Well similar to our friends who are clad in pigshit armour, the Kool Boyz get two Formations, three Monster Traits and a couple of warscrolls. And also similar to the Ironjawz, they’re pretty good. Shall we take a look?

The Formations

The first one is definitely competitive, and the second is interesting.

Gangin’ Up

Gutrippaz have been on a rollercoaster already in AOS4, starting out with access to Damage 2 and then having it whipped away from them. So they went from “Make you fight last and smash your face in” to “Make you fight last and do what exactly?”. Their output was halved and the faction dropped like a stone, so now GW is meeting us halfway with an extra attack: assuming you’re using it on those Gutrippaz, they’ll go from 2 attacks to 3 and get back 50% of that missing output. As an indication, with the 5+ Crit Mortals online, a reinforced unit of Gutties can expect to crash out about 20 mortal damage in a swing.

I’d argue that excluding Kraggy from the ability was a bit mean-spirited, when he’s not even the prime target for it (you’ll get more juice out of slapping it on a reinforced hammer), but whaddya gonna do? They obviously don’t want Donkey Dick propping up the army on his own but I’d like to see Kruleboyz performing a lot better first, and then we can think about trimming off the edges.

Anyway. I’ll take it. This is excellent, and likely to be my own Go-To battle formation for a good while to come.

Krule Mockery

While it hasn’t rocketed to the top of my schedule for running at a tourney, this Formation is pretty interesting nonetheless. Like all abilities that rest upon your opponent having a functioning brain, they won’t choose to annihilate their own unit just to make you feel better. It’s still pretty sweet though. Chip damage will intrinsically work best when you can stack other sources of chip damage – lucky this army has Boltboyz, then. You’ll occasionally have a unit that has been dinged up with your shooting, needs to get onto an objective and if it moves at all it’s toast.

Core abilities that are in scope include:

• Normal Move
• Run
• Retreat
• Redeploy
• Charge
• Power Through

There are also some bespoke Move abilities out there, but notably, piling in will not be in scope. This is part of the Fight ability, which itself is not a Move ability.

The general use-case is that you plonk one of your units way over in the far corner of the board, so if your opponent wants to come towards you or the centre objectives, they have to move away from it, and BAM! You’ll get more mileage where a unit wants to use a couple of Move abilities in a given turn, which is another way of saying that combat units suffer more (because they’ll typically move up closer then charge).

So is this a Gotcha, or….?

Let me paint you a picture: you and your opponent have been swinging arms throughout the combat phase, and at the end of it, they decide to Power Through with a unit that has a couple of health left, to go over and claim a terrain piece and score a tactic.  Ha!  That’s a Move ability, so you roll the dice and BLAMMO that unit has just destroyed itself.

Your opponent looks startled, and they realise they done fucked up.  “Oh man, I forgot about that.  I’ll just move it back…”

I’m happy to be the bad guy here and say that I absolutely would enforce the rule here.

This rule is a memory test as much as anything – setting a trap for your opponent is an intrinsic part of what it does. So I’d personally be quite strict when they go on to use something like Redeploy or Power Through and walk right into that trap.

This is your whole battle formation, and I’d argue that it’s pretty unreasonable for anyone to ask you to effectively go without one. It increases the mental load on your opponent by design – that’s what it does – so personally, I wouldn’t be giving them a takesy-backsy, and I wouldn’t feel bad about that either.

So: we got one Formation that is definitely very competitive, and one that is a highly playable alternative when you’re looking to freshen things up. A good outcome.

Monster Traits

As with Ironjawz, this is all gravy – you don’t have to go without an artefact to take one of these, you just get one as a free hit. Plenty of Monsters to choose from too.

Mean Un is kinda vanilla. But you know what? I like vanilla ice cream¹. Good quality vanilla has a very pleasant taste of its own and people who think they don’t like vanilla are usually talking about low grade, tasteless-but-sweet ice cream; essentially “Sugar Flavour” that is labelled as vanilla and gives the sweet spice a bad name². Anyway, +1 to Hit is good and the Mirebrute Troggoth feels like a prominent candidate for this one.

Tough Un is a similarly good, basic rule. These two seem pretty squarely aimed at working around incoming nerfs to AOA and AOD, giving you access to conditional +1 to hit and pseudo +1 to save, respectively. You’re not dumb for taking either of these.

But the one I’ll be choosing most frequently is Sneaky Un. Extra movement is always good, extra movement out of sequence is always great.

In fact…

Food Critic Hat [Off]

AOS Pontificator Hat [On]

Whenever I’m eyeballing a new book or update, the first thing I look for is extra movement jank, and that goes straight to the top of the shortlist. A Warhammer rule to live by.

