Following on from last week’s article, I asked our resident pro AoS players how they approached their games against Soulblight Gravelords.

Nico Cavada 🇵🇭 (Maggotkin of Nurgle): I’d say the dragon, but being unrendable and it healing is insane. I guess if you can reliably do Mortal Wounds at a safe range I’d go for that first.

Justin Clark 🇦🇺 (Blades of Khorne): Yeah don’t bother grinding out against the big vamps, unfortunately. Drop them in 1 or chaff them up.

Fabien Barbusse 🇺🇲 (Blades of Khorne): Giving advice against SBGL is tricky because there are 3 subfactions that are performing very well and play quite differently:

• Legion of Blood: more elite build with 3+ ethereal and a lot of heal for the monsters
• Vyrkos: bodies spam with 5+ ward, just sitting on objectives
• Legion of Night: teleport and counter charge shenanigans, usually with a lot of bodies as well

Raymond Lane 🇺🇲 (Maggotkin of Nurgle): Kill their heroes. Dent their movement and bile ins with bile piper or blight krieg. Plague claw and stench/geminids are amazing counters. Drones are the best demon choice into them.

Colin Klären 🇩🇪 (Nighthaunt/Nurgle/Sylvaneth): So, for me, I’ve played 5 Times against really good players with Soulblight and won all of them with Nurgle Glottkin, Belakor, Beasts of Nurgle spam and Sylvaneth Alarielle Winterleaf. I‘m playing armies which like to go against close combat armies because of abilities like no pile in, no retreat, counter charge, and so on, which is not only good against Soulblight. In my opinion, our whole meta shifts more to a combat meta with Soulblight, Khorne, OBR, FEC. Maybe there will be a change with Cities in November, but who knows 🤷🏽‍♂️.

Jeremy Lefebvre 🇺🇲 (Cities/Slaanesh): Kill the killable heros, and try to screen them out of objectives. Try not to get stuck in a grinding combat that is not on an objective, so if they want to stay on the objective, they have to stay in combat and risk losing the objective in the combat phase.

Lance Martin Tan 🇵🇭 (Ironjawz): The match-up for ironjawz isn’t great, but you can collapse on their deathrattle skeletons with the hunt and crush pile-in after to mitigate models from returning next combat phase.

Joshua Bennett 🇺🇲 (Slaanesh): For slaanesh it’s a fantastic matchup. Slaanesh has the speed and dps to be able to deal with the problems.

Keegan Graves 🇺🇲 (Skaven): For me, as a skaven player, I have the body count to contest the objectives against them. I use my guns and ranged mortal wounds to take out the heroes. That’s always the first priority. The second target is grave guard if possible. Clanrats and zombies will just slap each other on the objectives forever, and clanrats usually come out on top. The match-up usually just comes down to proper positioning and being ready to deal with the tricks SBGL brings.

Dalton Kahle 🇺🇲 (Gloomspite/Tzeentch): Goblins have the ability to outmaneuver them and still sit on objectives, I think Troggs will struggle slightly due to less speed, but they also have the damage output to put down a unit a turn of the small stuff, the dragon is where Troggs would struggle.

Aaron Newbom 🇺🇲 (Idoneth/Kruleboyz): I would say the most important thing to understand in terms of fighting SBGL is that they are, at heart, a board control army. They’re seeking to outscore you while you’re trying to grind through legions of dead dudes.

You have to play accordingly. You must be scoring points early. Playing too scared will lose you the game but so will being too aggressive

You’re almost definitely not going to kill enough of them to shut them down. Going super aggro will make it hard for you to stop them from stealing your objectives and steadily beating you on points. Playing too far back does much the same.

Play according to the knowledge that they want to hold board space over you.

There’s no one single trick, and every army is going to have to take that idea and apply it differently, but it’s a good place to start.

Jon Anderson 🇺🇲 (Idoneth/Lumineth): Pretty easy, play Lumineth. Bows? Wrong. Teclis? Straight to jail.

Luis Mendoza 🇲🇽 (Stormcast): Don’t charge to the zombies 😂.

Brett Martin 🇦🇺 (Woehammer Writer): For SCE, it’s Everblaze and/or Longstrikes to deal with long-range mortals. Judicators and Vigilors let everything get a little close. Holy command is as effective as ever. You can use it to reposition a unit away from their slower units. Knight Incantors can blunt their magic quite a bit, and lists with at least 2 should be pretty common.

Luis Mendoza 🇲🇽 (Stormcast): Also, resistant units combined with a solid ward are a good mix to face the inevitable combat with zombies. Position to block the graves is a good start.

Raymond Lane 🇺🇲 (Maggotkin of Nurgle): If you roll enough 5ups you’ll beat anyone and remember grandfather loves you

Walter Brock 🇺🇲 (Ossiarch Bonereapers): For OBR, they have a couple of nice things in their toolbelt. Arkhan casting a 12-inch bubble of no reserves or summons lets him lock down one objective for a bit of time. Arkhan, being good at spells, lets him do a good job of shutting down Soulblight spells. The Soulstealer carrion can stop zombies from contesting objectives when near it. The large amount of recursion lets them pretty much be immune to their zombie damage.

The hard part is when OBR fight them on a 4 or more objective mission. SBGL can play to places that OBR aren’t while being able to strongarm themselves onto objectives with bodies to get the points they need. It’s an uphill walk in the snow both ways, but they have the tools to get there with smart play and a bit of luck.

Peter Holland 🇬🇧 (Woeful Writer): There we have it! Want to ask our pros a question? Perhaps you want to ask a particular pro a question about their faction? Drop them in the comments below, and we’ll do our best to answer them.