The 9th Age 0.9.2 Beta 9th age list (2k)

[Eternal flitter]

So I played my first game of 9th age this evening with this list. Would have used more points but time was an issue and we wanted to make sure we actually finished! Anyway this is what I cooked up:

Vampire count, Von Casteltein, Dark storm, Blade of red thirst, Heavy armour, Hardened shield, Talisman of Greater shielding, Potion of Strength. 385
Master necromancer 150

Barrow king, BSB, Banner of Castelhof 180

45 Skeleton warriors, Full command, spears, shields. 300
20 Zombies, standard, musician 80
3 x 5 Dire wolves 3 x 40

2 x 3 Vampire monstrosities, champion 2 x 136
Cadaver wagon, endless horde, unholy convergence 120

Titanic bat 200
Dark coach 190

The main idea of the list is pretty simple: the vamp and wight king go into the skelly block. You know have a blurry, 4++ block to work with, also all your chaff is blurry too so it gets that much more difficult to sweep it away with BS shooting. The master necro sits in the second rank of the zombies thanks to the command group and corpse cart staying safe while buffing and growing the skelly block in the early game. The vampiric units rush off down the flanks to pick off anything they can.

If I'm being honest I'd probably forgo the spears on the skeletons, but it is a nice deterrent for mounted units at least and who doesn't like rolling ~40 attacks... ^^

Anyone want to weigh in with their thoughts? This isn't meant to be super competitive at all, but I think it's not total garbage either. Well you guys can be the judges of that!

 

[Mad 'At]

Would very much like to hear how this army did in battle afterwards
I like the build, it is quite similar to a list I've had in mind, though mine had zombies with the Banner of Castlehof instead.

Only thing I would suggest is adding a banner to the Skeletons. Seems like an opportunity wasted to not have one. I think either Banner of Cleansing Flame or Icon of the Relentless Legion could be good choices. Dropping some skeletons to make room for it probably.

 

[Eternal flitter]

Yeah definitely cleansing flame on the skellys is a great call considering you can choose to use it or not. I'm assuming RAI is that you have to choose flaming or non flaming for the entire unit's attacks for that phase, but yeah for 4 skeletons its surely worth it.

As for performance: I played a friend with his EoS army. He'd brought:

High cleric 4++ etc
Bsb etc
Lvl2 light with +1 cast/dispel
Witch hunter (undead)

2 x 5 pistoliers
10 xbows
10 halberds
30 spears FC
30-40 (can't remember) swordsmen FC
10 knights FC
mortar
cannon
24 flagellants with mini priest upgrade

So I didn't know what he was bringing and I feel that I unwittingly brought a hard counter to his list...
We rolled up "standard" deployment with the optional objective being have a scoring unit in your opponent's deployment zone.

Essentially I waited for him to deploy most of his stuff and then just went ahead and dumped the rest of mine down to get a +3 for first turn.

The strategy was simply to go invo crazy early on and keep the zombie bunker near the skeletons for most of the game to give them supernatural reflexes. Also, unless I'm playing this wrong, zombies 5 wide with a corpse cart and command fill the front rank forcing further characters to the second essentially keeping the master necro safe.

I won't write the whole thing up but the gist was that we felt that the synergy setup I'd created was massive, including the invo buff from unholy convergence and making all my chaff, and vargs really hard to kill with dark storm. his artillery couldn't touch the skeleton block with their 4+ ward and when I hit combat since I engineered 1 on 1s he couldn't stand a chance. However the positives for him were that flagellants are ferocious now being S5 all the time, but I dealt with them with some vargs and the dark coach. We called it at turn 4 when he only had the knights left.

I think that this list has possibly the best chaff in the game in the wolves: M9, vanguard, can march within 18", Ld10 within 18", unbreakable and blurry within 12" of the BSB. I honestly don't care that they can't flee, they are so reliable for their points in this setup.

In conclusion, while it's silly to make assumptions after one game, I really like the way this list plays and am very excited about 9th going forward with VC and my fledgling empire army too. I'm keeping an eye out for events in the new year in any case!