Decadent, I brought a old vine's infidel tonight. I brought big wave golden ale. OK, well, it's live because that's what happens now. So there you go. Everybody knows that, I think. So hopefully it's working. We'll find out. We'll see. Hello, everybody. If it's Wednesday, it's Warhammer. I apologize for the confusion, but Streamlabs decided to change things. And now when you hit one button, the other button just automatically goes. It's all buttons and I had to reconnect things and change things. Yeah, but this is all work. Anyways, there we go. Yes, it's working. Wonderful. All right. Well, welcome, everybody. I am very excited. I'm Vincent as always. I am excited about Slanesh joining me as always is my co-host Tom. What's up, brother? How you doing? Hello, friends. Also joining us this week, he's back, the most dangerous man in Warhammer it's the magical Mr. Mephisto. How you doing, Meph? Oh, I'm great. I'm great. As I said, when I didn't realize we're live, I'm got a nice, maybe a blue collar slob with a nice glass of Zinfandel here, or perhaps I'm actually a RL, Soul Blight General with a little glass of something else. You'll never know. It's the internet. Sure, indeed. Well, I've got my soapy light and water as always. So, you know, that's my standard thing. Really living high class for me. Anyways, yes, man, Zach, I am fully recovered from VinciCon 21, did not get a lot of sleep over the weekend. It was great. Tonight we're gonna talk about the new Slanesh Battle Tome. Lot to unpack. Tuck in, folks. This is gonna be a big one, a long one. I got a lot to say. It's great. Yeah, so we'll get into it. But first, of course, the news. Tom, what do we got? We got some hoofy rumor engine. We do. It's up on the screen right now. It is a new chaos model of some kind that is going to be coming with the third book, which is Broken Realms and Bellacor. Yup. That's maybe a new Marauder horseman.  Yeah. You can really tell by the horseshoes on that. Is that what that is, Vince? Yep. Only chaos horses get scars on there. Chaos horses have that particular horseshoe. Yes. Could it be another chariot model? Could be. Sure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yes, of course. Like, I could see it being a hero on horse of some kind. It could be a new Marauder horseman. Although I actually think the Marauder horseman held up decently better than the Marauders, that's not actually the exact same guys. Do you know what I think it is? Or it could be a new chariot of some kind. Sure, what's that? I think it's the multi-part cast warrior or cast knight, can't. Yeah, the problem with that is all of the chaos knights have armor on that part of their leg. So, I mean, look, it could be. Like, maybe it's a complete resculpt, but it would have to be a literal resculpt because every chaos knight has armor on the, I don't know what to, I don't know if horses have shins. Okay, like, I don't know if that's how their leg is divided. I don't know horse minds. I think that's an ankle. I think that's an ankle you're looking at. Well, this is the ankle, this is the ankle, this is a shin, right? My point is, is that like, how long do you think a horse's ankle is, man? It's like, your ankle is a pretty small joint. But whatever this bone is on a horse, it's all covered, they're all armored. See, I think you're over committed to the horse. This is a new best of course sculpt. Oh. See, it's prancing. He's prancing, yeah, it's doing a little.  Yeah, yeah. And you can see the little like tough of fur here that looks like a goatee. Yeah, sure. Best of core. Doing a little dressage is what you're telling me there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. See, now that we know vampires are inevitable, it's no fun saying it's vampires. I got to, I got to change gears. New best of course. Sure. Sure. What else would they nerf be the chaos? Incidentally, the new tome is coming and they're going to be OP. They had to get out ahead of that and nerf the depraved drove ahead of time with this mesh ball. I don't disagree. I don't disagree. So, hey, cool, cool beans. Yeah, I mean, I am very excited about broken realms bellicor and an interesting chaos civil war. It's not the civil war I wanted, but I'll take it, seems really cool. Like I love the idea of bellicor going after Archeon. So that's great. It's been missing from the narrative. Honestly, like Archeon needs consequences at ever. It just has like a narrative, like when you're writing stories, you know, conflict, subversion, how do you get there? Like those are the components of the story. Archeon has just, as far as I can tell, just been winning too hard. And so he got bored of winning so hard.  Yeah, he's just winning, too busy winning, but working on writing a new battle tome. Yeah, he's writing a new battle tome. He's been like, he's been doing the warrior poet thing, like up on like a mountain top, like watching at the sun bleed and like writing high coups, like whatever you do when you've already succeeded ultimately at your first goal the first time. And now you're just like, I mean, now we're just in bonus rounds, like.  And I'm like, look, homie, have you read these two scrolls? I don't know what you're, I don't know what world you're living in. A death master would be thrilled if he got one, if he got one wound on Archeon, you'd be like, man. That's victory. That is the best death master in the history of death masters.  The greatest death master ever.  It'll make it sweeter when he gets revenge later on, right? Like you've got to show him have some resistance. And bellicor is due for a win because he's pretty much been the chaos jobber. They don't want their main chaos guy to lose. They send a bellicor to lose instead just from a writing standpoint, take some risks, quit making him a jobber, have him like succeed, have him get some power, have him use himself. Look, I'm not opposed, I'd love to see it. I love Archeon, obviously. Well, maybe this is why Archeon doesn't just smash everybody. Like when the elves go and mess with Nagash, maybe the reason why Archeon doesn't just win, right? When the elves go and I move out. He's too busy, he's too busy winning elsewhere.  Right, right. He could use the, he could use the butt of the sword and blow him into the, into Adams. To be fair, Catacross only lost because of the mount in singular combat. They might have been evenly matched. Sure. I mean, I've read their board scrolls. Catacross did my least favorite trope in anime or like Warhammer, which is he just has planned Archeon.  I gotta be like, excellent. My guy did the just as planned for once. Of course, yes. Everybody loves a Xanatos gambit. All right, so yeah, it's a horse. It's a chaos horse and we all are looking forward to Broken Realms Velikor, because that sounds pretty cool. Now if we just only knew when the second book was gonna come out, we're already talking about the third one at any rate. Next month, they said it's coming next month. Yeah, I know. That's not more, I mean, given that's going, that means probably the dead middle of the month since we know the first release of the month is the Kill Team stuff, so that's fine. All right, what else we got? Yeah, so this weekend, there were some, you know, there's a preview show. There was Stuff Drop, some new models for Nighthawn. Model. And new model for Nighthawn. And a new model for Skeletons for Deathrattle for Soul Blight. And they said, importantly, they said Soul Blight Gravelords when they said this. Yeah, they did, yes. They importantly said that. So not like, hey, L.O.N. got a new model. We got to see all of the box for Curse City. Yeah. And got to see some elves. We did. It was a great reveal.  We did it during Vinnie Kahn. So, Minniak and N'John and Sam were all here and we had a big fun time talking about them. But, Meph, what'd you think of the reveal show? What you're writing? Okay, so I fell into the trap of expectation, which is something I hazarded everyone who watches my stuff from ever doing. Like, never have expectations. You were expecting to see the whole Soul Blight thing, or at least a good take on it. Two weeks in a row, I was expecting to see something for the Soul Blight Gravelords or two reveals in a row. I'm like, come on, we got Potato Cam, you got it out the way, quit teasing me. And so we saw that silhouette and I'm like, this is a blood knight. Like 100% the most blood knight silhouette I've ever seen. And I remember it goes on the screen. And first, I see the helmet because they're doing the thing where the model's spinning and I see the helmet, I see the horse. I'm like, I'm mid-typing Tom.  Mid-typing Tom. And then they zoom in on the face and it's a skeleton. And I'm like, dun dun dun. I'm like, okay, okay. And I'm like, like they got me.  At this point, I know Games Workshop is personally trolling me. Mephisto, like they are like this. We are trolling Mephisto.  You know, like when the war, like seeing a war band virtually means nothing for releases, right? So like when that one half was like, you know, that's the war band, you're like, okay. But now we saw like the awesome Hair Lady and you know, I saw the silhouette. I was convinced we're finally giving Soul Blight and I had to really fast regroup kind of in real time watching it live. I usually need to data parse my thoughts and I in real time had to regroup for my disappointment.   Like I love skeletons, you know, I've run a hundred skeletons in Nagash. I have three white kings already. Hmm, come on. Okay, enough about death though. The rest of it though, LRL, awesome. I think the traditional high elf players get something that they wanted from the get go. I'm glad they led with the weird. You got a twos and nines people. People would have felt betrayed if you had gotten the normal stuff first. And then the second launch was just the crazy weird stuff.  So I think it was smart that they actually led with the weird first. Cool, your sword masters now. Sorry, sword lords or blade lords. Everything is just a synonym. Like they're direct proxies. It's actually kind of funny. So that's cool. I'm trying to remember Night Haunt. I hope they released that hero sculpt with an apology letter to Night Haunt players. Like when you buy it, an apology letter comes with it. We're sorry about your lantern from White Dwarf. We apologize for that. PS, this model is OP as heck. It costs a hundred points and does everything the army needs. And now it's busted S tier. We are sorry for just jobbing you out for two years. So that's that. And then Cursed City is just breathtaking. I mean, it's one of the coolest boxes I think I've ever seen. The, in particular that the Grave Master or whatever who looks like a like right out of a Del Toro flick, like Silent Hill and Del Toro combined to make this one mega beast with a shovel. One of the coolest things I've ever seen and that sort of Vargulf, the new Vargulf. You know, man, new Smash Bat, he's here, he's ready. It proved to me that you can make Ghouls. Ghouls are kind of like a blank canvas. It proved to me that you can make Flesh Intercourts like really awesome.  Just real quick talk about the Roller Coaster I've been on here. Cause when I originally thought, okay, we're gonna get this big vampire release. I was like, all right, sweet. If it's this whole really vampire focused thing, I like vampires, but actually it's always put me off of death as I honestly could not give less of a hoot about the basic minions of death. Like you mentioned you love skeletons. Hey, great.  Like I understand that. I get the, I get it. I'm not, you know, I'm basting you for your likes, right? I'm just saying like to me, skeletons, zombies, wolves, bats, this kind of nonsense. I was just like, I don't want all this. I want sweet vampires. Like I think vampires are the coolest. Coolest. Right? All Castlevania all the time. Yeah, yeah. That's fine. And this release has clearly like gone, you know, the Roller Coaster I've been on as I've realized, as we've all come to realize, I think, that this really is just the full replacement for LON and what this army's now going to be, right? And probably encapsulate most of that stuff. I'm sure they'll, I'm sure they'll bin some things. I'm sure we'll get like clearly those bat swarms that are in Curse City are just going to end up being the bat swarms for, you know, soul-like grave lords. And yeah, fine. Yeah, I didn't even talk about those in my own show. I'm like, I just skipped over. I don't care about bat swarms and like rap. First of all, those bat swarms are amazing. I do love them.  He's like, put it on over here. Favorite little bat, whoever sculpted that, great work.  I'm like, no, well now I'm probably not getting that army. But then they brought me right back with Smash Bat. And I was like, look, if they don't roll in FEC and it stays its own thing and that tome holds, guess what boys, we're in it to win it. Like I'm Smash Bat in a way. That's a 24 hour army project waiting to happen. I'm going to get me three of those Var Gelks or whatever they're called, whatever nonsense they decided to call this one and work Smash Bat in a way. So yeah, good stuff. The reveal was great. And I really want to see them do more stuff like that where they focus completely on one thing. Like this was all AOS. I would just love them to do the next one. Just do it all 40K, then I don't have to watch, right? Like I don't have to watch a bunch of stuff. I don't care about, no offense. Like some people play both and that's fine. If you do great, no, no issue. But then you get two shows if you get both, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. But like, then I just don't have to care. I, you know, I don't have to worry. There's an hour and 15 minutes of content I'm watching for maybe 15 minutes of something I might care about. Right? So at any rate, I say split them up like that, you know? And just do it that way. I think that's way better. Before we move too far off Cursed City though, one last thing, zombie ogres and ogre vampires, like- Yeah, both sweeties all get out.  I think they look junk because they all have gravestones on their back. If it was like three of them and the other ones were zombies with other accoutrements or nonsense going on, I'd be like, fine. But like the fact that it's universal is weird. Well, the Gravelord himself, that's the mini I want to see explored. The way they do Night Haunt where like they took like, you know, here's a wraith. Let's see like where we can take Night Haunt in all the different directions. That's the guy they need to grab and go like, let's do a whole range of this and there's your dead walkers. Yeah. Not these like, not these like these other zombies that look quite frankly cartoonish in the face of everything else going on in that box set. 100% agree. 100% agree. Yep. Marvelous Mr. D said, I'd only approve if they split space brains into their own show. Yes. Just like absolutely like reveal show, space marines. And then like, then all of us can just be like, nah, there's just leave it to the space marines players. Write the letterhead in the logo with a crayon like it deserves like space marines like yeah. Yes. And as Rocco has mentioned, it's up Rocco, hope you're doing well. The ogre vampire who's in charge of the place is in fact a vampire it because he is, he sailed his fleet in to get there. So it is funny that in the end, he is a vampire it. So there you go. All right. There's a lot of vibes in there, it looks cold too. Like you're really getting like, they really populate that city and make it feel like a place in the more realms I think. