by Michael Clarke and Pat Nevan

BAM! Let’s welcome our latest writer Michael Clarke to the team. If you’re not familiar with Clarkey, ask your local Worlds player, because they’ll definitely know him – Mike has been a stalwart of the Australian AOS team from Day One, repping the green and gold with pride. 

Michael has taken point here on the second article in our 2023 Retrospective series – following on from the article where Pat and Seanzor awarded the best and worst models and paintjobs of the year, and with Pete’s content awards still to come. 

The format today is that we’ll be awarding the Best and Worst in each of the following categories, with Mike bringing you the Best and Pat Nevan layingwaste to the Worst:

• Warscrolls
• FAQs / Errata
• Enhancements
• Battleplans

Welcome aboard, Clarkey. Over to you mate.

Best New Warscroll

by Michael Clarke

With 9 new battletomes and approximately a zillion non-tome new units via warbands or other exotica, determining a best new warscroll was really hard. 

Firstly, we are going to limit the scope here by only focusing on warscrolls newly added to the game, rather than glow-ups and re-writes. 

  

Otherwise …

How do we define “best”?  Is best based on competitive efficiency & effectiveness?   Does it mean a warscroll that defines the heart of a faction or specific army build?  Or is it some really cool, fun mechanic or combo?        

As often with hard problems like this, I do also like to judo-flip to the opposite question:  what makes things bad?   And then use those indicators as a test, for the process of elimination.    A bad warscroll I think would be defined by:

(a) terrible statistical efficiency

(b) useless or overly complex rules

(c) mechanics that involve too much bookkeeping (an unfortunate growing trend in the game…. ☹)

(d) confused or questionable battlefield purpose

(e) oppressive game play / feels bads for the opponent.

With those criteria also in mind, the easiest warscroll to eliminate from contention as definitely NOT the best is Grundstock Thunderers…. especially on their “Are the rules writers actually truly brain dead?” initial release price point.    Why?   Because despite being the most ludicrously efficient shooting unit in the game, and both ‘army defining’ and ‘meta-defining’ due to having access to a zero risk +12 step synergy stack…. they ultimately massively fail the final Test (e) above…..  with KO & Thunderers being the most incredibly unfun, oppressive and feels-bad army / unit to play against!   

Ok, so now that I’ve redefined the question to take an obligatory cheap shot at the idiotically smooth-brained, overpowered Order teleport-shooting army, let’s get back to the actual question….. what was the ‘Best’ new warscroll for 2024?

The winner is: Belthanos, First Thorn of Kurnoth

Belthanos hit so many of my criteria.   He has cool mechanics that don’t involve excessive bookkeeping, a competitive but not OP stat set and was a release that becomes faction & army defining due to synergies!    Of course GW did overlook some temporarily broken synergy with Kurnoth Hunter keyword bingo, but ignoring that little brainfart, Belthanos very nicely walks the line of being competitively effective without being OP broken.   And while this isn’t part of the brief, well, Belthanos model is also pretty darn cool:

Notable mentions and close runners-up for this category include:

• Ionus Cryptborn 
• Skabbik Plagueseeker
• Trugg

It is noticeable that all the best warscrolls do also have cool models and were unique characters.   GW actually put some effort in here for these guys, so credit where it’s due: very well done!

Worst New Warscroll

by Pat Nevan

I’ve decided to follow Clarkey’s lead with this one and pick an actual new Warscroll, otherwise this section of the article would be a Novella-length rant about the pitiful job they did on any Khorne Bloodbound hero that isn’t a Priest (and I’m saving that for Khorne Battletome anniversary retrospective).

“Mighty Lord! Mighty Lord of WHAT? Motherfucker!”

Clarkey did a pretty good job of coming up with some generally applicable rules for a crap warscroll so I have naturally decided to go with entirely subjective personal preference. I nearly put the Alchemite Warforger in for having a ridicullous spell, broken buffs and looking like a Chaos Sorceror but…

The Winner is: Fusil-Major on Ogor Warhulk

You know what it is a really fun thing about Age of Sigmar? Big Ass monsters destroying individual models in melee. Trolls crushing people, Stardrakes and Ghorgons eating people, Giants stuffing people down their pants or throwing them at other units. Everyone has a bunch of great stories about a Star Drake eating 3 Juggernaught cav in a row or whatever. (I saw Joel McGrath do it). It’s also a really effective technique for plucking units out of coherency or killing champions and banner bearers.

You know what a really shit thing about Age of Sigmar is? Doing the exact same thing from 30 inches away like the Fusil-Major. Ranged, risk-free individual model kills are a bullshit feels-bad mechanic that steal the thunder from the honest, hard-working, lumbering idiots that we know and love. Can a Ghorghon fire 60 shots on 3’s and 3’s, mortals on 6’s and rend -2? No. Well why can some ass clown Order shooting hero wipe half a unit from coherency without leaving its deployment?

