“An old man’s dream ended, a young man’s vision of the future opened wide. Young men have visions, old men have dreams. But the place for old men to dream is beside the fire.”

Red Smith, New York Herald Tribune, following Rocky Marciano’s KO of Joe Louis in 1951

I’m a Moonclan guy, always have been. Grots themselves are deeply unfashionable right now because they have a shit warscroll Troggs offer a more durable way of slamming bases on objectives while your Squigs merck anything that moves. But we don’t play Grots because it’s fashionable, and I reckon there’s plenty of play in the green side of this book – so let’s try and demonstrate that at VIC GT this weekend.

The Event

VIC GT is a near-as-dammit sold out 50 player event in the Australian bush, and I reckon it’s a pretty good achievement to get that many people in a city that’s miles from everywhere¹. There’s plenty of players from Melbourne making the trip and a bunch of people travelling interstate too – all competing to get their name on that sweet perpetual trophy.

TO Pat has done a good job warming up the event’s FB page. Cobber has a way with words, I should ask him to write an article some time.

This is a supplied-dice event and TO Pat will be running The World’s Richest AOS Quiz on the Saturday night – pretty much all the prize support goes into quiz prizes, so there’s loads of good swag. And a few of us might even have our arms twisted to head to The Vine afterwards.

The List

Gloomspite took a massive kicking at the last update because they were performing in the fat middle and Games Workshop hates Destruction. Chariots were bullshit, fair fucks, but if you’re going to make a mid-ranking army’s rules far worse then you need to give them something back to compensate; otherwise you’re just going to obliterate them down to the bottom of the win-rate table, and that’s not managing the game as you promised you would.

I’ll let the North Melbourne double-bird girl summarise my thoughts on that.

So instead of using units with good rules, we’re just gonna flood the table with shit instead. And if you cheered for Gitz getting nerfed, and now you have to play against this kind of list, remember: You asked for this, motherfucker.

How It Wins Games

It gets on objectives and stays there for a bit while it’s getting slowly tabled. All the while it’s dominating objective control; so as you’re sweeping up armfuls of minis your opponent might think they’re winning, right up to the point where they’ve mathematically lost.

Aside from have a shit-ton of 25mm bases on the table, there’s two ways this list whips the VPs out from right under your nose:

• The Gittish Tide battle formation means that you can touch the objective with 1 Grot, and it counts as 40+ models on there
• The Loonshrine can usually be placed close enough to at least one objective that you can recycle units straight onto there

..and those two rules dovetail when you rezz the half-sized unit back with one model touching the circle, and they are all immediately contesting it.

The Bad Moon battle trait amplifies this further, with every Grot unit gaining +5 OC under the Moon a few times every game. Think about what that does on the table: a lonely Grot counts as 6 or 7 models on the objective, and can take it off a unit of 5 small models or most Monsters. The more units you have, the more +5s you get, so it’s not unusual to have +10 or even +15 OC on there. Your opponent has to wipe every single unit to the last man, otherwise the ragged scrips and scraps left over from couple of different units can hold it from a full unit of 20 models.

OC manipulation is generally a bit mid in AOS4, but not in Moonclan lists.

The Squig Module is there for situations where your enemy sets up camp on the objectives first, and you need to knock them offa there. Squig Herd are also somewhat of a DPS test in their own right: armies with significant shooting will be tempted to bypass the Grots and shoot off the angry balls of jelly, but 48 health isn’t that easy to shoot off, and even a couple of models left alive can explode back to full strength in the blink of an eye. Plus a turn or two of shooting into Squigs puts them a turn or two closer to losing the game, thanks to those Grots standing in the relevant places for long enough. So the Squigs are a useful combat unit but also a menacing bullet sponge.

The Grots can fight a little bit with +1 to wound from the Loonboss and the Gobbapalooza Rend backing up their weight of dice. They’re not nuking whole units, but it can sometimes make enough of a dent that the Grots can survive the incoming pain a bit better. Worth noting too that the Gobbapalooza rend can go on Shootas, which makes them somewhat scary, especially firing into more-expensive enemy Dakka. They will have a great time blasting into Longstrikes or Boltboyz, easily picking up a few premium models while their return fire barely makes a dent.

