sputters incoherently Not enough hammers? Sir, how dare you! My Herd is basically only hammers or scenario pieces, and I’m not running Beasts of Nature! Here’s hoping we don’t get a large cav ultra-hammer like the top flight armies have 
In my experience taking Herd to tournaments, I would often do quite well up to a certain point, where I climbed high enough to face other maneuverable armies with significant shooting. When you’re mostly De 4+ and relying on speed to keep you alive, things start to fall apart when your speed doesn’t matter as much and your defense is put to the test. Between NA, TK, NS and the Dwarf stranglehold, there’s a lot of shooting in the meta again, much of it quite maneuverable. I also wonder if the alpha strikers of the meta have made alpha Herd’s life hard (Keith Conroy having won Masters with alpha Herd not that long ago), tho the WC Chieftain sorta edges those match-ups out … Anyway, Herd have always been a rarity but now feels particularly grim from a meta perspective.
Abyssals I assume are out because we’re waiting for the new rules (and because they’re also a De 4+ army with a single slow hammer in the Molochs). Men are of course mid by design. Surprised we aren’t seeing the triple flying beast hammers I saw kicking around throughout the year but maybe folks have admitted that OGL probably does do it better.
On the Blade, I see Tasty’s logic on getting more from scoring square heroes with fewer attaks. Generally speaking, top tier list building in dice games tends to focus on minimizing RNG and maximizing control of results. The Blade is a very cheap way to add to that goal, especially if you’ve already picked up the Staying Stone (or can’t use it because fearless).