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. What's next Tom? Very question. What's next? They released to the narrative of the Kerr City. I know the news, don't worry. I've got your cover Tom. Sorry, I look for it. Lost my browser. They released the new, the story of how the Kerr City got that way. Right. And it's actually really cool. Cause it was this like mournhold was the name of the city before it was Ulfankar. And they kind of show this deal that got made. It just, it's like a really cool story and shows how like how screwed up the city got when Nagash flipped the, when the Necroquake happened and Shaish flipped. So the stability, stable parts now the outside and the high magic parts now the inside.  I'm sure that we're going to get plenty of expansions for it. And that's cool. I can't wait to see what other figs they explore in this space, just like what they did with Blackstone Fortress. They'll probably be overpriced boxes. All right. Totally. They're four minis and some cards and stuff. But okay. They're going to sell that initial box at a loss so that they can sell the X-Packs that are like just infinite sideways profit. Totally believe it. I think it'll be lower than we think. Fingers crossed.  But I agree with you. I think they'll want this one to be a bit of a loss leader cause it'll set people on for the new season of buying five expansions over the next year. Right. Right. You know, sacrifice 20 pounds now to make 120 pounds off of everybody later. That's just- It's the video game. It's like what video games are doing with like their paid services. They sell you kind of a shell game and then you buy the- Yeah, yeah. And by the way, yes, Whiskey Tango. I know they're not actually selling at a loss. That's that I'm using loss leader in the standard industry term. Like it just means at a, like in this case, I mean simply at a lower margin. It's at a loss. Yeah. At any rate. Okay. What else? So yeah, that was cool. Good story. There you go. Yeah. Yeah, we're getting closer to me finally seeing my like city's a Sigmar shy-ish city and what that might be, you know, like- Yep. It feels like if they ever redeemed this thing, which could be the end of it. Like I wonder if they won't at the end of this. Like let's say the heroes are successful and the city's redeemed and he's driven out. Do we get a shy-ish city of Sigmar? Like do we get more and hold as a city at the end? That'd be super sweet. Like in early 2022 or something, you know? Yeah. I think it's like that, you know, like why I like Broken Realms as an idea. Like I want to see that stuff playing out in this. So that'd be great. Like you would feel like this new city's here because I played through the thing and killed the bad guy and same- I did it.  Which would be awesome. Okay. What else we got, Tommy? Um, we did see in the inventory today that blood lore or blood knights and vampire lords are out of stock in most locations. Yup. Kind of a big deal. Yeah, not temporarily, like no longer available. Right. So good, like the official Herald that these things are dead. And of course, I mean, we've already seen the new vampire lord on foot. Lady with the bats in her hair. So that's not really that much of a surprise. Yes. Lady, when you're bats in your hair, I'm smiling. So at any rate, the theory that like this wasn't inevitable and we've been saying blood knights, blood knights, blood knights forever, there was no way they were releasing a new book called Soul Blight Gravelords. Like it just, there was no universe where they stick to a $100 fine casket and be like, this is the thing. No, obviously we were getting a new kit. This just confirms it because they came to the old one good. I can't wait to see how amazing these new blood knights are. See the only question I really have and maybe it's, maybe it's more semantical, but is this replacing LON or is this vampire counts 2.0? In essence, LON felt a little bit like vampire counts, but like, is this really like, that was a beta test. This is what the AOSC version of that truly is. 100% yes. Yeah, this is going to drink LON's milkshake. It drinks it up. Okay, like it is, you're done. Like it's done. This will, they will officially say like the LON Battle Tome is retired. This is the new, this is the replacement. Fine, as a Herald of Death, like as one of the main homers for it, you got to do something and if you do it well, then I won't be angry that you took away LON. That book was already felt outdated when it came out. As we've seen from two recent releases, Miff, I guess you get to roll a die. We'll see what happens. Yeah, I guess so, yeah. Yeah, never mind. Immediately recant. Hope for the best, fear the worst. That's right. Okay. Any other news stuff, it was quite weak because we had such a huge news item in the release thing, right? Which is fine. And the fact it's all 40K stuff building up to pariah nexus. Which, cool. What's for a pick? Yeah, it's fine. Good for them. And I'm sure there are people who are excited. I'm happy for them. All right, so let's just get right to it. Let's go into some pick of the week. All right, so a pick of the week. Miff, what would you like to share with everybody this week? Yeah, see, I'm gonna deviate from my last two times. I'm not gonna tell people to watch or listen to more Wisconsin based podcasts like Cubic shenanigans, The Mortal Realms or playing in slain. I'm not gonna do that. I'm actually gonna put something a little bit more, you know, international on blasts. Rocco Yoboy just started up. He's one of those sort of cross-pollinators. He tends to be in most people's chats, most people's streams. He just started up a YouTube channel. He's kind of doing some instructional style stuff to sort of raise that competitive, well, I don't wanna say competitive, but to raise the sort of like informational water level that players have going into our game. Because we tend to, our players aren't like a hundred percent knowledge base going in. And so he's just some basic, you know, raising of the water level type stuff.  He just started a channel. He's got a really unique twist on how he delivers his lore. I think it's pretty great. I know Doug's been helping him from two plus tough kind of his intro together. So he's one to watch, especially if you're more lore focused. I think he's got like four videos right now. They're all Slenash stuff. Like he'll go through the lore as you just see like a screen of him playing through like Vermintide or something. So pretty cool, pretty cool. Like a really like a harmony between YouTube lore videos and the Twitch streamer side of things. Very nice. I will link both channels below. Both of them are excellent pillars of the community and I'm more than happy to spoof their stuff. Tom, what about you? Pick of the week. What do you got to share with everybody? Yeah, I'm gonna choose a podcast. I don't know if I would consider them new per se. I mean, they're new-ish within the last couple months. It's Kentucky Fried Wargaming. It's a podcast that's kind of local to our Kentucky folks and they have a good 14 or so episodes under their belt. So they started last November and it's just, it is an enjoyable show. And so I just wanted to throw that one out there. Nice, nice. Are they broadcasting from Harlan County? That is all. No, I do not believe so. Darn, that's a shame. Four seasons into justify, that's my main focus. Apparently all of Kentucky happens. Everything interesting happens in Harlan County as near as I can tell. Clearly. Or sometimes in Lexington, which I agree with that. That is, so that's a perfectly fine city. At any rate, my shout out for this week is gonna go to, my pick of the week is going to go to Mr. Honest Wargamer Rob, who did a wonderful review show with Nathan of the Slanesh Battle Tome. It's great, he gets to one of the most fun parts is when he describes the model to Nathan and then has Nathan guess the points. It provides for hours of entertainment, watching Nathan trying to guess the points in the Slanesh Battle Tome. So, at any rate, check that out. In case people didn't already know that I have played Nathan IRL, he is every bit as awesome in reality. And of course, Rob is a darling, so. Yes, brilliant. Rob is such a darling and such a nice guy, he was able to get Tom a best sports trophy. If there are- No, we tied, we tied like a three for a third, I think to be clear. Do you have a best sports trophy because of you being on a team with Rob? No, like no, because we didn't get trophies for a third. But we were in the running and that's the news item here, is that Rob, we were in the running because Rob- Tom has never been in the running for best sports in any tournament ever, ever, ever. I mean, I don't know. Hey, you guys got my favorite opponent vote once. Wow, that's cool. He has gotten, yeah. Probably the same time, if you're talking about the game I think you're talking about, you guys got mine as well, I would say so, there you go. Because that was a legendarily fantastic game. So, all right, cool. Well gentlemen, let's turn to some hobby time blowing through these quickly because I want to get to the meat of the show. Meph, what have you been working on? You've been working on anything, man? Just a assembly right now, it's a little too cold and I do not have a garage so much as a shed. So like really no priming going on there. Maybe it's time I get an airbrush, I don't know. But a lot of building, a lot of building. It is, it was. Should be like a long time ago. You should purchase an airbrush like a month and days starting this hobby, I fully believe that. All right, all right, yeah. But I've been putting together a lot of Blood Bowl. I got the Blood Bowl season two box. I've got some third party minis that finally came out of a Kickstarter that recently shipped to me. So, a lot of Blood Bowl. Blood Bowl's been just a little, everyone did their sort of hobby lockdown army type thing. Mine was get into Blood Bowl, which is that game that I've liked for 20 years but never played. Sure. So here we are. Nice. So just putting together some stuff. Awesome. Tom, what about you? What's been on the hobby desk? You still digging yourself out of magic cards? Are you actually getting back some more, Hammer? No, no, like I don't know if you can tell. Like my magic card queue is empty. And so like I've been putting some paint on dwarves. Nice. So, yeah, it's been fun. Awesome. That's fantastic. Obviously this whole weekend was very hobby focused for me. I worked on the combined diorama project I did with Sam and Scott and John. And it was a lot of fun. Had a great time with that. We all posted it up and let people guess. I will, I'm not sure when we're gonna tell people what's right or maybe they already did. I have no idea. But it's behind me in this shot somewhere. I don't know if you can see it or not, but it's there, which one was mine. And that was super fun. So I did get that model painted over the weekend as well as getting in multiple games of AOS as well as getting in a couple, so much. We played a D&D game. We got AOS games in. It was a jam-packed, con-filled weekend. But now I'm back to Demon Man here. He's still coming along. Still got a lot of work to do on him, but he's progressing. There you go. Is that whip action going on there? Yeah, he's got this big whip.  But yeah, this guy is completely over-designed and insane. It's a nightmare. Look at that tail. Look at all these little spines for no reason. But yeah, so I'm working on not bloodthirster here. And his wings are somewhere else. His wings are over behind me. And I should have probably done all the red together with his wings attached, but I didn't. And now I'll live to regret that. So anyways, but he'll be done soon enough. Okay. Oh, I was very happy too, by the way, Matt, you'll be happy to know that my first game I played this weekend was my Giants against my sons, against Ninjohn's OBR. Okay. We ground some bones to make some bread. That's what I'll say. There was no... Was the tithe paid?  So I guess that's something. Hey, Nagesh cares not from where it went the bones flow.  You can have them. So at any rate, that was a very fun game. That's a, it's bad beats. You really don't have the table coverage as OBR to deal with what the Sons of Bahamut are trying to do. It might be the only book you have a strong advantage. It's true, like OBR is Giants best matchup. And I was leading into it. I don't play like a weak taker build. I play a lean in all offense build. And he had big hordes of more tech and I was in Stampa.  So it's not a great day to be a more tech guard. Yeah. Yeah. Every battle to him since that book came out just beats it almost like we deserve the nerf, huh? Sorry. Sorry. No, I, I was But it was a good game. It was a lot of fun. John's an awesome player. And it was really fun to play against him. So it was always good. All right. Gentlemen, with hobby time out of the way, obviously my slanesh stuff isn't here by the way. I'll turn to that eventually here. But now let us turn He shelved it. He's gotten rid of all of his slanesh stuff because of this book. Oh, I just ordered more. Like I, like, No, it's just the standard, the shipping delay here in the US because of the ice storm or whatever. Man, I don't have my stuff yet, which is fine. It gives me a chance to finish up that big demon guy, which by the way, that's pretty uniform. I stopped into my local store today and they were ranting at me to rant about GW because none of their slanesh stuff was in. And I told them, don't worry about it.  Very funny. Solid.  The storm of the century. Yeah, exactly. Like, there were the two of them. And that's what I said. Yeah, I'm not. Come on, serious. That's like, I'll yell at GW for a lot of things, controlling the weather, not one of them. Yeah, that's not, come on now. Really, like we got to be somewhat realistic here. Like there was a serious issue last week. People were, you know, like people were in a bad way, especially in places like Texas and stuff. Let's not getting your war dollies is kind of not a pie on the priority list. Okay. At any rate. So, here we go. Gentlemen, let's start with an overview from each of you. Meph, what do you think of Slanesh 2021? Okay. See, you should start with my take after someone else's take, so I can sound like a contrarian. Oh, okay. That's fine. We'll do that. No, no, no, I think, like with anything, the negative isn't as negative and the positive isn't as positive. The truth of this book lies in between. Holistically, I think the book is actually pretty smart. I'm not gonna say like awesome, best book ever. It's very smart because I think, and perhaps to the detriment of the book, games workshop listened to a lot of the feedback. Slanesh probably had the most cacophonous roars of NPE and outrage and hatred. We started up conversations of comp all over again because of where Slanesh was and for how long it was there. So I think that they went at this book changing a lot of that stuff in pretty intelligent ways. It's gonna be evident really early on in the allegiance abilities and I think that's where kind of the strength of the book lies is in a lot of like where they went with some of these allegiance abilities. Okay, all right. I also think they got gun shy though and there were opportunities to, when Locust of Diversion was first printed and we were in the height of just acceptance phase, of mourning that the activation wars were here, right? We were just in the acceptance phase. I looked at them and I went, hey, that's actually kind of cool.  