Beastmen vs WoC – SELWG stage 2 practice game – Part 1 – lists

On Friday 4 Nov I had the pleasure of facing off against a new club member, Luke and his ancient, child friendly lead (😜) 3rd/4th ed. Warriors of Chaos army.  It is made up entirely of old skool figures that are painted in a suitable chaotic scheme (as displayed in the below photo).

He  had recently gotten back into the game so was still learning 8th ed and had entered into the whfb comp for the 2nd stage (automatically putting him into group C or D) and wanted to try out his list. I will add (to get excuses in now) that he may be new to 8th but he’s probably played more games in the last month or so than I have in the last six.

With myself also wanting to try out the unused Beastmen list, the stage was set for an epic showdown between the Chaos powers, or the battle of ‘I wish I’d put something else in the list’!

So with that said I’ll post his list and then talk through what worries me (errm a lot as it happens!).

Note: This post was written before the game but I held off publishing it as it contained his competition army list so didn’t want to unfairly penalise him by giving his opponents a heads up on his list before the submission deadline. It also helps to explain why I jump between tenses. My use of English isn’t normally this bad!

Characters 

Daemon Prince – 495pts

Level 4 Lore of Slannesh + Chaos Familiar + Chaos armour + poisonous slime + scaled skin + soul feeder + charmed sh + dragonbane gem + the other tricksters shard

Chaos Sorcerer – 190pts

Level 2 – Lore of Metal + Chaos armour + luckstone + dispel scroll

Exhalted Hero – BSB – 241pts

Chaos armour + enchanted sh + disc of Tzeentch + Mark of Tzeentch + Talisman of Preservation + Third eye of Tzeentch

Core

5 Chaos Hounds – 30pts

5 Chaos Hounds – 30pts

5 Chaos Hound – 30pts

29 Chaos Warriors – 538pts

Chaos armour + sh + Mark of Tzeentch + FC + Banner of Movement

Special 

6 Chaos Ogres – 270pts

HA + AHW + Mark of Nurgle + FC

Chaos Warshrine – 135pts

Mark of Tzeentch

Rare

1 Hellcannon – 210pts

4 Skullcrushers – 330pts

Chaos armour + sh + Mark of Khorne + FC
List review

The first thing that was obvious to me upon receiving the list was that I needed to swot up on the WoC army book having not played them in over a year. There were some items (such as the Warshrine) where I had no idea of the rules. (This would be rectified by the bottom of the post!)

The second thing is that jumps out is the large number of high strength, high toughness models, also with high ward saves. I can potentially mitigate the str and toughness but I’m woefully impotent against the wards. About the only thing I can do is pump a high enough amount of attacks in and hope he fails them. Perhaps not the most auspicious of plans.

Characters 

The prince is quite literally a monster with a 1+ 5++ save and 5 WS 9, Str 6 AP + poisoned attacks and knowing 5 spells. He also has a 1/6 chance of healing a wound for every one he causes. He frankly worries me as I don’t have a huge amount that can deal with high armour and anything that could kill him has to survive his attacks before striking back.

The sorcerer not so much. I just need to force the dispel scroll as early as possible.  Metal is not the most frightening Lore for me due to most of my army not having saves. I suspect he will be in the Warriors so the other option is to just allocate attacks to him in combat.
The BSB is a fairly standard unkillable build with a 1+, 3++ save and rerolling ward saves of a 1 (although with a halberd he drops to a 3+, 3++ in combat). There is probably little I can do about him except to ignore him!

Units

The warriors although a solid anvil with a 3+, 5++, should be destroyable if only through overwhelming force (horde target number 1).

The dogs are a nuisance but taking them out with the doombull and Ghorgon will help beef up their attacks!

The Ogres by themselves aren’t hugely worrying compared to some of his list but the Mark of Nurgle definitely makes them far more robust. Not having anything to counter the to hit penalty, bar impacts could cause problems.

Chaos Warshrine – in itself it isn’t too threatening as although it technically counts as a T5 W5 chariot with a 4+, 3++ save (due to the Mark), it doesn’t have impact hits, which is something I guess. It’s main benefit is to allow characters to add an additional D6 when rolling on the eye of the gods table and then allow them to discard one of their choice. This massively helps prevent the bad rolls that can happen on the table.

Skullcrushers can be brutal but I’ll be hoping that I can either use harpies to redirect/frenzy bait them to somewhere useless on the board or failing that see if I can use the Bestigors to whittle them down.

I’ve only faced a hellcannon once before and it spent most of the game trying to charge my gyrocoptor. Perhaps my other unit of harpies can distract it in a similar manner. I definitely don’t want it targeting my large units as the str 5 template would cause issues!