The rule itself is annoying in that you don’t have to declare it to attempt it. It just kicks in as an added bonus when you roll a six because, I dunno, Order Babies need their bottles apparently. Plus the model is an insult to Ogor players everywhere. Some colonizer using an Ozempic-addicted, Gut Plate-less Ogor as a fucking Mount. Words fail me.

Image credit Games Workshop – grudgingly

Best FAQ / Erratum

by Michael Clarke

Defining the best FAQ / Erratum is another hard task (thanks to Editor Pete for giving me the hard ones!). GW have gotten a little better at hot-fixing gross and obvious errors (eg Alarielle-Belthanos), albeit they are still sometimes too slow and frankly those errors shouldn’t occur in the first place with a good editing and playtesting process.

So for this, I’ll ignore the hot fixes to temporarily game-breaking, unintentional stuff.  While those are excellent errata to keep the game in check, they are more hot-fixes than smart updates.

I’m going to call out here dual winners for the best FAQ for the year:

Winner 1:  The core rules update on “Ignore Magic” mechanics.  ‘Ignore magic’ mechanics had so many gaps and problems to it and had been a bugbear of mine for years, going all the way back into 2^nd edition.    The FAQ on how these mechanisms work cleared up dozens of ambiguities.     There are still a few minor gaps (which this is not the time to discuss) but regardless, this update was one of the most meaningful cleanups to a long-standing issue in the game.

Winner 2: The core rules update on “Fight on Death” sequences, particularly the potential for double-fight on death (Skaven trickery).   Fight-on-death mechanics are a very important and powerful interaction for the game, and required some cleanup on how they actually work.    I am also biased here because I did have very strong views that Skaven double-fight-on-death never actually worked simply based on the Core Rules sequencing…. but I felt I was a lonely voice shouting into the void on that issue, with 99% of TO’s and the community accepting the Skaven lie-lies that double-fight was legitimate.    

I was therefore very chuffed at being proven right by the clarification on this one, namely that it was not a legitimate mechanic for the EXACT reason I had always said it didn’t work under Core Rules sequencing:    

Thank you for listening to my “told you so” TED Talk / Rant on that issue!  

Worst FAQ/ Errata

by Pat Nevan

Given that most FAQ’s are fixes it was hard to come up with a worst one that wasn’t wholly subjective, still:

There is this gem from the September STD FAQ. Not that I disagree with the ruling: non-negatable mortal wounds can’t be negated, fine. No problem with the ruling itself, but why bury something important to the game in the FAQ of a faction? Why not in the core rules, or even an “Oh btw” in the Blizzard battlescroll? It works on other stuff like Quicksilver Swords and it’s not like their aren’t a few bodyguard saves around. 

Best Enhancement

by Michael Clarke

After using the first couple of categories to sneak in some anti-KO and “told you so” side-rants, I’ll keep this one way shorter.

For Best Enhancement, we are going to go back to the very start of the year for this one, all the way back to tunnels of Gallet!    I’m going to nominate ‘Fuelled by Ghurish Rage’ as best enhancement.    FBGR was a great rule that provided some safety for a small hero to take more risks, while also not being ‘guaranteed’, so those risks had to be smartly played.   I really like mechanics like that, which can unlock new ways to play various units, but with a balanced risk.    

My personal favorite and fun way to use it was with aggressively-played Contorted Epitomes.   Of course it was damn near broken in combination with the Wurgogg Prophet’s laser stare (the 3+ roll was ruled as a Ward, and he typically adds two to Wards with his artefact, making it a 1+ roll); though luckily they were basically non-existent in the meta at that time, so that particular combo didn’t warp the game!

Worst Enhancement

by Pat Nevan

Ha, you can always pick a new writer at the Craichouse because they worry about keeping things short. Worst enhancement had some pretty stiff competition in a year that saw its share of questionable space-fillers in the GHB’s, but I’m going to go with the worst in the actual game…..

The Winner is: Merciless Blizzard

It was honestly a toss-up between Merciless Blizzard and Rupture here. Both were busted on release and needed major revisions in the first update. Rupture basically vanished from the game once you couldn’t use it to feed spells to your own “wild” Krondspine, while Merciless Blizzard is unfortunately still with us in modified form. On that subject if you are one of the people who thinks I am a little harsh on Games Workshop’s Pewter standard of playtesting, reflect on the fact that 2 out of 3 spells in the GHB spell lore needed almost immediate major revision.

When it comes to ‘needs a rewrite’, 2 out of 3 IS bad. RIP Big Guy

Blizzard is one of those rules, like primal dice themselves, that was a lot more dynamic and exciting in the minds of the devs than it ever was on the table. You get the feeling they envisioned players risking it all to pull off a Blizzard to swing the tide of a crucial battle. After six months the reality of Blizzard is something like this:

1. Find a disposable Andtorian locus to be a Blizzard Wizard
2. If there’s something in range cast Blizzard. Ideally in turn 2 of the battleround when you have a bunch of primal dice.
3. If you roll a one in your casting, decide if you could care less about losing your wizard.
4. If you don’t roll or a 1 or couldn’t care less, keep throwing dice until you get your highest possible total or roll 2 sixes.
5. Your opponent throws whatever they’ve got at it to stop it.
6. If it works you roll the damage; you might get enough splash back to “gasp” kill your completely disposable Wizard.