The end result wasn't awesome for us because now none of my units are activating, your whole army goes twice before I go. That didn't feel good, but narratively fluff wise that felt pretty interesting. And then they take this, so the new Locust is like, okay, you don't get to pilot. So they approach these things, pretty, like I said, I think intelligently just based on the feedback, but the problem is, whilst communities are really good at sounding the alarm that something's wrong, I don't think they're always great at identifying what is wrong. And to listen to wholesale all the criticisms, probably push the, again, I think they got a little gun shy. But holistically, I do think it is a smart book. Okay, all right, fair enough. Tom, what do you think? I think it's fine. Sure. I mean, I say that as one like... Are you like the dog with the coffee in the house on Firefine or are you legitimately fine? Like, I'm like post-traumatic stress of an abuse survivor from the prior book. Sure. Looking at it go, you know what, they can deal with it. Sure. Like, because the reality is, is that like the book's not fine. And we're going to talk about that, I think tonight a little bit, but it reminds me a lot of KO 2.0 before the points adjustments. Like when I sat down to make lists, this book was painful. Yeah, yeah. It was a difficult, like it was a trying experience building lists. But I think that it just like the KO book, I think all of it could go away. And by go away, I mean a lot of the pain with just some points adjustments. Well, okay. I mean... So I say that to say, I think the book's in a good place. Like, in that you can only go up, but I mean, it's not a complete travesty.  Their army's been painful to play. I think it's probably better than it was for them. Maybe, but I think that the future's more hopeful. Okay, see, I never want to punish. I don't look at book and balance, and like I don't look at balance as punitive. And I discussed takes like that, that they were great, so they deserve to be bad now. I hate that. And I know, John, obviously, Tom was being sarcastic, but I get it.  Yeah, I know, but there are people who legitimately feel that way, and I appreciate you addressing that, yes. But I mean, there's someone in chat, and I'm sorry, the red wizard here, everything in the book needs to be like 20 to 40 points cheaper. Every single War Scroll should just go down. And some of them buy a lot more than 40. Slanecore, oh, sorry. Everything, like, here's the number that I would pitch out, Matt, is that all of the new stuff is 30 to 40% over-costed. Like, okay. Like, I feel really strongly about that number, and I'm gonna come back to that percentage as we evaluate units and their points. Sure. Because I think what we're gonna find is, is if you cut about 30% off, most of those units, 40% off of some of them, you get back to levels where you go, okay, that's just now worth the points. Okay. Yeah, I think those are all good thoughts. I find this book, I want it to open just like I did with The Sons of Behemoth, where I read from the beginning of a tale of two cities. Because I have found this book much the same as I did Sons and much the same as I did KO before it, to be a poorly designed book that's challenging to work with and interpret, that has a deeper foundational set of issues beyond just the power level. I think on the power level, it's probably fine.  It's hanging out with Night Haunt, probably a little bit lower. Yeah, exactly. I mean, so I don't lament that. I think more books should be coming out in that kind of power level. If the game was full of more things that looked like Ogre Glutton's, the game would probably be a much better game overall, right? And to me, Ogre Glutton's ironically, I suppose, given the nature of the model, are almost the definition of a unit sitting squarely in the fat middle, right? The book itself is challenging to read, to write lists. It has very little in the way of design that guides or inspires the player as to exactly what to do. It's frustrating, full of sort of non-bos, and the point situation certainly doesn't help, though it's certainly not the only problem. There are good bones here. The war scrolls are interesting. There are definitely quality scrolls. We're gonna talk about many of them. I think that the foundational elements of the book are not rotten. That is to say, as I talked last week about the difference why I don't count design, I don't count the war scrolls in the design. I see them as two separate elements, right? Because you could play the game with just the war scrolls. The book is an add-on that utilizes the war scrolls to holistically make something more more than the sum of its parts, or that's what it should be doing when done well. So the bones of the scrolls here, I think are good with one highly, highly notable exception we'll discuss that is just probably a trash fire. But the problem is that with these solid bones, we overpriced them and then did fairly uninspiring stuff with them. I agree with your read of Gunsci when I say that the nature of playing this army is that when it felt like they could make interesting choices, they made the sort of mad choice instead. Not necessarily the worst, certainly not the best. It's sort of the rise of Skywalker of books. It's pitching so down the middle as to be and trying to do so many things without any coherent strategy that it feels in the end incoherent. There is a lot of positive, there is a lot of negative and it's hard to disambiguate the design from the competitive, from the points. Like there's so many things pulling in different directions. It's become really, it was very difficult for me to actually formulate my thoughts around this book as someone who's played Slenesh for 15 years, right? Go ahead. I don't wanna interrupt your thoughts here, but I have to wonder the cognitive bias we bring into our game by having experience with it and where Games Workshop's eye is on the new player reading this stuff. Cause clearly we bring bias to this Slenesh book. Everything we're gonna say here has a bias, whether it's the, I'm glad you got nerfed or it's, I love this army, why don't, you know, or something in the middle of the road, you know, what it should be. Like I have to wonder how, if they really wrote this as like a oops, we're sorry, you know, they took risks with that first Slenesh book. I actually like was one of the only people left defending it at the end. You know, like, you know, like they need to nudge some of these, these oppressive abilities in different directions, but like they took, they went in really cool design directions with it. The prairie of these numbers were out of whack, right? Like way out of whack. Sure. The rewarding you for doing the right thing with double rewards was like, you know, I remember seeing the Ciberites Battalion and you know, Slenesh for me is a vacation home, right? This is my beach house. You know, my forever home is death.  Every now and then I take a trip to the cabin up north, play a piece of chaos. And every now and then I go to the beach house, rock some Slenesh. Like I didn't have that like attach, I don't have that attachment to this, but I still like was defending some of this stuff. And I feel like they could have like what, what is Slenesh, right? Like that's the question you go in when you ask it. And I saw that Ciberites Battalion. I'm like, this is everything I always want. Yeah. I want every, every army to have a battalion like this, zero to three or three to six of your heroes.  We're going to reward you with it having a good ability and it fits in everything. I'm just like. Yeah. And that's what I say. That's what I mean when I say like, some of the bones here are good. This isn't, you know, the discussion on the internet. Well, they slapped that on the wrist in this book, ironically, one of the things where I'm just like, why is this, this thing is already something I'm going to do. It's already good. And then they reward me for doing it. In this book, they punish you for trying to do it in the place it feels like you want to do it. Well, not like, so can I talk about it? Like, I want to talk about my initial experience. So thank you. I think it's related to this. Sure. Of like picking up the new book and wanting to like, I went into this wanting to build one of these armies. Yeah. Right. You and I talked about what we're doing. Cause the mortals that like, just to get something out of the way, it's not related to the book, but I think we can all three be in agreement here that the new mortal models are like just mind-blowingly good. Yeah.  That's an easy head swap, right? Like you can have a little minor knits here or there, but on the whole, this new model range, whether we're talking about Sigvald or Glutos or the executioners, the mere bedans, that is to say, whatever, or, or, or, or are fantastic. Okay. Like this is, this is the model release. I always wanted. I have nothing negative about it. I have hated seekers nearly my entire life. I adore these seekers. Yeah. The new exalted seekers are great design. The fact that they have different rules, even better, like justification for them being bigger and different. They're adorable little chocobo monsters that are kind of weird and like, it's great.  And I'm like, this is my favorite sculpt in this range.  They did something right. The models are stunning. They are. So Tom, I want to go to your, so just, I wanted to get that out of the way because I have nothing to praise for the sculptors and painters and everybody and all of that. As usual, they continue to kill it. And I will be thrilled. I will be ecstatic to paint these models at any rate. Please continue Tom. So I went into this wanting to make this work. And I began digging into the war scrolls and just reading and just searching because I wanted this mortal angle. And the more I read, the more surprised I was at how much all the interesting stuff that used to be in the book was gone. Just hand over fist, like I remember reading Celeste and I was like, oh, I love this guy. And I was like, wait, didn't they have a dual activation ability? Where did that go? And then I got to the epitome and I was like, oh, what about that? Wait, didn't they have re-roll casting? What happened to that? Yeah. And I just realized like the farther I went down the list, the more that all the really interesting design, like what Matt was saying, just disappeared. Yeah. It's all the stuff people were complaining about like that you could re-roll your unbinds with the epitome. Like why does this non-spellcasty army have one of the best unbinders in the game? Like it's a checklist of everything someone complained about just getting scrubbed away. Like this is that sharp edges. I was trying to look, to try to look smarter and look up the name of the person who designed braid. He mentioned this thing when you design a video game or when you design stuff just from a design principles in general, like you wanna leave some sharp edges. You know, something you can make a perfect ball, a perfect sphere, but no one's gonna remember it. Yeah, you can't hold onto it, right?  You see that pointing out of it and now this object is interesting. Why is this like this? And I mean, that's, I think that's the greatest offense is when you take it with the sharp edges yourself. I love that Tom turned his camera off and forgot to mute himself, by the way, it's very funny. Fantastic. But I mean, that also coincides with the twos and nines of design where you want that strong emotional response, strong positive, strong negative. You don't want people to be ambivalent.   Yeah, and ultimately when I read this, Tom, when I think about how I would approach this as a new person, I don't know what they're grabbing onto here. Like if the models grab you, great, fine, good. And that's what does a lot of heavy lifting. Let's not fool ourselves here, right? That models don't do a ton of heavy lifting in our interest in an army. Like a duh, okay. But at the same time, when I think of like trying to be a newer person in this game, there's no universe where I'd recommend Slenesh to a new player. Not as their first, not even as their second army. Like this is maybe like this and LRL or like third armies. The skill floor. Their movements seems to be solved. Yeah, on like trying to put together an army here that doesn't just get like flat lined off the table accidentally in a match. I'm not talking about like some competitive nonsense.   Like they didn't even know what happened. They just somehow blew you your 80 wounds off the table. I mean, it's a very finesse, finesse army. Like, and like you said, like, you know, this is a third army, you know, you know, maybe I'm very selfish in my in how I'm looking at the book because I'm like, I know how to make this work. Right? Like I know how to work this. You know, I know how to like do some stuff with this. And I know what I would do with this.  Sure, very nice. All right, gentlemen, shall we get into it? Shall we get into the meat of this? Shall we really, shall we gorge ourselves gluto style on this, on this army? And it wasn't really a question. It was redundant. Yes, we're doing that. Okay, here we go. Do you have anything special prepared that maybe like some sort of- Why I- So cute. Like some sort of- Why, what is this? But a presentation ready to go. Oh, tuck in folks. I got a lot of slides. Okay. This is why you brought me on to make an already long running episode even longer to really hammer home the point. I'm not going to lie and say I didn't try to get extra sleep last night because I knew I wasn't going to sleep at all tonight because we're going to have a long show. This is what it is. Okay. All right, here we go. He knights us the niche, 2021. Okay. Let's start out with our army overview as the feed catches up to me shifting around between display mode and all of that. All right. So, okay, so army overview. This is how I would summarize this army. I'm keen for your feedback gentlemen. I think this is a complex skirmish army with low defense summoning and mobility. Low defense, summoning, I suppose I should have Oxford Comma that and mobility. Always Oxford Comma. Yeah, I didn't in this case, but I apologize. Like this is putting together a lot of slides. I didn't really have time to go through and, you know, grammar it. Anyways, strengths, medium, fast mobility. Not the fastest army around, which is sad. There are a lot of much more faster armies, but it's fast. It doesn't fly, right? Right, it doesn't fly. You've got a lot of slow parts of the army trying to weigh it down, especially in your characters. You know, you've got a lot of 14 inch movement, which is good, but we're not talking about like, we're not talking about IDK or iron jaws, or even or beasts or even Nurgle. There is no unit in this book as fast as the fastest unit in Nurgle. Something about that feels ethically wrong to me, but it is medium, fast mobility. You do have a decent amount of mobility, certainly. Powerful, but limited summoning. We'll get into that. Pile in tricks. Pile in tricks for days. I'm trying to decide when I want to make this joke, so I'm just gonna say it now, which is that the best way to play this army would make Cardi B jealous by driving a giant Mack truck into the tiny little garage of the rules loophole of the six inch pile in trick. It simply like the amount we're gonna have to talk about this is more than I ever want to talk about a rules loophole. And yet it is one of the truly three major strengths of this army. And two of the three sub factions are decent enough in that they have a lower cost. They're also fairly uninspiring, but at least they don't weigh you down with too much of a cost. So that's something. They punish you in a weird way. Like the way they approach battalions will get into it.  Why, I guess. Yeah, weaknesses, high points cost, fragile units that comes with a star, because there is this weird anvil build we'll talk about later that doesn't actually, I think have any gas in the engine, but you can do it. Low synergies, poor battle line, maybe the worst battle line they've ever published in a book so far. And that's saying something. Weak magic, weak to shooting, no high-rend, still an NPE army, though better. To be very clear about my feeling on this, this is a more fun army to play and a more fun army to play against than its old version. But that's like saying that dying by the guillotine is better than dying by VX gas. That is true, probably technically, but in the end you're still dead.  