An Understated Beast: An Analysis of the Cave Drake

 I’ve enjoyed playing with Cave Drakes since the model was first released way back in 2007. It’s always hit like a truck and been a terrifying monster to play around, able to rip through battlelines or swallow heroes whole. These days, however, the community consensus on the Drake is pretty negative. The theory seems to be that its lack of Heroic Strike and F6 makes it too vulnerable to enemy combat heroes, who can Strike up and cut it to pieces. However, when I broke it out recently for a friendly game, I realised that the truth is a little less simple than “No Strike = Dead.”

    

         

                                                                              Heroes when they face a Cave Drake (National Trotguide)

Before we get to that, let’s look at why you might be interested in making a Cave Drake work. The answer to this is that it’s an absolute blender to match any killing piece in Middle Earth. Strength 7 is scary enough, but when you’ve got 4 Attacks and Monstrous Charge it becomes outright terrifying. Almost anything that’s charged by a Cave Drake and loses the duel roll is going to be facing a massive 10 S7 hits. Even its Fight value of 6 is perfectly acceptable against most models, letting it easily win fights against warriors or basic Captains and rip apart battlelines with ease. It’s got some neat side benefits— a cute Fearless bubble, a Brutal Power Attack that’s almost always worse than attacking normally, and it can bring along half a dozen Goblins in its warband for efficiency’s sake— but primarily you’re interested in its capacity to hit an enemy line and kill everything in its path.

    

       

                                                                                                                        No one wants this charging them (Sithious)

Unfortunately, as has been articulated all over the internet, you’re eventually going to end up hitting an enemy hero with Strike, who’ll get up to F7 or higher, win the duel pretty easily, and cut you into neat little pieces of lizard. When we look at a hypothetical duel between the Drake and someone like Elrond, the math seems to bear this out. If Elrond Strikes, he has a roughly 2/3 chance of winning the duel, and the great weakness of the Cave Drake is exposed. He’ll hack it down, crush the Goblins you brought with it, the air will be filled with your lamentations, and —

                                        68.5% chance of winning the duel is looking good for Elrond (Jeremy Hunthor's Spreadsheet)          

Hang on. Looking a bit deeper at that math there, we see that our Elven blademaster is actually only doing an average of 0.46 Wounds per turn to the Drake. In fact, if we do some quick maths ourselves, we realise that the D7 of the Cave Drake means that Elrond is only Wounding it on 6’s, and his three Attacks with one reroll to Wound have barely over a 50% chance of scoring a Wound even when you have won the duel roll. This is made especially annoying for the Elf Lord by his need to save Might for Heroic Strikes, meaning he can’t spend it on inflicting Wounds. Given that the Cave Drake has 6 Wounds and 1 Fate, it will therefore take Elrond a full 15 turns of combat to kill the Drake —longer than most games! Moreover, this is assuming that he has F7 the whole time. Once he’s out of Might by the third combat, he’s actually down to 0.37 average Wounds inflicted per turn, so these numbers are actually optimistic. If he decided to wield his Elven Blade two-handed, his odds of winning the duel roll would go down so much that his average Wounds dealt would actually decrease, so that's out as a potential solution. The Drake would be in a bit more trouble if it got trapped, especially if there were lots of other Elves in the fight with Elrond. But given that it costs 20-40 points less than he does and will probably be embedded in a horde of Goblins, it should be quite easy for you to keep its flank secure and pull off any extra models that try and gang up on it. Assuming you can do this, then there’s little to no risk of a S4 hero like Elrond killing the Cave Drake in an ordinary game.

    
                                                                       Elrond's not so big a fan of those numbers (Michael Martinez)

In fact, if we look a little deeper again, we see that our territorial little lizard is actually doing quite a lot of damage back to Elrond. It may only be winning combat every three turns or so while Elrond is Striking, but it’s dealing so much damage back on those turns with its 4 S7 Rending Strikes that it’s averaging 0.84 Wounds back to him per turn (note that his Defence is listed as 4 because the Drake will be Rending). That’s almost double the damage it was taking! Once Elrond runs out of Might and is back down to F6 with an Elven Blade, the Drake’s average damage output increases to 1.17 Wounds per turn, which is starting to get really scary for our favourite Half-Elf. In fact, if Elrond Heroic Strikes for the first three rounds of combat, then it will take him 17 turns to kill the Drake, while it will have devoured him within an average of 5 or 6 turns. Those aren't great odds for the Good player.

                                                                                                   Yikes

As it turns out, things actually gets much worse once we take into account charge bonuses. Assuming Elrond is mounted, him charging in increases his average damage output to 0.51 Wounds/turn, or 0.63 if he’s Striking, while also reducing the Drake’s chance of winning the duel and inflicting damage by a little bit. However, when the Drake gets to charge, things get messy. It ends up with an almost 50% chance of winning if he isn’t Striking, and there’s every possibility that he doesn’t survive the 10 S7 Strikes he will take if he does lose the duel. Assuming that the Drake charges every second round (probably reasonable, unless one side is burning much more Might than the other on Heroic Moves), then on average dice Elrond will be dead by the fourth or fifth round of combat. The Drake, meanwhile, will have suffered around 2 Wounds and have expended no resources, ready to crunch through the rest of the Elf shieldwall. Now is when we get to hear those lamentations I was talking about earlier.

                                                                                                    YIKES 

Obviously, dice are dice, and they can be unpredictable things. If Elrond rolls well and gets an early lead in Wounds, then it’s still quite possible that he brings down the Cave Drake. Moreover, all of this math changes substantially if we’re taking on someone like Bolg or Elendil, who have native F7 and will be Wounding on 4’s rather than 6’s. As it turns out, those matchups do still remain quite even unless the hero burns through loads of Might, with the ever-looming possibility of the Drake charging in and killing even these heroes in one turn. But they’re certainly a lot better-suited to taking on a Cave Drake than Elrond, Lord of the West though he is.

                                            

                                                                  Even Elendil is taking more Wounds than he's dishing out!

I am in no way advertising the Cave Drake as a hero-killer par excellence, capable of outduelling any combat hero with ease. However, the one-sided nature of this math makes it clear that the Drake is at least “pretty good” at killing enemy heroes, even ones with Strike. The fact that it only really gets countered by heroes with both F7 or higher and powerful bonuses to Wound shows that the gaping weakness of the model is a lot smaller than it first appears. It’s a monster that is perfectly suited to ripping apart battlelines and crushing smaller heroes, that also happens to put in a good showing against the vast majority of bigger combat pieces as well. If you back it up with a couple of Bat Swarms or Blackshield Shamans, then the one “weakness” of the model is totally patched over and you’re left with an almost unstoppable combat piece. And of course, you can afford to do so because all of this combat power comes at a mere 150pts. That’s around 100pts less than the heroes like Azog and King Elessar that really pose a threat to you. It’s not a perfect model by any means, and it can sometimes feel a bit crowded out by the multitude of other monsters that Moria can bring (check back in a few week's time for a discussion on this!). But if you run it, you’re unlikely to be disappointed. There’s even a chance that you’ll get that one in a million situation where Gaping Maw is actually worthwhile, and then you’ll feel properly smug.

 

                                                                         Honestly, I prefer the Drake (The Stuff of Legends).

 I hope you enjoyed this little exploration of one of Moria's less popular denizens. The next article will be diving into the maths behind another much-maligned model: the humble Shaman. They were the keystones of competitive success last edition, but have they now fallen too far to be useable? Tune in next week to find out (or at least read my ramblings on the topic). And if you have any experience with the Cave Drake that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you in the comments section below or on Facebook. 

Until next time, may your Drakes always have battlelines to crush!