new guy and had never played Skorne before, so I didn't want to pull too many weird and dodgy models out and start bouncing around and ignoring everything. So I went with a list as follows (roughly)

Mordikar
Krea
Molik
Shaman
3 Ferox
6 Venators
Swamp Gobbers

500 points.

I played against a jack heavy Menoth list using Kreoss and the choir. First time I'd faced a lot of these models. A Crusader, Guardian, Dervish and the Bastions were all pretty new to me, but I still did pretty well until the last turn.

Molik cut a wave of destruction through the enemy army. On like turn 2 he wrecked the Crusader then proceeded to eat the Choir pretty soon after and was ready to threaten Kreoss the following turn. His animus is just sweet sweet awesome, he makes the Shaman into one hell of a trickster. you use the animus then charge and get some insane distances off most of your army. It's even useful on Warlocks to cast stuff then retreat.

The game ended with Mordikar getting hit in the face by a Paladin when he had no fury on him. Two reasons for this, we were being rushed for time (someone else had booked a table before I got there and the 40k players had stolen it, so we tried to get the game wrapped up asap for them). And I didn't measure my control range. I wanted to cast Void walker on the shaman and move him up to Kreoss to threaten him and force him to pop his feat, so I could send in Molik and smash him into a pulp. The problem was my opponent was holding his feat back and I didn't want to commit to any sort of attack that involved everything falling over in front of a Paladin. So I goto cast void walker (didn't pre-measure) and I'm out of range, so I move Mordikar in removing the 2 fury he should of had to transfer. Plus the Paladin pretty much rolled 4 6s on his dice and just 1 hit killed him.

I really enjoyed the game but I learnt a lot about my playing style. I look at the board and tend to want to keep things alive when I'm playing Mordikar or Hexeris, I put high value on every unit and don't want to sacrifice any of them, where as when I play E Morghoul I consider every model except Morghoul to be disposable. And that second attitude is so much more natural to me. I like playing high risk and putting off fancy tricks to win games. Dancing around the table with Morghoul makes me much happier than sitting back with Mordikar using Manifest void (which is insanely over rated IMO, it rarely does -anything-). So I think from now on when the chance for 750 comes up I'm going to be fielding E Morghoul, he fits me so much better than anyone else. A good example of this is earlier I had the perfect Morghoul charge lane set up from where Mordikar was. I charged in, stabbed the paladin, teleported to Kreoss, used the feat and fan to disable his focus and then I just plain killed him with the 3 following attacks. It felt so freaking natural to look at the board and see assassination runs, it's just how I see the battle. I've pretty much always thought this way in and out of tabletop though. I'm rarely the guy running in head first, I'm always the guy looking for a flank or a weak spot to exploit to rip the enemy apart from an angle it couldn't cover. So I think I'm going to play Mordi at 500 but Morghoul at anything higher. So sorry Mordikar fans but Morghoul is just my dude.

Before the game I also had an interesting conversation with the other Skorne player in store. He likes Makeda (cough Makeda fanboy cough) about Molik and Gladiators and comparing the two. I've never found a gladiator to work well for me, but Molik just feels so damn right. I would take Molik is he just had his animus and his weapons. That animus is freaking sweet, I can be half the board away one turn and right up in your face the next. The double move lets you resposition and bring him back into the battle where I've often found once a unit or beast is out of position there is no way I'm getting them back into the fight. As I said earlier Shaman and Molik make a nice little team, you can get them way up the field early on or move them where you need them to. While road to war makes Gladiators better, Molik's utility is just so freaking high that the extra power and such just doesn't do much for me. I'm thinking I may replace the Cannooneer in my 500 points list with Molik. I love my ranged element (always have venators and an extoller, they come with the Warcaster ;) ), but god damn is Molik sweet.