Lores

I like the Soggy lore for the retreat thing and the extra movement spell. Retreating in the hero phase mostly helps you to Rally back up (with an enhanced Rally on the Loonboss Warscroll), and we can replace the lost teleport by investing in the Forbidden Power spell lore. Between that, the Wolf Cav and the +2″ movement, I’ve not had trouble getting places, given that I’m mostly aiming to simply get onto objectives rather than zoom across the board to smash people at the top of 1.

Battle Tactics

Restless and Attuned are heavily themed around holding objectives, as you would expect. There’s a bit of interplay between the two: if you go first, you can easily score Sacred Centrality, whereas if you go second, you should be able to score Water With Blood. So either way you can get the scoreboard moving and start progressing to the next rung. You can almost always score a decent number of points from BTs across the course of the game and you don’t need to stretch for 30: if you can hold your own on Tactics, and dominate Objectives, that should get you there.

How’s It Been Going So Far?

I’ve played a few local practice games with it, and won them all, but not against cutting-edge tournament lists. So I’m happy enough with the “Proof of Concept” but I couldn’t say that the list is truly battle-hardened.

One main learning point that I would flag up is that if you’re pre-measuring your Loonshrine to summon models directly back onto an objective, make sure your opponent knows your intention, and you show them that it’s within 12″ of the relevant circles as you start to deploy your units. Quite often the Shrine will be plonked at the back-middle of your deployment zone, so you’ll be leaning across it the whole time, and it can easily get knocked. Best to be clear at the outset where it’s officially been placed, and since it can’t legally move from there, there should be zero ambiguity.

Other than that, I haven’t been doing anything especially clever to win my games. Just putting Grots on objectives, scoring VPs and recycling the dead ones back onto objectives. The list almost plays itself tbh².

What Beats It?

Apart from chess clocks? A good combat army can still pick up pretty much all those Grots across a double. Yes there’s a lot of them, but they have 1 health and abysmal armour saves so they die in droves. That will leave your opponent’s army exposed to the Squigs and now you’re on for the double, but if the enemy has Strike First / Last kinda stuff, Squigs can’t do shit. So I’d say that a high-damage army with Activation Wars trickery is really well-placed to dismantle this list.

And as regards clocking out: chess clocks are optional at this event but I’ll be using one, because I’m confident I can play the army to time, and if I can’t then more fool me. One thing that helps a lot is movement trays, effectively turning every unit of 40 models into a unit of 8. So it’s more like having a handful of Ogor units to push around, when you cope think about it that way.

I would be nothing without mag trays.

Alternatives

I’d actually like to be higher drop, because this army is comfortable going first or second so I’d rather have the reroll than the choice. But Moonclan heroes are mostly a tax and it’s not worth giving up a full unit for a shitty Fungoid.

I’d also love to have a unit of Snufflers in there for obvious reasons, but with Droggz’s regiment only having capacity for one Moonclan unit, that’s not really workable. I guess a lot of people will be screaming “Just drop 20 Grots” but think about it this way: those 160 Goblins cost less than half my points³ , but they are about 80% of how I’m winning games. If I’m trimming any points then it’s not coming out of that.

I have come up with an alternative list that I think squares that circle somewhat, and leans even harder into the main WinCon of dominating Primaries. I’m sticking with this version mostly because I’ve been playing a few games with it already. But I do think this other version has a heap of play and if you’re interested in seeing it, I’ve written it up as a short Patreon article here.

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All in all, I reckon this list plays pretty well into a lot of on-meta armies right now, so wish me luck! I’ll be back next week with a report on the event, and some full-army photos, because at time of writing I’m still crunching the painting and some units will be wet on the table.

Or if it’s disaster, I’ll quietly sweep the whole thing under the carpet and never talk about it again. What’s that quote again? “History is written by the bloggers.” Something like that.

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1. Except the one place that matters. ↩︎
2. Apart from that one time I almost fucked myself by dumping the Bridge in my own way. That wasn’t very clever of me – don’t do that. ↩︎
3. Only 910 points combined if you were wondering. ↩︎