soulblight article looks alright. No mechanics for bloodlines expected but sad. faction traits alright, mostly the expected stuff changed in expected ways. gravesites gone. battle formations for skeletons, zombies, vampires, and necromancers seems about right, if far from inspired. The skeleton ability requires outnumbering to trigger, which really has my fingers crossed that skeletons jump up to unit size 20 to match their box. Unfortunately it also requires charging, and skeleton & grave guard units are both slow enough to make that iffy, while black knights are fast enough to reliably get to charge, but are unlikely to outnumber their opponents. Bleh, skeleton formation looking kind of iffy.
Only one spell lore is unfortunate, I was sure vamps would be one of the few factions to get two. And from the sample spell this lore is drawing more from the terrible vampire lore and less from the good necromancer lore. That's really unfortunate. I'm not a fan of the unlimited spell.
Radukar looks beaty but not too much else, I miss his ability to summon wolves. Lauka looks good, though whether she's playable will depend not just on points but on how she compares to the generic vengorian. Bloodknights look fantastic as dedicated anti-infantry, though without no ability to retreat and charge they're going to lose a lot of their impact after the first hit, and if they get charged by a non-infantry unit they'll have a hard time hitting back.
Vargheists on the other hand look terrible. they either needed a much better melee profile or for their teleport ability to be any movement phase instead of just your movement phase. As is... I don't know, if they're cheap enough maybe you take one unit just to force your opponent to babysit their objectives? Then again, Vargheists are already kind of iffy, so if they stay bad or even get worse it's not exactly a huge loss compared to now, just a missed opportunity, and the soulblight range is more than deep enough to weather a few dud units.
My big question about skeletons (are they a unit of 10, or is their unit size increasing to 20 to match their box size?) wasn't answered, and my other big question (do they keep some version of their auto-healing ability) was only answered for their spearhead entry.
All in all, the spite gourds focus looks ok to me. I'm not unhappy with it, but there's nothing here that excites me the way obr did with their faction traits and vokmortian, or nighthaunt did with reikenor or dreadblade harrows. I feel kind of like I did with FEC - this feels like the same already strong army, just a little streamlined and toned town in ways that I've come to expect from 4e - not bad, but not exciting, since all of the good bits on display were slightly less good versions of the good stuff we already have. Except the FEC focus still had Ushoran, and didn't have anything disappointed me like vile transference or vargheists.
So yeah, probably the least exciting undead faction focus, but I can't call it bad or disappointing really. Even if the traits are lesser versions of current abilities, they're still /good/, lauka and blood knights look good, radukar doesn't look bad. I'll be playing Soulblight for the first chunk of 4e at least just because that's what I have most painted, and I'm not coming out of this faction focus feeling bad about that at all.