They'll just be somewhat frustrated, which is different. So there you go. Anything I missed, gentlemen, or any thoughts you have to add to the overall strength and weaknesses, the overview? I like the caveat on the summoning. It is good summoning, but this is where you're getting the hot takes on both sides. It's OP, it's not, it's very good summoning. It has one very important limiter on it and that really for me, this is what good summoning looks like, honestly. This is what good summoning looks like. And I guess some people just take issue with that. Sure. No good summoning should exist at all. Yep, that's cool, right on. Yep, I agree. Summoning's really tricky as we'll get into. I think that much like, and Meph, you and I have talked about this a lot, right? Like when they made giants, the first decision they made was like, we're gonna have this ridiculous objective taking rule and then the whole army suffered because of it, right? And I think with Slenesh they said, we're gonna have this pretty decent summoning, right? But now the whole army's gotta pay for that, right? And the summoning actually isn't enough to dig you out of the hole you're already in, but we'll get into it as we get through the discussion, right? Right, that limited part in the PowerPoint is very significant. It's powerful, but it is limited. This is not what OP looks like. We've seen what OP summoning looks like. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, like. You're not replacing your whole army turn two. That's not happening. No, I mean, exactly. Yeah, we'll get into the summoning, but I mean, what I'll say is it's intimidating when you say, hey, there's the realistic chance that you could get three keepers of secrets in a game. Like if you fiddled for that, you could probably get to something like that, right? But the problem is at that point, it doesn't matter, you're dead. Three units over the turn of a game, over the course of a game, do not dig you out, especially three models like that, right?  Well, and that's the thing is like, you've got your wind stroke or your path to victory sitting here pointing you left and to go for the big energy summoning strat, it points you right. Yeah. And so it's just not, I don't like the doomsaing going on about the summoning. I'm like, this is fine. No, exactly, it's part of the strat, certainly, but it's not, I think they overvalued it would be my argument when they were looking at the strat. I agree, I agree. I can do that, I agree. All right, cool, cool beans. Let's talk points. Once again, courtesy of our good friend, AOS coach. If you haven't checked him out, go check out the coach. He's great and we love him. And he was nice enough to provide me this wonderful graphic, so I didn't have to make one, which I appreciate. Thank you, coach. So remember last week when we looked at the dock slide and it was like all green arrows of just stuff inexplicably dropping like a rock. Yeah. Well, here we are. I mean, you could just, you could just make this the show and just leave this up for six hours. You could like, we could, like. I mean. We did it, folks. I got him to laugh. Yeah, that's good. It's really good, Meph. I liked that a lot. Yeah, I mean, you're right. We could spend days on this. Now, the thing with points that I want to preface everything with is like if points were the only thing wrong, then like who really cares? Is my honest answer, okay? Because points are like the easiest thing to fix. Like you can, they can fix those anytime. Like twice a year, they fix those. Literally twice a year, they fix them, right? So if points are the only thing that's wrong, then who cares? Like it's not a big problem.  The couple that all of the Bladebringer chariots going, shooting up in points like 20, 30 points is ridiculous. The Hellstriders, which are like never impressive and are certainly not now and are just like regular chaff-cab, like the equivalent of Marauder Horseman. The fact that those shot up 40 and 50 points respectively, that is bonkers points adjustments. Like in what universe? Seekers and seeker chariots? What? Like these- It's fine. None of these things showed up in lists, none of them. And I have so many of them from like the stuff people are just handing me from the boxes they don't want. Yes, they put out a box set with a bunch of this stuff in it and then just like went, ha-ha, boom. On the bright side, your investment into that dual box set, there was a lot more points you were buying in that box set than you thought you were. So that's nice. Hey, there you go. Yeah, no, there's the- Silver lining. Silver lining, yeah, there we go. The only thing I have to add to this is the mask did nothing wrong. The mask did nothing wrong. She's so great and wonderful and we all love her. And it's Garbo that she went up at all. It's whatever. Now, this is gonna be combined with the fact, by the way, like so all these existing points shot up and spoiler alert, the new units were not pointed aggressively, okay? They were quite in the opposite. So, yeah. Anything else you wanna say on this? Like it's inexplicable. The entire points situation in the book is inexplicable. There is no justification for this. This is not because of the summoning. The summoning does not buy enough to counter this. That is not how this works. Like, plenty of armies have summoning or model restoration or anything like that. And they aren't paying this insane premium. When we get to the slide where it talks about the wounds to point ratio, it is so off kilter compared to every other army. Like we aren't even in the ballpark. I mean, these are OBR points without OBR resilience or murder. Yeah. Like, I mean, Daemonette's being 20 points off of more tech guard is like the most comical comparison ever, right? Right. Yeah. This isn't saying like, oh, Sarah Bone Reapers need to be more expensive. This is saying this stuff is too expensive, you know? Yes. Yeah, I mean, I don't have the up arrow next to Daemonette, but that is a good point that they also did lose their Horde bonus. So, which is fine. I don't generally like Horde bonuses anyways. I would like them to actually be reserved for like Horde-y things. Like things that are truly. Yeah, goblins and, you know, like whatever stuff. Planned rats. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But whatever. Inexplicable, unjustifiable, fix this immediately. Like, they should fix this in the FAQ they publish for this book a month from now. That they just come out with an entirely new point sheet. It's like, oops, all varies. Sorry. Okay, that's how wrong it is. I mean, it does come to, there was a question asked earlier on something along the lines. Do you think some of the like the strong reaction on the other side, like more towards like your side of the reaction is that they did release a book that wasn't, you know, peak competitive power level, like that they did release something in the middle? I don't want that. I really don't want that. And it's not, my primary complaint, and I will repeat this 50 times, is not the competitiveness of the army. Yes, it's lower than it should be, but it's not that far off. I want middle tier, middle power books. I don't care that there are five bad boys tearing up the entire meta right now, being bad actors. That doesn't mean we should publish more bad actors. My mama taught me that two wrongs don't make a right. Okay, I want more middle books, not that. All right, my problem with the book is when they make choices like this and then have all of this underwhelming design to combine it with, right? That's why I created that, that quadrant map last week. And we'll, we'll get to that at the end of the show. Right, because my disappointment is less with, with, we'll see as we get into it, right? There's so much more to unpack than just like, oh, it's not powerful. Like, I don't care. I don't play a lot of powerful armies. You know what I mean? Like that's not, I... See, I personally always want to be that second tier of power, the one you don't expect. Like I always want to live in that space where like... Yeah. Unfortunately things I love end up being powerful because I love power at any cost. No, like I want to live in that sort of, that second tier, right? Like not S tier, A tier, low A tier. That's where I like to live personally with armies I play. You know, we're looking BC tier here. Yeah, exactly. I'm fine being in the middle. If I've got models I love and rules that make me, that let me feel like I'm expressing the army in a way that is fulfilling to me and what I feel like the army should be, if the army has an identity and I'm able to express that, you know, sort of win or lose, right? Then I'm generally happy, right? Like when I lose with my iron jaws, I still have a heck of a lot of fun because when I get my iron jaws, I'm like, oh, well, the point of this army is to go smash and bash people. And guess what? That's what's going to happen. You know, like regardless, win, I might lose, but I did some smashing. I did some bashing. We checked both the boxes. Game was a success. Okay. So I guess, what is Slenash's identity that has such a dissonance for you? I have no idea. And I don't think the writers of this book really know either. Okay, all right, cool. Because a skirmish finesse army, like that kind of a thing, right? In AOS, you have to either be, like if you're going to play a skirmishy mobile thing, you've got to either be able to stand still and take the hit, because ultimately this is a game about going to a place and standing on a thing or going to a place and killing the people that are currently standing on the thing, right? So like arguably the ways to win are, A, you can be tough enough to take the hit and stand. B, you can hit hard enough to remove the people. C, you can do those slightly less, but also be fast, right? Or D, you can project power in some way that you don't have to move over there, but you can handle the necessary threats and then move over with weak things that can't take a punch, right? Like those are kind of your four venues. This doesn't do any of those, right? It's sort of way that you would build this naturally. Okay, okay. That's a problem. Now, what it does do, now you can get there if you 2.9 people, like left and right. And that's what this game is. This book should be called 2.9 The Battletome. It's all 2.9ing people. We'll talk about that later. Okay. All right. If you don't know what I mean yet, don't worry, you will soon. See, that's a nice tease as they say. Vince loves a jank. That's what I wanna do. I wanna just rules, loophole my way to victories all day long. Yeah, like if they were not intending to design a battle tone that incentivized bad in PE, they fail because what's happened is is the incentive structure, the new incentive structure incentivizes these bad experiences. Yeah. Yep. Well, I mean, just, I'm gonna forget it by the time we get to the, you know the six hours the show deserves. The finesse thing that you just described is retreat and charge. That's what this army needs to just do across the entirety of it, you know? Some sort of play with the retreat and charge. Run and retreat and charge, yes. Like all of those should be doing constantly, right? The army should be like incredibly mobile, like running fast. I don't care about the no-fly thing. We never had Celestia. Yeah, no, don't have fly. Yeah. Yeah, no-fly is fine. I'm not asking for some weird, suddenly Celest units grow wings. Like it's not what I want. You're just this churning blender, this dance, this ballet of murder. And that's what it, right? And like they don't get that. Yeah, so. I'd kill for a Keltner up in here. Anyways, okay. So, let's talk about the basic allegiance ability, shall we guys? Because I mean, I think these are actually, for the most part, better than they were. Not as good as they could be, but that's the story of life, I suppose. Locust of diversion. So obviously, Old Locust was pure toxic trash, period. Yep. Okay. It was one of the worst pieces of design that has ever been introduced into the game. And I'm glad it was uninvented. New Locust, seems milder, seems different. There's so much to unpack here. So first of all, it's now a one inch range. That's so important. If it wasn't, if that had gotten through with like the old sixth entry, even a three inch range, it would be so stupidly NPE, it'd be hard for people to wrap their head around. It would be worse than the Old Locust in some cases. Yes, that's true. Where Locust goes off, importantly, is the end of the charge phase. And this is critical for that one inch. It's saying you have, you know, obviously you've got to end that one inch charge. But if stuff was like arbitrarily just standing outside of, you know, that four inches, right? Like, I'm gonna Locust you. Sure, sure, sure. Even if it was three inches, so you technically had to be in combat. Yeah, sure. Even if it was three, so you technically had to be in combat, I'm telling you it would be the worst. But like a true nightmare. Well, I'll show you a visual later. At any rate, one inch range, it's a four plus, three plus for greater demons you can't pile in. Simple enough to explain, right? Great. This is going to do absolutely nothing apart of the time. Namely, if you're fighting any type of monster or monster hero or single model type of situation, right? Like there it does literally nothing.  It's irrelevant, right? I mean, in 95% of the cases you're fighting a single model. If they're trying to like Tokyo drift around you into one of your units, sure. Okay. But like if we're just talking mono, mono, right? Or whatever the appropriate word is for a slanesh demon, mono, a slaneshi. It's, it does nothing. If we're talking about like 40 blocks where you clip them and stop them from piling in.  