Whatever it was meant to be, Blizzard has become one of those basic bitch ugly things people do to win games, like a sports team running out the clock when they’re ahead on points. No one likes it but you’d be a mug not to do it yourself, and most Blizzards get delivered with an “It is what it is” shrug of apology. You don’t hear stories of thrilling games won or lost by Blizzard, it’s just a “Yeah I Blizzarded them” or “They Blizzarded me.” Followed by hopeful speculation about the next edition. 

Best Battleplan

by Michael Clarke

In 3^rd Ed the game trended to significantly more complexity and this reflects through to the current GHB in Andtor, with the most complex battleplans to date.   As a competitive player, more complexity rewards greater skill and game knowledge, and I like that; however, I do recognize the trade-off that it can overwhelm the noobs and slow the growth of the community.

While I would love to vote in Frigid Zephyr as the best plan simple to stick the boot into shooting armies again, unfortunately the mission never sees the light of day, so I will go in a different direction.   GW’s apparent attempts to discourage pure shooting gunlines need to be more structural than trying to use realm rules (see early 2^nd Ed Ulgu rules….) or single missions such as Zephyr, as those realm/ mission mechanics just don’t get used by event organizers and thus end up having no impact on meta or army build decisions to discourage the pure gunline.

Overall, I’m going to nominate Limited Resources as the best new battleplan.    The underlying rational is the high skill factor required to play this mission well: attempting to balance battlefield control, objective control (and non-control), to bait your opponents into mistakes on too much early game objective control and to manage the fight component to exploit the competing incentives is a very difficult task.   Limited Resources is arguably the mission that most strongly rewards skilled play that we have ever seen in AOS.

Interesting setup as well

Worst Battleplan

by Pat Nevan

Hard agree on Limited Resources – it’s a good one, and I think it’s fair to say the anti-castling battleplans are the best thing about this GHB. As for the worst battleplan….

The Winner is: The Lurkers Below

This turd in case you’ve repressed the memory

Use your best Epic Movie Guy voice to read this one aloud….. 

“In a game that has traditionally been dominated by teleporting shooting armies or fast-moving and hard-hitting forces, one group of Game Designers had the courage to develop a battleplan that was truly ideal for fast-moving, hard-hitting shooting armies.”

“You’ll thrill as the slow-moving foot-based armies that come to the game with a huge disadvantage anyway waddle slowly across a 30 inch gap while being mercilessly shot to pieces by shooting castles, or carved up on a whim by their fast-moving, teleporting opposition.”

“Watch in awe as experienced players struggle to comprehend the scoring rules for this masterpiece. ”Hang on, I have to hold them in order right?” ”From the end of my turn or the end of your turn?” ”Do I still count as contesting them for battle tactics when I can’t hold them?” ”What about warscroll abilities?” “Wait, if I’m the active player I can determine the order objectives are contested in, so because I controlled the middle last turn, I can contest your home objective now even if I’m going to lose the middle this turn, so you’ll have to start again right?” ”Uhh we are gonna need the TO.” ”What do you mean they’re busy?”

In all seriousness I was astonished when this mess made it out of the Season 1 GHB. Just awful, although Honest Trailers are still pretty good.

Greatest Innovation

Pete here, just slipping in one extra award. One thing the devs in AOS are genuinely great at is pushing the envelope and cooking up some innovative rule that the game has never seen before: in this case, physically picking up terrain and bouncing it off your opponent’s head in Brodd’s Stomp.

Yes, the interaction with free teleports was cooked at launch and yes, it needed a swift FAQ. Cry me a bloody river. Truth is, there are way too many Faction terrain rules that give zero fucks about Smash to Rubble. A few examples are:

• Seraphon using their pyramid as a node for summoning.
• Sylvaneth zipping around between Wyldwoods.
• Skaven teleporting to (but not from) a smashed Gnawhole.

That existing Monstrous Rampage absolutely wrecks Gloomspite, but it’s all over the place in terms of impact and I daresay the Devs didn’t quite realise when they wrote it just how ineffectual it would often be in practice. So I’m very pleased to see a solution placed right in the hands of the army where it makes most sense, and who needed a mid- life cycle refresh.

I did think the FAQ went slightly too far: I’d have confined the limitation to friendly Monsters, so opponents couldn’t completely stop you doing your thing just by standing there (especially my old friends the Weeds). 

Still, this is a cool addition to the game and breathed some life back into the Megas. We’ve been chucking terrain around as a missile weapon in MCP for years and it’s great fun.

I’ll be back soon with our 2023 Content Awards for AOS – catch you then.

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