Opinions are like starter set Murknobs: everyone’s got one, and they are by and large without value.  But opinions on what’s coming up in the next GH?  Well now you’ve got my attention, sir.  I love a bit of speculation about what’s around the corner and what you’d do if you were King for the Day.  No doubt the points changes are already locked in and printed, with Order armies living a charmed life while Kruleboyz are left to rot, but what would you do if you had your hand on the tiller?

The Plastic Craic team have all chimed in with their takes on what they’d like to see: structured around one points hike, one points drop and one rule change. 

Ready?  Let’s go.

Peter Atkinson

One Points Increase

Fugg me, where do you start?  There’s a clear step change in power level in the most recent books to come out – Gits and BOC have already copped their whack, so take your pick from any of the newer books really.  I always roll my eyes when some flog claims “there’s no such thing as power creep”, trying to look clever by telling you the sky is green and the grass is blue.

But there’s an element of truth to it now, purely because “creep” does not in any way describe the headlong charge we’ve seen in the power level of the most recent books.  A cat burglar “creeps”, but this is a ram raid.  They’ve crashed through the wall of the bank in a stolen bulldozer, sprayed AK47s around the room*, shot up the security guard just to send a message and taken all the money straight to the strip club.

I guess I’ll be boring and go with Thunderers because 135 points is just laughable.  But it’s really just scratching the surface of the whackadoodle balancing in this wave of releases.

The verdict: 150 points for Thunderers, but don’t stop there

One Points Drop

Let’s go out to bat for a pet unit of mine: I’m hard for that big, green Gitmob keyword.  In amongst all the heat and light of the Gloomspite release, where a whole bunch of people got a whole bunch of carried away with a whole bunch of overstatements about how this book would perform, the underpowered stuff got completely forgotten about.  Spiders need a good tickle – 270 points for the A-Rok Flinger is wild – but if you’re giving me the option, I’m giving Snarlfang Riders the love.

If you want a mobile screen, you can throw in Spider Riders and bank 50 points change; if you want a damage unit, you can take Boingrots at the same points and get access rend -2 and mortal wounds.  They are a beige generalist in book of technicolor specialists, and outshone in every way for every purpose. 

That being said, there is life in the Warscroll; the 6” pile in is a heavyweight rule.  It’s really just the points that are holding these guys back, and if you could drop them down to a level where you don’t feel bad screening with them (which is what they’ll generally be used for in practice), you’ll start to see a few about.  As it stands, I’m only aware of them ever seeing a single tournament list: one swashbuckling warrior, strutting into the gaming hall clad head to toe in Adidas.  And even that was just a captain’s pick.

The verdict: 110 points for Snarlfang Riders

One Rule Change

This one really boils my piss: why do Kruleboyz have to roll 4+s for their Dirty Tricks?  They are already super restrictive: covered in Mud cannot protect Heroes or Monsters, Disappearin’ Act cannot pick up reinforced units (and needs to beat their Wounds characteristic) and Lethal Surprise only works on a 2+ and within 1”. 

Every time – every time – someone who has never suffered the misery of playing Kruleboyz first looks at these rules, they skim over the limitations and assume you can pick up reinforced units, because that’s how it would work in an army that hadn’t been proactively shafted.  Take a look at how BOC are just dragging units around the board and you’ll quickly understand how awful and limiting KB rules are.  BOC are sneaky tricks done right, and KB…just isn’t.

At the very least, make them all D3 so you don’t have the possibility of hitting zero 4+s.  Why do you make them roll 4+s instead of just getting D3?  Why?  Whyyyyyyyyy?

D3 is already dicey AF with all the other limitations baked in, so just let them have some fuggin fun, for Gork’s sake. 

