So in the meantime, I’ve been active getting started with TTS, getting in another couple of games and prepping a little one dayer for this weekend. In the meantime, GW have been busy too! They’ve announced a series of article leaking faction rule updates for the next General’s Hand Book one by one until the releease of the GHB (which we can guess we’ll see mid to end June on that basis but you never know for sure until they go up for pre-order). At time of writing, we’ve seen three articles, Skaven, Stormcast, and FEC, and they’ve already given us an impression for what we’re going to get for each of the factions. Every man and their dog with an AoS webpage and Podcast is covering this… so let’s jump on the bandwagon and draw our own wild conclusions!
I won’t go through these detail by detail but if you want to check out the rules released you can find them all here: https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/downloads/warhammer-age-of-sigmar/
Scourge of Ghyran – What is it?
Here in our context, I’m referring to and talking about the additional rules for each faction. They’re new rules… and they’re free! Each faction update should be one page of new faction rules and one page of updated warscrolls.
The new faction rules that we’ve seen so far have been related to heroic traits, artefacts, monster traits, and probably most excitingly is new battle formations! We should see new spell lores for some factions. Apparently, these are focussed on aspects within the factions which aren’t working as GW wanted or aren’t seeing competitive play.
The 2nd page of each update should be one or two new warscrolls. These are optional warscrolls which means that if you want to use the vanilla one, that’s fine too. The primary restriction here is you can’t mix and match but generally at least from the ones we’ve seen so far, they aren’t units that traditionally are taken en masse. We’ve already seen some pretty spicy abilities being thrown out there really changing the utility or strength of the warscrolls.
This means that for everyone playing in the new GHB, we’re going to have a lot more options when building our lists! That’s pretty good news for all us list nerds!
What is it good for?
Well, obviously this is great news for list addicts. Competitive play will be shaken up quite a bit between the faction changes and the GHB changes dropping all at once. This means that for those of us playing a fair bit and looking for variation that’s what we’ll get (at least for a while until the meta settles again).
Changes of this scale across factions is going to be a bit of a shake-up for players not hitting the table as often. Understanding how other factions play is going to be a bit more confusing and it may discourage these more casual players from picking up these GHB rules (as we saw with some of the seasons in 3rd Edition).
Regardless of who you are… if you get a solid buff or a cool option of another way to play your army, that’s pretty nice. I can’t be the only who is waiting impatiently to see my armies rules drop!
It’s not absolutely nothing, huh?
Hot or Not?
Well… the first thing I expect to cause problems especially at the beginning is not being able to visually identify which warscroll a model has. So we’re going to have to remember what our opponent tells us at the beginning… ewwww. Over time, this will get better for sure but it’s going to stay a bit of a problem. Personally, I’ll be doing up some tokens to highlight when I use the Scourge of Ghyran warscrolls.
More choice! Good for a lot of us deep in the game. I hope this reinvigorates the list writing community to throw more wild lists out there into the meta (hats off to Jonas Ahm for going balls deep on the Pyregheists at Worlds by the way).
This is a chance to prop up some of the factions where things haven’t worked out as they were planned… this one feels a bit meh because GW don’t need massive rule changes to get this to happen and could be adjusted within the GHB seasons themselves… so a bit meh for me.
I’m most excited about opening up more playstyles, I think we saw this one the most from the FEC rules which looks like it may enable some Monster Mash lists which I honestly always like to see on the table. I do hope we see more variance in the competitive play but even if it gives me more options to base my lists around that’ll be a bonus for me.
Who am I fucking kidding? I’m excited! Give me more rules!
Fittsy: “HOT!”
Rereading my statement… it almost sounds like I’m just letting you all know that I’m pretty hot. A compliment is a compliment… I’ll take it even if it’s from myself!
But enough about me… what do you all reckon? Let us know here or join us on the Woehammer discord if you want to shoot more shit about all the changes and the massive shake-up this is going to cause. Let’s try something new and see what you all think! It’s POLLING time!
OK… it turns out the poll may or may not be working… maybe this old dog has not learnt a new trick this time. Maybe someone clever will figure it out soon and give me a hand to fix this up. Update: got it working for PC but not for mobile… I’ll see if I can figure things out for the next poll!
My Final Foughts
There will be hiccups. That’s for sure… we’ll probably see some factions shoot ahead early in the season and it may take a bit longer for GW to balance things out with the combination of more rules and dropping these and the season changes at the same time. I think there’s a positive that they’re putting different points on these alternative warscrolls so that will help take out one issue.
Will we see more list variance because of the new options and the playstyles being opened up a bit more within the factions? Will we see a shift away from unit spam? I’m not so sure… but I’m looking forward to find out!