Warscrolls

Gnashtoof Klaxon! Reset the clock.

This time, we might finally be in business.

Gnashtoof (160)

The Gnashy has always been a bruiser, with a rugged defensive profile and enough punch to hold his own. The issue you’ve had is that he’s never had a warscroll ability worth a damn – so you end up paying Hero points without any real Hero utility, and those solid core stats just get swamped out of any kind of efficiency.

Encouragingly, GW have understood the assignment here and given him two useful abilities that are bang on theme. Prowling the Flanks has a couple of hoops to jump through, but that’s OK. Let’s see what he can do for us in that space with the new Battle Tactics when they emerge.

Drag Em Out is absolute solid gold. Somewhat similar to the classic Mega-Gargant Suplex, moving your opponent’s models around in AOS is as rare as it is potent. A few ideas for how you can use this are:

• Pull them off an objective to directly hit their VPs for the turn
• Yank them out of range of their mates to break synergy auras (like chaining into extra-attack activations)
• Force them to drop near your Slippery Skumbag, if you have enough control over the table space where they can set up, so you can try for some free movement

There’s loads of other edge cases too that will emerge through gameplay. This is a high-octane ability that will win you games and more importantly, every time you drag some schmuck off into the shadows and rip them open, it’ll make you feel amazing.

Skumdrekk (250)

Skummy’s melee profile has been streamlined (dropping the D3+3 Bite) but it’s definitely an upgrade overall, with those Talons getting Damage 3 and Crit Mortal. That ties in nicely with his new Rampage to get his own Crits banging on 5s. Even with the limitations around the enemy unit’s size, this is a really elegant solution to the issue that Monsters can’t use Venom Encrusted Weapons. You’re presumably meant to feel good about fighting with these Monsters, rather than avoiding melee at all costs, so a bump in output is welcome.

And those betting chips are awesome. The general idea would be to spam Dirty Tricks early game to load up on them, then spend them in the crucial middle rounds to smooth out a few bumps. Coupled with the Skaregob Totem, you can guarantee quite a lot of DT rolls now. Across a couple of updates this army has effectively traded off the wild bullshit upside of teleporting in your opponent’s movement phase for much more reliable tricks – it’s rounded off the sharp corners for both players and if that’s arguably a bit of a shame, KB are at least reaching the point where they’ve got some good tools back to compensate for what they lost.

Tricks and Synergies

Let’s wrap it up with a few other cool opportunities arising from this update:

• The Killaboss on Gnashtoof is a great piece for getting the most out of Badmouthing Baiterz. You can guarantee a teleport onto the far side of the board (without using up a Dirty Tricks roll), getting him within 18″ range and then forcing your opponents to move away from him (and cop mortals) if they want to do anything.

• And at the opposite end of the Badmouthing Baiterz x Dirty Tricks spectrum: Krule Mockery is the first DT that operates in your Shooting Phase. So that’s an extra opportunity to spam the living crap out of Dirty Tricks rolls early game, and bank those tokens on Skumdrekk.

• Our shiny new Sneaky Un is a Monster Trait while the modern classic Slippery Skumbag is an Heroic Trait – so you can take both (across one or two models) for maximum slippage. The Vulcha is already the best caddy for Slippery Skumbag because his long flying move makes it much easier to get out of Dodge – Sneaky Un now gives you a great method (and timing window) to keep out of trouble, keep out of combat and keep on banging out your own charge mortals.

• As an edge case, if you’re lucky enough to restrict the space where your opponent can place their model after your Gnashtoof uses Drag Em Out, you might be able to dump them near a Mercenary Gargant for a rare source of -1 to Hit available to this army, or maybe your Murknob can use Breath of the Mire-drakes to ping off their last wound at the start of combat.

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This is an excellent update. There are a lot of nicely-painted starter set Gnashtoofs³ that have spent the past four years gathering dust, and now you can slam him down on the table without feeling bad about it. Swamphorde Bullies will be a competitive staple and the Monster Traits are all gravy. I happen to think that Kruleboyz are shaping up very nicely for the next GHB based on what we’ve seen so far, and this update just sets them up even better. Love it.

Have a good weekend, nerds – catch you on the other side.

Cover image: Killaboss on Gnashtoof by NC Dave

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1. I also like mass-market beer, and the missionary position. The classics become the classics for a reason 🤷‍♂️ ↩︎
2. I’m also prepared to go to war in defence of pineapple on pizza. Don’t test me. ↩︎
3. Gnashteef? Gnashtoofs? I’m running with Gnashtoofs. ↩︎