Thanks Boss, you beat me to my own update! This dumb year of 2025 is not slowing down in the slightest and it’s been a nutty couple of weeks hot on the heels of a nutty couple of months. Catching up slightly on my forum-posting here, semi-recently, I got in Battle 117 against the Brothermark in Control.
Cartwright continued iterating on his own Penitent-play, but ran more of a combined arms list this time, including three Heavy Arbalests, and dropping to just two supporting Phoenixes.
I ran the Herd, drawing inspiration from Keith Conroy’s 2020-2021 lists, of which the 2021 version won US Masters. In that vein, I was using Lycans, a Spirit Walker horde and Flying Beasts, as well as the Avatar of the Father to just try and be aggressive.
- Lycans were fun, but the game really showed why you want to give them waver-mitigation items. The hordes and items were good, and the regiments were ok, and worth playing around a bit more with.
- Beasts and the Avatar were all good, though I don’t think I was nearly aggressive enough with them.
- Alpha Strike was a hard style to play, but should really reward good positioning and threat assessment. I think ideally, from Round 2 onward, this kind of list should be able to charge anything it wants to. But, in order to do that, I need to be advancing more in my Round 1, whether I’m going first or second. A challenging playstyle for sure, but a decent first attempt at it.
Prior to the game, I did not do a lot of due diligence. There were a few threads here, and here with some light discussion. But as Boss notes, there were actually videos of the 2021 event. Keith stayed on the top tables so we see lots of the army, but the coverage isn’t as comprehensive as I would have liked, since the video bounces between several tables, and the commenters aren’t even sure what unit it what half the time. The final game was more helpful though, and there was also a nice Dash28 video of a UB game that was very insightful, as well as the Counter Charge Herd episode, which puts a lot of his thoughts into context alongside the rest of the army. I intuited things pretty accurately, but these other sources are helpful, and we’ll see what else I may stumble upon as I play around with this for the next few Herd games.