And boy is that going to be the opposite of fun for your enemy, okay? Who now literally just has their unit and goes, well, fight with that one guy on the end. Cause of course I'm going to charge you on the corner. Yeah. I'm going to, that's where that finesse comes in. But, but here's the thing. We always think about like counter play starting at the dice roll, counter play starts at deployment. I'm just like with my more tech guard, for instance, you're going to be looking for that corner. Yeah. Yeah. The compensate against that. Yeah, sure. No, I mean, I'm not going to get maximum coverage. Deploy in a circle against slanesh and you stop that nonsense. Yeah. Things that don't care about locusts, shooting units, units that charge you, single heroes, small footprint units that are set up correctly, like three pigs or something that happen to have reach, units with reach, and again, units in sort of circles or bubbles that are able to still largely get some number of models in, chaff units where it doesn't matter, you were going to kill them anyways, you know, so like just, there's a lot of things where the locusts might as well have not been rolled. Like in the, I've gotten three games in and in one of my games, I failed every locusts roll the whole game, just everyone. I never got the four plus. That's how four of the single diet rolls go. Sure. Right. Here's the thing, it didn't matter. Never once did I go, you know, oh darn, it just, it just didn't matter. It was like, okay, I failed the locusts. It's a single allegiance ability and it feels like it's doing what they want to do. It just feels like it's missing another component, like a retreat and charge and stuff like that. Like now you're not getting piled in against when you're fighting that horde. It's helping you against the horde units. Really, that's... Right. Yeah, that's kind of it. And I'll tell you right now, I would have much rather had, as I mentioned, my locusts of swiftness or something that just gave you like a super long charge or whatever. Like I get that there's, this is the meh of all worlds. Limeness would be very disheartened at this. So like this right here disproves his entire philosophical theory. I did it anyway, moving on. Tom, anything else on locusts? Did I miss anything? Nope, it's fine. Yeah, sure. Exactly. It's meh, right? It's like, it's not bad, not good. Sometimes it'll have a big effect and make people very angry. A lot of times it'll do nothing. It's fine. It's one of legion's ability. I'm not building my army around locusts, but like... Totally. I like that I have a finesse option for the mask and SIGVOLT, right? Yeah, sure, sure. I think the greatest crime locusts committed is SIGVOLT doesn't get it, right? Yes, correct. SIGVOLT can't do this. I was just about to... I was basically, yeah, Ellie's self-reducing on that one. The greatest crime locusts commits is SIGVOLT doesn't have the demon keyword. Totally agreed. Euphoric Killers is basically the same as it was with one very major change depending on how you played this army. Euphoric Killers is still sixes to hit, double tap, or triple tap if you're 20 or more models, which is a hilarious joke, since there is basically one unit in this army you would ever take at 20 models. And even that's pretty bad. But now it is Heed Dites only, not Slinesh only. It is only in melee. It is not in range, so it only feeds melee attacks. That is very important to note, because that means all your shooting units don't benefit from it when they are going pew-pew. And now your slaves to darkness that are in here, or your beasts of chaos in the grave, true. Did nothing wrong. Who did nothing wrong, do not get this bonus. Okay. If I can be salty one minute, I'm trying, like I have a more positive outlook on this book than I think you do. Yeah, yeah. But my great saltiness comes from, like my gateway into Slinesh was beast of chaos to pray of drove. Like 420 blaze it the fastest, murderous thing. Bestigores were one of those war scrolls that I love, but like you look at its army and you're like, this doesn't do anything here. And then you bring it over somewhere else and it's awesome. The thing that bothers me about the Heed and Dites keyword switch is I know that they're punishing marauders. Like you know it, that was what they were doing. And when they punish somebody innocent to like hurt the problem, like the problem isn't this, is it this ability? Chaos war is getting double taps were not the problem. Right, like that's not the problem. Like the problem is them, like change them. And they're like, we're just gonna make a whole allegiance ability worse just in case other stuff tries to abuse this. By the way, it also pushes to pray of drove, which I still think has play in Slinesh into the not fun way of playing it, which is as a summoning engine. I wanted to go screaming across the table with bestagore supported by like a keeper of secrets that I've bashed with a Saigor or Gorgon. So I have a good profile for my Gorgon, right? Like instead of a bad one and just goes screaming across the table, say this game is gonna end turn three one way or another.  And they said I don't get to do that anymore. And I take personal offense to that. One shall stand, one shall fall. Set your screens good, roll well. On your armor saves, like let's go. Yeah, and then importantly, feast of depravities. Let's get through this real quick here. You gain one depravity point at the end of the battle shock phase for each unit on the board, which contains any models that are wounded or has had a model slain. That's not exactly the text, but it's close enough. It does not grant any depravity if the unit is destroyed. It counts all units, both friend and enemy. You can also gain bonus points from the various hosts. That is to say invaders, pretenders and god seekers. And then you summon at the end of your movement phase. So the values go from six for 10 daemonettes up to 12 for the kipper or 30 daemonettes. Because you are basically, like if you take first turn, if you get forced to take first turn, you will never have depravity on your turn, right? So you're not summoning your first turn.    But effectively you're not summoning turn one. So effectively you're gonna start this engine in turn two. You probably have it for turn two and three. And let's be honest, most games are cited by turn four. Right, and this is that important stipulation at the very beginning. Powerful, but I would say manageable summoning. Yes, you are limited to one summon per turn now. From a hero or a fame. Or the fame, yeah. You used to be able to chain summon with SNESH. If you could pay the price, you could, you know, pop, pop, pop, you could no longer do that. Yeah, yeah, they, they, they, I think this is, this is cool.  This is a good way of doing it. And I actually, this is one of those things where like, we were about to disagree and luckily I don't have to. I actually think that the way they handle the end of battle shock phase is interesting design. We don't play a lot. I think it's cool. I don't know. We don't play a lot with like the battle shock phase. This is a really cool like almost shifting the battle shock phase into the cleanup phase. And the way they did it where they said, look at the units on the table. Did anything lose anything this turn and it's still there. Boom, depravity. It's super clean. I actually really like that design. I really do. I think that this- Thematic by the way, Meph, just to real quick, hit you back. You realize that it's literally the exact opposite of corn, right? Yeah, it's cool. Because corns gives you tithe for units that have been completely wiped out. Yeah, this only gives you DP if the unit has been wounded but remains, right? Yeah, right. So that's cool. I actually like quite thematically enjoy that mirror. I don't know if that was intentional. Like I don't know if anybody ever had that thought intentionally or if they were just kind of backed into this rule set. But there you go. I mean, slanesh summoning is just, you're just making sure that the pools have been scraped and buttered, right? Like it's, this is, I think of their alleged abilities. This is the best designed one. It really is. And this is why I take offense to people complaining about the summoning. I'm like, it's literally the only one that's like designed through and through the best. It's, heroes like is where you summon from within nine. So you can still, you can still block people out from summoning, right? You crowd a hero. You crowd summoning. Yeah, we did 12, nine away from the enemies, yeah. Yeah, it's the same stuff. And then the fame so that as a, so you look at this from both angles from, you're playing against me and I'm playing you, right? Even if you KO, snipe every one of my heroes on the whole table, I can still use my toys. I get to play with my toys. So I can still summon from the fame. Yeah. I mean, you don't, if they park a boat next to the fame. Sure.  But theoretically I've forced them to move out of position where I've placed my fame. Yeah. The, I'm okay with the change to Feast of Debravades. It's fine. It's as I said, powerful but limited summoning. I stand behind it. This is definitely much improved over its old version. Like, you know, credit where credits do. It's probably still not the best version of this, but it is certainly a better version of this than it was. Yeah. I agree that it's better. Let me, let me get one more. Let me, like, please, I want your point, Tom. But what I want to say is, quick note to all the Slenesh players out there, get yourself some little tokens or markers, okay? Because after turn one, when like units, when you go from units, not being wounded at all in the game to marking them the first time, it's really easy to, in battle shock, go like, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, right? And count. Turn two on. It actually becomes really hard to remember. Wait, there's what, that unit says it's got three wounds on. How many models did you have at the start? Is that, was that, did we lose a model there? Did that go from two wounds to three wounds? So I just started using little tokens to like, whenever I wounded a unit, I'd be like, they are depraved. And I'd put my little token next to that unit. And it became easy because then at the end of the phase, I just counted all the little tokens and picked them up, so. But also that social gaming's occurring that makes Aegis Sigmar, you're like, you've been depraved. Yeah, exactly. And you put on white gloves to put the token down next to the unit? Of course.  I found them very, very helpful and it made it much easier to play. So that's just a note to make your life easier. Okay, please, Tom, go ahead. What I would say is that the, like, what the new depravity system does, it is, it incentivizes you to not kill things. Yes. Oh yeah, we're gonna get into that because 100%, yeah, please, but go run on this. So I don't know, like, I know that you guys have said that it, like, so what it ends up doing is, it feels like it's a trap ultimately. Sure, to focus, I agree, yep.  Sure. Or summon or rather, or kill the unit and you don't actually get to use your mechanic. Right. I don't think that's bad though. That's one of those things that you say it, like either excited or not excited. It's a risk reward thing. It's like the advantage of removing your unit off the table is known to me, period. It's good for that thing to be gone. Sure. But it is a negative thing.  Like, cool. Like, cool. All I will say is like, buy a flaming skull though, because. Sure, sure. It creates a weird, I think what Tom's putting his finger on and it is interesting because this is one of those things where design has both good and bad mechanics to it, right? Like every, or elements to it. Every piece of design is a double edge blade, right? Yes. And we've talked about this so much on the show. And I agree with you, Tom, because what it creates is cross incentives, right? The first wound you do to any unit is like, yes, they're depraved and you're going to get a point off that. Every unit you do beyond, every wound you do beyond that is like kind of wasted.  So it's this weird cross incentive. And I think it, you know, the thing I've been saying is if you farm depravity, you're losing. You can either farm depravity or win the game, but you can't do both. Yes. And ultimately what it feels like is it's the opposite mechanic of court in the truest sense because they get a consolation prize for losing. Or a plus prize for winning, right? When they kill an enemy model, yeah. Or a plus prize for winning. You're already winning too hard, here's more. Yeah, yeah. Right, like yes, like yes, they get win plus. They get win and also win lose. Sure. First, you get to either win or lose. Right, yeah, psychologically. And yes, I understand a lot of people in the comments said, you know, the difference is blood type dumps when you use it. I'm aware of that. And I've said before, we've talked before about that. I meant only in the way you gain the points. It's a mirror. This may as well dump anyways because you can only use it once per turn. Once per turn, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'll say it's nice. The carryover doesn't matter because then, because as the unit, as the game goes on, there's just less units on the board. You might just need a screen right now. It's tactical that way. Like I like, I like having a summon board and be like, okay, I can't get the keeper right now, but I'm going to be able to get the keeper next turn. But right now what I need is a screen. So like, psh, like here's 10 day minutes, right? Like, and knowing I'm not reset to zero to play tactically in the moment as opposed to bet the house. Yeah, I've seen a lot of people talking about like, oh, you know, you take all the archers and you pepper wounds around, right? And you can farm to gravity. And I'm like, how are you winning the game? And I'm like, that's not doing anything. Like, great, congratulations.  Unfortunately, your army is getting slapped by their entire force. You killed my...  They've been spending their time destroying you and taking objectives. Yeah, I've been moving around the table. You took care of the ablative wounds that I already buy into my units. And I'm still at max killing potential because you didn't want to kill them. You just want to be like, yeah, I've got all the depravity possible. This is a terrible strategy.  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.  Wow, okay, cool. You did three wounds. Yep, there's three more tech guard or there's 11 skeletons back. Do you feel good about yourself? Yeah. By the way, I just, I put those 11 skeletons on the front of my unit. So you gave me movement too. Great strategy. Great.  But it just doesn't feel like you're like, but your allegiance ability is like a, it's like, if you're not utilizing your allegiance ability then you're functionally don't have one. Yeah, it feels like, it feels like when you're with, okay, when I play slaves and I have the general aura, right? Like let's just, let's just take this into another army position, right? Another chaos army. When I have the big general aura and I'm into spoilers and I have like the 18 inch aura around my demon friends, I'm trying to like maximize the number of units that are in that aura, right? Cause I want the re-roll ones to hit and the plus one to wound on everybody possible so I can go get to killing, right? When I'm aura of corn, yeah? Like it is an easy mechanic to lean into. It's there, it's good. You read it and you're like, yes, I want to do this as much as possible, right? And that's how most allegiance abilities work. With this, if you over lean into it, you lose, right? Like you made your army weaker. You did things that are not winning the game and that's weird, right? That's the tension. And like some tension in that kind of space can be interesting, but it's a really careful line to walk, right? So yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. I get you. But if you're playing the game as it goes, like it's functioning as intended. I mean, it really... Yeah, I think the answer is just never try to farm TP. Like just let it happen, right? Right, let it happen. Like you're gonna gain some bonus stuff from depending on how you pick your... Yeah, maybe you take like an endless spell or something so you can get... Yeah, you can like tap it when you need it, you know, like emergency button.  Ooh! You know, like... Right, right, right. Or 30 daemonettes because you need some extra board coverage because you just blew up your own troops doing it, like... Yeah, I don't have the list in here, but we'll talk about a funny list later. What happened when we get to the list section? I didn't actually put it in here, or we can talk about it just in the summary after that. All right, so now gentlemen, let's talk about sub-factions, shall we? All right, sub-factions. So, time stamping this. Oh, geez, nope, that time is way wrong. Okay, so... 16 sub-factions. All right, time stamped. There we go. Okay. So, all right, invaders. Three generals, only one command trait. Can't use a command trait or a command ability within 12 inches of any other general. You get one DP for being an enemy territory, D3 if all three generals are in. Your command traits that are of value in my mind are glory hog, which is one CP if any enemy units were destroyed, which is a nonbow with depravity, right? Or it's a consolation prize. Sure, I just feel like calling out that once again. There's a lot of nonbows in this book. This is like nonbow. 