The verdit: Give Kruleboyz D3 on each Dirty Trick instead of rolling three 4+s

*Automatically hitting, because hey it’s an Order book

Patrick Nevan

Another day, another whinge about Kruleboyz. Seriously, how many buffs can one faction get before people realize the problem is located squarely between the ears of the Kruleboyz playerbase? Anyways on with my GHB predictions. Given the piss poor quality of the GHB’s in third ed I can only assume this GHB will be the Fast Cavalry edition, which should give foot slogging infantry a real chance to shine. My biggest wish is an end to all this “Two GHB’s a year” half-season crap. Surely one of their worst ideas ever.

One Points Increase

I recently finished an article on this very subject, Thunderers Up, Glottkin Down was the gist of it. If I had to pick another for this GHB it would have to be Kroak. 395 points for the scaly deadshit is just insulting, not just for how ridiculously cheap he is but also for the Commercial Cynicism of putting him just within the price bracket for Order Allies.

You’ll shift models for a while, but no one believes he is going to stay there, and you will be left with a bunch of disgruntled customers. A 395pt Kroak is GW fuelling all of the worst things people say about them. If you wanted to shift boxes with Kroak as the go-to Order Wizard Ally, you should have made him do a lot less.

The Verdict: Kroak to 480

One Points Drop

Ogors. I’m not going to touch the ongoing riddle of the Thundertusks, that’s not something you can fix with points, but the Gutbusters side needs an across the board repricing.

My beloved Ogors got what I like to think of as Best Day Ever pricing. Someone looked at their output in their best case scenario and priced them accordingly. They sort of forgot about their resilience, leaving them in some sort of weird medium-pace Glass Cannon limbo. Too expensive to be throwaway units, too squishy to stand toe to toe with anything. Throw in some power creep and you are basically obsolete. How on earth are basic-ass Ogors this expensive? Leaving aside the mystery of 17 pt per wound Ironguts or Maneaters, I would start by repricing the humble Glutton.

The Verdict: Gluttons to 220

One Rule Change

You know what I liked the most about Season 2 of the last GHB cycle? The fact it wasn’t Season 1. The other good thing about Season 2 was not having my support heroes ruthlessly sniped off the board by my opponents. Or at the very least they had to take a special battalion to do it.

So why not keep the targeting rules or even improve on them? Just say hey you can’t target a Look Out Sir eligible hero unless you are within 3 inches of them. With anything: not a spell, not a Vexilor burst, not a stupid Realmshaper Engine, none of it. If you are going to have a game with 40k levels of ranged output, why not adopt their Look Out Sir rules?

The best part about this rule change is that it would outrage the sort of miserable Choads who delight in crippling armies with unanswerable mortal wound spam. KO players will just shrug their shoulders, shoot your units, then shoot your heroes. But lovers of Vexilor spam or Kroak based mortal wound nonsense, the worst people in the game, would be devastated.

The Verdict: Let support heroes live

Sean Benson

This GHB feels like it has been the pinnacle of Battle Tactics being the scarce resource everyone is fighting for, unless you’ve been blessed with enough good book tactics that you only need 2-3 generic ones to supplement your plan. I’ve been on Nighthaunt most of this version of the game, which (regardless of meta win rates) feels honestly pretty good. Safe foot heroes and big units able to fight in ranks with a battle? Thanks I’ll take both. Problem is every book in the 2023 era of power has enough damage to make 4+ ethereals really feel like you’re playing yahtzee in every combat phase to survive. Sometimes you win big, sometimes you lose big.

One Points Increase

To add my club to the dead horse beating pile, I think the stunty lad with way too many rules on his warscroll probably needs the Skragrott treatment: Arkanaut Admiral. Maybe the little guy doesn’t do EVERYTHING, but comes very close to it. At 125 points that’s Black Friday TV deals on a hero that increases damage, mobility, and is individually threatening (and is relatively safe in this GHB). Maybe doesn’t need to go full Skrag, but lets go dang close.
Verdict: Arkanaut Admiral to 190

One Points Drop

Of course the Nighthaunt player is going to look inward and try to help his homies on this one, but honestly this unit has been maligned since the warscroll and points came out with that box set: Craventhrone Guard. When we have ranged output units doing mortals on 5s/6s, hitting and wounding on 2s/3s, to have a unit like the Crossboos run 180 points for 10 feels like a stretch. The reasonable part of me wants to say let’s just go 160, but we’re wishlisting here and if Blissbarb Archers can exist at 150, Crossboos can go further.
Verdict: Craventhrone Guard to 70