I'm thinking of doing some painting tutorials, but I'm not quite sure yet. I don't think I have enough readers to bother with something like that and I'd feel bad about posting the blog on the PP painting forum with just a link here. On the other hand I maybe posting some pictures of a WIP Lancer. I decided I wanted to do some Cygnar (my 2nd faction, although so are Legion technically, but I don't enjoy playing Legion and my Cygnar haven't been out in a while even though I like Stryker a lot) in a pink sheme for the Paint pink thingy ma jiggy. The problem was I suck at painting pink, it just shows brush strokes so bad that I thought I'd do something different. Battle damaged pink Cygnar! This lets me use a darker purpleish colour scheme and only using pink in limited ways, while still having it a pink army.

As the Lancer stands it has a broken shoulder that's been messed up to look like it got hit with a mace, I'll probably paint it to look like it was hit by a flaming mace when I get that far but it is quite a way off currently. I'm tempted to cut the hand off the shield arm and model it as if the shield is strapped to the arm and wirings and cogs are all that's left of the hand now. Make it look like a really roughed up Lancer. I think the key is going to be making it look worn not wrecked and this will apply to the entire army.

But that's enough of this for now. If I play some more this weekend (my Stores 2 year anniversary), then i will blog about it but if not hopefully I will on Tuesday or at least get my Drake painted up to table top.

VS Khador 01

Blog time!

I got in a game today with Rory ad his Khador. Neither of us played serious lists and I was just wanting to try Mordikar out and see how he did with Beasts. I learnt quite a bit about Skorne by using the list I had and I doubt I will ever make another Skorne list without an Extoller.

Lists were as follows.

Rory
Old Witch + Scrap jack
2 Juggernaughts
Iron fang Pikemen
Doom Reavers
Alton Ashley

Me
Mordikar
Gladiator
Cannoneer
Savage
Shaman
5 Paingivers
Swamp Gobbers

Deployment.



Deployment was simple, Rory won the dice roll and decided to go 2nd. Skorne brick time! Since I was running so many beasts I couldn't do much else.

Round 1


I move forward edging away from his Doom Reavers flanking me and put up Gobber smoke to stop Alton pulling any of his anti beast crap. I load up the Agonizer and rile everything up for Mordikar to refuel for next turn.



Rory proceeded to move pretty much everything towards me, which is hardly shocking considering the armies. Casts Iron flesh on the Iron fangs and the world's most exciting turn ever ends!

Round 2


My pictures get a bit muddled here and I think this is Round 2. I moved a bit away from the Doom Reavers ready to use Gobber smoke to stop them getting first hit the next turn and just try to close space.



Rory moves his stuff more forward! Man this is such a crazy tactic, it's like he wants to kill my stuff or something! He puts the Iron fangs as a central wall and casts Massacre of crows.

Round 3

At this point I can't stop the Doom Reavers engaging my stuff, so I try to block them with the Gobber smoke and offer a few sacrifical Paingivers to take the shot for me and then I can Spirit in Amber them back and get some stabbing going. I did mess up this turn when I tried to use Mordikar's sacrifice to spray spell and couldn't target the doom reavers so ended up wasting a model to spray at a juggernaught and do diddly squat. Agonizer runs forward and starts to cry, Khador jacks aren't getting any focus and Scrap jack isn't arc noding either. I expect it to die this turn but it me control the damage the jacks are going to do when they hit my lines.

Cyclops gets poked by the paingivers and pulls off a Cyclops missle. Wailing on a Juggernaught it drops 1/3rd of it's boxes and is expecting to die next turn while sitting on 3 fury. I had meant to pop feat this turn but forgot to do so before I had finished with Mordikar.

Rory's Doom Reavers then proceed to eat some paingivers and the Swamp gobbers, which then flee and die the next turn to free strikes. But still they did an awesome job of just being in the way and stopping Alton molesting any of my stuff before I could get it into position.

Agonizer proves he's tough as hell and takes a beating from all sides but only goes down when the Old Witch finally spends some focus to take away his last wound. He ended up crippling a couple of jacks for a turn then wasted a turn of firepower to get rid of him. 30 points well spent.

