I’ve been playing Cryx for a year and a half or so and I still love them, but after TempleCon, I’m looking to be a little more relaxed in my gaming before the New England Team Tournament. I told myself I would become really familiar with MkII Cryx, choose 2 complimentary casters and playtest lists for the tournaments at TempleCon starting in January and I did just that. It all felt a little too serious though.
Now, the plan is to start on one of the armies I’ve been collecting models for and have a more relaxed time playing smaller games and learning a new army.
In my choice I had a couple of requirements:
1.) I wanted to use a lot of jacks/beasts. I’ve been playing a lot of infantry with Cryx. I have gotten to use a lot more jacks with MkII and playing Mortenebra but all the same, I wanted that to be a focus.
2.) I was leaning towards Hordes so I could get a better handle on the nuances of the Fury mechanic. I always forget little things like to kill the possible transfer targets first because I’m not familiar enough with the way Hordes plays.
3.) I wanted something in your face. With many Cryx casters, it is very easy to hang in the back of your army. I want a change.
4.) It should be one of the armies I have models for already.
5.) As always, I need to like the models. This is kind of taken care of in #5.
So my options were:
Legion(Are Hordes, have cool beasts)
Trolls(Are Hordes, have cool beasts, not in love with their up front casters)
Skorne(Are Hordes, have cool beasts)
Retribution(Are new, people in our area need practice against them, too much temptation to play a lot of infantry, not all models released)
Khador(Have cool ‘jacks, don’t own many models for them yet)
So as you maybe can see I was sort of torn between Skorne and Legion and I still am, but for the time being at least I went with Legion.
So lots of beasts you say? Sounds like a job for epic Thragrosh but as cool as he is, after hearing about Ultimate Legion doing so well with him and crazy sprays, I was a little put off towards using him. Since everyone loves ninjas I decided Rhyas would be fun to play at the very least.
Now when I started Cryx, no one wanted to play small games. I had to talk people down to 500 from 750, when what I really should have been playing to learn my army better was more like 350. So I decided that I would play 25 point games with my new army. Rather than get sucked into larger games, I would just paint instead. Luckily, a portion of our Resurgence event is 25 and there are a number of people starting new armies/dusting off old armies so people were down.
Here’s the army I tried:
Rhyas
Carnivean
Angelius
Nephilim Soldier
2 Shredders
Shepherd
Swamp Gobbers
Before I get into the games, there is a problem with Rhyas’s feat. It basically says, “After a friendly model damages a model, place the friendly model after boxing the enemy model” It changes conditions mid sentence. There is no official ruling on this but the previous version was “after boxing a model…” so it seems that it was the intention to change it to “damaging” in the whole thing but the second part was missed. I will of course check with my opponent, but this is how I will try to play it in the future. It did cause me some problems.
I played 2 games. The first was against Haley. Gotta say, I’m not a fan but the game was against Sevwal who is a great guy so it was of course enjoyable. I got in there and did some damage but eventually got killed after a failed assassination run.
The second was against Stubbs playing Mortenebra who I know pretty well. I was able to protect against the quick assassination run. I might have been able to take out Mortenebra with the Angelius but the reading of the feat messed me up as I was killing scrap thralls who are removed before they are boxed. If the reading really is after damaged, then it would have worked but it was again, a lot of fun.
Fun Rhyas bits from a Noob:
Rapport on the Carnivean for spraying is pretty cool. RAT 6 helps.
Between the Feat and her own abilities, the Angelius is crazy getting to the opposing caster. Rapport for even more fun.
Even though 1/3 of her spells were essentially useless because I was running almost all beasts, it was still a good time.
It was interesting to use the Fury mechanic myself. Even with a Fury of 5 I think I kept it pretty well together and didn’t once make a threshold check.
I really liked playing a melee caster with a small control area. It forced me to be more aggressive like I wanted.
I will keep everyone updated on the Legion’s progress both playing and painting. I plan on maybe adding a Seraph for slipstream next though I did like the army I used.