2.9 the nonbow, slanesh 2021. It'd be a contingency plan to the other bad combo. Sure, and then also skin taker, heal D3 at the end of combat if you slayed an enemy model. Can also work against your DP by healing you out of damage if you took only minor damage, right? So both of the good command traits in here work against your allegiance ability, which is funny, but whatever, they both are okay. The artifacts, the rod of misrule on a 2 plus, you basically gain a bonus CP. It's a little more complicated than that, but what does nonbow mean? It means it's the opposite of a combo. A combo is something that's good together. A nonbow is something that doesn't work together. It's an old magic term, right? Like for cards that you put them together, they just literally did nothing and cancel each other out. So it is a nonbow, like the opposite of a combo. It's bad, not good. Noncombo, yes, not a combo. And then the icon of infinite access, one of the few good synergy buff things you can do in this whole book, but it's only once a game, so whatever, but that's fine, it's still okay. Once a game, you can get plus one to hit rolls for melee, holy within 12 during the combat phase, which is good, because it doesn't buff enemies anymore. So that's kind of cool, and it's a relatively decent size, but yeah. We'll talk about what invaders is good at in a moment. Did you guys have any of, before we get into a good at, did you guys have any other thoughts on the command traits or artifacts? Slide aside, there are so many command traits and artifacts and things in this book that are so painful to read. I don't even know how somebody wrote them in good conscience, because it's like, once a game, when a hero's within three inches, you can roll 2D6, and then if it's over their bravery, then they get an egg one to hit. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, if you have the same number of demon units within 18 inches as mortal units within 18 inches, you get re-roll ones to hit. Yeah, yeah, I understand what you're saying. Realistic folks. In the command traits and artifacts, there's so many things that are literally caveated like three times, like only against heroes, and you gotta make a bravery check, and it's just, it's really painful. Now your words are very KO-ish. Just when I do like homebrew for Dungeons and Dragons, which we don't talk about, or like when I was developing my own game that got torpedoed in the end, anytime I found myself writing that, anytime I found myself writing that many qualifiers, I threw out the rule. Every single, like I would go back and be like, if you have that many qualifiers to a situation, the rule is bad. Every time you add an if-them to the sequence, and our programmer friends might know this, you risk problems. Like that granularity is unnecessary. It is simply unnecessary. In a game played like ours, it already takes us three hours. Yeah, yeah. You don't. It's insane. It is insane. So many of the artifacts in command traits work like that. They're not even like, they're just not even worth discussing. They're so patently obviously terrible. I don't even know what to, I don't even know what to do with them. The, I think the only other caveat I have for this is, I mean, this is a shout out to my boy, Heywo, who recently heard the term double genies. Invaders is triple genies. So if he was, if he enjoyed double genies. He'll love triple genies. Triple genies. Tripp Genes. Yes, by the way, to answer Red Wizards question, it has always been that you can have up to three, which is an important point. Sometimes you don't actually want to nominate three generals. I've seen lists with where they're only used to for various and sundry purposes. So.  Oh yeah, we'll get there. So they need something else to turn on, which is one of those like sort of, I think one of those things that Tom was talking about where like you start to build a list and you're like, I just want this like, this keeper is going to be my like hero hunter. It's even more evident in the next, the next sub allegiance when you're like, this is my, this is my hero. This is my like, my mega, my mega hero slayer general. And you're like, oh, it can't even use its own command ability on it. So it's got to have like, like a unit of derps in tow. Like, come on. All right. So invaders, what does it do well? This is my favorite sub faction always was. I always thought it was better than God seekers. I stand behind that. And I think it is still my favorite. I think it's probably equal with God seekers now. Glory hog is great. I love glory hog. Yeah. So what invaders does well is give me fuel, give me fire, give me that, which I desire, which is all the CP's I want. Okay. I want to, so the reason it's good for keeper heavy armies, is you got to run keepers as twins now. They, they're either zero or two. It should like, they should just be, if you try to add one to your army, a pop-up should happen on war scroll builder that says like, are you sure? Okay. Do you want it? Would you like to add another keeper? You know, like when you order from like DoorDash or something and they're like, here's the popular items that people who ordered, what you ordered also ordered, right? There should be a similar pop-up in war scroll builder when you only add one keeper to your army. That's like, people that built this army usually included another keeper. So like, it's good for keeper heavy armies because you need a tremendous amount of CP to run the offensive army. Like if you want to play this as an offensive army, which is how I want to play it. Yes. Okay. Not as some nimbly, bimbly dance around, do no damage and hope to gain points until I die army. All right. I'm not interested in, in like this death ballet. I didn't buy six keepers of secrets, not to use keepers of secrets. Okay. Do you want flesh-eater courts, like the chaos edition? Look, I want to be able to go smash people. Okay. Like three smash bats, three keepers, let's go. I got into slainesh to smash, quote, Vince 2021. Okay. So if you're going to do that, you have to have all your units fighting twice because units are woefully underpowered. Okay. They, yes, I'll, yes, Atilia, I'll explain why it's zero or two when you get to the Keeper of Secrets School. The, your units are so woefully underpowered on offense and how hard they hit. This is like tickle fight the army, right? That the only way you make up for that is by having the entire army fight twice. Okay. I will also say the fighting twice is a lot less painful now without the old locus. Like by that, I mean painful for your opponent. It feels more fair because it's like you fight and then they get to fight, right?  And so like, it feels more fair of the back and forth. You just get a lot more activations, right? Yeah. So, but it's still following the rules of we go back and forth, right? That's what makes this all fair. Okay. Locus of smash that. I indeed, absolutely. Lurid Hayes is probably the best sub faction in Wrath of the Everchosen. It sits on top of invaders. It's a very powerful combination, has a command ability for plus one to save, incredible on Archeon, fantastic on Sigvald who can use it to give himself a two up base, decent enough on a keeper because it can push her to three up. Also lets you redeploy up to D3 units off the table and then bring them in from ambush. Perfect for fulfilling the bonus depravity.   So that's cool. If you play this way in invaders depravity generation is secondary. It's a bonus, not a strategy. CP generation is primary, right? What you want is your army always landing every charge always running six, right? Which you're doing also from Lurid Haze cause it gives you like a re-roll on your runs which is good. And always piling in and fighting twice. Heavy offense build, very vulnerable to armies with high power projection. I mean, that's like, that's the story of Slenesh. Like it's not unique to invaders but invaders is particularly weak cause the more you rely on keepers the more you rely on stuff that's just like you're gonna blow off your keepers which are not tough. I really wish they had included like Lurid Haze in this book like they did with, you know like how they took a pay like DOK included some of it. They should have just put it in this book too. Even when you look at it and you see I only got three sub factions. Just like, you know, like you kind of like jar a little bit like four to six seems to be where most other armies are living. You only have like these three immediate options. This goes back to that. Like who are they printing this book for? The new player or the like five armies or the new player like that. There's a little disconnect there. What I will say about invaders is I get to run SIGVOLD and feel less bad about it cause it's the, I take the two keepers and then SIGVOLD and then SIGVOLD gets to go be fabulous on the table somewhere. Well, and also he's a really potent threat coming in from ambush, right? Behind the enemy army because it was built in charge bonus. So he's like the only use I can see for SIGVOLD is in invaders Lurid Haze which is sad because he should be better than that. He is- He should be an auto-include in every army. 100%. He's majestic. He's gorgeous. Finally, Catacoros has a rival to his codpiece. Like finally, it has been too long. Yes. All right, so that's invaders. Anything I missed with this one guys? I got it in all my quips throughout. We're good. Good, all right, awesome. Fair enough. Pretenders as in this pretends to be a good sub faction when it is in fact not. The general gets two command traits and you can reroll hit rolls of one for units of 10 or more yet another number that is honestly decently hard to hit in this book, especially with how fast you lose things. You get one DP for the general being within three inches of an enemy and D3 if they're within three, if the general's within three inches of two units. Everything that was good in this faction got nerfed. Easiest way I can say it, okay? If you had something in this faction you thought was good, like the plus D3 damage from Strength of Godhood or whatever or Sliver Slash with plus two attacks, all bad, all nerfed. The fact that you get two command traits in this army is hilarious because the two I've written here which are like real underwhelming, okay? Like real underwhelming are the best two in the list. That is rough, okay? So yeah, like Pretenders is just a shell of its former self. I always thought it was the weakest. It is definitely the weakest now. Like I don't, this is just a terrible choice. This is called get nothing from your sub faction to sub faction. This is the part where I asked you before we went live. I'm like, if I disagreed with you during your slideshow am I allowed to interrupt you? Yeah, me man. I disagree with Pretenders. That it is a shell of its former self isn't, I don't take issue with that. Like boo who you only get plus one attack from your artifact. Welcome to the rest of our armies, okay? Like most of us had to deal with that and you're the army that gets to activate twice. Like I'm not, there's some of these things that got nerfed and they just got brought in line with other artifacts. Because quite frankly, one of the greatest offenses Slenesh committed was that thing I was talking about where that first book rewarded you for doing the thing you already wanted to do and then just threw extra money in cocaine at you. They stopped giving you money in cocaine. Like I'm sorry, I feel bad for you. Pretenders, the greatest offense Pretenders commits is you want a superkeeper, right? Like that's what you want. Sure, that seems to be what this is telling you to do, right? Like you don't literally the narrative of this thing is it's led by a superkeeper. Yeah, you don't all the way get there and that is the crime. But like I'm not, I don't feel bad for you that your artifacts got worse. They kind of had it coming. I'm not dying on that hill. Like it doesn't bother me. Sliver slash going down. I don't care. All the artifacts in here are bad, except like plus one attack is the closest thing to anything good. My point was you can't manufacture the superkeeper you're pretending to be. Sure. Sure. And how fast does this thing die? And when your one kipper dies, it takes basically the entire allegiance ability with it. All that is left when your one kipper dies, which will happen, keepers die. There are 14 wounds on a four. Hello, we're on the shooting matter right now that everyone said would fix slanash. It fixes slanash real good when you have only one keeper. Even against melee armies. This thing is going down. Okay, it's not like it's fine. I like keepers. I like them quite a bit as a matter of fact, even post nerf. But like, when that one thing dies, which would, when you explain, like explain to your opponent, everything special that I can do is drawn from this one model. Yeah. Okay, well, I guess I know what I'm gonna kill. Right. What you have left is re-roll hit rolls of one for units of 10 or more. And keepers have the inherent flaw. And by the way, this is actually a sweet design. This is what's cool about keepers. This is why keepers feel like that 300 point or I used to say 360 point. They went, they're like one of the only things that went down with their 320 now. 340. 340. Yeah, like, yeah, whatever. Like, like they're one of those models that feels like actually when I buy a 300 X point model, like monster, this is what I want a Gorgon to be. You know, this is, this is what I want anything in that range to feel like. If I activate first, I get the charge. I outmaneuver you. I played the game of Aegis Sigmar and I got the charge. Never heard. Yeah. If you get the charge, you kill me.  What, what pretenders should do is make it to where that keeper can activate twice cheeky and then beat you. Right? Like. It would have been so cool if they had made the pretender general able to activate its own command ability on itself. Or, or what if, what if you had two heroes and one hero you like wrote down at the beginning of the game and that's really your, your keeper of secrets. Sure. Like. And like, and like do some. There's, there's stuff they could have done here and they just didn't do any of it. So it's like, okay. We lost Matt for a second, he'll be back. Let's go to one of the, what does it do well? My answer, not much, sadly. Okay. The artifact that CT is being nerfed combined with less survivability means that banking on a single powerful hero that has 14 wounds and a four up save is generally a bad bet. If you're using faultless blades out of warriors the Everchosen, you can make Siggvault a little less squishy with the command ability to suffer two less wounds. Just kind of a neat trick on Siggvault. But it's just bad because the army either has to win through speed or offense- It's a different model than what you are. And now you, I think I'm back. I am back. You're back. Yeah, you had to catch up for a minute. Okay, you're back. I had to vomit at least once tonight. I see him do it all the time. I'm like, man. It's fine. I'm gonna try potato internet just once. In my estimation, you're winning through either speed or CP generation to fuel the engine of the offense. This one does neither. Yeah, I ran it too hard and broke the internet. Thank you. Absolutely. I see you, Dr. Milonis. Are we still on pretenders? We are, yes. We're just talking about what does it do well. Okay, like single model bets for an army have kind of always been not as great as advertised. Like whether it's just Archeon or just Nagash or like a single stone horn on, or a single frost sword on stone horn. You know, you always need some other juice. You always need some other gas in the tank. They put all their gas in their tank in that single thing. That's scary. But I do like the command trait, strength of Godhood by the way.  I like seeing the Godhood because being able to... Plus one damage, it's cool. It's not the worst. After they've made their save rolls, you can be like, hey, that's the two damage attack. Or when you're looking at that. Yeah, I understand. You realize that iron jaws have this dude with two sticks who just goes two plus one damage to all of your attacks. I try not to look at other people's armies when my army's being punished. Yeah, I understand. I'm just saying like stick guy, you know stick guy can do that to a mawcrusher, right? Like and make him have a four damage, eight attacking. He doesn't do it to his mortal wounds though is the thing is when you proc the mortal wound attack that those five mortals, you can make that six mortals now.  