Round 4

(The template isn't Gobber smoke, it was just difficult to remove it with 2 dudes on top of it)

This turn I moved up the hill and popped Mordikars feat, brought back a couple of Paingivers and started to pick apart the Doom Reavers. Rory had been trying to take out my Shaman for most of the game but due to Elevation and some bad dice on Rory's part (or so he says.. everyone else could roll his dice fine ;) ) it had been surviving quite nicely and would end up being a key piece in the game. So the Savage continues to beat on the Juggernaught, rips it's arm off and just generally acts like a badass that he is.

Rory's turn comes and he decides to start swinging and he ends up playing pinball with his models. Everything is going in every direction imaginable and he once again claims his dice hate him (Rolling 1 dice is rarely a positive thing either way..). He tries to pull the Shaman out with the Scrap jack and misses, Shaman makes a dash towards The Old Witch. I didn't have any plans for it at this point but my beasts were clustered together and it wasn't a good situation to be in. Old Witch pops feat and my next turn seems suddenly a lot less exciting.. Rory takes another shot at the Shaman and he casually wanders up to the Old Witch. I thought he was just out of range but he was in and the plan fell nicely into place, Shaman takes a nasty hit from the feat but

Round 5


My turn comes and any one who knows me knows I play assassination games. I have a bucket load of fury on the board and totally forgot to manage it less turn, so I start throwing some dice and everything passes. Gladiator is still full of fury and the Cannoneer has 1 on it, but both remain in control (I had wanted the Gladiator to go nuts as it was engaging a lot of stuff and a throw would of been sweet to knock down the Old witch). So any way Mordikar activates first. I move him so he has line of sight to Old Witch, She's Defense 19 so I have to boost and slap Deathmark on her. I didn't think the Shaman could kill her with 3 fury. I had to transfer off a free strike from a very angry Doom reaver as mordikar went to get LoS, but the Cannoneer took it and didn't lose anything for it. So Mordikar has 2 Fury left on him and is standing pretty damn close to some very angry Doom Reavers, I either get the assassination or he better have a get out of the abyss free card again. So I heal the Shaman's Mind and end Mordikars activation. Shaman starts swinging with 3 attack dice, hitting 3 of his 4 attacks, Dice -2 was damage, but apparently all I can roll is 4s. Old Witch lives with like 6 boxes left and I figure I'm screwed until I see the Cannoneer sitting on the hill with 3 fury open and a nice long ranged attack. So it wanders up, Defense 19 old witch, needing 15 on 4 dice. And it misses.. Roll the scatter dice and it still clips her, so I boost the damage and hope for the best. I roll exact and down she goes. Caster kill and I win while Rory tries to figure out how a cannonball fits through a gap in the bases far smaller than the cannon nozzle.

Things I learnt.
-I want an Extoller in every list I make. They bring so much utility and solve so many problems. I don't care what I have to sacrifice, Extollers are so freaking sweet!
-I want a Cannoneer next to the Extoller. I had considered dropping her but she is a really nice finisher and fury battery.
-Agonizers are worth the 30 points but they only work for 1 turn because they have a huge target painted on their heads.
-Mordikar is a very good troops caster and Paingivers and Bloodrunners will be insane with him. 1 Fury to kill a model with no way for an opponent to punish you for it is nuts. Scenario play is his sweet spot because 'void isn't so hot when both casters are half the table away behind a wall of big nasty things
-Shaman is a nice utility beast and worth running 1 of if only for the ability to bounce around.
-Cyclops missles are fun and including a Savage in lists just to wail on things is not a bad idea. I just need to remember to keep it in my caster's control area.
-Rolling 2 yellow dice is a bad idea, rolling 1 yellow and 1 pink dice gives much better results.
-Make sure you remember feats are in play when Rory goes "move stuff! Go on you pansy!" and figure you'll shut him up by sticking a knife in two Doom reavers..
-I like playing assassination lists. I struggle to care about units and fall into the school of "They take too much effort to kill, screw it". I had been considering switching to Mordikar and Hexeris for a few months but I think E Morghoul needs to return. He fits me so damn well and I enjoy using him a lot more then a board control caster. I can fit everything I want in a Morghoul list and I win games, so I think I should just suck it up paint his annoying figure and play him some more.
-Take notes when blogging about an event.