Interview by Peter Atkinson

Ya boy Toby Resnick has only gone and done it!  A podium with Spiderfang, using the Grimscuttle Tribe no less.  It’s rare that anyone has the minerals to put Spiderfang on the table at all, but doing it in their own Subfaction and going on to smash face is a really special achievement.

Today we throw Six Questions at Toby to find out a bit more about his list and how it goes about winning games.  It was a smaller event, but there’s always gonna be plenty of airtime given to whoever wins the likes of Cancon and LVO (and rightly so); 6Q4 is all about celebrating cool achievements with cool lists for what they are.  So let’s take a look at Toby’s list and how he he managed to tiptoe along the line of genius, lunacy and the ability to roll 5s.

We first picked up on Toby’s achievement thanks to the excellent Top Three coverage over on Woehammer. Check them out to keep your knowledge of what’s winning as fresh as Sigvald’s breath:

Top Three AoS Lists for Locus Pocus

The List

Note: The Warparties both count as Battleline in this list

Six Questions

• Kraggy in the list helps the deepstriking Spiders make their charge.  Is the damage there once they get in?

The funny thing about this list is that you never actually ever rely on doing any damage at all. The power in charging is throwing about a massive amount of 160mm bases covering large areas of the battlefield, that can hopefully hold an objective for a few turns, and making it impossible for your opponent to get enough onto an objective.

As well as this, the ability to return to deep strike gives you a decent amount of forward pressure without ever relying on your damage.  People tend to stay back to stop a Spider dropping in behind, taking out support pieces and returning to deep strike before they can be hit back.

• Did the Scuttleboss take any good scalps?

I feel that the Scuttleboss always has more impact as a threat than he actually ever does with a swing. He is such a pain to hit with his Headdress (only ever on 5s) and retreating out of combat once per game.  He tends to avoid big targets because they are just hard for him to hit, but he can create some zones of the board where your opponent doesn’t want to go.

That said, he didn’t get his reputation for no reason! Some of his biggest kills he’s done have been Frigates, a turtle, Vampire Lord on Zombie Dragons, Neferata and most notably a few Fyreslayers players as this spider went through their armies and they realised nothing they had could stop him!

• Spiderfang Warparty: was capping objectives as 10 models a factor?

It’s a big factor in how the whole list plays because it’s always about “How can I expend the lowest amount of resources to take the objectives without needing to do any damage?”.  Having a model that counts as 30, two that count as 10 and a unit of Stabbas that contest from 9” away gives you a lot of objective control.

• I noticed you named your units, is there a background strory to this army?

So I’ve always enjoyed my armies and tend to give them names to the characters, but with my Spiderfang I went to a whole new level with an evolving story based off of how events went, and then actions in those games influenced how the story itself progressed. The first thing that happened was charging a Webspinner Shaman into 4x Stormcast dragons, allowing the rest of my army to engage without a dragon breath from Unleash Hell and freeing up the Scuttleboss or an Arachnarok so they could all fight. That was the birth of Spizglub, and he got his Tuskhelm and both the story and the original Kragnos Spiders list was born.

You can check out the full story below:

• What are some good and bad matchups for Spiderfang in your experience?

One of the best matchups I’ve found to be is Nighthaunt, especially lists where you run the Scuttletide. The army itself doesn’t have the best rend, relying on mortal wounds for the majority of its output, which negates one of their main benefits.  Then the Scuttletide is the perfect counter to Nighthaunt charges as it can hit every unit with a few mortal wounds as they charge in.

Other good matchups are slower armies you can outmanoeuvre like Fyreslayers or Ymetrica.

Some bad matchups I would say are armies that can really buff up a single unit with good mortal wound protection, or lots of board control to zone out deepstrikes, like Varanguard-heavy lists or Soulblight who can just have a lot of bodies stopping you getting in to good targets (or even fit the bases in, as they are massive).

• The list has limited chaff and most units are fragile.  How did you manage to control the board?

Board control for the list is interesting as it mostly comes through counting as lots on objectives, along with the threat projection.  And then it pounces: either doing a bunch of damage, or using the bases to physically block up the board, so even when you die they are not on objectives.

Well done that man!  Absolute legend and an awesome achievement.  If you or a friend have smashed out a good result with a cool list, get in touch – we might be able to give it some airtime here on the blog. 

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