Last weekend I played my first game with Gators since Wolfcry last month. I even took a Boneswarm with Maelok as I was trying to gimp my list as much as possible. It did ok - killed a trooper, got one corpse token and jammed with its animus. It died after I forgot the +2 ARM from Maelok's feat but would have done a pretty good job tanking had I remembered. The least disappointed I've ever been with it. I won after I failed to assassinate him with Snapjaw, and then he failed to assassinate Maelok with his caster - ARM 21 is legit.
I've been filling my 1-2 Warmachine games a week with some proxying instead, mostly Khador at the moment. This is mostly to take a break from Gators for a while so I can come back and be excited about playing them again -
a good strategy for keeping yourself playing the same faction all the time despite no new releases for what is set to be a full year.
I've been having fun reading the Khador boards and their response to being the worst "real" faction in the game (even Minions seem to do better in tournament rankings). It's not quite as fun as reading through the Trollbloods forums during the 'OMG MOUNTAIN KING IS SO BAD!!' phase, because the Khador players are mostly just stiff-upper-lip people who want to kill as much as possible on the table, winning be damned, while the Troll players are trolls. But it's still fun.
Anyway, here is a summary of Khador in my mind. Not much has changed for them in 2 years or so.
- Iron Flesh Kayazy are good. Stupidly good. But they are not the answer to everything anymore since Wrath/Domination + Gargosals has provided buckets of high DEF hate (none of which really worries Satyxis), and the meta has adjusted to have one list to deal with high DEF spam.
- 1-2 jacks at the most - most casters will only want to run one jack, and that jack will be a heavy hitter - Beast, Behemoth, Spriggan, Drago (with Vlad) or Conquest. If you take a second jack, it is either a cheap one like a Juggernaut, or a utility one like a Devastator or Demolisher.
I guess this is fine in the great scheme of things, since regular Hordes lists will take 2-3 heavies in larger points games, with a couple of support lights. I wish MoW solos were more like lights in providing good utility or ranged support. The MoW Kovnik is a beast but SPD 4 no reach really hurts him (I always had one marshalling a Destroyer in my eVlad lists way back when - worked great) - other than that, MoW are really crap.
If anything, this highlights how focus still doesn't work the way people want it to in terms of running warjacks, and Cryxmachine will continue until it does.
- Half the faction (casters/jacks/infantry/solos) are great when put in the right place, and the other half is balls.
I guess in the end this isn't that different to Cryx - half your casters are amazing (especially the 3 prime ones), half your troop choices are super amazing, you have a few amazing solos.... and the rest is entirely overlooked. I guess Khador does at least take 1-2 heavies while Cryx takes a few lights, maybe a Kraken, maybe Deathjack.
The main thing holding Khador back at present is the lack of tricks and how the meta at high levels has changed to deal with raw stats superiority - namely high DEF and high ARM. Jamming is also a more prevalent tactic with SR2013, which means that Khador's style of focusing on charge lanes is become less effective. What they have received so far in Vengeance does seem promising however, so let's hope it brings them out of the gutter, and they can go back to realizing how great eVlad actually is.
TL;DR: eIrusk is the Calaban of Khador, Butcher/Vlad/Sorscha are all great fun to play, and I hope Butcher3 is sweet.
Next I'll probably play some Protectorate, Circle, maybe even a little Cryx and Pigs - whatever I can get my hands on before the next nearby tournament pushes me to practice with Gators again. It's good to have a regular gaming group that lets you borrow all their stuff so you can get better :)
