The army lists at the NOVA Open certainly brought to light some of the nastiest Forge World units. How nasty? Check out these five top contenders.
I’m sure NOVA pulls a lot of stats and maybe has exactly which units from Forge World, but here are the 5 that were on display in the top tables. Some seem fair, some seem over the top nasty. You be the judge.
5- Kharadrys Claw
Weren’t it for a poorly designed list ( more on this later), you would hear a lot more about the subtle Chaos drop pod.
This fun thing can carry a bunch of Berserkers – or whatever Chaotic troops you enjoy – and deliver them anywhere on the battlefield.
If that’s not fancy enough for you, the real treat of the Claw is it’s devastatic pistol, which unleashes 2D6 shots at every unit around it. Every. Single. Unit. Character trying to hide behind this small line of troops? BAM! 2D6 pistols to the face! Can’t see me hidden behind that wall objective claiming guy? BAM! 2D6 pistols to the face!
Now you might be wondering how good a short range pistol may really be, but that’s because you’re not thinking with Warptime. Allowing the Claw to get insanely close to everyone, right where it needs to be!
Now you’re thinking with portals!
4- Elysians
A quite popular feature in Astra Militarum armies, the Elysians combine a lot of the popular features of guard, namely a lot of bodies, and dropping across the board.
Similar the the popular scions, the Elysians can be held in reserves and dropped everywhere, quite useful to take objective and assert board control, for slightly cheaper.
They also have quite a few snipers, that can be dropped with perfect line of sight to take out nasty buff characters, or inflict extra mortal wounds, when things really need to die.
3- Decimator Dreadnoughts
It’s hard to tell if people are raving about the dreadnoughts themselves or about the Petard, the awesome weapon that they carry around.
The Petard is 2D3 24″ shots that instead of normal damage, inflict a mortal wound on hit. Rolling to wound is so 7th edition.
The dreads themselves are neat to carry the guns around, sporting 8 Wounds at Toughness 7, so no degradable profile.
2- Malefic Lords
A malefic lord doesn’t really have an official model, but they are some sort of bare fisted renegade psykers. In game terms, it’s a 30 point smite-caster, that hides in units and turns super saiyan when they peril of the warp.
Smite is a pretty strong mechanic in itself, and the fact that you can take basically infinite of these guys made this by far and large the most played FW unit at NOVA. Kelsey had 13 in his list for example, and it’s a go-to HQ for a lot of Chaos lists.
A unit I once referred to as ” Sounds playable, I’ll play 6 ” turned into a nightmarish must include HQ, that fits oh-so-well in a Supreme Command Detachment alongside Magnus.
1- Alphabits the Daemon
Gamer-turned-expert-ornithologist Carlos Kaiser, who’s faced 3 of those lists in his weekend can attest to the nastiness that is this big pigeon. Aetaos’Rau’Keres is the Forge World Lord of Change, but let’s face it, nobody will ever use his real name.
Because he is over 30 power levels, big bird has flown under the radar in the ITC scene where he is banned. But what an entrance it made at NOVA, first propelled by Alex Fennell in the Invitational, and then by Kelsey Haley in the GT.
Kelsey, who built the nastiest list imaginable, got 7 19-0 wins in a row at the GT, in games that seldom lasted more than 45 minutes each. His Waterloo came at the hands of Andrew Gonyo horde of IG.
Carlos hated the bird, Andrew believes he’s not the end of the world if big bird sees the light of day
TL;DR Section:
NOVA was pretty much an all gun blazing FW event – play whatever you want. This all-you-can-eat no comp generally brings out the worst in lists, and in this case, spammable.
- Pros of massive bans, banlist or restriction is it makes things more enjoyable.
- Cons of massive bans, banlist or restriction is that some of the fun and fair things get punished in the lot.
- So what’s the future for Forge World and tournaments? Hard to tell.
What I can tell however is that Reece and Frankie from FrontlineGaming had very few kind words to say about the Titanic Vehicles. I can also say that Mike Brandt, the man behind NOVA, was often seen during the weekend mumbling something along the lines of: “ban all the Forge World.”
My thoughts on most forge world, more of less: Maybe it doesn’t break the game, but it does tend to break player morale.
You can check out more 8th Edition tips over on Mismatched Play.
