German army officer, upon seeing a photo of Guernica in Picasso’s apartment: “Did you do that?”

Picasso: “No, you did.”

Hello, stranger! After a quiet few weeks, I’m firing the keyboard back up and aiming to post regularly again. I’ve got loads I want to discuss over the coming weeks, but first of all I owe you the results of the May Listbuilding Challenge, which was all about writing a deliberately bad Seraphon list.

List of the Month: Sweet Fuck All

And there you have it, for the first time ever I got no responses at all. Not a Skink sausage.

So I guess it’s official: it’s literally impossible to write a bad Seraphon list. You can put any random hotch potch of units into a list with any of the wildly overpowered subfactions and it’ll probably be as good as (or better than) the most fine-tuned competitive options that many other armies in this game can muster.

You had your chance to prove me wrong, and you failed, so it would appear to be unanimous: lizards are fucking cooked.

These little bastards have lead a charmed life to date, and sailed largely untouched through balance update after balance update. Surely it’s beyond time that GW gives them a proper working-over with the nerf bat (popping Destroyer while they’re at it)? They need to be eviscerated from top to bottom, from Battle Traits to Warscrolls and everything inbetween; otherwise it’s just going to be Next Man Up and business as usual.

If you can think of any reason why that wouldn’t happen, please let me know, because I’m currently drawing a blank on why an Order army that’s popular with playtesters would get such overtly preferential treatment.

June Listbuilding Challenge: BINO Lists

You know what are the worst kind of netlists? Those “It’s Not A Netlist” netlists, where people take the core of a proven formula, tinker round the edges and claim that It’s Not A Netlist. Just fucking own it, dude.

DOK players have been at it for years but Legion of the First Prince are the most recent masters of this formula, taking a Khorne Daemon Prince, Kairos Fateweaver and then whichever of the endless, efficient chaff options they haven’t seen someone else running recently. And then because they’ve iterated the chaff slots, “It’s Not A Netlist”. Well I’ve seen them all, and they’re all Netlists, buddy.

The second biggest form of gaslighting in AOS currently – and one which I’m happy to encourage, because I’m a big fat hypocrite – is the “I’m Proving [Bad Faction] Is Good” lists, which are Bad In Name Only (BINO).

What I mean by that is taking the lowest possible representation from a given faction, padding it out with Allies or Warmasters and proving that You’re The Guy who can do well with [Bad Faction]. The Chaos keyword jamboree (and especially Archaon lists) have long been the hotbed of these kinds of antics, but it’s a game that’s increasingly open to all of us:

• Mercenary Mega-Gargant lists have done well in all kinds of Grand Alliances
• Gotrek is a tough little bugger, and has a reinvigorated home in Fyreslayers
• Kragnos is mos def a thing with his current Warscroll
• We’ve all got access to Krondspine stirring up the pot right now
• Some of these options allow for Allies on top

So let’s have a bit of fun and see what we can cook up. I’m offering List of the Month internet points in two categories this month:

• Competitive Krondspine lists. You can chuck Krondy into any faction in the game that you like, and show me why you think it’s an army with 5-0 potential. I’m sure that boney bastard has got a 5-0 in him, so let’s see your tech
• BINO meme lists. Maybe you can be the guy to prove that Spiderfang are secretly good, in a list with barely 40% actual Spiderfang? This is more of a thought experiment and turd-polishing exercise, so don’t stress if your army isn’t cutting-edge competitive, but sneakily good is definitely welcome

Since we’re already well into June (my fault, sorry) I’ll be letting this one run a little longer than normal, through to the end of July (or the release of GH22 if that comes sooner).

JFK once said that victory has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan; so get those Krondspine lists in to me and you can claim for eternity* that everyone is running the Your Name TM list, because it’ll be right here in black and white that you did it before it was cool.

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Credit for the cover image to https://twitter.com/AussieWargamer

*Eternity, or until I get sick of paying for web hosting on this stubbornly loss-making site, whichever comes sooner.

https://ko-fi.com/plasticcraic