One Rules Change

We’ve effectively seen this two GHBs in a row, once cooked in and then again built into a battalion but it really opens up the game for 1″ melee units to be reinforced and stay valid. Again it probably has a slant to Nighthaunt, but there’s a lot of units that are given a leg up with this rule and it is Galletian Veterans / Bonds of Battle. Keep the double rank attacking for unmounted infantry units, even if it means requiring a battalion. Anything that keeps list-building and battalion choice interesting beyond “lol 1 drop” is a win in my book.
Verdict: Keep Galletian Veterans / Bonds of Battle

Calvin Rarie

Are you folks ready for a hot take? I think this GHB has been too simple. Oh your little heroes matter? Well, that doesn’t mean shit if your army is just straight up shot off the table. What’s that? Khorne already likes playing with 3+ Galletian Champions anyway? KO has flying foot heroes who can’t be interacted with and essentially auto-score tactics? I can’t wait until we get back into the meat and bones of good generalship, because right now these tactics and grand strategies don’t reward tight, complex play–they reward linearity, which is how you end up with cancer like 70+ Blissbarbs just running all over the place.

One Points Increase

Blissbarb Archers. Get the fuck out of here, please, so we can go back to playing actual games of Age of Sigmar. I, in fact, think that basically everything involved in the current Blissbarb hell we’re in is going to go up, but let’s be real here, how is 150 points at all acceptable for a unit that has this level of offense? An effective 30″ threat range combined with a 1 drop means you could easily face off against 88 of these assholes and watch as they run up and just mow half your army down. If you’re into that, go play 40k.

Verdict: Blissbarb Archers to 200 points

One Points Drop

Okay, I’m going to be real with you here–I am obviously one of a handful of people on Earth that competitively play Bonesplitterz so I’m speaking to a VERY niche crowd here, but I think this more addresses GW’s incredible slowness to re-evaluate the effect of their bannings on an army’s performance even after we left the season where they were applied.

In this case, I am talking about the humble Boarboy Maniak squad. At one point, Bonesplitterz reached the top of the meta, which was a stunning achievement in my opinion of the tenacity of the Bonesplitterz player base and the realization that the army was in fact good off the power of a select few units–which isn’t saying much since the army is literally just 10 Warscrolls, 6 of which come from the same box. (I’m not counting the Underworlds unit. It sucks.)

However, Maniaks, despite being a good unit overall, were buoyed by Bounty Hunters at the time, which allowed it to put out some stupendous damage for low cost. So they went up! And nothing else went down. Which normally would be fine, but between the Maniak, Wurrgog Prophet, and Big Stabbas, everything remotely efficient in the army suddenly became very expensive, and none of the weaker units got cheaper. The army has zero flexibility in army design thanks to the rules offered, so everyone more or less stopped playing the army competitively. For months. Sins have been paid for, it’s time to come down.

Verdict: Boarboy Maniaks down to 140

One Rules Change

My favorite mechanics from the past two GHBs have been the “If you go second” abilities, where you could turn off objective control unless you had a certain type of unit, or just straight up remove an entire objective from the game. These are interesting, game-changing abilities that reward tight strategy and an even tighter grasp on understanding momentum. I still get them these days in the form of Jaws and Prize of Gallet, but that’s scarce now.

I want priority rolles to matter immensely, as it is the single most defining aspect of the game by far–and that’s not to say it doesn’t already, but there were games I won being tabled in Round 5 two seasons ago because I gave away priority and denied my opponent the ability to score on the one objective I still held. That doesn’t happy any more!

Give it back to me, GW. Let me have to think deeply about priority in a way that I haven’t in a long time. I don’t know what that mechanic may be, but I know you can do it.

Verdict: Make Going 2nd Matter

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