by Peter Atkinson

Two words: THANK YOU. Thank you to whichever legend shared their joy with all the world. Photos of the GHB are all over the internet, in every group chat and everyone’s DMs – decent quality too. Today we’re here to review those leaks, taking a look at what we’ve seen and what it means.

Here is the core matched play content we’ve seen so far:

Now let’s get into it!

Realm Rules: What’s a Locus?

Pretty much what we already knew from the official reveals, but worth a mention that there’s no stipulation around Mounts. So small mounted Wizards like the Maniak Weirdnob are in scope. Unfortunately, so is the Slaan, so unless he’s been heavily nerfed elsewhere that’s going to be a whole year of bullshit interesting.

How does Primal Magic work?

So at the start of each hero phase, you both roll the dice, and each 4+ means one dice for both players. So if you both hit the 4+, you get 2 dice each. They last for the Battleround, but you roll the dice in each Hero Phase.

I love the risk-reward around the Primal Miscast – worth noting that it doesn’t apply to Unbind rolls. D3+3 MWs is brutal – it’ll pop your small Gloomspite wizards outright. That Primal Supercast on the double 6 is dope too, especially because it builds in two big downsides: that wizard can’t cast any more spells, and your opponent gets a super unbind dice to use against you too. It’ll be quite funny when you supercast your shittest spell and accidentally fuck the rest of your own Hero Phase, so if you do find yourself flush with primal magic dice, maybe save that Arcane Bolt for last.

Big fan of this – well done to the dev team, it’s very nicely crafted.

Rules Check: Badsnatchers

If you choose to reroll a casting roll, you cannot use a primal magic dice to supplement that roll.

Does the Harbingers of the Everdank ability count as rerolling a casting roll? The wording is that you can “re-roll 1 of the dice in that casting roll” (my emphasis). I’m leaning towards saying that rerolling one dice in the casting roll is distinct from rerolling the casting roll itself, in the same way that I am one person in Victoria but I am not the State of Victoria.

I am of course wildly biased, so I’ll wait for the ruling on that one, but I don’t think anyone would be shocked at a shitty outcome for the closest thing Destruction has to a Magic Dom faction while the Aelves and Lizards come out smelling of roses. For a change.

Nullstone Adornments

There’s a pretty tightly-worded intro paragraph that explains how you take these. They’re pretty much artefacts – you can’t load up a Hero with one of these and an artefact – but you do get to take 1 in every army for “free”, in addition to your first regular artefact. Crucially though, you can only take these if your army does not contain any Wizards:

All anti-magic themed. Out of these, I think I like the Pouch of Nulldust the best: it could potentially bork a whole magic phase and swing the game. The Pebble could be handy on something like a Stonehorn or Maw Krusha, to save it from a MW bombardment. I’m not keen on trying to unbind from scratch with that first one though.

With my Destruction hat on, I’m thinking this is nice for Sons of Behemat, to at least give them a bit of anti-magic when they’re not playing the main Locus game. In Sons I think I’m grabbing the Pouch of Nulldust most games.

Lore of Primal Frost

You can take one of these spells instead of one from your own lore, and only the Locus (little non-Unique wizards) can take them:

Hoarfrost is dope and looks set to be a defining feature of this season. We’ll do a whole follow-up article on the awesome combos this throws up, but one example at the forefront of my thoughts currently is buffing the bejaysus out of Grots. The Loonboss will get ’em popping MWs on 6s to wound in combat, so putting them down to a 2+ to hit will force through a huge number of dice. There are loads of things you can do with this, but let’s just say bravo to GW for making it melee only.

Rupture is a bit crap, unless it isn’t. You generally want Krondspine to go wild, and you have a good substitute for making Endless Spells go wild in dispelling them. It does interact quite well with shutting down a couple of Grand Strats and Battle Tactics (see below), so there are certain situations where it will be amazing, but I’m not sure I’d pick it from the Lore just on the off-chance those situations and matchups come up. Mainly one to keep up your sleeve if you take the Shaman CT (see below) I think and not one I’d be likely to pick per se.