I guess. I mean, like even the old D3 one was questionable, but at least it was D3. Yeah, it's not great. Okay, Godseekers. Godseeker. All right, so plus one of charge. See, this was my favorite before and still is. Not fair enough. I think this is, it definitely came into even footing with invaders, which is a positive. When I was playing to pray of droves, Godseekers just felt like the best, like I'm already running 50 best of gores with a shaman trying to help them move six inches, then run six, then Godseekers are right. So I have a bias and it just got stronger. Okay. Yeah, I don't think you're wrong if you're playing Godseekers at all. I think it's actually quite good in this new book, which is again, like that's a testament. So that's good, that's cool. Plus one to charge trolls. Okay, that's cool. It's a good buff. Like I have no issue with that. It's a nice all over army buff. It fits in well with how Slenesh feels like it should be played is a nonbow with the fact that you have to six inch, exploit things and 2.9 people like crazy. I don't need to charge. I just file in from six as an army. It'd be like, if I just gave Yeti's plus one to charge across the board, like, okay, that's a cool thing, but I generally don't care. But it's good for summons and stuff like that. It has the best like depravity generation, which is plus D three depravity for general made a move and then plus one of any other unit charge as well. So it's quite easy to get like D three plus one depravity out of God seekers every round, which is cool. That's great. You know, that that means on average you're getting like three depravity out of this, which is it's a significant chunk when, you know, 12 is what you're aiming at, right? Command traits, they lost the run in charge command trait, which is a shame. But we still got speed chaser, which is retreat and charge, which is cool. Great, great command trait there. Wonderful on like a herald on exalted chariot or blade bringer, sorry on exalted chariot. I dig that. The new one is sweeping slash, which I actually don't hate either, which is two plus for D three mortal wounds, two units within one inch on a charge. So you can like, you can put that on a chariot boss and actually do that twice, which is kind of cool because it's all units within one inch. It's great for, you can put on a keeper or something cool for splashing around to depravity, right? Cause you can, if you hit two units in the corner, then both of them take a few mortals and you know, that's that's depravity world. So that's good. Artifacts, the cameo of the dark prince is still a standout cause it's one CP once per battle. You obviously just burn it and then throw it on the feign and the feign got better. So, you know, perfect artifact for, for comboing with the feign, the girdle, the roam racer. If you want the ability to fly in this army, neg one to wounds, you gain fly, like, okay. It's not wrong. It's not bad. Yeah. I mean, I, I don't know why there's the need for the neg one wounds. I could just be like an artifact to gain fly, but sure, you know, okay. That's fine. This, this is a long line of artifacts in Aegis Sigmar thinking that they need to have a downside. They just don't. Right. Like, I think about like the, some of the city's artifacts and I'm like, this doesn't need a downside.  Why are you giving it downside? Especially in an army that has a spell that can make you fly. Why do I have a thing that has it come on now? Yeah. Yeah. And then the rapturing. I mean, it's, it's like, it's like an allegiance ability that you would burn to give you a benefit and then also penalized. Right. It's weird. If that were to be a thing. I mean, I don't think we'd ever see that, Tom, but sure, I hear you. I mean, if they did it, then in the good version of that army, they'd probably put some other ridiculous hero that could like take the penalty away and then force it onto an enemy unit in a very un-interacted way.  Sure. But I mean, they would never- It's not theoretical. Yeah. Do that. You're right. Okay. Enrapturing circlet. I think this is the best artifact maybe in the whole, all three of them, possibly. It's in a fight with the rod of misrule, which is the enrapturing circlet. The enemy unit cannot retreat if you're in combat with them. And then on a three plus, you can cause one mortal wound to all units within three inches. Fantastic artifact. Stopping people from retreating is incredibly potent when combined with the locusts, right?  They are just stuck doing nothing. Wonderful for NPE because if there's anything people love, it's having their units sit there and literally do nothing. But it is very potent. And then the three plus to cause one mortal wound to everybody is actually like pretty darn great for just, you know, splashing around little mortal wounds for free gravity. Yeah. It just says three plus to get it to privacy. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So it's like it's generally a great artifact that actually aligns with how the army wants to play. So a plus, well designed, well done. Yeah. No, like there's a song by the smashing pumpkins called it's a speed, speed kills, but beauty lasts forever. That is the God seekers. Like speed kills, man. Like this army just it, I mean, this had me at hello when I was reading it because of my cognitive bias. I'm like, I just needed an excuse to say that I was right the whole time before and I have it now. Yeah, there you go. Definitely has the best artifact list. I have no pushback on that and as well, actually, some of the better command traits also and good to crowd degeneration. Yeah. But the best thing is like it's, it's different. Oh, maybe you're going to cover this in what it does well. But your depravity is like you go into the territory where you're ignoring it, but you're also getting that that keeper of those 30 demonets in pace. Yeah. And that's why I like this. Sure. Yeah, I think it does a lot well. It's good for an offensive build, especially if you focus on chariots. It can empower summoning by allowing the summons units to land a charge on an eight instead of a nine. Statistically, that's actually very different. Good for the more skirmish and DP farming build as well as it's the easiest DP generation. You know, it's an all around solid choice, but it really doesn't work super well with keepers of secrets because the lack of CP to keep the engine going, right? So it's like this is a good choice if your concept is a lot of like the new exalted seekers, bliss barbs or slick blades and chariots or stuff like that. That's going to work well here where you're kind of spreading around a lot of wounds and trying to charge people sometimes and 2.9 people at the time and so on and so forth. You're trying a pin and win strategy with an army that isn't tanky at all. Correct. Right? And so you're going to need that summon second wave as you deplete yourself is how it theoretically should work if your army weren't over-costed to send. Right? Sure. And that's the thing is like this is, this is for me, this is the most slowness it gets because it feels like, yeah, I'm just going to like, I'm going to like blitz in even with the, we're talking about the pile and tricks. The pile and tricks, remember you roll your charge. You don't decide to go in. You go, did I get enough coverage to get in as far as I want to or do I take the pile and over this way instead? Right? So like you get to where you can pile in on that unit over there and then you're like, well, let's see what this charge dice roll says. Okay, nevermind. I'm just going to like do that and stuff. Like there's some pass in there where it's not like the ballet I talked about earlier. It's just the like that sort of cheeky, like, you know, faint into a follow-through going elsewhere on the table.   It really feels like the way the army should play. Yeah, I agree. I think Seekers is like, is going to reasonably work well for a lot of people. If you, this is the closest to sort of how you think the army should probably play. There's some ultimate challenges to it, of course, but like, yeah, Seekers is good, right? And I think that if your concept is this sort of fast skirmishy force, this is going to be the obvious home for you, right? Tokyo drifting chariots into a couple of lines of units. Like, oh, nice chaff screens you have set up there. Turn this thing sideways, plow.  Like there's some, I like this. When you talked about how like the army, this is that one time that it is telling me how to build my army in the whole, in the whole. Well, I mean, I'd still take an argument with that because I had to think through this and really like put this together. That's why I'm sharing this. Because again, this is like, let me break this down, Mef. Let's, okay, think about Doc. We're not talking about power level at all. We're talking about design, okay? Yeah, I'm supposed to have hags. I'm supposed to have witches. I'm supposed to have a cauldron maybe. You start reading the book and you go, I think snakes are cool, right? Like you looked at the model range and you looked at snakes and you went, man, snakes are cool, right? That is a very reasonable reaction because in fact, snakes are cool. You are right. Yeah, my first hot take of the evening, the snakes are cooler than the daughters of Cain. At me, Chuck Moore. You're right, Chuck's wrong. At any rate, so you know, you look at the book, so you start with this preconceived notion of like snakes are cool, great. You open up the book, you read through, you look at the, you look at the sub factions or whatever, right?  I thought snakes were cool. Oh, look at this thing. Here's this thing that says snakes get plus one attack and snakes do good things. Cool, this must be the thing I'm supposed to take if I like snakes, right? Okay, neat. And then I keep reading and I see that like, oh, neat, Marathi has this ability that if she's near snakes, she gives them a plus one to attack. Oh, that's cool. I'll take that, but I'll take her in there, right? And so on. And like, so there's a linearness to the build. I'm not arguing that all books should be written in a linear fashion. There's a whole different show we could do on linear versus modular design. But my point is that- Oh, I look forward to being back on a year to do that show. Absolutely. My point is like, there is something guiding you through what is supposed to be what, right? Like there's some line you can follow. Nothing about Godseekers says keepers are a bad choice here, use chariots. Well, see like, what if my way of approaching this is I wanna charge fools and summon stuff. Sure. Then you're gonna have the best version of that if you use chariots and not kippers, right? But that's not- Which also feels bad. Which also feels bad. I mean, that goes to that sort of second breath look at design. People look at, I think that's a very, a very ubiquitous way to approach the game where you're like, I look at the cool models. How do I play these cool models, right? Yeah. And I look at things as a theme build. This is that Johnny in me. Where I'm like, I wanna charge fools and summon stuff. And then like, so that's my premise. And then I start looking at reward scroll that helps me charge fools and summon stuff. I don't even look at the models at that point, right? Yeah. So I think, I get what you're saying is what I'm saying. Because where I look at how to approach a book or a build is different from yours. And now I get our personal disagreement. They could have done cool stuff in each one of these related to some kind of unit or to, to whatever. Yes, Lucas, you're right that the basic secret chariot does become battle line and God seekers. So it's, you're right that there's not nothing, but that's not actually that, but regular secret chariots being battle line isn't actually what makes seekers of any value here, right? The problem is there's nothing like anywhere close to the synergy of direction you have in other books like slaves, lizards, daughters, any of these things. Again, I'm not asking for somebody to hold my hand or to be like every book has to be linear. I'm okay with modular design, but like the, there's just nothing like that.  It's the worst army in history, but you can do it. You too can spend 600 points on battalions to field the heat night host. So this, this was one of the things I had avoided mentioning this. I mentioned it earlier on. This bothers me with a design direction. Yeah, it's, I don't think there's any reason to bring battalions into your sub-faction. That offends me. I would be okay with it if they did it in an interesting way. This is not. It's a penalty. It's a penalty. It's only a penalty. It only shows up as a penalty. Entice me to do the cool thing. Right. If you said, if you said that a Siborites battalion in, in this faction cost 20 points less. Sure. You're telling me I'm supposed to take Siborites there. Yeah. You're not slapping me on the hand for wanting to do something cool. Don't ever slap people. Siborites in pretenders. Siborites one of the best, second best battalion in the book. You only can put one hero in. One hero in it. I'm gonna pay extra points to roll on a D6A1 for a benefit. And I don't get to reduce my drops. The main reason I'm taking a battalion are you freaking kidding me? That's the most boneheaded. I actually have an all caps in my own handwriting. So you know I was serious. Siborites, why? When we got, when you were on the section for, for the previous, I'm just like- Let me answer a thing in the commentary quicker. How do I feel about Scarlet Cavalcade from Everchosen? It's worse than just taking regular Godseekers. It locks you into things you don't want. Like just take regular Godseekers and choose the good command traits and artifacts. You actually have really good choices and Godseekers on those things.  I just, GW, cause I know you actually watched Vincent, not me. Please don't do this with Italians anymore. This is bad. Yeah, they could have extracted that and actually wrote real rules there. This is bad. Let's just don't do this, please. Sure. Yeah. We're all in agreement. It makes no sense.  They're de-incentivizing you. Yeah, they're de-incentivizing you. They're disincentivizing you to do something. Right. Don't do that. And it's the exact same type of rule writing that we see, for example, with Kao Garrison. Sure. They're de-incentivizing certain abilities.  Like in a game as synergistic as Age of Sigmar has become, not having an incentive is like a disincentive. Yes. Right? Well, especially in an army that is very low on synergy overall. Yeah. Giving you nothing is basically the same as punishing you. Sure.  There's so much stick in the game already. There's a lot of stick beating you into not taking the cool stuff because points can be a stick. The points are wrong. Yeah. Let me jump in and explain a comment real quick here. Okay. I really need to know, Homs says, I really need to know how exactly do the ever chosen sub factions work exactly? They are more traditional sub factions, i.e. they give your entire army an ability. They give your heroes a command ability they can utilize. They dictate the command trait that your general has to have. And they dictate the first artifact you must take. There is one for each of the existing sub factions that are in here. They lay over the top of it. They combine with it. But then they dictate your choices as per a normal sub faction. You don't lose anything, but you have the opportunity cost, especially with something like mentioned with the scarlet cavalcade and Godseekers where you actually lose access to a very good command trait and a very good set of artifacts because your first one now has to be dictated. So there is an opportunity cost to it even though there's no direct cost. So there you go. That being said, Luridhay is still the best. All right, let's keep going gentlemen. I wanna learn. We got so much more to go. So much more. Oh, it's cool. No, this is all good discussion. I just like, I shut it down. Is this now the like the Mephisto Sode or whatever? I mean, we knew this was gonna be a long show and I'm fine with it. Because I want to get the whole take. I'm talking in and trying to like, let us move forward. It's fine. Look, there's... I appreciate you. We appreciate you. Tom, that's what we appreciate about you. All right, spells. Limited spell utility. This army has weak magic. Like I know no other way to say it. Their spell lures are generally uninspiring and they're not good spellcasters. And you know what? I don't care. I think magic is generally dumb in this game anyways unless you feel like it's either basically nothing or it destroys the world. So whatever. Spells are split between demons who get six spells, greater demons who get three spells and mortals who get three spells. I've outlined here what I feel are some of the more interesting spells. And you know, I actually like magic working like this. I wish everybody's spell lore kind of was like theirs. Maybe bring this one up 10 or 15% and that's how all spell lures should be. I don't like spells ruling the game. I think it's just kind of a wacky thing. So that's fine. Spells are prayers that get interacted with but because the dice are harder, they should be weirder. But not better. And that's... I was having a conversation with Tyler Emerson earlier where like they just, I don't think they have spells figured out. Somehow. No, no. I know. I know. So here's the spells that I think are literally worth the time it takes to read them. Every spell is not pictured on this list. I do not think are literally worth the text they're printed with.  So it's such a good idea. Yeah, it's, they've talked before about why they don't generally apply holy within to enemy units because your opponent has complete control over that, especially during your hero phase. So your opponents can just literally tail out three guys and break you from casting this spell, right? But I guess they just forgot that design principle when they wrote this book because there's multiple instances of this. One dive for each model in the unit on each six D3 mortal wounds. That's cool. If you can get it off, it's a good spell. I like to give it to offensive push heroes, people that are gonna be deep in the guts of the enemy army. It's a cool spell. It's a decent enough horde damageer. So I don't hate it. It's fine. Born of damnation, which is CV4, heal a heat knight hero within six inches D3 wounds. Cool. Lot of healing in this army actually. Got a decent amount of healing, which is strange, I guess, but that's fine. I'm not against it. It's an interesting angle. You can kind of push the healing angle. The greater demon spells, which again are gonna be very limited because we're talking only about keepers and keepers are keepers, which you may use them or you may not, depending on the army. Path to the Dark Prince, casting value seven. The caster can fly. No universe where that should be casting value seven. That should be five, but because it's a self buff, it's literally only the caster can fly, and not something else. I mean like the wargog prophet or whatever it is from Bone Splitters is like looking at this spell and laughing his head off at the delta here. Projecting of damnation, casting value five, heal demon heat knight heroes D3 or D6 if the casting was 10 plus. So a second heal, kind of cool. And then slothful stupor, casting value seven. One enemy hero within 12 inches cannot run charge or use command abilities. Very powerful spell, obviously hard to get off because you gotta be fairly close, but it is a powerhouse, like no diggity, no doubt. And then the mortal spells are generally all bad, but whatever, we'll make the best we can of them. Dark delusions, casting value four. One enemy unit, again, holy within 18 inches. And then you roll 2D6, and if it's greater than their bravery, then you can get plus one to hit for attack to target that unit. So if you cast the spell, add an enemy unit, and it's not unbound, and the enemy unit is holy within 18 inches, which they could easily stop.  Not to mention the swath of armies that are all just default bravery 10. Your reward at all of that is plus one to hit for attacks to target that unit, which is a good bonus. But boy, do you gotta jump some hoops. Gotta get in them hoops. Ogre casting makes this look, yeah, like the ogre spells are 10 times better than this. I think Hewo would disagree, but. They have a spell that's just like pick a unit, and they lose a save. Yeah, but the cast values are dumb on there. Their cast values are, again, casting values, massing, it's a spell that can do a thing. That's a seven, that's what I'm talking about, I believe. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's all of them, right? Yeah, sure.  But that's the thing is. And they have easier access to plus one to cast than I do. That's the thing is like, I see a lot of like cast value four and five in slanesh, and even like the new trend towards like lower cast value spells is a good thing for Age of Sigmar. You have prayers out there that are going off on two ups that you can't contest. Sure. Like, yes, let's get into the realm where we can start to like think about, spells should at the very least be a 50-50 before we even get to that second tier of contestation. But my thing is that they should do something interesting, not numbers, and so like I'm already. Yeah, I mean, yes, I've included several four and five spells. Keep in mind that's basically the ones I picked and part of the reason why they even made this guest. Right? There's a lot of much higher numbers on this list. Yeah, so like Tyler Emerson and I were just going to do a spell show where we talk about spells. But the thing that I think is actually like pertinent in this spell list is the ability to give fly and healing. Sure, yeah. You have some like triplicate healing stuff that you can do with keepers to where they have some hidden resilience and that's not worth nothing and some replacement to units that's not worth nothing. Because you're going to farm that where the sequencing of depravity happens. Remember, you're always on like a delay essentially in the sequence because you need battle shock and then on the next hero phase, you got to get to that next hero phase with that unit not being wiped out because your opponent went between, right? Yeah. Or whatever.  That out of, they have healing in a couple of different sequences. And I think that's what's pertinent about the spell casting. No, I don't disagree. The healing's fine. I mean, hero phase healing is, you know, it is what it is, right? It can do stuff and sometimes it doesn't, right? I mean, if you heal and you put three units in front, you've just gained movement too, right? Yeah, sure.  And see what you answer, you get it. Well, yeah, like overpriced Warstrel, not a spell I'm taking on top of my build that I've already given. I don't disagree. But it's like, Belldom can shut it down too. Yeah, I'm not saying that. That's the problem with spell magic. Yeah. And that's the problem with magic going on right now where there's like a whole other episode devoted to it. But at least their casting values aren't nines for no reason. Yeah, I mean, one, agreed. Two, I'm not anti-healing. When I run this army, I'll tell you right now, I basically take all the heal spells in hysterical frenzy, maybe or slothful super depending on like what the spread is, right? Right. Because I do think there's value to it. Like it's very good to be able to heal your keeper. If you manage to get her where she's got like five wounds on and you push her back up into her first tier, it's a difference, right? It's just don't, what all I'm saying is don't overvalue it. Why is healing pretty garbage for Sylvaneth? But when I play death, people rage at my healing. The difference between restoring a couple wounds to a single model versus restoring models back to a unit. That's the difference and it's huge. Yeah, it's night and day. It's a big deal. Don't we get to restore some models with some of the slash healing? Nope. There was some model restoration in this army. Nope, it's only healing the individual folks. It's all hero focus. All the healing is hero focus. Okay, so at any rate, and then battle rapture casting value five, one mortal slaness unit, holy with an 18 becomes immune to battle shock if the casting rule was 10 plus three units. I would normally never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever put a spell like this on the list, but I did. And that's because most of your mortal slaness units are bravery six and will explode if looked at funny and bravery is a real problem if you're playing the mortal side of the army. It's a real problem. It's like a B.O.C. level of problem. Yeah, they don't get any free, any free bravery immunities. Like every good army gets. I remember when I first got into Aegis Sigma, one of the first things like Hey, what taught me to look at was like, does it get to be immune to battle shock? Yes, no.  That was like literally the first thing he taught me about the game, which is why I have a completely skewed view of battle shock phase entirely because even in AOS 1.0, there was like ways to be like that thing shock immune prior to inspiring presidents. And there's a severe lack of battle shock immunity in command abilities and traits across this army. And so you have to rely on a spell, which is a sad place to be because spells get interrupted, command abilities do not. Yeah, there's like one command ability you can look to and it is on an interesting character. I'll say that, but we will like, and that's still, right? So Celesk changed a lot. I don't have the scroll for the unit breakdown error because I'm going through the mortal stuff. Huge. But Celesk actually is interesting because it's one of the few scrolls that didn't go up in points. It's still only 200 points, which is still probably over-costed, but they have a weird re-roll one's bonus whereas Tom mentioned earlier, you have to play this game where you have an equal number of demons and mortals in this 18 inch bubble, which is just like really hard to actually manage to a point because, you know, units kind of need to move wherever they move, but it does grant a big old bubble of re-roll ones to hit, which is cool. If you can manage it, like it's not a bad bonus. It's just kind of a weird game to play.  Sure. It's just a weird mini-game to play, right Tom? Like that's what we're saying. Like it adds this other thing that's just like, because it used to be on the calendar. Clashbacks with Night Haunt. Yeah. Right? Because like Night Haunt is also playing the bubble game. Yeah. Of like managing the bubble, but then charging, but making sure that you don't charge out of the Holy within 12 inch bubble of all of your heroes, because that's what all the support is. And so I say that to say, like those mini-games that take mental space make armies not fun to play. They just need to be chosen from the game. I don't like the design space of it at all. I don't like it either when it used to just be the commandability for sill was immunity to battle shock and re-roll ones to hit. Why am I doing extra mental? That was fine. It was fine. It didn't need, we didn't need this extra mini-game like for no reason. It's like- It's a mini- They cut the text of the alternating fighting and we're like, oh we don't have enough text on this scroll anymore. Right? So let's write this other new complicated mini-game like it didn't need to be there. The fighting mini-games fun because it means I get to kill stuff. Look at me not swear there. I'm a Warhammer Weekly, not my own show. Thank you. No, I meant you have to pile in multiple times in cool ways and maneuver still around. Yeah, you get to do some stuff. Like it's cool. Not anymore. No, you don't get to have fun anymore. I dislike when rules that were interesting go away. I don't, like the numbers can be fixed by the way of like how OP the thing that's happening is. If something interesting is happening, battle shock is the least interesting thing in the world. Why make it difficult? Yeah.  I truly don't get a grant. It was such a loss for me, because like Celesk I wanted to have as the center of my army, right? Sure, sure, sure. Because I love, I just love the model and I love. Yeah, and so I was excited to use Celesk and like hoping that this round would make the mortals viable with all the new models. And I was like, awesome, let's do this. And then I saw it and I'm just like, sure. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Okay, anything else on spells? The casting values are edging towards correct. That's all I'll say. And I like the healing, I think it, you have triple healing on your like 3D3 healing on a keeper. Yeah, which is cool. Or 2D3 healing on one keeper, D3 on another. Like there's some good stuff going on there. Yeah, no, you can get to 3D3, right? If you, because that's the Nestor's hand as a D3 as well. Yeah, so you have 3D3.  I've got 3D3 heals. You know, that's in the place where people are like super mad about the amount of healing you're throwing at the thing. I think that the amount of healing this army can do to your keepers is an understated fact of the book. And I think that that's a strength. I agree with that completely. They could heal a lot before though, couldn't they? Yeah, sure. One of the spells got better. So that's the answer. Okay, right on. Yeah. And their casting value is also dropped, which is good. So like, the spells got better. And the healing thing, I'm never gonna bag on the healing. Like I said, I take it every time. So there you go. Right on. All right. Units, gentlemen, let's talk units. Okay. Now it is... But not the pose units. Now it's time. The challenge. We begin our unit discussion with what I call the challenge. The army within the book has a real problem with points to wound ratio. The exceptions being bliss barbs and slick blades who do stand out as quality units. The Sigbald is just so bad, even with his feel no pain. Battleline Choices... I mean, he's giving Settra a run for his money. Poo boy. The Battleline Choices in this, there's so much to unpack on this one slide. The Battleline Choices in this book are inferior in every way to all potential selections from outside of the book. To pray of drove, cast warriors, marauders, et cetera. Building only inside this book results in very low wounds. Well, you have just daemonettes and just without... Everything over on the chart on the side where you see where it's tagged with BL, that's Battleline under some kind of circumstance. Okay. Okay. Okay. Right. Important distinction. Yes. So like the bliss barb archers are Battleline in a slanish army. The Hellstriders and all the Hellstriders are Battleline in a slanish army. The Mirmadesh and the Twinsouls are Battleline if you have a Lord of Pain general and the Secretariots are Battleline if you're in Godseekers, right? But all of these are inferior choices in every way to broader choices you can make. Outside the book. In every way, they are patently worse. Okay. And I do not like every list I've seen of people trying to build anything competitive. The first thing they jettison, first thing is any Battleline from this book. The Battleline situation in this book is a travesty. I will stand behind that. I should be able to build a functional army out of whatever's in this book. Taking stuff from something else should not be a requirement. But these Battleline choices are so out of whack because of their current poin