Blizzard is incredible. Holy shit! Again let’s just say well done to GW for getting out ahead of the game, and preventing people from dumping it through Portals or that Seraphon pseudo-portals tech.

Command Traits

These can only go on a Locus General:

Shaman is OK – there are two and a half good spells in that Lore, so why not.

Eye of the Blizzard is tempting. I’m already hooked on the Primal Dice mini game, like some alley rat in Excelsis tapping his veins and scratching around for Glimmering money.

Chilled to the Bone will be very appealing for flowchart armies, who really need their big Turn 1 combo to go off, so you will see it being used.

Eater of Magic is hilarious if you have buffed unbinds from some other source. A Command Trait that relies on a dice roll (unbind) just to give you the chance to roll a 5+ will get a big nope from a lot of people on diciness alone, but the pay-off is there if you back yourself in. This will give you stories. Extremely dicey, as well it should be, and please send me all your joyful tales about stealing Kroak’s dumb warscroll spells.

Core Battalions

Suffering from the same issue that all Battalions do: is it better than going 1-drop? And the answer, in competitive terms, is generally “No”. The second one is too niche (although note that your target doesn’t need to be a Locus, so you can totally hunt down Nagash for example).

That first one is pretty sweet though – again, I love the primal magic dice, so I could see myself combining this with a Warlord or Battle Reg. I’m one of those people who often takes a Warlord plus Something Else, and this one will be my go-to Something Else for the next season.

Note that you can’t take each of these more than once, so sadly I can’t lump 6 Wurrgog Prophets into three Acolytes Battalions. Boo.

Grand Strategies

Yeah these aren’t great. Making them hard is fine, except that the faction ones are all over the place. If GW hadn’t dished out 3 free VPs to Tzeentch (and often Fyreslayers) just because, I’d feel a lot better about these.

I’d probably go for Barren Icescape, which is essentially Table Your Opponent, or Overshadow, which is Almost Table Your Opponent and Have Tough Battleline. Worth noting too that the Rupture spell could fuck with Magic Made Manifest.

If you’re going to make the Grand Strats hard, that’s fine, but issue an erratum to Tzeench please.

Battle Tactics

Quite a lot of Magic themed ones here, so if your army is a Magic Dom, you’re on Easy Street.

For people with too much self-respect to play Lumineth or Seraphon, my picks are…

Early Game: Surround and Destroy. Run two units out wide and have one near your backboard, badda bing.

Mid Game: Intimidate the Invaders. Very much within your control, and very much something that combat armies will want to do anyway. You’ll occasionally see someone get pinned in their deployment and they’ll be a bit sad, but in most games I expect to score this at some point. Also a good late-game option if you’ve tabled your opponent and have nothing to worry about except moving your models around.

Mid Game: Bait and Trap. I’ve rarely finished a game and thought, “I wish I’d retreated less”. You should generally be able to set this one up.

Late Game: Magical Dominance. Dicey AF unless you have multiple wizards alive, and you’ve tabled your opponent or at least smashed their Heroes off the board. When the risk of an Unbind is gone, you can punch out a cheeky Arcane Bolt and you’re golden.

An edge case that springs from the page is that the Wurggog Mask staring ability also takes place at the start of the Hero Phase. So he can stare down some chump until they’re on 1 wound, choose Magical Mayhem once you have that knowledge, and then pop them off with an Arcane Bolt or such like.

I’ll miss Desecrate and Eye for an Eye, but with a couple of solid book tactics you should be hitting 4 or 5 in most games where your army doesn’t get obliterated.

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So that’s our initial analysis: you’re going to have loads of big memorable moments coming out of this season. Best laid plans will come crashing down with primal miscasts, and you’ll definitely get some stories out of it that you’ll still talk about years later. I’m honestly pretty keen.

This is just the start of our GHB coverage: we’ll post a separate article soon covering our first thoughts on the Battleplans, and then we’ll circle back round with a full suite of articles:

• Calvin’s Hot Takes
• Winners and Losers
• Our Favourite Combos
• Battleplan Review
• Endless Spells Review

Can’t wait to see the points when they’re revealed too!

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